Black-chinned Hummingbird : Living with Focus

This is a Black-chinned Hummingbird. Is the photo hideously out of focus? Sure. Or is it a glorious impressionist study of colors and soft light? Sure. Your choice. The beauty of this photo lies in its ambiguity. We are given the power of agency. Do we savor the sight, give it attention and focus? Or immediately dismiss it and move on? In art, the choice we make between acknowledgment and dismissal is the difference between brilliance and blunder.

The Israelites were freed from slavery with signs and wonders. HaShem manifested worldly might in qualities and quantity never seen since: plagues, liberation, sustenance, revelation, and fulfillment of the covenant. This was overwhelming Presence. And yet. Real people, with different focal depths, could see things differently. It’s a long litany: the golden calf, the episode of the spies, bitter water - and “manna? again???” The essence of freedom is the liberty to see this or that, to choose where to direct focus.

Attentive time is the ultimately scarce resource. It can never be replenished, but it can be invested rather than spent. Tanakh teaches that Israel’s desert wandering was a journey of political maturation, rehabbing its atrophied powers of agency. Kavanah, intentionality, is the legacy we have been given. We are the “like-ness” of our Creator. We are to choose Art rather than Chaos, to find beauty and cherish it. Like the Hummingbird, our world is in front of us, how we choose to focus, is entirely up to us.