The Saints' Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel's Urban Periphery 9781618110213

Citation preview

The Saints’ Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel’s Urban Periphery

Yoram Bilu

ii

The Folk veneration of Saints in morocco and israel

iSraEl: SoCiETY, CulTurE, aND HiSTorY

Series Editor: Yaacov Yadgar, Political Studies, Bar-Ilan University

Editorial Board: Alan Dowty, Political Science and Middle EasternStudies, University of Notre Dame Tamar Katriel, Communication Ethnography, University of Haifa Avi Sagi, Hermeneutics, Cultural studies, and Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University Allan Silver, Sociology, Columbia University Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Ethnicity, London School of Economics Yael Zerubavel, Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University

Yoram Bilu The Saints’ Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel’s Urban Periphery

Translated by Haim Watzman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bilu, Yoram. [Shoshvine ha-kedoshim. English] The saints' impresarios : dreamers, healers, and holy men in Israel's urban periphery / Yoram Bilu ; translated by Haim Watzman. p. cm. -- (Israel: society, culture, and history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934843-71-0 (hardback) 1. Zaddikim--Israel. 2. Zaddikim--Morocco. 3. Jews, Moroccan--Israel--Social life and customs. 4. Shrines--Israel. I. Title. BM750.B52313 2010 296.6'1--dc22 2009050231

Copyright © 2010 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Cover and book design by Adell Medovoy

Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com



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contents I.

The Folk-Veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel Dream Portal Roots in the West: The Cult of Saints in Morocco From West to East: Moroccan Jewry in Israel Native Saints and Immigrant Saints: The “Sacred Geography” of Moroccan Jews in Israel

1 17 28 41

II.

Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim and Rabbi David u-Moshe A Dream Journey to the Saint A Saint in the Next Room: Rabbi David u-Moshe and the Ben-Ḥayyim Family The Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe at the Dawn of the 21st Century

59 98 117

III.

Ya'ish OḤana, Elijah the Prophet and the Gate of Paradise The Road to Paradise Dreamers in Paradise Paradise Lost

127 151 182

IV.

Alu Ezra and Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar Early and Late Revelations Life-Story as Folktale: The Cinderella of Beit She’an Twenty Years Later

193 217 223

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

V.

Esther Suissa and Rabbi Shimon Bar-YoḤai From Patient to Healer Written in the Egg Yolk: The Healing Art of Female Saints’ Impresarios Esther and Rabbi Shimon: A Return Visit

229 243 266

VI.

The Cult of Saints from a Comparative Perspective: Symbol, Narrative, Gender, and Identity Crosscutting Stories: The Saints’ Impresarios from a Comparative Perspective Personal Symbols and Mythic Narratives Gender and Sanctity: The Female Way to the Tsaddiq Migrating Traditions: The Historic Timing and the "Shelf Life" of the New Shrines The Cult of Saints as an Israeli and Local Phenomenon

271 284 301

Bibliography

325

Index

345

308 312



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INtroduction At the beginning of the 1980s, when I began to look into the Israeli incarnation of the cult of saints practiced by the Jews of Morocco, I did not imagine that a generation would go by before the fruits of my labors ripened into a book. The long stretch between that beginning and this conclusion resulted, for the most part, from the cult’s dynamic, ever-changing nature. New and renewed sites and saints, festivals, and wonder-workers appeared one after another, sometimes at a dizzying pace, so there was a constant temptation to keep on gathering material from the field, and it was difficult to set an endpoint for the research. I therefore, for a long time, limited myself to analyzing individual cases of sites and their founders, and published over the years a number of journal articles and book chapters devoted to aspects of the cult of saints in Israel. Now the time has come to examine the entire range of phenomena that I have studied. In this book I take a comprehensive view that encompasses the greater part of my work on this subject, both that which has appeared in print and that which is published here first. Space does not allow me to provide a list of all the articles and book chapters I have written, in Hebrew and in English, from which I have taken material to include in this book. I will simply cite some of the central milestones. The material I put together for the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures that I gave at the University of Rochester in New York in the spring of 1994 served as a starting point for the composition of this work. I was fortunate to have been hosted, in recent years, at three academic homes, two of them outside Israel, at which I was able to devote myself to writing. In February 2000, during my stay at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, I began the project, and the following year I continued it at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I completed the first draft of the book in New York, during the first half of 2002, when I served as a visiting professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I am grateful to Maurice Kriegel, my host in Paris, to David Roskies and Alan Mintz of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and to Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich of the Hebrew University’s department of psychology, who organized the research group on narrative psychology at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

