Black Vulture : Lost and Found

This is a Black Vulture. I see them every visit to this park, but I hadn’t been there in quite some time. I of course knew the basic layout when I returned, but many details were new. I noted numerous new presences immediately. As it should be. But there were also things missing, and those were easy to overlook, to forget. And that I find a little troubling. This vulture, an old acquaintance, I saw in a new place. It was only when I saw him that I realized that his usual haunt, up on the branch of a particular tree, was gone. That dead tree, the foundation of so many of my photos, long predates my visits to the park, and this morning I had initially overlooked that it was gone.

The Jewish prayer for the dead, the Mourner’s Kaddish, is all about memory. Kaddish is recited yearly at a death’s anniversary. But fascinatingly, there is nothing in the text of the prayer itself that speaks of death. Nothing that speaks of the individual whom we mourn. Nothing that speaks of the psychological nadir of profound loss. Instead the prayer is an exaltation. We recall with this prayer that HaShem is to be praised, praised for having created the world in the way that it was. Praised beyond the capacity of words to convey meaning. And praised for the gift of peaceful wholeness that is so particularly wanting at a time of death.

This vulture, the “right bird in the wrong place,” drove home for me the importance of prescribed observance. Would I have otherwise forgotten that dead tree - just a tree - that had made much art possible for me? Precisely when we are feeling our greatest emptiness, it’s vital that we express our appreciation of the greatest Presence. Kaddish reminds us of our gaping emptiness and the copiousness of what we - and our community - still, eternally possess in HaShem’s love. Kaddish is about memory, of what was and what will be. This is the prayer that reconciles the warring feelings within us and grants us peace. We are gifted with reminders, a Vulture and a sublime prayer, to acknowledge both loss and possession.