Painted Bunting : The Light In This Moment

This is a Painted Bunting. The bird himself is a stunning display of color and motion. Framed against this sea of Indian Blankets, it’s chaotic and vibrant and glorious. I took this on a quiet, cloudy morning with very few active birds. The sun had been hidden all morning - for hours - and I’d had scant opportunities. But for just the briefest of moments, the clouds broke. (Not!) coincidentally, the Bunting launched himself in this moment. (Not!) coincidentally, I was looking in precisely the right direction in this moment. The light - in this moment - made this scene spectacular rather than a muted, shadowed gray.

Jewish traditions date back to an era when artificial light was not taken for granted. Hanukah’s miracle illustrates the challenge of making light from oil eight days distant. The poor widow in II Kings owns nothing but a jug of oil, which miraculously refills, sales from which allow her to redeem her sons from being sold into slavery. Shabbat is bookended with lights, kindling and extinguishing to demarcate the specialness of the day. And think of Isaiah. His prophecy could well have been that Israel would arise as a mighty empire, co-equal with Babylon, Rome, or Egypt. But instead he describes Israel’s transcendent destiny as a light unto the nations.

My community has recently suffered the darkness of anti-Semitic events. What to do? One response is “curing” the problem, through education and outreach. A second is accepting this filth as an endemic blight, addressable but incurable. Both responses are necessary, but I would suggest that it is impossible to excise darkness directly; darkness is intangible and constantly moving. It is, though, eminently possible to dispel darkness, to dilute it to nothingness, by flooding the area with light. For the Bunting, in this moment, I was blessed with a wash of sunshine and hence this photograph. Now, in this moment, what is our light with which we’ll beat back the darkness?