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Some of my work on the cult of saints in Israel was written in collaboration with colleagues. I wish to thank my friends Henry Abramovitch, Eyal Ben-Ari, Galit Ḥasan-Rokem, and Andre Levy for their contributions to this book and for allowing me to use our joint work in my writing. Many people assisted me with advice and helpful comments—Moshe Bar-Asher, Binyamin BeitHallahmi, Issachar Ben-Ami, Harvey Goldberg, Uziel Ḥazan, Lennie Helfgott, Amia Lieblich, Elhanan Reiner, Avigdor Shinan, Moshe Shokeid, Melford Spiro, and Yair Zakovitch all deserve my gratitude. It goes without saying that all responsibility for the final text is mine. My heartfelt thanks to Osnat BenShaḥar, the coordinator of the Hebrew University’s department of sociology and anthropology, for her loyal assistance, and to the editorial board staff of the University of Haifa Press, who adopted the Hebrew version of this book and awarded it the Bahat Prize. Finally, this book would not have been written had dozens of men and women, in particular the four heroes of this text—Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, Ya’ish Oḥana, Alu Ezra, and Esther Suissa—not opened their doors, homes, and hearts to me. I hope that with this book I repay at least some of the debt I owe them.



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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel: Ethnographic and Historical Considerations

Opening: Dream Portal This book began with a dream. I am not the one who dreamed it, however. It came to a forestation laborer in Safed named Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim. I first encountered his name in the mid-1970s, when I was gathering material for my PhD dissertation on the folk medicine of Moroccan Jews in Israel (Bilu 1978). I conducted my research in out-of-the-way moshavim (semicooperative farming villages) in the Judean foothills, communities only an hour’s drive from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, but far out of public sight and mind ever since they were established in the 1950s and 1960s. In one of these villages I found a mimeographed leaflet in which Avraham recounted his dream. He had sent it to the village synagogue, where it caused a stir among the worshippers. In florid language, with a quasi-prophetic preamble, Avraham related how Rabbi David u-Moshe, one of Moroccan Jewry’s most important tsaddiqim (holy men, sainted figures),1 had appeared to him and asked to rejoin his former devotees. The rabbi’s tomb lay in the western High Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco, but his flock had emigrated to Israel, leaving him behind and lonely. The tsaddiq ordered the dreamer to set aside a room in his home in Safed and to publicize his new address so that all who needed his aid could find him. Avraham did as instructed. He sent his announcement to a large number of Israeli synagogues serving the Moroccan community. It concluded with an emotional appeal to all the tsaddiq’s faithful to come celebrate his hillula, the festival marking the anniversary of the saint’s death, on the first day of the Jewish month of Heshvan in his new home in Safed. In his dream, Avraham encountered a mythical saint face-to-face, and the saint told him that he wished to immigrate to Israel in the footsteps of his former devotees, who had left him behind. Furthermore, the tsaddiq wanted to become a permanent boarder in the dreamer’s home. I was astonished. No less surprising to me was how the written version of the dream made its way from one community to another, and the kind of public response

