A Vort On Parshas Ki Teitzei: Why Send Away The Mother Bird

00:16 In this week's Parsha, the Torah tells us a very interesting mitzvah. If you walk down the street, you see a tree, and there's a nest with a kosher, with kosher birds, and there's little baby birds inside the nest, and the mother of those baby birds is sitting over them and giving them food and, right, touching the nest, making sure, watching over them like a mother watches over the kids. The Torah says that if you wanna take the little baby birds, then you have to first send away the mother, send her away, shoo her away, and then take the little baby birds, and you can take them home. I don't know what you wanna use them for. Maybe you wanna eat them. Even let's say it's not really baby birds, there's only eggs. You know, birds are born from eggs. The, the bird lays the eggs, and she sits on those eggs, and they get warm, and after a while, the eggs hatch and baby birds come out. So let's say there are eggs in the nest, and the mother is watching over the nest. You have to shoo away the mother first, send her away, and then you can take the eggs for yourself. What if somebody... Oh, first of all, it has to be a kosher bird, as I said, and it can't be in a backyard, somebody's backyard. It has to be in a place which doesn't, is not, nobody's, doesn't belong to anybody, like either the street or a park or the

01:55 forest, a place which is nobody's. If it's in somebody's own garden or backyard, then you don't have the mitzvah of Shiluach Hakan. Okay? But what happens if somebody, let's say you walk down the street and you see on a tree a nest with a dove. A dove is a kosher bird. And you see the mother dove is sitting by the nest and touching it and watching over her little, um, baby, baby birds. You wanna do the mitzvah, but you don't really wanna take the baby birds with you. Do you have a mitzvah to do it? Or is it only if you wanna take the baby birds? Hashem says, "Send away the mother bird because, you know, she's gonna feel bad when she sees you take away the baby birds." So the Torah says, "Send her away first, and then you can take the baby birds." Should you do it? But you don't wanna take the baby birds. Should you still send away the mother? Well, some say yes, some say no, but we do it. We, we actually, when you, if you see today a nest somewhere and you're not interested in taking the baby birds, you still wanna do the mitzvah. You get a big mitzvah if you send away the mother bird, and then you pick up the nest and put it back down, and you leave it there. You don't have to, you don't have to take it home. Now, why? So what's the mitzvah about? Why, why should I send away

03:27 the mother bird if I'm not even interested in taking the baby, the baby birds or the eggs? So in the Zohar, it says a very beautiful thing. Do you know why Hashem gave us this mitzvah? Because the mother is like Hashem, and we are like the little birds inside the nest. And when I, when we were in the nest, we, we are like the little birds. Where's the nest? Yerushalayim, Eretz Yisrael, the Beis Hamikdash. But when, uh, Hashem sent us into Galus, sent us away from Eretz Yisrael, destroyed the Beis Hamikdash, it's like the little birds being taken away from the nest. So we want Hashem to have rachmanus on us, especially in the month of Elul when it says in the month of Elul, Hashem's is extremely, extremely full of rachmanus. The 13 different types of rachmanus Hashem has on us. It says that Hashem has, feels very, very, very pity on us and compassionate on us and, and really wants to help us. But when you take the mother bird and send it away from the nest, the mother gets even more anxious and more excited. She misses her birds. When do you miss your mommy and tati? When you're next in the house, next to them, or when you're in camp? When does your mommy miss you more? When you're home the whole time, or when you go away to camp for two months? That's when she misses you more. So when we send away the mother bird from the nest, and

05:18 the mother is forced to go away because we're pushing her away, then she gets full of rachmanus. She gets so full of... She feels she misses her, uh, birds. She wishes she can come back. She wants to come back and protect them and take care of them more than when she was on the nest because she was pushed away. Just like your mommy feels more anxious, and she feels more missing you when you're not home. Same thing we do with Hashem. We've been in Galus for so long, and we're taken out of our nest. And by pushing away the mother bird, we're saying, we're telling Hashem, "You are like our mother. You are like our father." And you are so far away from us. And when we do this, Hashem gets filled with rachmanus on us, just like the mother bird gets full of rachmanus on her chicks, on her little bare babies, because she's been pushed away. So we remind Hashem, you've been pushing-- we've been pushed away from you. And that arouses and wakes up in Hashem, so to speak, in the Shechinah, great, great rachmanus on the Jewish people, and hoping that this will bring Mashiach. Hashem will have rachmanus on us, take us out of Galus, bring us, bring us to the Beis Hamikdash and rebuild the nest, and he come, he'll come back to the nest, and we'll be reunited. We'll be together in the new nest, the third Beis Hamikdash. Now, I want to just share with you one

