My morning rendezvous with the birds on the balcony of my Jerusalem home began many years ago, when I first met my son-in-law’s mother, a Holocaust survivor. At the time, bread was highly subsidized in Israel, very inexpensive, and many people threw it out when it became a day old. She told me how a crust of bread often meant the difference between life and death in the Auschwitz concentration camp; so In Israel, she would ask her neighbors to give her what they didn’t want. What she couldn’t transform into breadcrumbs, she would take down the street to a place near her home in Yavne, a small development town, where there were donkeys, and she’d feed the bread to them.
There are no donkeys in the neighborhood of Beit Hakerem where I live, but I never forgot her words and since then could never throw away a piece of bread. So I decided to feed the birds, putting out the crusts and stale slices every morning on my back balcony where I grow my herbs. For most of the year, when it’s sunny, that’s where I eat breakfast, and now the birds come and breakfast with me every day. At 6 a.m., there are one or two sitting in the branches of a tree below the balcony. They know me now – they twitter a few notes, and soon there are ten or more different birds coming magically from surrounding trees, waiting to partake of their breakfast. For me, feeding God’s creatures is like a song of praise to the Creator, and they repay me with birdsong.