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it aroused. As a clinical psychologist by my first training, my inclination was to view any dream as an expression of a subjective, elusive individual experience that, in a therapeutic framework—on the psychoanalyst’s couch, for example—could be used to pry open a window into the recesses of the dreamer’s psyche. Yet this dream had metamorphosed from a personal experience into a public event. It had been written down, redacted, reproduced, and disseminated in order to enlist participants in the cult of the immigrant tsaddiq. What had seemingly begun as a private and personal nocturnal vision, encompassing an intra-psychic world of experience, became a concrete cultural phenomenon, with an objective existence in the interpersonal and social world.2 I quickly learned that the leaflet had elicited excitement and enthusiasm from most readers. They were virtually untroubled by questions about the real nature of the dream and the reliability of the dreamer. Their readiness to believe the dream was probably inseparable from the tidings it brought— the restoration of a tradition central to their former lives in Morocco. Since they lacked an accessible site where they could demonstrate their reverence for the holy man and appeal for his succor, the cult of the tsaddiq Rabbi David u-Moshe lost its vitality after the Moroccan community’s relocation to Israel. Now Avraham was establishing a substitute site so that the cult could be renewed and expanded. It was also clear to me, however, that the excitement had another cause. I realized that many readers of the leaflet understood dreams in a way sharply distinct from my own. My psychological background led me to look for the meaning of dreams on a psychological plane; to view them as a reflection of an inner reality of wishes, troubles, and conflicts connected to the special life circumstances of the dreamer. For the Moroccan-Jewish readers of Avraham’s account, however, a dream (at least of the type presented here) was located in a cosmological rather than psychological reality, and served as a means for conveying messages from entities with a special (“supernatural”) ontological status, like angels, saints, and demons. The majesty of Avraham’s dream came, from my point of view, from the creative imaginative forces in his mind. But for the villagers, it came from a transcendental, sacred religious realm that is nevertheless organically integrated into real events.3 Some seven years passed from my encounter with the dream letter to the densely foggy winter day when I knocked on the door of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim’s apartment.4 I found myself in a modest public housing project building, identical to all the other buildings in Safed’s Canaan neighborhood. Fans of mysticism will be intrigued to know that, from the



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moment I got off the bus at the stop next to Safed police headquarters until I reached Avraham’s door, I had to feel my way like a blind man through the wooly mist that enveloped the entire neighborhood in a thick white halo. But the atmosphere in the crowded, steamy ground-floor apartment that housed, at that time, not only the tsaddiq but also Avraham, his wife, and six of their ten children, was far from mystical. I walked into a unique setting. Here, under a single roof, ordinary (and loud) family life, including the normal domestic activities of cooking, laundry, cleaning, family meals, homework, play, fights between children, and television viewing, coexisted with the ritual activity of a holy place, which received visitors from near and far, at all hours of the day (and sometimes at night). Avraham and his family opened their home and their hearts to me. Over a period of years I visited the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe dozens of times, on weekdays and on the holy man’s hillula celebrations. I interviewed Avraham, his wife, and most of his children, as well as many of the pilgrims who sought out the saint. And I observed the activities that took place in this home shrine. On a few occasions I went along with Avraham to his job in Biriya Forest, and to the Safed municipality on business related to the shrine he had in his home. Even more than other visitors, I enjoyed the Ben-Ḥayyims’ generous hospitality, and felt myself fortunate to have found such a gracious place to do research. I became friendly with the family, and ate the delicacies that Masouda, Avraham’s wife, prepared in her tiny but always bustling kitchen. Sometimes I spent the night in the adjacent oneroom apartment where one of the grown sons lived. Some of the warm welcome I received undoubtedly resulted from the way the home functioned as a pilgrimage site, open to visitors at all hours. The lack of any division between home and shrine accustomed the inhabitants to a routine in which the family was frequently intruded on by strangers. One might also argue that the very decision to establish a holy site open to all in the middle of a residential apartment was evidence of openness to others and a sense of hospitality already present in the family. Whatever the case, the more familiar I became with the place and those who frequented it, the more I felt that my presence at the site, especially on hillula days, was no more invasive than that of the other persons who frequented the shrine on a regular basis. In addition to the family, volunteer helpers, beggars, peddlers, singers, ritual slaughterers, and old men offering blessings, there was also an anthropologist. Furthermore, Avraham made no secret of his hope that my interest in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, and my explicit intention of writing a book about it (a plan that came to

