Before I rushed off to worship services one morning, I glanced out my backyard window at our bare black oak tree that shook in the frigid, late February wind. Alighting peacefully on one of the branches was a striking, sharp-billed blue jay. It was the first one I had seen in the liminal transition between winter and spring, when cold and warmth, snow and sun can’t seem to distinguish their identities. Transfixed for seconds that might as well have been hours, I marveled at the luscious blue-violet hue of its feathers in which the bird smartly dressed, with quiet composure. The jay’s visual richness, so common yet so alluring, impressed me with such force. I wanted to cheat time by jumping out our back window rather than running outside to the backyard, a move that risked my losing sight of the bird.
As the bird flew off out of my sight, my eyes darted rightward from the oak tree to the sawdust and the forlorn stump where our old honey locust tree recently stood. It too had been a home and a resting place for blue jays and other animals. Sadly, its circulatory system had decayed, choking off the supply of water from its roots so that many of its branches lay bare and rotting for the last few seasons. The tree came down on a Friday as I was returning home from a volunteer mission to Israel. Maybe out of distraction and more likely out of heartache, that day I avoided walking outside to look at the honey locust’s poor remains. I had just come back from a difficult trip during which I’d witnessed the remains of trauma that terrorists had inflicted upon innocent people in Israeli border towns near the Gaza strip on October 7, 2023. Cutting down a sick old tree and gunning down civilians are not the same thing; but having seen enough of the aftermath of violent death the week before, I needed to avoid the aftermath of yet another living thing’s demise. Only weeks later, during my momentary and momentous encounter with the lively blue bird, was I able to finally bid farewell to our dead tree.
My fleeting, corner-of-the eye, encounter with the bright movements of that blue jay and the darkening decay of that tree stump recalled for me a similar experience I’d had a few weeks before while in Israel. After a few days of volunteering and bearing witness to the horrors of October 7, I was weighted down with a leaden, exhausting depression. As a final, much lighter activity prior to flying home, our volunteer group left the Gaza border towns and traveled north to Jerusalem. We planned to bury our collective sadness in shopping and some good food at the city’s massive, bustling outdoor market known as the shuq. I wandered around its numerous stalls, jostling and being jostling by lively throngs of people preparing early for the Jewish Sabbath or just enjoying a day outdoors. I immersed myself in the prosaic happiness of just being alive that the market has always granted me. I had just spent almost a week assisting and grieving with Israelis still suffering the aftershocks of violent death. Yet here I now was, among other Israelis, doing what people always find a way to do, even in the throes of suffering: buying and selling, finding comfort and sustenance in food and drink, meeting friends, reclaiming the everyday dignity of being human, loving and being loved, living against the lurk of death. I watched the throngs flow back and forth, living, undulating waves of people from across the country, the globe, human heritage and history.
Glancing at all of this life, I thought about a world where my people no longer live in fear because we're Jews; where Israelis and Palestinians no longer suffer the traumatic, fatal wounds we’ve inflicted each other; where Israel and her neighbors are at peace; where all people from all places, times and cultures would descend upon this market and every market on earth with a lively, colorful joy like the quiet joy of that graceful blue jay.
My fleeting encounters in Jerusalem and in my backyard remind me that these contrasting images between life and death are simultaneously hidden and in our line of sight. They confront us out of nowhere then just as fleetingly disappear, but their lesson endures. Violence and peace, joy and anguish, the energy of life and the entropy that is death just happen to us, and we have little or no control over them. Yet they also are us, the products of how we choose to behave, the images and visions we choose to see and forget, the realities and ideals we choose to keep in our sights. We will live and die like the blue jay and the old honey locust. While we are alive, we need to decide if our encounters with each other will be about killing and being killed, bleeding and being bled, or about filling and being filled, feeding and being fed. Best that we err on the side of life before we glance and find it gone.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY. Check out his writings at danornstein.com
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.