I used to hate the Ten Commandments. I hated Charlton Heston. I hated anything that smacked of authoritarian, paternalistic, overbearing high-and-mighty lording-it-over-you-ism, especially if it tried to tell me I couldn’t watch the Yankees on the Sabbath.

Last week marked the observance of Shavuot, which celebrates the revelation of the Ten Commandments, and is the “least observed” of the major Jewish holidays – which is maybe why it has some special meaning for me.

In other words, it’s Torah publication date – and very timely from a personal standpoint, as we are about to hit the publication date of my memoir, The Silk Factory: Finding Threads of My Family’s True Holocaust Story.

The Ten Commandments have started representing something different to me since I discovered so much of what happened to my father during the war: they represent something lost.

We were not a religious household by any means, and it was important to my parents that we appear to be normal Americans – not so much to assimilate, but to camouflage our Jewishness so as to avoid persecution.

My parents were consumed by a strange form of PTSD, for as much as they listened to classical music on WQXR in New York, and watched public television station WNET on Channel 13, and for as much as my mother adopted my favorite sport (baseball) and team (The Yankees!), and my father read the New York Times, they were never very far away from the horrors of war.

I was not allowed to wear a Yankees patch on my jacket, because it might provide a sniper with an easy target. I was not to kick empty bags or boxes I came across on the street because they might be hiding a bomb and explode on contact. I was never to discuss my religion or politics with my school mates or neighbors because you never knew… after all, my father’s family was decimated by neighbors and former friends.

But there was something else that was decimated, and that was my father’s faith. I’m not sure if his mother’s murder at the hands of the Nazis was the final straw, or if it was the whole straw. But I know this: just like Moses in a fury broke the tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments, so my father in a fury broke with Germany, broke with his trusting nature, and broke with his God.

Once, however, at around the time of my bar mitzvah, we went to temple together. It was Yom Kippur, and the service was long. It was at an Orthodox congregation because my father was a purist – you either went for the whole thing or not at all. (Reform Judaism held no interest for him — no more so than Hassidism, which he considered no better than a cult).

My father was ancient (72 was old in those days), his bladder cancer briefly in remission, and his body wracked by the effects of radiation and chemotherapy, which was then still experimental.

I remember the other elderly men of the temple urging him to sit even when sections of the readings were traditionally read while standing, and his initial obdurate refusal to rest, his white knuckled hands gripping the chairback in front of him, his forearms trembling as he muttered prayers in a strange language, before he finally gave in and sat.

The Ten Commandments still hold little sway for me; there’s too much look-at-me-I’m-your-God-ism in it. I mean, there’s only ten, and three of them are spent talking about God. Think of how much better off we’d be if one or two of those Commandments had been about protecting the Earth, or not organizing ourselves into armed bands brought together for the express purpose of killing other people. Just for starters.

But I’m not here to bury the Ten Commandments, I’m here to praise them. Or actually, one of them in particular: Number 5.

Honor your father and your mother. Seems pretty obvious, but sometimes very hard to do. Sometimes, your mother and your father seem to do some fairly dastardly deeds. Their behaviors can seem inexplicable.

Then their behaviors become our behaviors.

But that’s not why I’m singling out the Fifth Commandment. I’m singling it out because even if we have differences with our parents, I’ve learned that we need to understand them in order to understand ourselves.

That’s one of the most important lessons I learned and that I share through my memoir, and it’s why this holiday has special meaning for me.

Order The Silk Factory here.