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fruition only after a long delay), would publicize the site and help it become more widely accepted. I learned how clear and sharp the boundaries of my role were for him at one of the hillula celebrations, when I sought to help out the members of the family, who were toiling in the service of the guests. They refused absolutely. “You go record, talk with the people,” Avraham insisted. This was his way of assigning me the task of documenting events at the site. In keeping with this definition of my role, Avraham needled me to publish the material I was gathering. In this he, oddly, reminded me of some of my senior colleagues at the university, who were constantly jacking up my anxiety level by preaching about the importance of regular scholarly publication in the quest for tenure and promotion. I had a difficult time withstanding Avraham’s entreaties, so when I published my first article on the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe (Bilu 1987), I immediately gave him a copy. I was happy to have done his bidding, but also apprehensive. The popular hagiographic literature about holy men to which Avraham was accustomed was quite different from the analytic probing, detached style, and other scholarly conventions I adhered to in my article. The article was written in English, a language Avraham does not know, but I feared that others might provide him with a partial translation, out of context, that would eviscerate my work and put it in an unflattering light. None of these apprehensions were justified. On the contrary, when I next visited the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, I discovered to my surprise that, despite its potential for causing intercultural misunderstanding, my article had immediately been appended to the adulatory literature. Avraham reproduced several copies and placed them in the center of the saint’s room, together with the prayer books, books of psalms, talitot (prayer shawls), boxes of candles, and other holy objects. He explained to me that this way overseas visitors who did not know Hebrew would be able to learn about the shrine and tell others about it. The central place my article gained in the holy site (and in the world of its devotees) was, for a young scholar at the beginning of his career and in need of encouragement, a unique badge of tribute. But, from a more clear-headed point of view it also testified to Avraham’s desire to use my work to help him publicize his project and to gain it recognition and honor.5 *** The Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe is one of four sites I address in this book. It was the first I investigated, and I spent more time there than



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at all the others, old and new. Furthermore, my paths to the other three impresarios of holy men began there, directly or indirectly. Together with Avraham, they—a man and two women—are the protagonists of my story. I reached the first of them, Ya’ish Oḥana, via a family from Beit She’an who visited the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe and told me that a holy site had been discovered in their city. The name of the place, “The Gate of Paradise,” piqued my curiosity, so a few days later I went to Beit She’an to investigate. The shrine’s imposing name was no surprise to a boy I ran into on the main road. He gave me precise directions to the new site: “straight, turn right, then the first alley to the left, and you’re in Paradise!” The modesty of the holy place I found there contrasted sharply with its lofty name, but the welcome I received in the home of Ya’ish Oḥana and his wife Ḥannah was in no way inferior to what I had enjoyed in Safed. Ya’ish in particular shared with me the story of his life and the events that led to the establishment of the site. It too had been revealed to him in a dream. I visited the Gate of Paradise dozens of times, and attended a number of hillula celebrations in honor of Elijah the Prophet, its patron saint. I interviewed more than a hundred visitors, most of them women who lived in the Dalet neighborhood, where the site was located.6 Dream stories held a central place in these interviews. I learned during my first visit that the new holy place, born of a dream, had set off a chain reaction of dreams dreamed by others, all of which had to do with the site and its holy patron. I had heard of the same phenomenon in Safed, but in Beit She’an it was even more intense. The community of dreamers that sprouted up around the Gate of Paradise was additional testimony to the role that dreams could play in the public space, beyond the psychological level of personal experience. I sometimes reached Beit She’an by driving my own car from Jerusalem up the Jordan Valley. More often, I took a public bus that followed the same route, the lines that have Tiberias or Kiryat Shmonah as their terminus. Sometimes I would combine both sites in one trip—I would spend the morning in Beit She’an, then reboard the Kiryat Shmonah bus and ride to Rosh Pina, where I switched to the Safed bus. In such cases, I would sleep over in Safed, and visit the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe again the next morning. During these visits, I learned that Avraham’s enterprise had been an inspiration for Ya’ish, and that significant personal ties had been woven between the two places. Avraham’s son, Meir, lived in Beit She’an and served as liaison. It was he who referred me to Alu Ezra, the first woman among the four saints’ impresarios I have chosen to present in this book. The site founded by Alu is situated in the Tet housing project, just a

