Lately, crows have been cawing outside my window and in the park when I go for a walk. They’re special to me because, years ago, a flock of crows attended my father’s funeral. Ever since then, when I see a crow, I imagine my father is visiting me — or, if there’s a whole flock, the ancestors in general.
My connection to crows goes back to childhood. When I walked to school early in the morning, a line of crows waited on a telephone wire to greet me. They’d caw as I passed underneath. Back then, my father complained that they watched him working in the garden. He thought they were laughing at him. Maybe they were. Crows are highly intelligent. They can recognize human faces, make and use tools such as hooked twigs, and even pass knowledge down to their descendants. Their cries, at the very least, have elements of language.
Biblical tradition speaks of the orev, the raven or crow (the term orev or, in English, corvid, covers them both, as Rabbi Laura Duhan-Kaplan points out in her book Mouth of the Donkey: Re-envisioning Biblical Animals). This word orev comes from a root that means “mixing,” as in erev, Hebrew for evening: the time when light and darkness mix. The orev is associated with liminal moments and transitions.
We see this in a variety of stories. The orev is the first bird Noah sends out of the ark to look for land, the first creature to see the new world after the flood. The raven never returns, maybe because it finds a new home (Genesis 8:7). According to midrash, the raven blames Noah for risking a raven despite there being just one pair of ravens and seven pairs of doves. In anger, the raven doesn’t go back to the ark (Sanhedrin 108b). Knowing the importance of ecological diversity and valuing the survival of its own species, this raven stages the first ecological protest.
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But in Jewish legend, the orev’s journey with humans begins before Noah’s Ark. When Cain kills Abel, Abel’s parents, Eve and Adam, do not know what to do with the body, as they have never seen a funeral. So they sit by Abel’s body and weep. Finally, a raven comes and, by pushing earth over another raven who has died, demonstrates how to perform a burial. Adam and Eve do likewise and bury their son (Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 21). This story associates the orev with death but also with wisdom around grief, ritual and culture.
The orev takes on an angelic dimension in the Book of Kings in the story of Elijah (1 Kings 17). Frustrated by the waywardness of the Israelites, Elijah walks into the wilderness. He spends the night in a cave and discovers that ravens have brought him food. There’s also a well of water. After eating that one meal, Elijah is strong enough to walk for 40 days into the wilderness until he reaches Mount Sinai. Here, the orev is the messenger of the Holy One, nourisher of prophets, guardian of the wilderness journey.
These three stories suggest that the orev’s gift, according to Jewish lore, is to know the way where there are no maps. So we might think of this bird, in ancestral memory, as a guide on journeys beyond the edges of what we know. When I hear a crow call, I’m reminded that even in the most familiar places, there is an aspect of the unknown. A poem I wrote several years ago called “Ne’ilah with Crows” includes the lines:
They come to me and say: This is the world,
hard as it is, you must make your way in it
with a mostly open heart. Mostly open, because
no attribute in the world is perfect.
Everything is a balance, like a crow on a telephone wire
or on the dark, dark church steeple half a mile away…
The crows are crying, voices,
not of ease, but of flight.
The Talmud holds a few sinister tales about the orev, just as popular culture does. For example, the Talmud claims that if an orev calls to you, it is a bad sign (Sanhedrin 65b) and that Haman’s grandmother was named Orevati, or “my she-raven” (Bava Batra 91). When Rav Illish is in captivity in Babylon, a raven calls to him to escape, and he believes it is lying, but when a dove calls with the same message, he believes the dove. This is a typical privileging of light over dark, but we don’t have to go along with that. The orev is a wise bird, and we would do well to pay attention to the wisdom we’re offered.
Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, Ph.D., who teaches on the Torah of crows, observes that “crows know how to hack a world that wasn’t made for them — about adaptation as alchemy, about the fierce work of survival in unpredictable terrain.” She sees crows as exemplars of “a spiritual ecology … fierce and feral and tenacious as a weed.” Maybe we could learn from the crow and the raven how to honor the moments when we go off the map. Maybe what we need sometimes are crows’ feet (their actual feet, not their namesake wrinkles, though those aren’t bad either).
In fact, Rabbi Laura Duhan-Kaplan reports that once, when she was dizzy and oxygen-deprived on a high-altitude trail, crows led her back to safety. “Crow really does talk,” she says. “Raven really does rescue. And many birds see humans as part of their flock.” That’s how I’ve experienced them, too. I’m convinced that those birds on the wire at the edge of my childhood lawn knew I was going beyond my home borders and out into the world, and they were watching over me.
So when we meet crows or ravens, in stories or in nature, may we greet them as friends.
This essay initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on June 13, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
