White-throated Sparrow : Finding Our Place

This is a White-throated Sparrow. These migratory beauties appear by the thousands each fall. They’re gone with the spring. They follow their food supply north and south, on the move, maintaining position as conditions inevitably shift. Sparrows’ lives depend on the plants and insects they consume, suitable habitat for hunting and breeding - and perhaps a gamut of considerations still unknown. Migratory birds’ faculties still aren’t fully understood. When is it time to move? Where shall we go? Who will lead us as we travel? What is our Place?

King David’s 84th Psalm extols the Temple in Jerusalem. He sings in ecstatic joy of the Temple’s protection, physical and spiritual. This image: “Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself in which to set her young,” so relatably makes his point. Even the smallest, the most vulnerable, find a place to settle in the stones’ niches. At surface, King David describes a place. More deeply, this Psalm invites us - and today compels us - to contemplate HaMakom, The Place, one of HaShem’s many names.

Who are “Displaced Persons?” In 1945 they were the European Jews after the Holocaust. Not “victims,” not “survivors,” but Displaced Persons. Definingly, these people had been uprooted, their niches in the stones destroyed. Today, after Never Again, diaspora Jews still face assaults and sprint to safe rooms in Israel. But we live in an era when the covenantal promise has been fulfilled, and we have our place. When? Where? Who? We share the same questions as the White-throated Sparrow. But HaMakom, The Place, is with us to provide sheltering answers.