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

five-minute walk from the Gate of Paradise, and like it was founded in the late 1970s. When I first visited Alu’s apartment building, with its many entrances, I discovered a dedicatory inscription on one of the supporting columns. It declared that the saint Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar had appeared here. Then I realized that this shrine concerned the transfer of a saint from Morocco to Israel, as did the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, rather a local Israeli revelation, like the Gate of Paradise. The interviews I conducted with Alu, some on my own and some together with Galit Ḥasan-Rokem, produced an account of a unique life story. At its center was a one-time encounter with the holy man during childhood, and a renewal of the relationship with him many years later (Bilu & Ḥasan-Rokem 1989). The association with Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar made Alu a well-known healer, and people in distress, most of them from outside Beit She’an, sought her out. She allowed me to observe a few of these therapeutic encounters. Esther Suissa of Yeruḥam, the last of the saint agents I present in this book, is also a healer. However, her powers derive from an intimate alliance she has made with a celebrated local saint, the greatest and first master of kabbalah, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai. I first encountered Esther’s name in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. On one of my visits, I found in the saint’s room a plastic-encased notice in which Esther presented herself as a woman who heals through the power of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and Rabbi David u-Moshe. The notice included as testimonies two letters of thanks she had received from people she had healed. In her home in Yeruḥam in southern Israel, Esther told me the story of her life, at the center of which was the special relationship she had established with her patron saint after long years of illness and suffering. She also allowed me, even more so than Alu, to observe her therapeutic encounters and to document her means of diagnosis and treatment. My visits with these female healers were less rich than my encounters with the men. One reason was that I discovered them only after I had studied the men, and already had in hand answers to some of the questions with which I had embarked on the project. Another was that the room that each woman had dedicated to her saint served principally as a treatment room, not as a cult site full of visitors and activity. But I would not rule out the possibility that the gender barrier between a male researcher and his female subjects also contributed to this outcome. ***



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As the reader will soon learn, the endeavors of this book’s four protagonists constitute only a tiny proportion of the entire and varied range of a vibrant cult of saints that has come into being in Israel during the last thirty years. Neither should these four be taken as a representative sample of the group I call “saints’ impresarios”— a small number of men and women who have reestablished in Israel, usually after a dream revelation, the traditional cult of a Moroccan or local saint. Nevertheless, there is logic in choosing research paths that branch off, directly or indirectly, from a single central site, the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. This is particularly so when the cases under study broke down evenly between men and women as well as between imported traditions (which involved the transport of a Moroccan saint to Israel) and local ones (involving a local Israeli saint). The geographical distribution of the sites is broad. Even though two are located in the same town, Beit She’an, they range from the Galilee in the north through the Jordan Valley to the central Negev in Israel’s south. The research subjects’ importance goes beyond their small number, because they are cultural entrepreneurs par excellence, whose sites, over the years, drew thousands of ordinary believers. True, these initiatives cannot compete with the attraction of central cult sites such as the tombs of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai on Mt. Meron, of Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes in Tiberias, or of Yonatan Ben-Uziel in Amuqa, near Safed. But the popularity of these central sites derives from well-grounded traditions, as well as from a wide range of institutional support from public bodies. The four saints’ attendants presented here represent new or renewed traditions, borne exclusively on the shoulders of individual entrepreneurs.7 In my opinion, the central value of this book lies in its protagonists’ detailed life stories and rich worlds of experience, gradually brought to light during in-depth interviews and by relationships of trust woven gradually along many meetings. Each such story is, in my opinion, a world unto itself. However, some common patterns are evident in the life stories of the four protagonists, and in the circumstances of the revelations they received. *** All four of the cases here involved active sites that have won recognition from the communities where they emerged. Nevertheless, my field work during the 1980s revealed clear differences in their drawing power. Anthropologists sometimes err in their rhetoric and writing style when they locate the subject of their study in an “ethnographic present”

