Immortality through Defiance: Reyhaneh Jabbari and Lot’s Wife.

The world shivered and cried this week at the unjust  execution of 26-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari, hanged in Tehran on Saturday, convicted of killing a man allegedly trying to rape her.

Lost in the reactive and temporary shame of being Iranian, a human, a man, that day, I read the piercing Biblical line “But his wife, from behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:26).

Each year, I read the same passage and secretly pray that Lot’s wife does not turn around.  This year, as I re-read the story with fresh tears in my eyes over Jabbari’s execution, a new meaning evolved.

Lot’s wife remains nameless throughout the ages.  She has no identity of her own.  She is someone’s wife.  She is a mother of four daughters, two married and two betrothed.  Had she not turned around, she would have rotted away to history’s unforgiving mass grave, forgotten, unnamed.  It is her very act of defiance that preserves her in a pillar of salt for eternity!