Snowy Egrets & Double-crested Cormorants : Our Own Lens

These are Snowy Egrets and Double-crested Cormorants. They both prefer the same aquatic habitat, so in a sense it was hardly surprising to find them both present like this. Of course they were clustered together. But it was my first time to see two sizable flocks together, and I’d never seen either of them on that particular river. In other words, while they were behaving perfectly naturally, it was entirely uncharacteristic - within the frame of my own experience.

The character depictions in our tradition are often tantalizingly scant. In such a deep and rich literature, there’s almost shockingly little that we know directly. Was there really no husband-wife chat after the Binding of Isaac? Anguish and rage after Aaron’s sons were killed? What dynamic established the priestly line through Aaron’s sons, but Moses’s successor was Joshua? We are told almost nothing about how they looked, what they thought, and ultimately what they thought of themselves. Instead it is Midrash, Talmud, and our own interpretation and experience that flesh out our understanding.

Is it merely a matter of historiography that Tanakh’s depictions are less detailed than moderns might expect? No, it’s more. Exploring the “gaps” in our ancestors’ lives was inevitable. Bringing our own perspectives, experiences, and awareness is equally inevitable. And in this questioning, we are taught to look at ourselves just as probingly as we look at them. What are our lenses - that hopefully magnify and clarify, but sometimes distort? Seeing the Egrets and Cormorants today, no less than the characters of our indelible past, is a combination of their history and our life experience.