“The Mother and Child reunion is only a motion away.” That was Paul Simon’s 1972 record, his first after Simon and Garfunkel broke up. Simon said he was sitting at a restaurant in Chinatown, and there was a dish on the menu called Mother and Child Reunion: chicken and eggs. And immediately, he went to write a song about it.
When we think about words like mother and child, we think about our own experience. And naturally, we think about human beings. I could never have seen the chicken and the egg behind the lyrics. But once I heard the story behind it, the invisible became visible.
When we read in the Ten Commandments — Honor your father and your mother — we naturally think about human beings. It seems pretty straightforward: “Honor your father and your mother, so that you can earn a long life.” But maybe “honor your father and your mother” is not just about human beings. Maybe…it’s about the chicken and the egg.
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Our parsha this week, Ki Tetzei, includes a law that says – “If you are going on your way, and you come across a bird’s nest, with the mother bird sitting over the chicks or the eggs, do not take the mother along with the child. Let the mother go, send her away, and take the young for yourself, and you will fare well and have a long life.”
Like honoring your parents, it grants the same reward of long life. But what’s the goal? If the goal is really to be sensitive to animals, we wouldn’t steal their eggs. And we wouldn’t eat birds to begin with. Nachmanides says that since the result is not really a kindness to animals, this law is meant to benefit human beings, to make us more compassionate. But then I discovered a number of scholars who say – Nachmanides is wrong. This law couldn’t be more clear-cut, it’s about animals. But we are still trying to make it about us. To paraphrase Maimonides — you’re so vain, you probably think this mitzvah’s about you (also a 1972 hit).
It’s not just about us. In fact, the entire book of Deuteronomy is devoted to a platform of: it’s not just about us. Deuteronomy restates and revises earlier laws from the Torah, often with this goal, of turning our attention toward the “other” in our midst. In some cases that is women, in other cases that is the slave, or the stranger — Deuteronomy insists over and over, remember you were once slaves in the land of Egypt, remember you were a stranger, remember you were the “other”.
And sometimes, the “other” is the chicken and the egg.
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The Torah teaches us that even if we do take the eggs for food, we can never start thinking that an animal is just ours for the taking. The phrasing in the Torah, taking the mother with her chicks, is “em al-habanim,” a phrase that is used a few times in the Bible to discuss unethical warfare. “Taking mother and child together” appears in this same Hebrew formula in the story of Jacob and Esau, and by the prophet Hosea, to describe ultimate cruelty in war, unchecked violence against mother and child, with no moral code. The Torah puts our taking of animals for food in the context of war: something complicated and messy, that can be justified, but only if it’s done ethically.
We can justify being meat-eaters, but we have to admit, it is a type of violence. Even something as mundane as the chicken and the egg.
Frankly, the law of the mother bird is nothing new. In Leviticus we were commanded, Don’t slaughter an animal parent and child on the same day. So we should already know not to take a mother with her eggs. And yet, the law from this week’s parsha takes the invisible and makes it visible. The image of the mother bird in her nest somehow takes the abstract law and makes it impossible to ignore. We are left with the understanding that ethics don’t start in the philosophy classroom, or on the battlefield, they begin with the nests we find in our own backyard.
Our Torah is consistent in teaching us — it’s not just about us. Even if we aren’t as sensitive and considerate as we would like to be, even if we do miss the mark in caring for the “other”, even if we are taking the eggs away from the nest, even if we do engage in war, we can do it with some concrete measure of our values. And when we do make these compromises, which we do all the time, we can’t lose sight of what we have to do to honor the sanctity of mother and child. It’s only a motion away.
