The sages liked to place two sons side by side to show how kibbud av, honor of a father, can be faked and how it can be real.
The first son fed his father lavishly. He set out rich meat and sweet wine and insisted that the old man eat at his table every day. But when the father hesitated to do something the son wanted, or asked for a small favor the son did not care to grant, the son would insult him publicly, humiliate him in front of guests, and shame him until the old man wished he had not come. The food was a costume. The contempt was the real relationship.
The second son was poor and could offer no banquet. He put his father to work at the millstone, turning the heavy wheel for long hours, because there was no money to pay someone else. On the surface it looked like cruelty, a son letting his father break his back in hard labor. But look again. The second son had gone to the authorities and taken on every tax and every penalty that would otherwise have fallen on his father. Every fine that would have dragged his father into court, every summons, every indignity at the hands of the Roman officials, the son absorbed himself. He kept his father at the millstone in the house precisely to keep him out of the hands of strangers who would have treated him far worse.
The first son, the sages taught, inherited nothing in the world to come. The second son inherited the Garden (Gaster, Exempla No. 193).
Honor is not measured by what lands on the table. It is measured by what is kept off the father's back.