by Sheldon Oberman
A story that people keep telling for over two thousand years has to be a good one, especially if it is about the wisest person in the world. That's King Solomon, right? I always thought it was but I wasn't thinking very deeply. This tale set me straight.
What if the wisest one in the world is not a man but a black woman from Africa? Or what if it is not a person at all but a little bird? What if there are many forms of wisdom and many "wisest ones in the world"?
Let me tell you the story of how this story came to be.
About seven years ago, a conference organizer asked me to tell some folktales to a group of young people. She specifically asked for a tale about Solomon and the hoopoe bird. Until then I had always told personal tales or stories from my books, however, I liked Jewish folktales and decided to give it a try.
King Solomon, the hero of many wisdom tales, is from Biblical Israel. However, his stories have travelled as far and wide as the Jews themselves and the core of this tale comes from Yemen. King Solomon's wife, Balkis, asks him to build a palace of bird beaks. He agrees but the hoopoe bird tells him riddles which cause him to change his mind.
It was a simple yet deceptively clever tale and different than most wisdom tales. Here, Solomon does not seem wise. He makes a foolish promise and gets outsmarted by a simple bird. Or at least, he is made smarter by a simple bird. The Yemenite tale pulls him right off his throne and teaches him that the way to wisdom is not through pride and power and it is certainly not through exploiting weaker creatures and violating nature.
I loved the story but it felt incomplete. Howard Schwartz and Barbara Rush had retold it by adding an Arab tale in which Solomon rewards the hoopoe bird. That helped but I kept wanting Solomon to learn more. And I felt uncomfortable about Solomon's wife whose role was merely to create the problem and then disappear.
The solution came one day from an Ethiopian woman who was a friend of my mother's. She told me tales of her hero, the Queen of Sheba. Her people saw Sheba as powerful, dignified and every bit as wise as Solomon. She reminded me of how Sheba journeyed to Jerusalem in search of wisdom and how Solomon and Sheba had once symbolized a strong love between two great and greatly different cultures.
So I invited the Queen of Sheba into the story and created a new version; Sheba wants to learn from Solomon but she also contributes her form of wisdom. All of them, Jewish man, Black woman and little bird gain wisdom from each other. Most of all, they realize that we all have great things to learn when we honour each other's differences, with an open heart and an open mind.
It was a wonderful story to tell, with so many moments of insight and emotion. My young audience enjoyed it immensely. So did I. I have been telling Jewish folktales ever since, especially this one, which has grown through many retellings and is now presented in this beautiful book.
However, the organizer of the conference was disappointed. "That's not the right story," she said. "I wanted the one about the hoopoe losing its crown. You told the wrong story by mistake."
What a fortunate mistake.