“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul” wrote Emily Dickinson in 1891. This poem, read commonly as a meditation on the human capacity for endurance amidst desolation, beautifully lends itself to also being read as a quasi-midrash on Parashat Noach. The image of Noach’s birds being sent out, over and over again, to search for a sign of the flood waters receding, is foundational in the literary symbolism of birds as objects representing freedom and hope.
Like Dickinson’s bird that “never stops – at all,” Noach’s sending is persistent, almost stubborn. He does not send one bird and give up. The text says:
“It was at the end of forty days: Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made,
and sent out a raven; it went off, going off and returning, until the waters were dried up from upon the earth.
Then he sent out a dove from him, to see whether the waters had subsided from the face of the ground.
But the dove found no resting-place for the sole of her foot, so she returned to him into the ark, for there was water upon the face of all the earth. He sent forth his hand and took her, and brought her to him into the ark.
Then he waited yet another seven days and sent out the dove yet again from the ark.
The dove came back to him at eventime, and here, a freshly plucked olive leaf in her beak! So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from upon the earth.
Then he waited yet another seven days and sent out the dove, but she returned to him again no more.”
(trans from The Schocken Bible, Everett Fox, 1995, accessed on Sefaria)
The repetition of sending and returning forms a rhythm of hope – a hopeful waiting, rather than passive endurance. Dickinson’s “thing with feathers” that perches in the soul sings its wordless tune through this same rhythm: fragile, maybe even foolish, but unfailingly alive.
Which birds Noach sends is particularly significant. Birds in general have long symbolised freedom, transcendence, and the possibility of beginning again. But the Torah names two specific birds, and the choice of each carries symbolic weight. The first is the raven (orev). The raven is not a popular bird. Its appearance in literature – from the ominous raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poem to its wider associations with death and decay – gives it an aura of foreboding.
Rabbi Nelly Altenburger writes, drawing on the Mei HaShiloach, that the Chasidic master “affirms that the raven is the symbol of anger. He understands that Noach sends out the raven as a symbol of sending out the anger from the remaining existence. The idea is that the world had gone through a purification process, and that Noach understood that anger and violence were the causes of the destruction. The raven, as a symbol of anger, is sent out. But it does not disappear; it comes back and forth.”
In contrast stands the dove (yonah), that timeless symbol of peace and optimism. Whilst the raven flies back and forth, perhaps unsettled, the dove is happy to go out and explore and then return over multiple expeditions. She doesn’t stay close to her safe space, and she also doesn’t refuse to try again after disappointment. If the raven symbolises an anger that waxes and wanes, could the dove symbolise hope? Hope that is not eternal, and not immediate, but which grows incrementally when proof is provided that things are finally changing for the better.
The process does not end when the dove fails to return. The flood may be over, but the work of rebuilding has only just begun. The dove’s silence, its non-return, is the sign that the time for waiting is done, and God commands Noach to leave the ark (Gen 8:16). Hope now demands embodiment: planting, covenant, and risk.
Dickinson’s poem and Parashat Noach together teach that hope is both fragile and fierce. It begins as a song that perches quietly in the soul, but it must eventually send us outwards to build, to plant, to try again.
However, what Noach teaches us is that Dickinson is wrong. Even if hope never “asked a crumb” of her, it certainly asks a lot of Noach, and of us. What use is hope if it requires nothing? Hope might have feathers but for it to have wings and take flight it demands action from us. Passive hopefulness is not worth the brain space it uses. We know the oft recited teaching from Rabbi Tarfon in Pirkei Avot that tells us that although we are not required to complete the work, neither are we free to desist from it, and to me that applies here too. We are obligated to be hopeful, but it’s not enough to feel it. We must enact the changes that we are hopeful for, putting the work in and sending out the doves, in order for us to transform hope into something more solid and less feathery.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.Emily Dickinson
Emily Carp, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.