A New Year for the Birds

Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2021/5782

By Rabbi Mark Glickman

For reasons I’m sure you can understand, I’ve spent a lot of time this past year sitting out on my back deck. Now the back deck of our house, if I do say so myself, is a wonderful place. Perched on the ridge overlooking the city from the west, we have a panoramic view of the University, a couple of hospitals, and in the distance, we can even see all the way across the city to the airport. Through the trees to the right is the city skyline, and closer in to the left is the Hart mansion, whose dungeon was the training place of many leading lights in today’s pro-wrestling world. Even closer, are trees and grass and brilliantly coloured flowers that Caron and our neighbours keep in deck-top planters.

We loved that view from the moment we first walked into our new home, but it wasn’t until this year – until COVID restrictions led me to spend so much time out on the deck – that I connected with a dimension of activity out there I’d barely even noticed before. It turns out that this quiet backyard of ours is home to a constant thrum of activity. We see squirrels looking for acorns back there, and rabbits hop through, as well. We’ve seen a mama bobcat come through with a couple of very cute, playful, and carnivorous cubs alongside her. There’s a family of deer that visit us regularly, and we often see coyotes, as well…although, curiously, we never see the deer and the coyotes back there at the same time.

And then, of course, there are the birds. There are constantly birds behind our house – usually, you can see them, but you can always hear them.

Most omnipresent, as you might guess, are the magpies. Before, moving to Calgary, I had heard of magpies, but I don’t think I had ever seen one – they just didn’t live in the places where I did. They’re so common here that we sometimes take them for granted, but I remember the first time I really stopped to take a close look at one of them. I was sitting on my deck, and a magpie landed just a few feet from me and started pecking at the lawn. I was struck by its vivid colours – the snow-white of its underbelly, shoulders and wingtips; its jet-black head; the blue of its wings and tail.

After watching that particular magpie feeding on whatever it was finding in the lawn, I took out my phone and started to research the species. Magpies, it turns out, are remarkable birds. Related to crows, they are able to use tools and even to mimic human speech (maybe that’s why the ones in my backyard seem to stutter sometimes). The magpie is among the few species of North American songbirds whose tailfeathers make up more than half the length of its body. And because of what magpies do to crops, some people call a group of these birds “a mischief of magpies,” or “a gulp of magpies.”

The type of magpies that we have here are black-billed magpies – you can find them living from Alaska all the way down to the southwestern United States. They are usually monogamous, and they mate for life, sticking with their one partner through thick and through thin. In fact, scientists who studied magpies in South Dakota found that they have a divorce rate of only about eight percent.  And given human divorce rates these days, this means that South Dakotan magpies have a thing or two to teach our species about how to maintain a marriage.

But the eight percent divorce rate among the magpies in South Dakota doesn’t tell the whole story.  That’s because it turns out that another group of scientists studied magpies here in Alberta, and found that the likelihood of magpie divorce up here isn’t eight percent like it is for their cousins in South Dakota. Here in Alberta, the magpie divorce rate is 63 percent – about eight times what it is south of the border.

Think about it. If you were a married magpie, and you moved with your beloved magpie spouse from your treetop home in, say, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to another treetop home here in lovely Calgary, your marriage would probably be doomed. In fact, if you were a married magpie from anywhere, your marriage would be unlikely to last here in Alberta. Sadly, the majority of magpies you see around here, are divorced.

I looked again at the magpie pecking around all alone in my backyard, the poor guy. Or maybe it was a poor gal – I couldn’t really tell the difference. And come to think of it, maybe the unfortunate partner was the ex-spouse of this magpie I was looking at, and maybe this magpie was the philanderer, or the one who was lazy around the nest. Maybe this was the one who deserved to have the blues.

Looking at that solitary magpie and imagining its ruined marriage, I reflected on life’s solitary moments. Another magpie landed a few feet away, and it started pecking at the lawn, too. “Look over there,” I wanted to say. “He seems nice. And from the the looks of it, you two like to do the same things. Why don’t you go over there and check him out?

