I was inspired a couple weeks ago by Rabbi Gittleman’s presentation about birding and tracking at our Shavuot night of study. A session you can now watch on line if you go to the YouTube channel (click here).
Our ancestors understood better than many of us how alive the world is. How in praise of God it all is. Hashamayim m’saprim k’vod El. (Psalms 19:2). “The sky speaks of God’s glory.” Everything speaks of God’s glory – in its complexity, in its beating heart, in its burrowing roots. All life is a psalm.
Our ancestors had a custom of imagining the stars and trees and birds and reptiles speaking words of Torah. If the mouse were to quote Torah, what would it say? This playful practice, called Perek Shirah, developed in the Middle Ages and has been used by Jews across the Jewish world. What is the Torah of each plant and animal? If we were to imagine them speaking verses, what would they say?
I live up on Sonoma Mountain, in the woods, under the sky, with hawks flying over, songbirds outside the window, fearsome bobcats and snakes and a million lizards. There are old oaks around my house, and laurels, some of whose lives I’ve unhappily curtailed over this last month, in order to make our house more fire defensible. And in the wake of the loss of these favorite fragrant trees, I’ve now planted flowers and herbs to have outside the kitchen door, something I’d never done in all these years, perhaps fearing to become a Country Living Magazine cliché. But these little plants – purple basil and orange twinspur and pink primroses, joyfully spreading their wings, wiggling their toes in the aromatic organic potting soil from Harmony Nursery – well, they bring me joy. They delight my eyes, my nose. They are not a substitute for the fallen laurels. But they are a reminder that even in the hard soil of loss, things will bloom. In Perek Shirah, the Wilderness speaks, quoting the prophet Isaiah. It says:
יְשֻׂשׂ֥וּם מִדְבָּ֖ר וְצִיָּ֑ה וְתָגֵ֧ל עֲרָבָ֛ה וְתִפְרַ֖ח כַּחֲבַצָּֽלֶת׃
The arid desert shall be glad,
The wilderness shall rejoice
And shall blossom like a rose.
The flora and fauna at my house are very, very alive. There are many personalities crowding around our house, and under our house, and sometimes in our house. Each has its own Torah. Each has its unintended teaching for me.
For instance, there was the dark-eyed junco that until this week was visiting every day as I sat and wrote or went to meetings on Zoom. This little sparrow, with its black head and gray back and white breast, and a shock of white stripe when it spread its tail feathers, this bird would land on one of several windowsills and tap until we’d look. Then it would throw its head back and sing. Then fly off, only to return a few hours later and engage us again. Unlike the black-headed grossbeak, looking like a speckled robin, that has been terrorizing my brother-in-law Doron for weeks, as it ferociously attacks its own reflection in his office window, our junco didn’t seem too fooled by reflections. It saw through obstacles. It seemed to notice our movement inside the house and looked as interested in us as we were in it. It witnessed and we witnessed.
Once or twice the dark-eyed junco would have a bit of grass in its beak when it visited, and I realized it was building a nest, and introducing itself to us, the neighbors. I haven’t spotted the nest but it is undoubtedly right there in the glory of one of the laurel trees still standing, shaded and green, every bit as lovely as any temple of old. As the sparrow says in Perek Shirah, quoting Psalm 84:4:
גַּם־צִפּוֹר | מָצְאָה בַיִת וּדְרוֹר | קֵן לָהּ אֲשֶׁר־שָׁתָה אֶפְרֹחֶיהָ
אֶת־מִזְבְּחוֹתֶיךָ יְהֹוָה צְבָאוֹת מַלְכִּי וֵאלֹהָי:
Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself in which to set her young,
near Your altar, Adonai of hosts, my sovereign, my God.
And now for the last week the junco is gone. I’m imagining it completed its nest and is sitting on eggs somewhere. And the Torah of this might just be the simple, universal proposition that once you have children, your friends never see you again. Which I don’t mean disparagingly. The poor thing undoubtedly has its talons full with the joy of parenthood. And life is too big for any of us to follow every interest and every curiosity. We turn to those who need us and we give our love and our attention to them. And sometimes we just have to save pecking on other people’s windows for another day.
Now last year, as you might recall, I had a family of lesbian deer living here (click here to be reminded), spending the heat of the day in the shade under our house. Two moms, sometimes three, and some fawns too.
This year’s tenants are more of a heteronormative nuclear family. A young 4-point buck, a doe, and a fawn. The adults might well be the children of last year’s lesbian moms. Which would figure. As queer parenting has come of age, we queer parents discover more and more that most of our children are not queer. It doesn’t matter how primed we are to raise queer kids the way we wish we were raised. We end up raising straight kids while the straight parents continue to raise the queer kids. And so we the queer parents and the straight parents are all just a little out of our depth all the time. Which is, frankly, the continuing state of parenthood generally – being a little of your depth all the time.
