The Raven
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
October 12, 2007
Tonight I’d like to talk about the ancient art of storytelling, and how and why we tell stories….by looking very closely at one character in the story of the flood… the raven, the black, unhelpful bird, who brings no leaf, no hope, in fact who never returns at all. Why did the storyteller of the Torah put the raven in the story? It was a storytelling decision. Why did the ancient storyteller make that decision, and how have we Jewish story-listeners thought about that bird over the centuries?
From a storytelling point of view, the raven is not necessary. It would still be a good story if there were only the dove, who went out a first time and found no resting spot, and then a second time, and came back with the olive leaf, and finally a third time…never to return. That’s fine storytelling. So why insert the raven? What does he add to the story?
In the case of the flood story, we actually know more than usual about where this story came from, because in 1853, archeologists digging in the ancient palace library of Nineveh came across a set of clay tablets written in ancient Akkadian, which when translated told the story of a man named Utnapishtim, who is warned of a flood, and builds an ark, and take pairs of animals on board with him…and even sends out a raven and a dove when the rains stop…just like Noah. The book written on those tablets came to be known as the Gilgamesh Epic, named after the hero of the story, who goes to find Utnapishtim and to hear his story.
Imagine that moment digging in the dirt in Iraq, in 1853….finding those pieces of clay covered with ancient writing, and then imagine how it felt to translate that writing and discover that it included a story of a flood and a man on an ark sending out a raven and a dove.
But the Gilgamesh story is not exactly the same as our torah’s flood story. It’s an earlier version! Utnapishtim sends out a dove first, who returns, and then a swallow, who also returns, and finally a raven….who never returns. We could spend days discussing the similarities and differences between the stories of Noah and Utnapishtim, but the important point for us now is that someone….some storyteller, at some point made a decision…to forget the swallow, and to have the raven go first, and then the dove three times. Why? How does it change the story; what is added? What is driving the Torah storyteller? Who does he want the raven to be? (ask for responses).
At first glance, it seems that the raven has become a symbol of wickedness….or at least, despair.
The Torah version of the story takes three birds of the earlier version….none of whom is better than the others, and replaces them with two birds…who seem to represent binary opposites. Light and dark. Good and evil. Faith and despair. The dove brings the great sign of hope and the future…and the raven, which in the Torah is the dove’s opposite…brings nothing.
In general, the Torah’s genius is its morality. In the Gilgamesh epic, for example, the gods bring the flood to wipe out humanity because the humans are making too much noise! It’s like angry neighbors calling the police to shut down a loud party on Saturday night. By contrast, God in the Torah sees that the earth is filled with violence and immorality, and brings the flood in order to make a fresh start. The Torah seeks to bring morality to the world, and the image of these two birds, the good dove and the bad raven, seems like part of the Torah’s teaching about good and evil.
A close look at the Torah text reveals something deeper about the two birds. Upon close examination, (Genesis 8:6) we see that Noah has no relationship with the raven at all….he opens the window and lets it out…and it flies to and fro…until the waters dry up. By contrast, the text is careful to say that Noah sent the dove mei-ito…literally “from him,” implying already some connection between them, and it says Noah sent the dove lir-ot hakalu hamayim…to see if the waters had receded. The storyteller is describing Noah sending the dove on a mission of discovery, and when at first the dove finds nothing, she returns to Noah and he stretches forth his hand, and brings her back into the ark, unto himself, beautiful expressions of caring and affection…all completely missing from the raven episode. The raven and Noah, it appears, have nothing between them….no affection, no understanding, no connection. The dove represents not just hope…but also love. And the raven, it seems, symbolizes love’s absence…mistrust, estrangement, and fear.
As Jews, when we read the stories in the Torah, we join an ancient conversation about those stories….and discover that the stories do not stay still. They continue to live, and to change….becoming new every time they are told by a new storyteller.
The Talmud contains more stories about the raven, revisions, retellings, re-imagings of the story, in a word, midrash…some of which intensify the wickedness of the raven, and others seek to tell the story from the raven’s point of view.