Caron came out with some snacks, and I shared with her what I had learned about our Alberta magpies. We looked friend on the lawn, all black and blue, and I began to think about how different his – I’ll assume it was a “he” – life would have been had he been a South Dakota magpie. In that case, he might still be married – I hope happily so – and pecking around the lawn with his spouse. There’s something about living here in Alberta that devastates the success rate of magpie marriages. Is it the cold weather? Something in the prairie air? Alberta politics? I have no idea.

What I do know is that we tend to think that our lives are completely of our own making – that we, and we alone, determine our destiny. But if that was the case, then every one of us in every community would be the exactly same. Not only would magpie marriages in different places have the same chances of success, but so too would people’s lives be identical. Rodeo would be as popular in Nova Scotia as it is in Alberta; voters would be as conservative in Vancouver as they are in Calgary, and poutine would be as popular in Brazil as it is in Canada.

But the fact is that, although we each certainly play a major role in forming our own identities, each of us is very much a product of our environment and of the others around us, both now and in the past. That’s because our lives – our selves – are not impermeable. They touch and are touched by others who come near us. What makes us us is not only our own will, but also our context. Those around us have a hand in making us who we are just as much – and sometimes more – as we do ourselves. Because I know you, I’ll always carry a little bit of you in me, and because you know me, for better or for worse, you’ll always carry a bit of me in you, too.

Think about this from the perspective of being Canadian. In most places in the world, the term “residential school” means just that – a school that’s residential, where people live. But to you as a Canadian, that term means something very different, and simply hearing it makes your stomach turn (or at least it should). As Jews – people who are a part of the wonderful community and people to which we all belong – we have a particular outlook on things such as justice, a special concern for our people wherever they live, and unique insights as to what makes a good corned beef sandwich.

Many people say that you can be whoever you want to be, but I think that might be a bit of a conceit. You are partly what you make of yourself, but you’re also partly who we in your environment make you. I think this might be why God created us male and female in the creation story that many synagogues will read tomorrow. God wanted us to complete each other, and knew that the best way to become complete would be to have a partner who was different. Nowadays, of course, we know that differences can originate in varying genders, and from countless other sources, as well. But the point is that we tend not to partner with people who are identical to us, but instead with people who are different, and who can have a hand in helping to complete us.

Adam and Eve were so very different, and thank God they had each other. For magpies, men, and women – we’re all the product of both self and other, of both identity and context alike.

The magpies weren’t the only creatures flying around my backyard. Soon, a robin landed near where the magpies had been. The robin chirped enthusiastically, or at least it seemed enthusiastic. It was hard to tell, of course, because faces with beaks aren’t very expressive.

I soon discovered that, sure enough, bird experts refer to this song of the robin as its “Cheerily Carol.” It says, “Cheerily, cheer up, cheer up. Cheerily, cheer up, cheer up.” Why are they so happy? It turns out that the robins who sing the happy song I was hearing aren’t doing so gratuitously. They’re doing it, I learned, because here in Alberta, robins are in their breeding grounds, their mating grounds. They are happy, because to a robin, Alberta is the land of love!

The American robin, which is the kind of robin we see here in Calgary, can be found all year long in much of the United States. It winters in Mexico, but it doesn’t breed there, so robins in Mexico are sad ones indeed. Mexico might have good Mariachi music, but you won’t hear any happy robins singing happy songs there. Here in Canada, however, is where the robins breed. So that robin I saw in my backyard? He was one happy guy.

Lonely Mr. Magpie, eat your heart out. Our robins in Alberta, unlike our magpies, are joyous birds. They know that life is at its fullest during our moments of connection, and that’s why they sing their songs.

Compare that to our own experiences during recent months. So many of us have been isolated, disconnected from meaningful human contact. We’ve learned that while online conferences are sometimes necessary, they certainly don’t cut it in terms of forging the bonds we need with other people.

