by Bruce Feiler
“There are not enough universities,” he said. “Many people moved to bigger cities. Some went out of Iran. I don’t know why. I like this country very much, and I live here freely.”
And what lessons should be taken from the story of Esther?
“The best way for Jews to survive in other lands is to adopt local customs but still maintain their Jewish ways. We can live with other people, but we shouldn’t become them.”
In my conversations with the Iranian Jews of Los Angeles, I had learned that Hamadan once had a sprawling Jewish cemetery that had purportedly been relocated to build a public park. They wanted me to scope it out. For religious Jews, moving graves is a grievous sin. The guardian directed us to the other side of town, where a circular park, lined with flagstones and recently planted oak and pistachio trees, was filling with late-afternoon visitors. Some boys kicked a soccer ball. Women in chadors huddled around a picnic blanket. A gaggle of aging men played chess on a bench. In the center of the park were about a dozen graves covered in Hebrew lettering.
As we eyed the stones, a man came over to see us. He was bald and had a few missing teeth. He began pointing out various tombstones and exclaiming the virtues of the deceased. This one was a doctor, that one a schoolteacher. Many graves had been relocated outside town, he said, but those were all older than thirty-six years, as Muslim law allows. The few graves left behind were more recent. I asked him how he knew so much about the departed. “I was a postman,” he said.
“A postman!” Linda said. “Do you know about the story of Esther?”
“Sure,” he said, bursting with pride. “The postmen saved the Jews in ancient times. They used the postal road built by Darius.”
Linda applauded, and the man beamed at the attention. “God be with you,” he said.
We continued perusing the stones, then settled on a bench. Our trip would end here, overlooking half a graveyard, in a half-erased community.
We pulled out our Bibles. Long before we came to Iran, Linda knew that one central idea of my travels was reading the stories of the Bible in the places where they occurred. In Hamadan, that meant Esther. In the days leading up to our visit, I noticed that she had tucked away her guidebook and begun leafing through the Bible. I would step out of the shower or roll over in the middle of the night and find her frantically scribbling notes on a piece of paper or stuffing bookmarks next to notable passages. By the time we sat down for our supposedly impromptu reading, Linda had enough notes for a Yom Kippur sermon.
And enough insights to earn her a Ph.D.
The first thing she told me, which surprised me, was that she had grown up idolizing Esther. “Long before I wanted to be a Moroccan princess at my wedding,” she said, “I wanted to be a Persian princess, and I dressed up as Queen Esther on Halloween. Not Purim, Halloween. I wore a green dress with a crown and dangly earrings. I think my mother still has a picture of it.”
“How come you never mentioned this before?”
“I had forgotten about it until now. But the truth is, now that I’ve read the real story, I’m realizing that we must have gotten the sanitized version in Sunday school.”
For both of us, reading the Book of Esther in Iran was unnerving. From its opening, in which the king throws a party that lasts half a year, to its closing, in which the Jews throw a festival to celebrate their slaughter of 75,500 people, the story reeks of moral depravity. The narrative revolves around parties—ten in all. The king, who is portrayed as an impulsive drunk, deposes his first queen at a banquet, enthrones Esther at another, celebrates with Haman at one gala, then sends him to death at another. The Jews celebrate their edict to fight back at one party, then their bloody victory at two more. Considering that the Bible is so interested in morality, this open ribaldry is surprising.
In part for this reason, the Book of Esther has come under withering attack since antiquity. Critics have lambasted its debauchery, the cruelty of its characters, and the fact that none of the central figures shows any kindness or forgiveness. More important, nowhere in the story is there a mention of God. Ancient Jewish sages argued against its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible. Martin Luther said he wished it did not exist at all, arguing that it lionized Jews too much. Some contemporary polemicists used it as the basis for anti-Semitism, pointing out that once the Jews assume power they massacre their neighbors.
I asked Linda how she felt the Jews came across.