One midrash says that there was a basic rule laid down for everyone in the ark….humans and animals…and that was “no sex.” It’s not a silly idea…after all, there was not a lot of privacy, and they didn’t know how long they would be on the ark…and if they all started having babies, it would soon get too crowded. So that was the rule, and that rule was broken …according to the Talmud….by the raven! And because of this, he was sent out first…not on a mission at all, not to see if the waters had receded, but just as a punishment for breaking the “no sex” rule! A little like a misbehaving CIT getting sent home early from camp…This midrash, for its own reasons, adds new ammunition to our initial impression of the raven as the bad bird.
But the same page in the Talmud includes other midrashim …in which the rabbis ask more deeply about the raven, and what he might have said and done as Noah was opening the window and getting ready to toss him out into the flooded world. Rabbi Resh Lakish says that the raven accused Noah with a t’shuvah nitzachat….an irrefutable accusation. The raven said to Noah, according to Resh Lakish: “Your Master hates me and you hate me! Look, your Master—God--told you to brig seven pairs of the pure animals, but only one pair each of the impure animals like me. Obviously, God hates me. And you also hate me….since rather than taking one of the animals of which you have seven pairs….you choose me…the only male of my species. You know that if I die, of the heat or the cold, my entire species will die out!” To this accusation, said Resh Lakish, Noah could say nothing.
Why did Noah choose the raven…and not one of the birds of which the world could afford to lose one? Did Noah have a grudge against the raven? This midrash actually says that the raven continued, “Or….are you perhaps interested in my wife?” The first midrash says the raven got tossed out for breaking the no sex rule….but this midrash pushes us to ask an unthinkable question: “Is it possible that the problem was not with the raven, but with Noah?”
The moment we allow this possibility, notice how the raven begins to look like another animal in the Torah…the scapegoat, driven into the wilderness on Yom Kippur, loaded with the sins of the people…so that they could start the year fresh and sin free. Like all scapegoats, the ancient biblical scapegoat had done nothing wrong…but people thought that by getting rid of it, they could separate themselves from evil.
This weird old midrash, questioning Noah’s motives, was suggested by Resh Lakish, who incidentally is known as one of the most independent thinkers of the Talmud…he was himself a bandit before he became a rabbi. And Resh Lakish wants us to think about the raven in the same way. Not as a bad bird, but as Noah’s scapegoat.
Suddenly, the story of Noah and the flood, the ark and the birds, the dove and the raven take on an entirely new set of meanings for us…the reader. The raven’s irrefutable accusation is directed at every one of us, when we look for a scapegoat, for a bird to throw off of our ark…for the person to remove from our life.
We all do it, don’t we? Hopefully not all the time, but we do it. At work, we fall easily into thinking: “if that person would just leave….everything would be great.” In our chavurot, here in our congregation, even in our families, all too often, we secretly think to ourselves “things would be so different, so much better, if she…or he….vanished. Perhaps the problem, suggests Resh Lakish, was not in the raven at all…but in Noah, who …in at least one telling of the story….just needed to see the raven go.
Edgar Allan Poe, also, was visited by a raven, who spoke to him only one word, over and over again…the word “nevermore” in response to each of Poe’s questions. The bird is a mystery to Poe, and a torment. He shouts at the raven “Prophet! Thing of evil…prophet still, if bird or devil!” Just as in the Noah story, the raven brings the man no hope….but in both the Noah story and Poe’s “The Raven,” the problem is not in the raven, but in us.
Our Jewish tradition does offer one, surprising, and marvelous alternative reading of Noah’s raven, for which we need to turn to the great 11th century French commentator RaSHI…Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki. Rashi sees no wickedness in the raven. The raven, says Rashi, left the ark on another mission….completely different from that of the dove. The raven’s mission is hinted at, says Rashi, in the words, “he flew to and fro until the waters dried up.” The waters that dried up, says Rashi, are not the waters of Noah’s flood…but the rains of a much later generation…in the time of Elijah the Prophet. In Elijah’s day, the waters did dry up…there was no rain, and a terrible drought, and Elijah goes to hide in a brook. There he stays alive by drinking water from the brook, and he is fed bread and meat by….ravens. Any story about Elijah, in our tradition, hints at redemption. Elijah is the prophet who will one day bring us word of the arrival of a better world than the one in which we are living.
That world will come sooner when we learn to regard the ravens in our life, the ones who seem to be unhelpful and best thrown out of our ark…as simply on a different mission, not our mission perhaps, but bringing bread and meat to the hungry prophet who is still in hiding, waiting to bring us word of the coming of the messiah.