Likkutei Sichos: Volume 36 - Yisro
Likkutei Sichos, Vol. 36: Parshas Yisro - Kibud Av (Part 1)
Unpacks the Ramban's claim that honoring your parents is really honoring Hashem, and why that's true specifically because they're partners in your creation, not, as the Chinuch and Ibn Ezra suggest, merely because they raised and fed you. Shows that even the physical body parents contribute depends on an open, revealed partnership with Hashem, since the power to give birth is an unlimited koach no limited creature could have on its own — the same "koach hamafli la'asos" language used for the soul-body union in the bracha of Asher Yatzar. Closes with the Gemara in Kiddushin: the nations who assumed "Anochi" was Hashem seeking His own honor, until "kabed es avicha" showed them otherwise.
Likkutei Sichos, Vol. 36: Parshas Yisro - Kibud Av (Part 2)
Continuing the sicha on kibud av v'eim, this shiur traces the Ramban's claim that honoring one's parents is fundamentally kavod for Hashem back to a Gemara in Kiddushin about why the nations connected honoring the stars to the Aseres HaDibros. Along the way it unpacks who the Chida was, and how the Tzemach Tzedek locates the real difference between a parent and a star: free choice.
Likkutei Sichos, Vol. 36: Parshas Yisro - Kibud Av (Part 3)
Picking up the sicha on kibud av v'eim, this shiur pushes past the Tzemach Tzedek's answer to ask why the ancient belief that the stars have bechirah counts as apikorsus rather than a simple astronomical error. It works out how a parent can be praised for choosing to have a child without that choice ever competing with Hashem's exclusive control of the world, folding in a story about the Rebbe and a leaked Rashi from a Shabbos farbrengen.
Likkutei Sichos, Vol. 36: Parshas Yisro - Kibud Av (Part 4)
This shiur develops the difference between how the koach ha'ein sof of creating a child sits within a Jew versus a non-Jew, and uses it to explain why honoring a parent is, at its root, identical to honoring the Torah in a talmid chacham. It closes with remarkable stories of the Rebbe's own extreme kibud eim, and opens the difficult question of how free choice can coexist with hashgachah pratis.
Likkutei Sichos, Vol. 36: Parshas Yisro - Kibud Av (Part 5)
Wrapping up the sicha, this shiur lays out the two distinct gedarim inside kibud av v'eim: a sechel-based debt of gratitude that binds every human being, and a deeper din bein adam laMakom unique to Yidden. It works through whether kibud av counts among the seven mitzvos bnei Noach, Yaakov Avinu's twenty-two-year punishment, and Dama ben Netina's famous devotion to his father.