Yellow-breasted Chat : Resetting our Perspectives

This is a Yellow-breasted Chat. I glimpsed a yellow flash out of the corner of my eye. In this park, just about anything yellow is worth further investigation. The Chat is by no means rare or endangered, but it tends to stay out of sight, and I’d never seen one before. So for me, this bird was a joyful new find. The irony of course, is that I saw this bird in a thicket that I’ve passed 1,000 times before. I can’t say if he had just recently arrived or whether he’d been there all along. Had I simply been looking at the thicket through the wrong lens? The encounter depends on the seemingly happenstance presence of both parties.

This is the season when we start to read Torah anew. The stories in Bereshit are my absolute favorites. There’s something so dramatic, so powerfully literary, so full of awe in these early tales. The majesty of the universe’s creation - our first week’s reading - is followed immediately by the awful judgment of the Flood and the extermination of all creatures from the land. That is a phenomenal whipsaw to contemplate and absorb in just two weeks. The story of the Flood is of course one that I’ve heard and told 1,000 times before. But each reading, I discover an additional nuance or alternative explanation that’s joyfully new to me.

Tradition teaches Noah’s generation was undone by violence and immorality. They saw their world the wrong way. The Flood cleansed the earth and initiated a reset. There is a similar lesson for us as we read and re-read these stories. Too often we are governed by preconceptions: “there is nothing to see in the thicket;” “I know all there is to know from a text.” Our cyclical reading empowers us to learn and to see newly - while preserving our cherished prior core. As we bring conscious intention to our worldly experiences and our reading, we unshackle our perspectives. We receive a reset too, allowing us to see both the Chat in the thicket and Torah from our own new vantage points.