Black-throated Sparrow : Jonah and the… bird.

This is a Black-throated Sparrow. It’s a bird I shared months ago, and that’s precisely why I’d like to revisit it now. I was quite early in the days of my “interrupted walks,” and I joyfully, surprisedly saw him on a cactus. The photo was good, but the journey to get there was lacking a certain confidence, a sense of being pro. This photo, conversely, resulted after I first heard his call, tracked him down, and then very deliberately made the effort to take the photo. It’s a very different approach. Is the photograph itself better? You answer, but with nearly a year between them, I’d like to feel the latter photograph embodies a certain confidence.

We will soon read the story of Jonah. It is a story well known to all of us. Like all the greatest stories, it invites us - compels us - to place ourselves in the protagonist’s sandals. So I ponder: Why didn’t Jonah accept HaShem’s charge at the outset? Why not gratefully take on the status of prophet? Or at most, self-deprecatingly demur like Moses and then take up the mantle? Instead Jonah fled, risked his entire ship, and even had to be regurgitated by Leviathan(!) before performing the mission he’d been given. I don’t see him as a grudging man or a selfish man. Rather I see self-doubt and fears of unworthiness, what we would today call “Imposter Syndrome.”

Human nature harbors anxiety. Am I a good parent? A good partner? A good team member at work and a constituent of my holy community? Even knowing intellectually, rationally, that the answer is “Yes!” - still we doubt. Doubt is proof we care. Jonah experiences God directly, allowing Jonah to push through doubt, to be a light among the nations and bring Nineveh, that great city, to repentance. On Yom Kippur we are sealed in the Book of Life. Our mission is repentance, prayer, and righteous giving. May we this Yom Kippur be sealed with confidence to be our true selves, whether a prophet or a photographer of a beautiful Sparrow.