What Will You Sacrifice For Focus?
On The Tradeoff Between Mystery and Knowledge
The Torah instructs that one cannot take a mother bird along with her eggs, but must scare her away, first. The Zohar reads this commandment symbolically—the mother represents the origin of things, while the eggs represent that which is within our experiential and epistemological grasp. Here’s the text:
“So it is written: Do not take the mother along with the young (Deuteronomy 22:6), for She is the concealed world, unrevealed, so Let the mother go, since She is totally unrevealed, and the young you may take for yourself, corresponding to what is written: For ask now of primal days... from one end of heaven to the other (Deuteronomy 4:32). (Zohar, I:58a, Pritzker edition, translated by Daniel Matt).
1) What is the mother bird to you, and what are the eggs?
2) What questions and topics do you feel you must bracket and which do you feel you must take up?
3) The Torah teaches that the reward for observing the commandment is a long life (literally translated as length of days). In what way might the pushing aside of certain questions and the specialized attention on others lead to either longevity or days which feel longer?
4) Think of the Zoharic text as a form of meditation instruction—the mother bird represents the distracting thoughts that arise to take you out of the meditation and the eggs represent the experience you might have if you could just shush those thoughts. The choice then becomes, which do you prefer: the nice, shiny thought or the length of days. Be honest: do you want the length of days, after all? Why or why not?
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