Both Polish and Ethiopian Jews traditionally fed birds at specific times of year, ascribing deep meaning to this practice. Did the custom spread from south to north with the migratory flocks, or was it simply the Jewish imagination that took wing?

Bird migrations to distant climes have always fired the human imagination, and many cultures saw sustaining these creatures as a spiritually significant act. Among the Jews of Poland, for instance, it was customary to feed songbirds on the Sabbath whose weekly Torah portion includes the song sung by the Children of Israel after the parting of the Red Sea.

The first to record the custom was Rabbi Abraham Abele Halevi Gombiner in his Magen Avraham, a major, 17th-century commentary on the Shulhan Arukh, the definitive code of Jewish law. The author refers to the practice in the context of the prohibition of feeding non-domesticated animals on the Sabbath.

Some are accustomed to place corn before the birds on Shabbat Shira (the Sabbath of Song), and this is incorrect, for their sustenance doesn’t depend on you. (Magen Avraham, Laws of the Sabbath 324:7)

More than three hundred years earlier, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher’s legal code, Arba’a Turim, cited a custom to eat cooked wheat kernels on that Sabbath and pondered which blessing should be recited beforehand.

In the 18th century, Rabbi Joseph Yozefa Kashman Segal anchored the practice in the initials of the name of the Torah portion in question, Be-shallah, adding:

I come not to publicize this custom, but rather to warn those accustomed to placing wheat before the birds [on this Sabbath] that this is forbidden, because their sustenance doesn’t depend on you. (Noheg Ke-tzon Yosef, p. 193)

Rabbi Segal too rejects the practice of feeding birds on the Sabbath, and it’s unclear to what degree this custom was accepted. Yet its very discussion in a major work of Jewish law such as Magen Avraham led the sages of subsequent generations to address it as well. Although some of these scholars testified that the practice didn’t exist in their day, they continued discussing it. Some allowed the ritual, others didn’t, and still others attempted to explain it.

Rabbi Raphael Meislish’s Tosefet Shabbat, written in the 1700s, characteristically disagreed with Magen Avraham, defending the custom in question as a reward for the birds’ singing God’s praises at the parting of the Red Sea. Quoting his mentor, the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Pinhas Shapira of Koretz likewise notes that birds fly through the air, the very element that produces sound, and that “song” (i.e., poetry) is written in a Torah scroll with large, “airy” spaces between stanzas:

Birds are masters of song, for no other creature – aside from man – sings like birds, because song comes from the air. Indeed, instruments produce sound only from the air […]. Therefore, song is written [in the Torah scroll] interspersed with spaces, i.e., air. And the entire Torah is also called a song. (Imrei Pinhas Ha-shalem, 1988, Be-shallah 110, p. 62)