“THY TENDER MERCIES EXTEND TO A BIRD’S NEST”

Today I had to kill a baby sparrow to put it out of its misery. I cried and cried and have been miserable all day and then some. “Had to” might be too strong a phrase. Perhaps you can help me decide.

We heard odd noises thrashing about in our garage. The thrashing, we found, came from the tiniest of sparrows that had the misfortune of getting its baby-feet stuck to the pad that the exterminator had set out to trap rodents that routinely wander in from the field below.

Squeamish as I usually am about such things, I still tried to delicately free the nestling’s tiny feet from the goo. As you would expect, it was all to no avail without tearing them away from its spindly legs. The little sparrow looked up at me with plaintive eyes, sadly pathetic eyes that, at least to my imagination, begged me for help and hope. But, I could give it none. So, I stood frozen for an eternal moment, and then I killed that baby bird. And, I cried and I cried until I heaved, and then I cried some more.

Dr. Freud and James Joyce alerted us to the significance of stream-of-consciousness, and stream-of-consciousness overtook me. Why does our mind run to the things to which it runs? Rarely, sad to say, do I instinctively jump to Talmudic quotes, but one that I learned long ago captured the moment: “Thy tender mercies extend to a bird’s nest.”

The God of Deuteronomy demands that we take mercy on a momma bird and her nestlings. Celebrating God’s compassion even toward one of the earth’s most common and negligible creatures seems, a fortiori, to be apt praise to the Master of the Universe. Yet, we are warned to be exceedingly careful of invoking such praise, for if we utter it thoughtlessly, we might infer that God extends no similar mercy to His other creatures.

Per my sainted mother, who knew of such things, “God can take care of Himself.” If we are to be the vehicles of God’s mercy, then the problem might well be with us, not God. I came so up-close-and-personal to that helpless little creature, saw the terror in its eyes, felt the shudder of its struggling wings, held its destiny in my vaguely arthritic hands. And, my choices were to let this errant nestling die a long and torturous death or to quickly take its life. I chose the latter.

Perhaps this is the issue: The grief, the tears and the heaves seem directly derivative of being up-close-and-personal. The plaintive eyes of a nestling look up into our eyes begging to be free, and only a psychopath would not well up with the instinctive intention of mercy. An infant cries from pain that it cannot fathom or rationalize, we see the uncomprehended terror in its eyes, and how can we not have mercy, how can we not cry? We look, as I did, into the hollow eyes of our parents as they lie on their deathbed, our helplessness overwhelms us, memories of long forgotten salad-days spent with them well up, our shoulders shudder and we cry disconsolate tears.

Distance, it seems, distances us. Bombs explode on the remote cityscape, justifiably or not, and we watch our screens intently, even gleefully, as a morbid video game plays out in a fantasia of crosshairs, bunkers and puffs of smoke. It is just another round of Mortal Kombat, because we cannot see the eyes, the terrified eyes, impervious that, with each fireball on the horizon, we are watching death. And perhaps we rationalize that the death was well deserved, but we dare not escape the desperate terror that fills even the unseen eyes in the nanosecond before life is laid waste.

This is not a discourse advocating vegetarianism or euthanasia. It is simply a plea to look into the eyes whenever we are inclined to do violence, be it of the fist or the tongue, whenever compassion is poised to be overtaken by callousness, whenever life and death are remanded to our hands. Look into the eyes and see the fear, the helplessness, the terror. Then cry a bitter cry that sometimes life’s choices are only between relative shades of grief, that the ultimate amalgam of God’s compassion and ours is yet merely an iridescent dream. And, let those tears that attest to our capacity for mercy become the most articulate praise we might ever offer.