There’s a lot to learn from the fauna with whom we share the planet. Last week, I wrote about the precipitous decline in the North American bird population and why it seems to me that we need to care—and to care a lot—about something that, at least at first blush, appears not to be too relevant to (or too likely impactful on) human beings at all. And now I would like to bring to bear to other recent experiences I had learning about the animal kingdom in my effort to find some way to grapple with the nightmarish disaster that befell those poor people at Har Meron last week—and, if possible, to learn something from the contemplation of the catastrophe.
The night just before the horrific events in
Israel was our UJA reception at Shelter Rock. It was a lovely evening, one that
honored our Shelter Rock cantor, Ḥazzan Larry
Goller, and which raised a very respectable sum for the UJA. And then it was
over and Joan and I had some dinner, then sat down at the end of a long day to
watch something on television. And what we ended up watching was Pippa Ehrlich
and James Reed’s 85-minute documentary, My Octopus Teacher, featuring Craig
Foster as the film’s sole human actor. I can’t recommend it highly enough—the
film, a documentary, is engaging, very interesting, moving, and deeply
satisfying—but the specific part I’d like to write about here is the segment
featuring an attack on the octopus (who is definitely the star of the movie) by
a pyjama shark (yes, there really is such a thing, click here). It’s a little gruesome, but we’re made to
understand that that’s how things go down in the deep: there’s a food chain and
the basic principle is to eat for as long as you can avoid being eaten. But the
octopus successfully escapes the shark by hiding in its den, or mostly it does
because one of its eight limbs protrudes outside the den and the shark, willing
to take something instead of nothing, bites it off and carries it away to its
own den where it presumably serves as the main course at dinner that night.
But the part I want to write about has to do
with the octopus, not the shark. The octopus has been dealt a terrible blue,
but it seems naturally to know what to do. It first sets itself to adapting to
its new normal and then to rejuvenating that missing limb and growing it back
to a state of full usability, which is exactly what happens. In other words, it
sizes up the situation, accepts how things are, take stock of its options,
realizes it can move past the tragedy and with tools it already
possesses…and then, slowly but fully naturally, it does just that. In other
words, the octopus lacks our human inclination to allow the fragility of our
human condition to enrage or infuriate. Instead, it understands its own vulnerability
to be part of who it is…and also part of what it can be. So that’s what I
learned from My Octopus Teacher. (To read more about the movie, click here.) And then, the next morning, we heard about
the disaster at Har Meron.
Earlier in the week, I had read—and had been
fascinated by—an essay published on the LiveScience website (click here) about
a new discovery regarding a mystery concerning the kraken, which is the name
popularly given to Architeuthis dux, the world’s largest squid. And to call
this animal large is hardly to say anything at all: at its maximum size, A. dux
can grow to be 46 feet long, the size of a semi-trailer. (The paper announcing
the discovery, written in language only a serious scientist could love,
appeared on the ScienceDirect site. To take a look, click here.) So
the issue under discussion was just how these creatures have managed to hide
from the world so successfully that up until just a decade ago there was
serious weight given to the contention that these squids didn’t exist at all,
that they were “just” another kind of made-up sea monster willed into being by
the mythological imagination. But they do exist…and one was finally
photographed in 2012. And then another one was photographed in 2019. So the
basic issue, since they clearly are real, is how have they managed to
hide so effectively over all these many years that people have been looking for
them. And the answer has to do, here too, with adaptation. Architeuthis dux has
eyes the size of basketballs, about three times larger than the eyes of the
animal with the next largest eyes. (By comparison, the eyes of grey whales are
about the size of baseballs.)
It’s dark down there at the bottom of the ocean
and these giant eyes serve two functions: they allow the squids to maneuver
around on the sea floor without coming to any harm, but they also allow
them to see even the slightest light from a human visitor in a research
submarine or from an underwater camera. In other words, these creatures would
be almost fully blind if they had eyes that matched their size. But they
don’t…because they have evolved these gigantic eyes that are able to keep them
safe not by denying their vulnerability but by addressing it. How scientists
were able to fool giant squids on two separate occasions to come out of hiding
is the subject of the papers referenced above. But my point here is not that
these huge creatures are vulnerable because of their size, but that their vulnerability,
rather than paralyzing them, propelled them over the millennia to develop the
kinds of eyes that could see in the almost absolute darkness of the
ocean floor and that could thus make and keep them safe.
And now, Miron. A disaster that could surely
have been averted. A horrific loss of life that could just as easily not have
happened. Whom to blame is an open question! Some are blaming the police for
not having prevented this disaster in advance. Others have preferred blaming
the government for not closing down the site in the first place, especially
given that people have been calling it a death trap for years. And, of course,
there are plenty of people in line to blame the victims—didn’t those people
know they were courting disaster (pandemic and otherwise) by coming together,
mostly unmasked, in such large numbers and in such a small space? There will be an official inquiry that will
decide where to lay the blame, so there’s no need to second guess them in
advance. Instead, I suggest we respond, not with recriminatory rhetoric or with
self-righteous invective, but with a renewed sense of awe at the human
condition.
We are fragile things, we human beings. We
break easily. We can be crushed in a moment by people without even a single one
of them actually wishing us any harm. We can be felled by viruses so tiny that
even regular microscopes are unable to see them clearly…or at all. We don’t age
all that well either, succumbing to various ailments and weaknesses as we grow
older, only some of which can be deferred, let alone defeated. And we human
beings are all subject to the awful brevity of life itself, to the natural
limit our humanness imposes on our beingness. When I read about this
catastrophe in Israel, I too was at first outraged and eager to apportion out
the blame. I still am wholly in favor of the government getting to the bottom of
things too, and certainly to determine if this nightmare could have been
averted by people doing their jobs correctly. But what I personally am taking away
from this—and what I recommend that you too consider as your personal
takeaway—is a renewed sense of just how friable it all is, just how ephemeral,
just how evanescent. We feel so mighty and so invincible, so strong. We think
of ourselves naturally as the kings and queens of our tiny domains. But, in the
end, we live by the grace of God’s breath within us and we are gone in an
instant when our time is up. A renewed sense of awe at the precariousness of
the human condition is what the tragedy of Har Meron brought to me personally. And
I offer it to you all as well as a way of responding to a senseless disaster
and its tragic loss of life not with anger or with a rush to judgment, but with
humility.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Martin S. Cohen
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