Adath Jeshurun

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from Can­tor Lipp

I’ve always won­dered why the dove hold­ing the olive branch has become a ubiq­ui­tous sym­bol of peace­mak­ing. There is noth­ing in the por­tion of Noah itself which we read which gives us an explicit answer.

In read­ing through the por­tion this week, I was reminded of and dis­cov­ered for myself many par­al­lel struc­tures, the last of which led me to an answer for this year’s study at least.

First of all the flood itself is described as an undo­ing of God’s work dur­ing the 2nd day of cre­ation in which the waters of the deep are sep­a­rated from the waters of the heav­ens. One has to imag­ine that the ancients would look up into the sky of a beau­ti­ful day and see the same blue they would see when they would look at the sea or any other large body of water. The flood, in their minds, was the con­trac­tion of the fir­ma­ment cre­ated on Day 2 of cre­ation to allow for the waters from below and above to rejoin.

Another par­al­lel that jumped out at me this year was God clos­ing the ark door at the begin­ning of the flood yet there is noth­ing keep­ing Noah from open­ing it him­self when he real­izes he can get off the ark and release his pas­sen­gers, ani­mal and human, onto dry land. Still, God has to tell him to get off the ark even though Noah is able to open that door by himself.

These par­al­lels come in threes. The third I noticed this year was that of the dove and the olive branch. The dove is sent out three times as well. The first time it comes back empty beaked, there is no place for it to rest except for the ark. The sec­ond time it returns with an olive branch indi­cat­ing the trees are finally break­ing through the waters. The third and final time, the dove doesn’t come back at all; it has found a place to land out­side the microsys­tem of the ark.

I under­stand that the asso­ci­a­tion of the olive branch with peace is most likely from Greek antiq­uity and not orig­i­nally from the Bible although it became asso­ci­ated as such later on. Still, since this asso­ci­a­tion is so cen­tral to the sym­bol, it seemed to easy a solu­tion to sim­ply blame it on the Greeks.

By using the same par­al­lel struc­tures that can be found relat­ing to the rever­sal of cre­ation and the open­ing and clos­ing of the ark, I noticed a par­al­lel for the first time between the olive branch and the rain­bow. The olive branch is the com­pro­mise posi­tion between the dove hav­ing nowhere to land but the ark and a place to live per­ma­nently. Sim­i­larly, the rain­bow, the sign that God will no longer destroy the earth, can only exist when the water mak­ing clouds and the sun are in bal­ance – when the weather is over­cast with no sun means no rain­bow just as a clear day with­out clouds mean no rain­bow. A rain­bow is the com­pro­mise between absolute rain and sun.

Peace mak­ing requires mutual sac­ri­fices and com­pro­mises, some of which will taste as bit­ter as the olive which has not yet been mar­i­nated to be edi­ble. When Ehud Barak made his offer to Yasser Arafat at the begin­ning of this cen­tury my first reac­tion was shock. How could he give away so much? How could he split Jerusalem? But my sec­ond reac­tion, one that I have con­firmed with other Israeli cit­i­zens who, unlike myself, have served in its armed forces, was that if this com­pro­mise were accepted and led to real peace, I could live with it.
Per­haps more impor­tantly, the olive tree lives for a thou­sand years. As bit­ter as its fruit can be with­out mar­i­na­tion, those who are able to make peace tend to be those who can tran­scend the ben­e­fits of the short term, even mere life­time ben­e­fits of an agree­ment, and see the rewards to future gen­er­a­tions who will ben­e­fit from the nec­es­sary compromises.

Every shab­bat we get to review the many com­pro­mises we needed to make dur­ing the past week between the life we lived and the life we per­haps wanted to live or ought to have lived. Shab­bat is a taste of the infi­nite time sym­bol­ized by the olive tree, a time to view our com­pro­mises in a larger con­text, to let go of the angst asso­ci­ated with them, to breathe deep from the per­fume of eternity.