We have been discussing how the Baal Bitachon takes strength from the world around him. He sees what’s going on in nature and that speaks to him. The Hovot HaLevavot is training us to see these lessons. He sees the embryo in its mother’s womb and thinks: Wow! How’d it get there? Who’s feeding it, nourishing it, giving oxygen to the embryo? Well, he realizes, the same G-d that took care of me when I was an embryo can take care of me now.
Then he looks at his breakfast, the egg, and thinks: Who set up the egg like that? Who gave it food? Who gave it oxygen?
Our next point is:
והעוף באויר
And the bird in the air.
This too is a lesson and it’s only two words.
The Hovot HaLevavot points out that the bird spends his time up in the air but there’s no food up there. That could be a problem. How do they eat?
G-d gave birds various abilities in order to feed themselves. They’re natural abilities but again, we are supposed to learn from nature.
Shlomo HaMelech says: לך אל נמלה עצל
- If you’re lazy, watch the ant.
Watch nature. We are supposed to learn from nature but we have become very distant from it.
The next time you’re in Miami, check out the Safari- it’s about an hour out of Miami. For 2 hours you can ride around looking at all the animals, listening to information on a CD. Every step of the way is another “Wow!” so that you learn and wonder at how G-d gave all the animals their different abilities.
There are many birds, each with their own different capabilities for getting food.
Let’s look at vultures. Recently, at a doctor’s office, I saw a National Geographic magazine that had about 20 pages featuring the vulture. It was fascinating. Vultures have a tremendous sense of smell and sight. They can spot or smell a carcass from literally miles and miles away and then within half an hour the entire carcass is devoured. How can they do that? The animal is dead. Its flesh is hard like leather. But vultures have special beaks that can poke in and devour every part of the carcass. That’s G-d’s way of feeding them.
In the broader sense, without vultures, all these carcasses would cause infection and disease. So in a way, they are G-d’s sanitation system, eliminating the disease that the dead animals would otherwise be spreading. G-d put into the system that things get cleaned up this way.
Let’s consider other birds:
Many birds have the ability to see fish down in the water from high in the air. The bird can spot the fish swimming and can swoop down into the water and pull the fish out of the sea. His claws, eye sight, and beak are all specially designed by G-d. The birds know to come down to the exact spot where the fish is going to be- not where he is, much like the famous hockey player Wayne Gretzky who said “I go where the puck is going” when asked what made him so successful. The bird can go where the “puck” is going. G-d gave him this ability.
Then there’s the flamingo- He’s a gorgeous pink color, with a long beak, very long, thin legs and thin feet. G-d planned this. If he had thick feet, the fish would notice him. They’d see a predator and swim away. But he’s able to stand in the water with these very long thin legs and the fish think they’re some type of stalk or plant. And then, as the fish swim by, the flamingo can bend down and catch them. He’s hunting. That’s why he has those tall, thin legs.
There are endless abilities that G-d gave birds. The Baal Bitachon thinks: G-d likes birds, but he likes me even more.
The Baal Bitachon gets hizuk from looking around at nature and seeing that just as Hashem takes care of these birds and gives them all these abilities, he can take care of me even more. How? We don’t know, but He can do it.