Solomon and the Ant

Solomon and the Ant — page 3 — with Rabbi Akiva and Shepherd's Pipe with the Baal Shem Tov medieval fables such as The Wisdom of a Bird The Wound That Did Not Heal The Mouse that Went Looking for a Husband and Teaching a Wolf wisdom tales The Best Merchandise and Never Afraid Again anecdotal tales Sharp as a Diamond and The Crowded House trickster tales Juha's Nail and What His Father Did Chelm fool stories A Lot of Sense and Wrong Kind of a Horse holy fool tale A Holy Fool riddle stories The Seven Questions of Alexander the Great and The Riddling Woman and more While many of these stories are associated only with a specific person or period within Jewish folklore one can also find versions of the same story told with a different hero Such is the case with The Coachman's Answer which is most often told with the Dubner Maggid and his coachman But there are versions found elsewhere with a different rabbi Or else the time period gets changed into more modern times as in these versions of The Crowded House and Never Afraid Again As is the case with many Jewish folktales variants are also found in world folklore Because of the fluid folklore process many tales in the Jewish oral tradition resemble tales in universal folklore While many of the tales originated in Jewish sources Torah Talmud Rabbinic tales and so on many became adapted into the folktales of other cultures and other religions The obverse is also true Many folktales that stem from other cultures and religions were transformed into Jewish stories as long as the themes values and ethical lessons in those stories also resonated

Solomon and the Ant — page 4 — in Judaism In other words just changing the names of the characters to Jewish names will not create a Jewish version of any story without the main criteria noted above Since Jews have lived in most parts of the world there has always been a strong influence of the dominant culture on the Jews In many ways Jews are chameleon like in that there is a great deal of assimilation or melding of foods names clothing folkways and folklore from the particular culture in which they are living However the normative Jewish religion has always remained true to its core beliefs Thus there were strong cross cultural contacts for example with the Arabic culture in Spain and throughout the Middle Eastern countries especially in the realm of folkways folktales and folksongs In the telling and retelling of the adapted stories the tales began to mirror the cultural and religious contexts of the storytellers and soon became the carriers of Jewish values and traditions For example in earlier Jewish fables many of which were translated and adapted from Indian Roman and Greek sources the animals were not only endowed with human personalities but also spoke wisely about Torah quoting biblical and Talmudic passages As a further example there are several stories in this collection that embody a similar theme that especially resonates in Judaism that a person should be happy or satisfied with who he is and with what he has The Mouse That Went Looking for a Husband The Coachman's Answer The Crowded House and What Do You Want to Be There is always a compelling reason why a certain

Solomon and the Ant — page 5 — story continues to be told in a culture over the generations primarily because of the importance or emphasis of its teaching This theme reminds me of the extraordinary Chasidic story of Reb Zusya of Hanipol who said In Paradise they won't ask me Why weren't you like Moses but rather Why weren't you like Zusya The theme is echoed in The Ethics of the Fathers too when the question is asked Who is rich The answer given is The man who is content with what he has So our stories come from near and far some from Jewish sources and many transformed from other cultures Isaac Disraeli understood this when he wrote Tales have wings whether they come from the East or from the North and they soon become denizens wherever they alight This can be seen in the examination of tales collected in the Israel Folktale Archives IFA Founded by folklorist Dov Noy in 1955 the IFA has collected more than twenty three thousand folktales from the various ethnic communities who now live in Israel The stories have been classified according to tale type and motifs Throughout this book there are notations of the tales that have variants found in the Israel Folktale Archives This clearly shows how tales circulate and become adapted to different cultures within the Jewish oral tradition and in that of other countries From antiquity into the present the Jewish people have had a dynamic interaction between text and the oral tradition From the beginning Jews have had a great respect for orality Being the oral storyteller he was Sheldon Oberman retained an orality in his

Solomon and the Ant — page 6 — versions of these folktales He employed dialogue and simple sentences vernacular language and so on These stories when read aloud sound as though he was telling them directly to the reader Actually even when one thinks of reading as silent research has found that there is always an interaction that takes place between the reader and the print that in turn makes the words spring off the page That is an art achieved by Sheldon Oberman Solomon and the Ant and other Jewish Folktales is a book that I expected to read only after its publication I did not expect to participate in editing it However when the author storyteller Sheldon Oberman or Obie as he was called by his friends suffered from a serious illness early in 2004 he asked me if I would complete this book for him I agreed with my whole heart as I regarded this task as a sacred responsibility At the time I still hoped he would heal and recover enough strength to finish the book himself or at least that he would be able to confer with me during the final drafts That was not to be Sheldon Oberman died on March 26 2004 I only hope and pray that I have fulfilled Obie's expectations Sheldon Oberman did not live to actually hold this book in his hands nevertheless he held the stories in his heart In his first anthology of Jewish folktales Obie had left these forty three stories brief introductions to each story after story notes and some sources for the stories I have wanted to preserve as much of his voice and thoughts as possible Therefore I edited his words carefully and judiciously My contribution to this book is in dialoguing with the stories and his notes through my

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