Yellow-billed Cuckoo : The Time Budget

This is a Yellow-billed Cuckoo. It’s also called a Rain Crow because it has a tendency to sing out its “knocking” call in response to thunder. From there, folk tradition built this bird up to be a predictor of rainstorms. Whether true or not, I can’t say. But I will attest that the few of these stealthy birds I’ve seen have all poked out of the trees only on days when it was about to rain. Put another way, if you want to see one, you had best be willing to brave imminent rain, to acknowledge his limits and parameters.

The Talmud teaches a vast number of rules guiding sacrificial practice. Piggul raises the question of the priest’s intent: did he have the proper place and time in mind for eating the sacrifice, such that the sacrifice fulfills its purpose? The concept of Notar essentially prohibits left-overs. Sacrifices had to be eaten within their prescribed time limits. Even today, our financial contributions to tzedakah are legally capped rather than unlimited. We are gently protected from ourselves, such that our generosity of spirit doesn’t outstrip our adequacy of resources.

Today we are blessed (and challenged?) with an essentially unlimited number of worthy options to which we can deploy our time and resources. These days, for an even stronger reason, we benefit from making choices which respect our constraints. We typically think of a budget as applying to money, but a “time budget,” which guides our days is arguably even more important. Money comes, money goes, but time is the only resource of which we’ll never get any more. Whether asking or offering, our tradition teaches that we should be intentional about giving. The Cuckoo carefully guards his appearances; we should equally guard ours.