A Personal Reflection

In my life, a certain inner line has gradually taken shape, one that I did not fully recognize before, and only now, as I am going through training in the Animal Chaplaincy program at Compassion Consortium, an interfaith school where different spiritual traditions do not compete but seem to enter into a quiet dialogue with one another, I have begun to see that what I am studying there — attention to animals, the ability to be present with them, to be with them without words — does not distance me from Judaism, but rather brings me back to it from a different side, a more living, more human, and perhaps deeper one.

This realization became especially clear when I opened the book Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer, because his words helped me see what had long been living within me but had remained unnamed, and at a certain point this connected with what I know from Jewish tradition, especially where he quotes Rabbi Zusya of Anipoli:

“In the World to Come, they will not ask me why I was not Moses; they will ask me why I was not Zusya!”

At that moment, I paused, because I understood that this is not about comparison, but about authenticity, about the responsibility to live one’s own path — the one given by the Creator.

Looking back, it becomes clear that my connection with animals did not begin with this program and not even recently, but much earlier, in my childhood, next to my grandfather Leo, a livestock specialist, an educated man and a director of a state farm, someone who lived a difficult life but was not broken by it, a person respected and remembered to this day, who would sometimes, with a smile, call me “the godfather of cats” when I was seven or eight years old, and at the time it sounded like a joke, but now I understand........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)