The new fawn is still tiny – spotted, maybe the size of a cocker spaniel. It is completely adorable in the way that young mammals are completely adorable to old mammals. It is shorter than the grass in the nextdoor meadow where it and its mama often graze. It is hidden by the grass from the prying eyes of predators. But at the same time it can’t see where it’s going.
So it jumps, it springs in the air, pushing off of all four legs, and it bounces forward, hop, hop, hop, like its little legs are pogo sticks. One moment you’re looking at grass, and then a tiny deer is in the air, like a flying fish, then it’s gone below the surface. What I’m learning from the fawn is the importance of getting the long view. Not just once in a while when you stop to collect your thoughts, but with every step. To go up and back between being firmly planted on the ground, and taking in some altitude to see what’s ahead. Up and back. Down and up. Not forsaking one for the other.
In Perek Shirah, the deer quotes Psalm 59:17:
וַאֲנִ֤י אָשִׁ֣יר עֻזֶּךָ֮ וַאֲרַנֵּ֥ן לַבֹּ֗קֶר חַ֫סְדֶּ֥ךָ כִּֽי־הָיִ֣יתָ מִשְׂגָּ֣ב לִ֑י וּ֝מָנ֗וֹס בְּי֣וֹם צַר־לִֽי׃
And I will sing of Your strength,
extol each morning Your faithfulness;
for You have been my haven, a refuge in time of trouble.
Strength and refuge. Thank you, deer.
The other creature that has caught my attention of late is not attested in Perek Shirah, but has been teaching me its Torah nonetheless. It is a creature we all know, the oak leafroller. You won’t see it now, because it’s all busy becoming a moth. But a month ago, I would come out of my house in the morning and walk under the oak trees only to get tangled in fine threads of silk that would stick to hair and skin and clothing. The leaf roller is the caterpillar that we encounter in the spring, hanging by a thread.
A few weeks ago I was again at my desk and out the window, I saw for the first time, a leafroller actually descending from the tree. The sun had caught it and its silk, so I could see the whole operation, as it dropped from what for it must have been a dizzying height, controlling its fall by slowly letting out more and more thread.
I had never seen one of them actually take this dive. Because they are born in the tree and they eat the buds. And then one day, driven by just a strong gust of wind, they tumble off the leaf and glide, like aerialists, until they are able to draw themselves back onto a leaf, where they rolls themselves up and begin their transformation into moths.
I think about the loneliness of these tumbles. So many of them are in the trees that to us it seems like a party. But to them what is it? Each one tumbles alone, each one of them alone, hanging from a thread. Each one of them eventually following a biological imperative to roll up in a leaf and build a cocoon. Does it know what is happening or going to happen? Does it have any reason to think that it is an insect? That it has anything to do with such creatures? Does it spin its cocoon just thinking how much it needs to sleep, not picturing how or if it will be transformed. Thinking its life is ending? And in fact the life it knew as a crawling thing is ending. Is this a little death? Is this fatigue? Is this faith?
Is it a little like us when we die, when we close our eyes for the last time, not knowing if any transformation is ahead? Or like us when we’re born? Because who knows what is ahead in this life? Who could imagine it? Or at any moment of transition and transformation – all we can do is follow our best instincts, hang on tight, and trust. This is everyday faith, non-fancy faith. This is the theology that lives in our cells, not in our thoughts. Every moment of living is an act of faith. Doubt is peculiarly human. But faith is in our DNA. This everyday faith that the next moment will flow from this one, that we will cocoon when we need, emerge when we can, and in every cycle, keep spreading our wings.
If the oak leafroller caterpillar were included in Perek Shirah, I think it might quote Psalm 119:30:
דֶּֽרֶךְ־אֱמוּנָ֥ה בָחָ֑רְתִּי מִשְׁפָּטֶ֥יךָ שִׁוִּֽיתִי׃
I have chosen the way of faith; I find balance in Your law.
Today’s Torah of nature: choosing the way of faith; balancing delicately on nature’s thread.
Everything speaks of God’s glory – in all its complexity, in its beating heart, in its burrowing roots, in its silk, in its organic faith. All life is a psalm.
Post-script. As I prepared this blog entry for posting this Shabbat morning, our friend the junco was (and is) back, playfully making me run from one window to the other, tapping, singing, tapping, singing, reminding us it remains part of this family, no matter how much I write otherwise.
