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August 27, 2009
This week’s portion supplies one of the most celebrated laws of Torah: “If you come across a bird’s nest with the mother sitting over the fledglings…do not take the mother with her young. Let the mother go and take only her young.” So important is this commandment that those who observe it are promised long life.
The most relevant rationale for our time comes from the Ramban: The Torah allows us to kill animals for food but not at the expense of losing the entire species. Killing a mother and its young will eventually render a species rare and even destroy it altogether.
How wonderful that God’s mercy extends even to the smallest bird; and how surprising, therefore, to see the Mishna warn us that “anyone who says, ‘Your mercy extends to a bird’s nest’ should be silenced.” Why would we punish the proclamation of God’s goodness?
The Gemara provides two answers. The first is the desire to prohibit jealousy among species, as if to say that God cares for birds more than other animals, when, in fact, God cares equally for all. Meiri, however, singles out human beings as different, in that God’s compassion for other animals applies only to the species as a whole (hashkaha klalit), whereas, with human beings, God cares for each of us personally (hashkaha pratit) — a lesson well remembered on the High Holy Days, which are predicated upon that premise.
The Gemara’s second explanation seems to be a gross denial of the first. As the Talmud words it (in its typical laconic fashion), “Your mercy extends to a bird’s nest” implies that “God’s character (midot) is mercy, whereas it is actually edicts.” But what can that mean? The dominant view is to consider this a warning against interpreting God’s commandments (not God’s character) as signs of God’s compassion; we are to see them, instead, as “decrees of a king.” The point is that we obey God’s mitzvot as we would the edicts of an absolute monarch — we would do them even if they were pointless, with no benefit whatever.
The problem with this almost universal interpretation is the Talmud’s use of the word midot, which means “character,” not “commandment.” If the issue were God’s commandments, the Talmud should have said mitzvot, not midot. What ought to shock us is the patent objection to saying that God’s midot, God’s very character, is compassion, especially if we hold that God cares personally for each and every one of us.
We might, of course, just have two inconsistent opinions, but how could any talmudic authority deny God’s essential compassion? The midrash pictures God on Rosh Hashana moving from the throne of justice to the throne of mercy, even overlooking our first sin, so as to “give us one for free,” as it were. At Ne’ila, the closing service of Yom Kippur, we read that God “reaches out a hand to sinners,” because “God does not want sinners to die but to live.” If this is not a God of mercy, what is?
The way to harmonize the two opinions is to recall the talmudic tale of Elisha ben Abuyah, who watched a little boy plummet to his death while climbing a tree to remove the mother bird. “Is this ‘the long life’ that Torah promised?” he is said to have asked, and with that, he became the singularly well-known apostate of talmudic times.
There is nothing wrong with positing God’s essential mercy, but we must not take that claim too far. God may care for us, but as “king of the universe,” God is committed to the laws by which the universe operates. As Elisha ben Abuyah discovered, God does not prevent gravity from pulling a boy to his death, even while the boy is obeying a mitzva that promises long life. When the rabbis called God a king, they did not mean that God could and would do whatever we want — even if we deserve it — not because God is stubborn, whimsical, or reprobate, but because neither God nor God’s world works that way. That is not how God demonstrates compassion.
Compassion means sympathy, not sympathetic magic. Our challenge on the High Holy Days is to generate expectations that are appropriate to our reason and experience. The day after Yom Kippur will not find us miraculously free of burdens. It may, however, leave us sensing that in some mysterious fashion, God holds our hand as we shoulder them. God’s mercy does extend to a bird’s nest, and children climbing trees to save mother birds sometimes die. Both are true.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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