OWC Publications

Chicken Scratch

By Andrine de la Rocha
 
A while back, my daughter announced that she was interested in hatching baby chicks from eggs for a science project. Typically, she failed to tell us this until it was too late to acquire fertile eggs and incubate them. Instead we bought half a dozen day-old chicks at the feed store with which she intended to perform complex and mysterious experiments.
 
Around that same time, my girlfriend and I had begun reading the Babylonian Talmud, the body of Jewish writings by ancient Rabbis, and were delighted to discover how many of the stories refer to chickens and experiments. The moment of God’s wrath: when the rooster stands on one leg and his comb pales. How to tell if there are demons about: sprinkle a fine ash on the floor at night and when you wake there will be chicken tracks in the ash, which proves there are demons, as everyone knows that demons have chicken feet.
 
In the first few days one of the yellow chicks became ill and, despite moving it to a box under a heat lamp in my daughter’s bedroom, it died in the middle of the night. The wailing woke me as she cried, “I’ve never prayed for anything so hard in my life and it still died! God does not exist!” I was poorly prepared to handle a spiritual crisis at three a.m. The science project would take on a decidedly different tone. I wrapped the chick in tissue and put it in a Ziploc bag in the basement freezer to bury when we could say Kaddish and give it a proper funeral.

 
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