“Horribly. When the Jews are oppressed, they’re generous, but once they get power, they’re vengeful. It reminds me—” She started to talk about contemporary Israeli politics but caught herself. An obliterated Jewish cemetery in Iran was hardly the place to discuss the merits of land distribution in the West Bank.
“But you know what it really reminded me of?” she continued. “David and Solomon. I guess the Bible doesn’t like kings very much. Once Esther and Mordecai join the royal court, they also behave poorly. I think Jews are best as the moral minority. And when we get power, we’re not immune to the fact that power corrupts.”
“So wait, now you don’t even like Esther anymore?”
“Well, at the beginning she’s really passive. But after a while, I do think she begins to understand that as a woman she has more influence than she thinks. One line in the first chapter seemed comical.” Linda flipped through her Bible until she found the reference, Esther 1:20. “When Queen Vashti refuses to attend the king’s party, Ahasuerus is so embarrassed that he issues an edict that ‘all wives will treat their husbands with respect.’ ”
“And what’s wrong with that!”
She looked at me pityingly. “Later, Ahasuerus bows to every wish that Esther has,” she said, “and even Haman is constantly told what to do by his wife. So clearly it’s farcical, this bureaucratic attempt to keep women down.”
“But look around you,” I said. “Seems to work.”
“No, and that’s the point,” she said. “I think many Westerners think the veil is similar to that edict. That it’s meant to keep women subservient in some way. Yet being here, meeting influential women like Mrs. Moussavi-nejad, and going to the gym, where all the women wear skimpy outfits and makeup, I began to think that maybe this modern decree to have women in the veil and chador isn’t being any more successful in holding women down.”
Despite its moral ambiguity, the Book of Esther has remained popular, especially among Jews, in part for its positive vision of diaspora life. The Jews are perfectly content to live in Persia and not return to the Promised Land. Plus, they use their proximity to power to protect their coreligionists. As Mordecai says to Esther: “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace.” Total assimilation is not good, the story suggests; Jews should identify with their faith no matter how prominent in Gentile society they become.
This message was particularly poignant to me. As a Jew growing up in Georgia, I felt my minority status as a burden. My parents were deeply devoted to their Jewish life and served their community in numerous ways, yet they still tugged at the gossamers of assimilation. They were driven to overcome the anti-Semitism of the past, yet secretly believed they never would. I remember a particularly anguished conversation with my dad when I was a teenager in which he said that, despite his professional success, he would always feel a degree of insecurity, with that proverbial packed suitcase tucked under his bed in the event he needed to flee.
I could not live that way, I said. Perhaps I was the naïve beneficiary of their sacrifices, but I refused to see myself as restricted by my Judaism. Two decades later, I still didn’t feel confined by my faith, but I no longer tried to shutter my Judaism away. For me, learning to talk openly about religion was a way of toppling the past and standing, knock-kneed yet proudly, in the light. For me, and Linda as well, assimilation was not the goal. Acceptance was. We dreamed of succeeding in the world not in spite of our faith but, in part, because of it. Being in Iran, I was reminded that this idea was hardly new.
&
nbsp; It found eloquent expression in the Book of Esther.
I asked Linda if she felt Jews in the story were oppressed.
“No,” she said. “I’m amazed how much they seem integrated into the community.” She pointed to Esther 3:15, after the king issues his initial order to kill the Jews: “The couriers went out posthaste on the royal mission, and the decree was proclaimed in the fortress Susa. The king and Haman sat down to feast, but Susa was dumbfounded.”
“I read that to mean that the Susans liked their Jewish neighbors,” Linda said, “and were confused about why the king would suddenly order the Jews to be annihilated.”
That sense of acceptance is reinforced when the order for the Jews to defend themselves is again sent by mounted courier, this time on the king’s own steeds. “First of all,” Linda said, “I’m thinking absolutely of Darius’s postal system and the fact that they have two types of horses, the regular and the fast. The first order, to kill the Jews, goes out on regular horses, but the second goes out on the FedEx horses because the king is more anxious to counteract that order. And again, the order goes out in the script of each province, even the Jewish script. They don’t have to assimilate. They’re allowed to keep their own language.”