And what’s the opposite of isolation? Love! Not love as a feeling, but love as an act. Doing things that connect us – connect us passionately – with other individuals. And if you’ve ever been in love, you can understand that robin’s song.

Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, teaches that the Messiah, waiting for his or her time to come, has a wonderful little bird, and when the time comes for the messiah to arrive, that bird sings a song that is so vivid, so magnificent, so melodious, that nobody – not even God – has heard such a tune before. The bird sings that song, the Messiah arises, and the age of goodness and unification begins.

I think I heard the robin sing that very song of salvation in my backyard that day. And in fact, there have been moments during the past year when I think I’ve even sung it myself. Because even during these months of isolation, there have been moments of love. I’ve had great talks with my wife; I’ve Zoomed with my kids and my grandchildren; I’ve celebrated and shared special moments with you even in these restrictive circumstances.

Many of us have had such moments. Difficult though this year has been, many of us have still found a way to enjoy our own chorus of love songs.

One day shortly after the beginning of the pandemic, I had a Zoom meeting with a conversion student. It was a beautiful day, so I brought my laptop out onto the back deck to speak with him there. As we spoke, I saw a gull fly overhead – I barely noticed it. Soon, another gull came, and then another, and then several more. And within just a couple of minutes, the whole sky was filled with them. Hundreds of birds swirled around above my head. “Conversion shmonversion,” I said to the student. “You should see what’s going on over here!”

Some gulls flew by so closely I could almost touch them. Others were hundreds of meters in the air, so small they were barely visible. These were smallish for gulls, white against the blue sky, with black crowns and wingtips.

What I later learned about these birds made me amazed that they had the energy to swirl. They were Franklin’s gulls, it turns out, and Franklins gulls are migrators. They go south for the winter, and I’m not talking Lethbridge here. No, Franklin’s gulls fly over the 49^th parallel (for them, the U.S. border is open), over the United States, through Mexico and Central America, along the South American coast, and winter in Southern Chile. Every year. And then, they come back here to Canada, only to repeat the cycle once again. They have been known to live for as long as nine years, each of them flying tens of thousands of kilometres just in migration – I hope they get frequent flier miles.

At the time I saw those gulls, of course, we humans were locked down. We couldn’t get on a plane to Kelowna, let alone fly to Santiago. But those gulls were world travellers. Now, whenever they fly overhead, I think of all they’ve seen – all the journeys their lives have taken. Soaring above me, they’ve come from the other side of the earth.

It reminds me of a bird ritual from Jewish scripture. The Torah tells us that when a person contracts a certain skin disease called metzora – a word usually translated as leprosy, but which probably refers to something more like psoriasis – that person is to be removed from the camp and isolated until he or she gets better. And after that person’s condition clears up, the Torah prescribes an elaborate ritual that involves placing the blood of a bird on that person’s ear, thumb, and big toe.

It’s a strange ritual, but looking at those gulls, I think I understood it…at least a little. Birds travel. They cross borders. They are worldly in a way we could never be. And they always return. These magnificent creatures are both rooted a certain place, and transcend it. They are local and international, Calgarian and Chilean. They have loyalty to their home, but aren’t limited by it.

Being at home and yearning for distant horizons? That’s something to strive for, even and especially during a lockdown.

It’s September now. The mornings have turned chilly, and for our people, the New Year has begun. But I still sit out back, and I still watch the world unfold from there on my deck-top perch. And one of the things I’ve learned this year is of the value of doing just that. Sitting. Watching. Learning. Reflecting. Those birds have taught me much this year. The power of community; the importance of love; the value of being home and taking magnificent journeys.

Those are some important lessons, and those are just the ones I’ve learned from the birds – we haven’t even started to talk about the insects yet.

Alas, the bugs will have to wait for another time. For we all have some reflecting to do on this Rosh Hashanah, for even here at Temple, or from in front of our screens at home, we can sit, watch, listen, and reflect. And when we do, we very well might soar to places we’ve hardly yet dreamt of.

This year, in 5782, let’s do just that, for surely we will all become far richer as a result.

Shanah Tovah.