Animal Wisdom
I’ve been reading a book called What the Robin Knows, by Jon Young, and early on Young tells a story of a time when he was visiting with some friends and looking out a window while people were talking. He describes what he sees as follows:
Perched in a nearby tree was a robin, singing away. I couldn’t hear the song, but seeing its head flip this way and that - its mouth open, its throat moving, its body relaxed - I knew the bird was singing. I turned back to the wrentit, and just as I did, it flew up five feet, something over waist height. Now it was almost in my face, a few feet away. I could barely hear the chut! alarm, but I could see the pumping tail. This was the same bird that had retreated from me a few minutes earlier, so I concluded that something else had startled it even more. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the robin had quit singing and was rigid except for its tail, which was now also pumping in alarm. Let’s see… two alarmed birds in a suburban yard, one of them a ground dweller who has jumped up five feet - not ten, not fifty, but five…
When I turned to my new friend and said, ‘Hey, a cat’s coming,” he didn’t know what to make of my prediction. He hadn’t seen what I’d seen… I pointed down to the ground outside the glass door, where the cat would surely slink past shortly. When it did a few seconds later, my friend’s jaw dropped, but only because he hadn’t been following the story outside. Any thoughts about my psychic powers were erased by my real-world explanation of what had happened between the wrentit, the robin, and the cat.
There’s nothing random about birds’ awareness and behavior…
Most of us I imagine are still pretty impressed with Young’s ability to read the story the birds were telling. You could call it animal wisdom, meaning both the wisdom to know (at least in part) what animals are doing and why, and also the wisdom of the animals themselves who are constantly reading their own environments for threats and opportunities.
This story came to mind when I read a commentary on this week’s Torah portion that centers on a kind of animal wisdom. Like a master observer who sees more than meets the eye, the Baal Shem Tov reads this verse and discovers within it a concealed message:
“So are Betzalel and Oholiav to make, and every person wise of mind, in them whom God has put wisdom and discernment (asher natan Adonai chochmah u’tvuna bahema), to know [how] to make all the work for the service of [constructing] the Holy-Shrine for all that YHWH has commanded.” (Exodus 36:1)
“Bahema” is a fancy way to say “in them”, but resembles one of the common words for an animal, behema. So the Baal Shem Tov reads here about the chochmah… behema, the “wisdom of the animal.”
A later Chassidic writer, Reb Noson Sternhartz, elaborates:
In holiness, this quality is exceedingly precious—namely, the quality of behemah (animal). That is, to make ourselves like an animal, as though we possess no understanding (da’at) at all. As [King] David said: “But I was brutish and did not know; I was like a beast with You” (Ps. 73:22). And as our master, teacher, and rabbi of blessed memory wrote on the verse, “all… in whom (bahemah) God bestowed wisdom”—that it is a great wisdom to make ourselves like an animal (behemah).
…And then, when we arrive at insight, we must know the truth: that we are still far from wisdom—in the aspect of “I said: I will be wise, but it (i.e., wisdom) is far from me” (Kohelet 7:23). For the essence of wisdom is to discern that wisdom is far from us, as our master of blessed memory wrote…
(Translation from Rabbi Sam Feinsmith of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.)
Reb Noson uses the animal as a metaphor here, contrasting a simple being of animal awareness with our busy, angsty, and imaginative minds. True wisdom, he suggests, requires reminders that we still have wisdom to learn, that a decisive, definitive knowing is still far from our grasp. We would do well to pay close attention and not assume we know more than we know.
In using this metaphor, Reb Noson draws on centuries if not millennia of precedent in defining humanity in contrast to animals. Humans have consciousness (souls, intellect, whatever you will), and animals do not. It seems a defining trait of the human animal is in its self-perception as being more than animal in some way. So what’s shocking about Reb Noson’s teaching is that he says we should try to become more like animals, at least in one respect: a version of “beginner’s mind,” emptying ourselves of human clutter for the simplicity of animal awareness, so that we can be open to gaining new wisdom.
Over the past century or so, we have steadily gained an appreciation for the intellect and consciousness of animals such as octopuses and crows, among others. We are not so tidily distinct from animals. But I appreciate the suggestion that remembering “the soft animal of our bodies,” as Mary Oliver puts it, has a place in our spiritual lives, and that cultivating our own animal wisdom can be a path to holiness.
Shabbat shalom!
Rabbi Jay LeVine