“So do you think the story is an ode to the diaspora?”
“In some ways. It’s striking that nowhere do the Jews ask to be returned to Jerusalem, or to rebuild the Temple. They’re happy to be living side by side with their Persian neighbors, drinking in their own way, worshiping in their own language. It’s exactly like Persepolis, with all these different people talking with one another, being happy. It’s not that diaspora is necessarily good, it’s that diaspora works if there are certain conditions under which the Jews are able to live in peaceful coexistence.”
“What I love about what you’re saying is that we never would have made that connection unless we came here.”
“No way. All my life, Iran was the epitome of darkness. And I came here really concerned. Would I wear the right veil? Would it be dangerous? And instead I’ve come away realizing how much we have to learn from this place. As Shahrokh said, we’re paving new roads, yet we’re not trying to see if some previous roads may be able to take us to where we want to go even faster.”
As she spoke, I was struck by the tone in Linda’s voice. Despite all the external pressures she faced—the black head covering she could never quite master, the dangers of being in a totalitarian regime, the fear of being a Jew in a fundamentalist Muslim state—she had completely succumbed to the spirit of the place. She had stopped thinking of Iran and started feeling it.
She had stopped reading the Bible and started becoming a part of its ongoing story.
Near the end of the Book of Esther, Mordecai charges the Jews to celebrate the feast of Purim in the month that had been transformed “from one of grief and mourning to one of festive joy.” This shift embodies what happens to the Jews in diaspora, as they move out of exile into freedom. Rereading the story, I began to think that maybe God is present during this time. Maybe God is there when Mordecai overhears the plot to kill the king and when the king discovers that Mordecai saved his life. Maybe God is there when Esther overcomes her instinct to save herself and instead saves her people. Maybe God is even there when the Jews succumb to their baser instincts and attack the Persians. And maybe God is there when Mordecai, understanding that vindictiveness, declares that Jews should observe Purim by “sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor.” In the unshackled possibility of diaspora, God is everywhere orphans and courtiers, prime ministers and little girls believe in the possibility of redemption.
This is the gift of the prophets: the belief that out of grief can come joy.
I reached for Linda’s hands. “And if we were lucky enough to have a child someday, and that child wanted to dress up like Esther, what would you tell her?”
“I would tell her to dig deeper,” Linda said. “I would tell her to go beyond the differences we’re told exist between us and other cultures. I would tell her to uncover a piece of herself in a land that may seem alien. And I would tell her, as a Jew growing up in the diaspora, that a piece of herself lies dormant in all these places . . .” Linda looked at me. “Why are you crying?”
“Because what you’re saying is so beautiful.”
We sat facing each other, alone in the hills of western Iran, in a place that as a child I had doubted would ever be possible: Jews at home in the world.
“And I would tell our daughter, ‘Wherever you go, first you will find some commonality with the Jews of these different places. In each of these lands, you can find shards of your own culture, your own history. Your own self.
“And finally,” Linda said, “I would say to her, ‘Wherever you go, you’ll find remnants of our family’s home, too: African masks, Persian carpets, nomadic necklaces. So wherever you travel, your father and I will always be there. You can feel at peace. Because you’ll be at home.’ ”
CONCLUSION
WITH GLADNESS AND JOY
Avner’s father died on Friday morning, and I arrived in Jerusalem that Sunday afternoon. A few hours later, about three dozen friends and family gathered at a small cemetery at Kibbutz Gezer, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, not far from Tel Gezer, where the biblical-era battle in which Canaanite kings stand up to Joshua took place. Avner chose this site because it accommodates nontraditional burials. His father, a fifth-generation native of the land of Israel, a pioneer in Israel’s fight for independence, and a schoolteacher, was fiercely secular and wanted a nonreligious funeral.
