May 21, 2012

Of Torah and Khoresh Gheymeh

A Brookline couple shares its passion for Judaism – and Persian food – with the world.

by Sohrab Ahmari

February 21, 2011

 

After saying Kiddush and ritually washing their hands, Sammy and Reyna Simnegar’s Shabbat guests are treated to a difficult Torah challenge drawn from Eshet Chayil. The Proverbs hymn, Sammy points out, contains an apparent contradiction. Near the beginning, King Solomon laments that a worthwhile woman is nigh impossible to find in this world (“A valorous woman who can find? / Her price is far beyond rubies”). Yet Eshet Chayil closes with him saying – some say he addressed this to his mother, while others say he wrote it for one of his wives – “many daughters have done worthy things, you surpass them all.”

 

“Well, which is it?” Sammy asks his guest. “Is the Torah telling us that there are many valorous women – or few, if any at all?”

 

Going around the table, each guest reflects on this biblical quandary. Some attempt to put a modern spin on a passage that seems so out of place in 2011 Brookline, Massachusetts – even among a group of young, mostly Orthodox Jews. “I think it’s really about each person finding the right partner,” a young woman muses. A husband defers to his wife’s interpretation. (Thankfully, as a first-time guest and the only cultural Muslim at the table, I am exempt from participating.)

 

And before the riddle wrinkles too many foreheads, Reyna intervenes; dinner is ready. Over the next few hours, Reyna serves dish after dish of the best Persian food I have had since leaving the old country. The highlight is undoubtedly Reyna’s khoresh gheymeh, a notoriously difficult split-pea stew. Hers is made with impossibly tender cubes of lamb and sits atop a mound of perfectly-steamed Persian rice. Saffron-golden roasted chicken and salmon kabobs, among other savory delights, are also on the menu. And, of course, the entire affair is completely kosher.

 

So how did this 33-year-old Venezuelan-American come to embrace Orthodox Judaism and Persian cooking? “Only in America,” she says. “Only here could a story like ours take place.”

 

Reyna was born in Caracas into an ostensibly Catholic family. But as a child, she never felt quite at home in the Church. “Catholic school was unsatisfying because questions were discouraged,” she explains. “And I had lots of questions.” At an early age, she found herself “infatuated” with Judaism and the Jews in her neighborhood. She also began noticing some of her own family’s “weird” traditions – like the fact that when paying their respects to the dead, her parents would not purchase flowers. “They would look for stones at the cemetery to place on graves,” she recounts. “I thought, ‘How cheap! Why can’t we buy flowers like everyone else?’”

 

Why, indeed. At 12, Reyna learned that she is a descendent of Marranos, crypto-Jews forced to convert to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition. Soon after her discovery, Reyna began exploring her own Jewish heritage and identity. “All roads led to Judaism,” she says. But it was a long and difficult journey, interrupted by, among other things, an American education and her future husband Sammy entering Reyna’s life – or, to be more precise, the U.C.L.A. Taco Bell Express where she worked while attending full-time as an international student.

 

During one of Reyna’s busy lunchtime Taco Bell shifts, Sammy, an Iranian-born student, drew her ire by ordering two bean burritos with no cheese. “I was so annoyed with this gringo making a custom order – at Taco Bell of all places,” Reyna recalls. “Then, after getting his burritos, he had the chutzpah to come back and ask me where I was from.” Sammy was intrigued by Reyna’s accent. “Are you Argentinean?” he asked her. “No,” she curtly replied, reluctant to engage in playful flirtation with Sammy, “who, frankly, was not the hottest guy out there.”

 

Later, after she returned from a break, Reyna learned from the Taco Bell manager that “the gringo” had left her a napkin note asking her out on a date. Reyna was not amused. She already had another student, a Saudi man some twenty years her senior, constantly badgering her for a date. (The Saudi later politely exited stage left upon learning Reyna is Jewish.) But on a Friday night, Reyna’s cousin convinced her to give Sammy a call – if just to prank him. When she did, Reyna was struck by Sammy’s earnestness. “He sounded incredibly sweet and so genuine.” She agreed to the date. 

 

The two hit it off, especially once Reyna noticed the “Chai” necklace Sammy was wearing, and showed off her own Hebrew skills. Neither could believe the other was Jewish. Reyna did not even know Persian Jews existed.

 

As their relationship developed however, both hit cultural stumbling blocks. Sammy’s family wanted him to marry a girl who grew up two blocks away from their house in Shiraz. They thought of Reyna as just another mekziki (a derogatory term used by Iranians in Los Angeles to describe anyone from Latin America.)  Meanwhile, the Orthodox L.A. rabbis overseeing Reyna’s conversion process – begun spiritually when she was 15 in Caracas and in practice when she was 18 in L.A. – thought Sammy was insufficiently pious. It was true. “When I was an undergraduate, I didn’t believe in much,” he tells me in Persian. “I thought, ‘let those dahatis [villagers] have their rituals and their superstitions.’” 

 

When Sammy finished his undergraduate degree and moved to New York to earn an M.B.A. at Columbia, the rabbis immediately tried to find Reyna a husband more conversant with Orthodox Judaism. Reyna resisted, joining Sammy in New York just seven months later – but not before taking an intensive, weeklong course in Persian cooking from his mother in LA. It was a “superb investment on his mother’s part,” Reyna thinks. “She wouldn’t have to FedEx frozen Persian dishes to New York every week.” 

 

Meanwhile, Sammy steeped himself in Torah. After years of pondering difficult theological quandaries – “is there a G-d? why do bad things happen to good people?” – Sammy came to the conclusion that there is a “G-d who gave the Torah to the Jewish people,” and thus, in order to be intellectually honest with himself, he had to become a Torah-observant Jew.

 

A move to Boston and five kids later, the couple’s passion for the things that drew them together – Jewish life and Persian culture – has only grown stronger. Feldheim is about to publish Reyna’s gorgeous Persian cookbook, Persian Food from the Non-Persian Bride. And their Shabbat dinners have become something of a Brookline institution – well-attended by young Orthodox, yes, but also by more secular Jews and the occasional Catholic priest. The couple warmly opens the doors to a Persian Jewish culture that can often be insular and forbidding. Anyone is welcome, as long as she is willing to try an unfamiliar dish – and wrestle with a Parsha quiz or two.  

As the evening comes to a close, no one has offered a conclusive, definitive answer to Sammy’s question. But I suspect it might have something to do with Reyna’s enthusiasm for a language and culture so distant from her own – and also with Sammy’s boundless generosity of spirit.

 

 

 

Sohrab Ahmari’s review of a new anthology of Mideast literature appeared as a feature in the February 2011 issue of Commentary.