By the time you read this article, half the country will be ecstatic, and half the country will be in depression, depending on the election results. There is a private school in Manhattan that is scheduling a day off after Election Day so that its students can deal with the traumatic results of the election. That’s our snowflake generation. Though I may prove to be a snowflake myself.
At this time, I will occupy my mind and yours with a bit more of a fluffy story. My daughter Shani, in the Lakewood area (Manchester), has a frum neighbor who raised chickens and collected eggs daily. My grandsons loved playing with them, naturally.
Well, one day last week, the neighbor decided that with winter approaching, it would be harder to keep the chickens comfortable in their outdoor coop, so they arranged for a shochet to come and bring a quick end to their chicken problem.
We were then sent pictures of the chickens, reduced to parts and covered with onions in the oven. All of us were aghast at the sight of one’s pet chickens ending up on a dinner table.
It occurred to me that it is interesting that human nature is such that if you stay away from some harsh realities, they will not bother you. Or bother you less. If we thought of the meat and poultry that we eat as the living, breathing, emotion-laden creatures they were, we would all be vegetarians.
In Baltimore, I have a home-made chicken coop that my daughter Sori built. It houses four chickens and a rooster. The kids gave them names like Midnight, Chip, and Ocean. Although the chickens have not yet laid eggs (they need a total of about 21 weeks from birth to do so), we have gotten to know them and recognize each for its personality. (The biggest “chicken” is the rooster.)
There is no way we would ever think of slaughtering these chickens and certainly not eating them.
I think that is how we survive in the awful times we live. If we paused to think how many lives and families have been upended in Israel by this devastating war, and how many Jewish hostages are living hellish lives as we go about our day, we would go stir crazy... which we should. We continue our lives like the chicken dinners we eat. We cannot pause to think of how happy-go-lucky the chicken was living a week ago. I am not defending our attitude; just trying to understand it.
I must take a moment to commend my own son Simcha. He has taken it upon himself to obtain the email addresses and/or phone numbers of many of the families of the fallen in the IDF. The amount of appreciation they have for each communication is beyond description. Simcha has humanized each casualty, not just a sad story to read about and move on.
Speaking of chickens coming home to roost, the chickens have come home for the universities and Charles Schumer in a devastating congressional report in their complicity in tolerating anti-Semitism on campus. But I hope to address that at another time. I don’t want to take my mind off the suffering of our brethren.
Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld is the Rabbi Emeritus of the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, former President of the Vaad Harabonim of Queens, and the Rabbinic Consultant for the Queens Jewish Link.