06:52 other thing. The Gemara, the Gemara asks a simple question. What if you see a nest in the ocean? Let's say you're on a boat, and you see like a board, like maybe a little... There's like a board, like a piece of wood that's floating on the water, and on top there's a nest with a bird. Do you have a mitzvah to send away the mother bird? What's the question? Because it says in the Torah that when, when you walk ba-derech, ba-derech means in Hebrew on the road. You have to be walking on the road, and you see a nest, that's when you have a mitzvah to send away the mother bird. But is the water, the ocean considered ba-derech, on the road, on the way? It's water. The road means like, you know, where people walk down the street, that's called a road. But the water is just water all over water. There's no roads on the water. Says the Gemara, yes. You know why? Because there's a pasuk that says, "Hanosi bayam derech," Hashem creates roads in the water. Now, whatever that means, I may as well tell you what it means. Rashi says it means that Hashem made roads in the Yam Suf. When we came out of Mitzrayim, you know, there were 12 different passages, you know, people were passing by in 12 different roads that Hashem created inside the ocean. The sea split, and there were 12 roads created. And each shevet, each tribe went in a different road. So we

08:32 see that Hashem, the pasuk uses the word derech, a road in the water. So therefore, if you find a nest on the water, somewhere in the sea, you're riding in a boat on the sea, then you have a mitzvah of shiluach hakan, to send away the mother bird. Then the Gemara asks, "What if you see bashamayim, in the sky, you see a bird with a nest?" Now what does that mean? So Rashi says, you know what it means? You see a bird, like maybe an eagle, a large bird, and on the wings of that bird, there's like a nest. And you're able to send away the mother bird. It's flying very low. It's in the air, in the air. A nest in the air is considered ba-derech, as if you find a nest on the road. The Torah says, "Ki yikah retzu ba-derech," you find the nest on the road. Is that considered a road? And the Gemara says no. That's not a road, so you don't have to do shiluach hakan if the nest is on the wings of a bird. So today, let's say you are on a plane, and you're flying very high up, and you see a bird and a nest on the wings of the plane, right? The planes have also wings, large, large, long wings. You look out the window and says, "Whoa, a bird, and there's a nest." Now, it's hard to get out of the plane and send away the mother bird. But if you could, is

09:59 this a mitzvah? No, says the Gemara, because in the air that's not considered being on the road. From here, the great Rogatchover Goan learned a very important lesson in Halakha. You know that you have to say a special tefillah. It's called Tefillas Haderech. When you ri-- when you're driving a long distance outside the city, you have to say tefillah, special Tefillas Haderech. I'm sure you've seen this in the car. The question is, if you fly in a plane, can we call that Tefillas Haderech? You're flying in the air. Are you supposed to say that special tefillah, Tefillas Haderech? Is flying in the air considered derech? The Gemara says no. But shiluach hakan, sending away the mother bird, the mother, the mother bird, also says ba-derech. And the Gemara says that's not-- in the air, that's not considered ba-derech. That's not considered on the way. So the Rogatchover says, from here we learn that you don't say Tefillas Haderech when you're flying on a plane. Only if you're driving with a car, going with a boat, it has to be close to the earth, to the, to the earth. But other people disagree with him, and I think people do say Tefillas Haderech today. What some people do is, to be sure, they say Tefillas Haderech when you're still on the runway. You know what the runway is? The plane, before it takes off to go off to the air, it first goes on the ground a little bit, and then it goes faster and faster

11:26 and faster and faster until it goes straight up. So before it gets off the ground, you say Tefillas Haderech quickly so that you would still be on the ground. It could be called Tefillas Haderech. A good Shabbos.