By Jorge Chaminé, founding president of CEM
A convergence of Jewish and Persian poetry listening to a wounded world
Beyond bombs, walls, censorship, and slogans, a music endures. It comes neither from power nor from weapons. It rises from the deep heart of peoples—from their poets, their women, their songs.
Today, the world trembles under the blows of deadly headlines. Peoples are bombed, repressed, exiled. Children die without burial; women march, gagged. And while leaders lock themselves in the certainty of their dogmas, it is the people who pay the price of silence and deafness.
But there is one place missiles cannot reach: the beating heart of poetic and musical traditions—especially those of Iran and the Jewish people, two peoples bound by memory and depth, two peoples who have sung for centuries in both shadow and light.
The Jewish people, through their Psalms, lamentations, Sephardic or Hasidic songs, have learned to make pain into a breath of hope. The Persian people, through Ḥāfiẓ, Rūmī, Saadi, or Khayyām, have turned the intoxication of injustice into divine ecstasy.
And both, despite centuries of separation, meet in the same minor key—that of a mystical song, where love is whispered, and listening becomes an act of truth.
Today, faced with tyrannies, fanaticism, and the manipulation of faith, poetic speech becomes a nonviolent counter-power—a blade of light.
When Rūmī writes, “Come, come, whoever you are…”, he does not speak to a creed. He speaks to the human being.
When Yehuda Halevi whispers, “My heart is in the East…”, he does not invoke a land, but an inner vibration.
Sacred music—whether it’s the sound of the Sufi ney or the Jewish violin—is not folklore: it is a language of survival, resistance of the soul, an ethic of listening.
In a world where slogans replace thought, where hatred is mass-produced and compassion is censored, poetry reminds us that peoples are not their regimes.
Iran is not its theocratic regime.
Israel is not its government’s politics.
Gaza is not its Hamas.
A people is what its mothers sing to their children.
What its poets dare to write in prison.
What its exiles whisper in the alleys of Berlin, Paris, Toronto, or Buenos Aires.
It is not force that will resolve conflicts.
Not shouting, but listening.
Not revenge, but understanding.
And not forgetting, but poetic memory—the one that weaves the threads of a brotherhood older than nations.
When an Iranian woman walks with her hair in the wind,
When a Jewish farmer sings the Aleph in the dust,
When an oud converses with a violin—
The world, for a moment, becomes more just.
To those who say all is lost, that peoples are doomed to war, we respond with Hafez:
“Even if the garden is laid waste, the rose knows how to bloom again.”
And with the Zohar and the Masnavi:
“Where words fail, music begins.”
It is time to open our ears again,
to silence the drums of war,
and to listen—
to what the peoples say when their song is given back to them.
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