The guests gathered on folded chairs in a small grove of pine, carob, and hawthorn trees. The plain wooden coffin, draped in black fabric, was poised above a grave in front of a giant yucca. The kibbutz had tucked several hand-painted signs into the ground quoting biblical passages about ancient foods:
Your limbs are an orchard of pomegranates
And of all luscious fruits,
Of henna and of nard,
The Song of Songs.
Avner’s thirty-year-old daughter, Smadar, was the first to speak. “Saba,” she said, using the Hebrew word for “grandfather,” “you said you didn’t want a religious burial and we’ll do as you ask, but we think there is a place to talk about your life.” Yair Goren was born in Rosh Pina, in the Galilee, in 1923 and left home at sixteen to join the Jewish Underground, bicycling around the Dead Sea buying up weapons. He later led the Jewish invasion of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Catamon during the War of Independence, helped open the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, and pioneered relations with the bedouin of the Sinai.
Yair was a gigantic man, outsize in personality and disposition, who could quote the Bible by heart. The last time I saw him, while Avner and I were searching for King David in Jerusalem, I mentioned that I was put off by David’s behavior. Yair scolded me. “Nobody said we have to be like David,” he said. “And compared with Rameses II”—the brutal pharaoh of the late second millennium B.C.E.—“he was an angel.”
At the funeral, Smadar poked fun at his towering presence. “Saba, you always knew what you wanted to teach,” she said, “even if we didn’t want to learn. You had a huge belly we could jump on. You were the world for us.”
Avner spoke next. Like most guests, he was dressed casually, in black pants, a white cotton shirt, and sandals. His squiggly hair seemed more gray than usual. Like other men I have known at the time of their fathers’ deaths, he seemed to age as a result of the event, assuming the mantle of patriarch. He talked about how his father used to take him on biblical walking tours of Jerusalem. “I grew up with great openness,” he said. “Humanity was the most important value. Like a lot of founders of the state, my father’s values were so obvious he didn’t have to communicate them: to belong to a society; to contribute. I do what I do now because of him.”
Avner choked up once, as he spoke of his new wife, Asnat, and how she had helped make his father’s last years more enjoyable.
Avner and Asnat stood hand in hand as the coffin was lowered into the ground and guests helped shovel dirt on top. One by one, each mourner lay a rose on the small mound of earth. A few, in deference to Jewish custom, placed a stone. Then Avner, in a move that amused the guests and surely would have made his father proud, delivered a short lecture about the history of Tel Gezer. Avner’s gesture ensured that the final sound was one of laughter.
A few days later, we drove past Tel Gezer on our way to the Tomb of the Maccabees, shrine to one of the seminal events in the late first millennium B.C.E., the Jewish uprising against Greek hegemony. Two thousand years after Abraham first heard the call of God, a small band of Abraham’s descendants stood up to the leading superpower of the day and declared their right to worship freely. This event, coming at the end of the biblical era, became the centerpiece of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah and the backdrop to one of the most beloved rituals of my childhood.
But recently I had begun to view Hanukkah differently. The bloody mix of politics, violence, and faith that forms the core of the story is an uncanny prism through which to view the struggles of today. Were the Maccabees pioneers for religious freedom or terrorists imposing their faith on others? To answer that, I returned to Israel in time for the festival. I came to end my journey where it began, to walk the final steps of the birth of Western faith with Avner, and finally to confront my ambiguities about the role of religion in my life.
I pulled out my Bible. The end of the Exile in Babylon introduces an unexpected dimension to Israel’s national story. The debate revolves around a simple question: Who is a Jew? The Israelites who remained in exile after the fall of Babylon and practiced a lifestyle based on worshiping Yahweh, keeping the Sabbath, and marrying only within the faith believed that they were the real Jews. Religion, they maintained, did not need a political entity to survive.
