Music and midrash
Partnership presents unique duet of song and study
Galeet Dardashti in concert
Galeet Dardashti, performer, cantor, and student of Arab and Persian music, shattered a few stereotypes for her audience of adult educators and learners in "Sweet Dreams," a program of musical midrash sponsored by The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life of MetroWest. Appearing with her were Rabbi Norman and Naomi Patz, who framed the musical selections by introducing and explaining midrash and anchoring it in Jewish tradition.
The June 6 event, held at Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston, was a revelation for those who thought that Jewish music traced a short arc between hymns and klezmer, as well as for those who regarded midrash as the exclusive province of bearded sages.
The Partnership planned the program to honor their donors and celebrate their first birthday as an organization. Partnership president 
Ellen Goldner spoke of the agency's mission — to enhance life in the MetroWest community by focusing on the learner. The evening's presentation, she said, would be a "meeting of shira and shura," a union of song and text study.
"Midrashim," Norman Patz, rabbi emeritus of Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove, told NJ Jewish News in a brief phone tutorial before the concert, "are beautiful stories. Because the Torah's style is so spare — like a Picasso line drawing — these stories explain problems and make connections not explicit in the Bible." And because they continue to be developed post-biblically, he said, a process that goes on even in our own times, midrashim have a wide and varied authorship. So much for bearded sages.
Patz spoke of the genius in two millennia of "Jewish leadership brilliant enough to figure out how to make adjustments in Halacha [Jewish law] — just like the Supreme Court reinterprets the Constitution — and make changes without killing each other," in effect ensuring continuity and the preservation of the Jewish people.
Before each of Dardashti's musical interpretations, 
Naomi Patz, author, editor, scholar, and Rabbi Patz's wife, talked about the singer's subjects — all women — and explored some of the midrashic takes on these often obscure biblical characters. "The choice of the women is Galeet's," she said. "She is interested in women — especially the forgotten ones. Her mood is upbeat and celebratory because of her music: Sephardi, Moroccan, Middle-Eastern." So much for viewing Jewish musical expression as two-dimensional.
Naomi Patz examined stories about Queen Vashti from the Book of Esther, for instance, with the eye of a sophisticated contemporary critic and asked provocative questions: Who is the heroine of the Megillat Esther — Esther or Vashti? Why did Vashti refuse to appear before the king, her husband, when summoned? Was it, as one midrash writer cast the story, that he demanded she appear nude? Or, as another wrote, was she protecting his reputation by sending a dutiful wifely response? In Dardashti's version, a line near the end of her musical account — sung in Persian — says, "Vashti the Queen started a revolution," simultaneously elevating Vashti and placing the singer firmly in the camp of the revisionists.
Dardashti serves as cantor at Congregation Shomrei Emunah in Montclair and leads the all-female Mizrahi/Sephardi ensemble Divahn. 
She is one of 12 artists who received a two-year Six Points Fellowship that will enable them to present their creative projects to audiences in the New York area. Her own project, Voices of Our Mothers: A Middle Eastern Musical Midrash for Today, focuses on biblical women, Jewish and non-Jewish. "Women are overlooked in midrash," she said, "but I take hold of various nuggets that I find interesting — not necessarily what others find interesting. That's what's great about midrash — I have a lot of material."
Dardashti comes from a line of musicians and a tradition that is Sephardi on her father's side and Ashkenazi on her mother's. Her grandfather was a famous singer of Persian classical music as well as a cantor in Iran, although schools to train cantors did not exist in that country. Her father immigrated to the United States and "discovered that here, cantor was a profession, so he went to cantorial school," she said, and he passed on his training to her. She is a PhD candidate in anthropology, writing her dissertation on contemporary Mizrahi (North African) and Arab music in Israel. In this program, backed by three musicians playing cello, violin, and percussion, Dardashti reached into a conglomeration of religious practices and cultures for her material and sang her stories in Hebrew, Persian, and other Middle-Eastern languages.
Her familiarity with a variety of traditions enriched her performance. Her riff on a midrash about Dinah, daughter of Leah, Jacob's wife, used the words of a Sephardi piyut (religious poem) that Iranians sing in celebration of the birth of a daughter. "You know," she said mischievously, challenging her audience, "people have all sorts of ideas about how women are treated in Iran." So much for stereotypes.
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