The Raven, Never Flitting

Fleeing from the evil king Ahab, the prophet Elijah hid at the edge of a creek. There he was fed by wild ravens who brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening.

This story was known to all who came to our little synagogue in Israel to pray that wondrous day of Yom Kippur, the highest of the High Holy Days. It was a small group of parishioners, but not a cohesive one.

There were two old ladies, one estranged from her husband, and one a widow, who never prayed in the synagogue any other day of the year. The estranged husband was in the men's section; his grudge-bearing wife was behind the curtained partition, in the women's section. In the men's section there were also two people who never appeared any other time of the year. One was a man the children called "the monster man" because his eyebrows were grown together, his buck teeth protruded out of his protracted jaw, and his nose and lips looked as though they were twisted out of shape. No one knew whether or not he lived alone. There were people, an odd-looking woman or two and an occasional man, seen slipping in and out of his run-down house. But like the master of the house, they moved about furtively and spoke with no one.

The second yearly male visitor was a short man who kept his mouth slightly open at all times and had a permanent wondering smile about him. He was seen regularly with his trio of small dogs, each of whom had a sharp high-pitched bark. The small man would put his small dogs on the sliding-pon, one by one. He would give the dog a nudge at the top of the slide, then run to the bottom of the slide to catch the dog as it reached the slide's bottom. When they tired of that, the dogs, one at a time, would get a ride on the see-saw. The favored dog would cling to the wood grain of the board as its master raised it ever so slowly off the ground. The master would hum a melody with a high note at the see-saw's highest point, then lower the board slowly till the dog jumped off.

There were guest families, too, in the synagogue. Three married children, two daughters and their husbands, and one son and his wife were there, they and the eight children they had between them. Each of these families lived elsewhere, but they were with their parents on that particular Yom Kippur day.

The local, regular parishioners were not many more than the required quorum of ten men. Then there were some wives and minor children. These regular parishioners had between them a dozen unmarried children ranging between the ages of three and twenty. That's how it happened that twenty children under the age of twenty and not even two dozen men and women were witness that day to the amazing visit of a spirit in the shape of a raven.

No one has proven it was a spirit, but it was definitely a raven. As every one present in the synagogue that day knows, a raven trundled up twenty steps to the synagogue entrance, waddled through the open door, and stood absolutely still in the hallway that connects the men's and the women's sections.

And his eyes had all the seeming of a demon's that is dreamingAnd the sunlight o'er him streaming threw his shadow on the floor;And their souls from out that shadow that lay floating on the floorSaw him after-Evermore!

Now our sages may have said: "Not for nothing does the starling visit the raven, but because it is of the same kind,"¹ but the sages must have meant something other than physical resemblance. For the starling, that speckled bird whose flocks fly in fantastic formations every winter evening towards sunset, is a small creature, no bigger than the palm of an...