Great Blue Heron Juvenile : Explanation and Meaning

This is a Great Blue Heron, a juvenile. He’s one of a large group of birds standing below a dam. They position themselves there because small fish get swept over the dam, a substantial fall, and end up stunned when they land. In the bird world, this is as close as it gets to shooting fish in a barrel. The herons and egrets almost just lap them up without any effort at all. The birds don’t know about the gravitational constant, and they can’t calculate F=ma, but they certainly know how to profit from the application. Birds don’t have an explanation for this easy breakfast, but they experientially appreciate stationing themselves where they do.

Jewish scholarship can be divided into two components. Halakha are the legal discussions. What are our laws, and why are they what they are? Aggadah deals with legends and stories. What else do we need to know about our world? In contemporary terms, the former appeals to our brain and the latter to our heart. One is rational and legalistic, the other emotional and mythic. Partisans can debate the primacy of one over the other, but I daresay that all sides would concede that the literature - and by extension Jewish life - would be immeasurably diminished without the presence of both. Writ large, Halakha gives us cogent explanations, and Aggadah gives us a sense of underlying, often obscured meaning.

I was recently challenged to explain my conviction that there are no coincidences. “Then how do you explain x and y and z?” I don’t! But my inability to posit an explanation does not diminish my surety that meaning underlies events. Maybe time or perspective will change things. Before Newton formulated the law of gravity, did things not fall to the ground? But maybe there are some things, entirely real, that are simply not amenable to explanation, only acceptance. Our Sages included Aggadah alongside Halakha. The Heron shows how we too can profit from appreciating meaning even without explanation.