(RNS) — Iran is on our minds and on our lips.
There is far more to that story than meets the eye.
The Jewish community of Iran (once Persia) is arguably one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Several years ago, I tutored a Persian Jewish girl for bat mitzvah, and I gently teased her: “Who knows? You might be related to Queen Esther and Mordecai!”
Sure enough, she came back the next week and told me that according to family lore, I was absolutely right.
There are significant Persian Jewish communities in Great Neck, New York, and Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, California — so much so, that those locales have earned the nickname “Tehrangeles.”
But, here is something this Ashkenormative Jewish guy never really knew. I knew that they had a distinct culture, with distinct foods and customs. All that was clear.
But, I never knew they had their own way of interpreting sacred texts.
That is, until I wandered into a bookstore in San Diego and picked up a volume — “In Queen Esther’s Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature.”
The editor, Vera Basch Moreen, has collected texts written between the eighth and 19th centuries, including fragments of early documents, verse renditions of biblical books, prayers, religious poetry, secular poetry, commentaries and historical chronicles.
I was enraptured.
But, here was why I could not leave the book in the store and had to own it.
I started reading about a Jewish-Persian poet named Mowlana Shahin-i-Shirazi. He was the earliest known Jewish-Persian poet. We know very little about him, except that he seemed to have lived at the time of the great lyrical poet Hafiz — sometime in the 1300s.
And, here is your Jewish-Persian sermon for this Shabbat.
In his long epic poem, “Jacob and the Wolf,” the poet re-imagines the story of how Joseph’s brothers, the sons of Jacob, sold their brother into captivity and came before their father with Joseph’s torn and bloodied coat, claiming a wolf had ripped Joseph apart.
Everyone knows that story, except the poet goes several steps further. He imagines Jacob’s lament for his son going on for pages upon pages. He imagines that Jacob suspects he was not hearing the whole truth from his sons.
The story of Joseph and the wolf is a lie,
Exceedingly brazen, a patent lie.
No wolf knows anything of Joseph;
the story of my darling sons is just not true.
Can a wolf burst into the midst of a flock,
Leave lambs behind and steal my Joseph?!
We can almost imagine the biblical patriarch interrogating his sons in the manner of Columbo: “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. You return with the entire flock intact and safe — and yet, the wolf goes after a young boy? You sure about that? You think you might want to change your story on that?”
The poet continues, imagining Jacob smells the proverbial rat. He looks at his son’s tattered garment, and he notices some things don’t make sense:
All that you are saying is a complete lie:
If by heaven’s decree Joseph fell captive
Into the clutches of a bloodthirsty wolf,
Where are the marks of the wolf’s claws,
The paw prints, and the traces of his bites?
And if the wolf ate him without his tunic,
Why is it thus drenched in blood?
And if the mad wolf ate him with his tunic on,
Where are the tears of his fangs on it?
You have to smile. All along, there were holes in the sons’ story about the fate of Joseph, and in a thousand years of Jewish literature, no one ever figured that out?
Oh, but it gets better — and, frankly, brilliant — the Persian-Jewish poet imagines the brothers run to find the wolf, intending to bring the animal to their father so he can see they are not lying. The poet imagines Jacob interrogates the wolf, asking why he killed his beloved son: “Was there nothing better to eat than my Joseph, not enough fat and lovely lambs around?”
The wolf pushes back:
O prophet, for the Almighty’s sake,
Beware, bear not a bad opinion of me.
How could I shed a prophet’s blood;
How can I contend with God’s own prophet? …
The prophet’s blood is forbidden to us;
I do not even know who Joseph is …
I am innocent; God knows my inmost thoughts.
Had I seen Joseph, I would have laid my head
Down at his feet; tender respect and honor;
Caresses, hundreds, would I have shown him.
In all this time no wolf has dared
To hover round your sheep …
Jacob realizes the wolf is innocent of the murder charge. And then, in a brilliant move, the poet continues by inviting the wolf to tell his own story: that he had come from Syria, and that he had been wandering, and his own son wandered off from him, and that he had been searching for his son at the precise time Jacob’s sons had accosted him and took him.
By evening I was headed toward the desert,
From Syria into Canaan, weeping,
Bewildered, and distressed. I questioned
Every beast, good or bad, on every bypath
About my child and suddenly arrived here …
With this, Jacob reaches out to the wolf:
Jacob said: “He’s looking for his child,
Just like me; two streams of tears of blood
Flow from his eyes; without doubt,
He is afflicted, just like me. He is mourning
his child; he is stunned and afflicted.”
Aloud, he said: “Come, let us cry together:
We have both lost our beloved children.”
Suddenly, man and wolf relate to each other. The wolf has come from Syria to Canaan — just like Jacob, in his own journey. They have both lost children. They feel empathy for each other.
This is not how we know the story. It is a midrash, in the same way as “Wicked” is a midrash on “The Wizard of Oz.” This medieval Jewish-Persian midrashic poem utterly humanizes the wolf — in a way we had not even known was necessary. After all, the animal, wrongly accused of having killed Joseph, has a walk-on part in the biblical text; frankly, he doesn’t even appear in the biblical text — he is a hapless victim, and not a victimizer.
To be honest, we are lucky the wolf didn’t sue for defamation of character.
Ah, but that would be another story, wouldn’t it?