Here’s why fathers are important: They fret over weeds.

It is certainly the case, though it is not totally clear why (let’s face it, physical ability probably plays a role), that in the average middle class suburban American home blessed enough to have two parents, the mother’s role is usually in some way more confined to the home itself, whereas maintenance of the yard/pool/deck/etc. is more the purview of the husband.

So it was in my home, growing up, and the statistic was in no way mitigated by my mother’s propensity for gardening. It was somehow clear in subtle ways that her role was to plant and nurture beautiful life in riotous color but not to push the damn lawn mower around. Thus I, growing up, came to push it (being second in size to my father and chief honored recipient of his powers of delegation), and eventually, none of us really wanting to push it, we hired a yard service.

Yet still, after years of dissociation from the actual labor of dealing with our oddly shaped front yard, it is not unusual to hear my father, as we stride out toward the synagogue or take the dog for a loop around the cul-de-sac, assessing the extent of our weeds.

Very slowly, as I, over the past couple of years, have become ever-so-slightly less dense, I have come to secretly wonder whether this is the single most important thing my father can do for us.

This is not to downplay, of course, all his other roles. A provider is most basic and in most ways most essential, a protector, the law enforcer, etc. But I can’t help feeling that these are roles too appreciable by the lost philosophers of our Internet age. Fatherhood’s advocates tend to emphasize responsibility, particularly fiscal responsibility, in their efforts to get an entire generation adrift in nihilism to set aside their baser hedonism. They argue that family life is perhaps the only means of civilizational survival; they bring all the power of Darwin and evolutionary psychology and stories about cave men and fighting wild animals to bear on the problem of lost masculinity.

All of this is ultimately the fatherhood of the animal, and when it comes to convincing men, I take the old, counterintuitive approach. We do not first need to become animals to be human; stories of a father killing the bear that threatens his young brood speak to a place in the human heart little above the self-destructive pleasure-seeking boheme.

Fatherhood, in the human sense, does not exist to ensure any sort of physical outcome. The physical protection and survival of the family are themselves only animal means to a human end. And the human end is intellectual, purposive, and ultimately spiritual.

At the intersection of intellect, purpose, and transcendence, one finds the Kabbalistic concept of Chachma, the highest distinct faculty of the human soul, its ability to subjugate itself to, and thereby unify with, an external reality. It is the foundation of all wisdom, and it is the part of the intellect that lets a person open a window beyond the limits of their own existence and devote themselves to a higher truth.

And Chachma is often referred to, in the Kabbalistic texts, as father.

My father tells us that the weeds do not belong. He tells us that a human being is civilized, that chaos and all growing wild is fun, but order and civilization are right. He does not explain himself and does not need to. By dint of being the father, he is our collective familial Chachma. He sets the tone for higher truth; he tells the family that what they are is wonderful and more than he deserves, but what they can be, if they find purpose, is something much higher.

Don’t be an animal; don’t fight with your siblings; keep your promises; pay your debts; delete the weeds; take pride in your lawn.

There are things worth doing, a whole world of truth beyond what we are or even desire, and it is ultimately Good.

For this, I thank my father, and all fathers everywhere.

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