Shabbat Shalom!
Let me tell you something about my life – my
home is basically a farm. Some people
have dogs – and yes, I have a dog. But I
also have two chickens… and about thirty fish. Some of the fish live in a pond in the back
yard that I dug myself last summer.
The chickens each provide one egg per day,
and it’s my job to gather the eggs.
Sometimes I open the door while a chicken is in the middle of laying an
egg, and when that happens they get very offended and start clucking angrily at
me. But otherwise, we get along really
well.
The chickens seem to know me. When I walk up to the coop, they start
running around in circles and making noises excitedly. They know that I’m the one who lets them out,
so they can hang out on the lawn and eat grass.
When you think about how chickens are treated
in big factory farms, where they are kept in tight spaces indoors and fed
steroids to fatten them up so that they can’t even move, I’d say that my
chickens are very lucky chickens.
By the way, in case you are wondering, I do
eat chicken, but I would never eat my chickens.
But when my father was a kid and one of his chickens had a cold, they
would feed her chicken soup.
While I am not a vegetarian, my caring for
animals has helped me to be more sensitive and I understand the need to go
above and beyond what others might do, to teach myself that important lesson.
In my portion, the Torah talks about the
Nazerite, a person who dedicated himself to God by going above and beyond what
most people did. The Nazerite did not
cut his hair, never touched grapes and never drink any wine.
The idea is to control our cravings by being
extra-disciplined. My taking care of my
animals helps me to become extra-disciplined too, because it sensitizes me to
their feelings.
Here’s something interesting – before I got
the chickens, I was interested in birds, and I heard that if you get quail eggs
in the supermarket, you can incubate them.
So, I did that, and in 32 days, from a dozen eggs, nine quail chicks
were hatched. Unfortunately, three died
right away. I took care of the others for several months but when it got too
cold we had to let them go – so they flew away – and shortly after that we got
the chickens.
For me, taking care of the quail helped me to
become disciplined enough to take care of chickens.
Ironically, in the Torah – in next week’s
portion in fact – quail became a symbol of the Israelites’ lack of
self-discipline. They craved meat so
much that when God provided quail, they kept on eating until they got sick –
and many died.
So for me, those quail chicks helped teach me
to have more self-control, so I could aim higher to fulfill my goal of caring
for lots of God’s creatures, to go above and beyond, like the Nazerite. But for the Israelites, their uncontrolled
craving led many to their deaths, and they were buried in a place that the
Torah calls the “Graves of Craving,” Kivrot Ha-ta’avah.
Naturally, my mitzvah project also has to do
with animals. At my school I am
collecting donations for an organization called OPIN, Outreach to Pets in
Need, whose mission is to “PROMOTE
ADOPTION OF HOMELESS ANIMALS, AND TO PROVIDE ASSISTANCE TO PETS IN NEED THROUGH
MEDICAL TREATMENT, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION.”
You can find the link to donate on their website, opinpets.org.
We also bought some dog supplies that we are
using for our bima decorations that we will also be donating.
No comments:
Post a Comment