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devoid of historical context.8 But the history of holy places in Israel and throughout the world tells of sites that have disappeared as quickly as they appeared. As hard as it may be to found a holy place, maintaining it over time is even more difficult. The entrepreneurs’ initial success was thus no guarantee that their sites would endure. Aware of the short “shelf life” of many locations on Israel’s controversial and volatile map of holy places, I returned to them some twenty years after my first visit, to ascertain their fate. The information I gathered during these later trips, which I conducted in 2001 and 2002, add a diachronic dimension to my observations, even if the historical depth is only that of two decades. *** I long pondered the question of whether to use the entrepreneurs’ real names or, alternatively, to try to disguise their identities. It is accepted practice to camouflage the names and life circumstances of research subjects, a practice based on weighty ethical considerations. However, it seemed very difficult to accomplish in this case, and perhaps unnecessary.9 My doubts about the need for concealment—a sacred cow in ethnographic writing—might seem like no more than a rationalization, but it derives in part from the responses I received from informants whose identities I systematically disguised in my previous book (Bilu 2000b). I expected that they would commend me for my effort to protect their privacy. Yet some of them regarded the camouflage as superfluous and even insulting. Without consultation or consent, I had erased their presence from my book. Furthermore, the unique nature of the four cases depicted here made it impossible for me to provide complete anonymity without entirely revising all their personal details and life stories. Such an extensive alteration would have rendered shallow the understandings and meanings produced from the material I collected. In the final analysis, my work is about figures with a definite identity, acting within specific life and social circumstances, in a given historical context, in well-known places at specific dates. The attempt to interpret the entrepreneurs’ life stories—which organize and unite all the facts into a narrative sequence—and to grant them meaning, is inseparable from the specific weaving of associations into these specific concrete data, not to other data. I am aware of the responsibility placed on me by the decision to present the stories of Avraham, Ya’ish, Alu, and Esther without interposition. At the center of their stories is the revelation by a revered saint—a pinnacle of



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spiritual experience that empowered the tellers and granted them a sense of renewal and confidence in their destiny. Yet the familiar link between, on the one hand, stories of religious revelation and mystical enlightenment and, on the other, states of distress, illness, and suffering, are not absent from the cases presented here.10 All the protagonists, both men and women, shared with me accounts of low points in their lives, traumas and crises that are difficult to speak of publicly. Yet to disregard them would detach the revelation from the motivating power at its foundation. In the end, the real test of the dilemma I present here is the ability to present the inner experiential worlds of the book’s protagonists, as well as the social reality and cultural context in which they act, using an empathetic and respectful approach that will not cause them harm. I hope that I have lived up to these standards. The social and political questions that the revival of a saint’s cult raises with regard to the face of Israeli society are fairly complex. But, on the personal level, I could not help but wonder at the strength contained in the revelatory experiences of simple people, with little formal education or economic means, who live on the country’s periphery. This strength enabled them to imbue their lives with spiritual meanings, to alleviate their distress, even to establish holy sites meant to heal others. I wish to give a voice to these experiences, as well as to their personal and collective implications and the changes they have produced. *** I realize that these good intentions may discomfit critical readers. I aspire to present, in an ostensibly authentic way, the big voices of little people who live outside the hegemonic culture. This is an aspiration that guided generations of anthropologists in their field work during the era of ethnographic realism. Yet it no longer seems so innocent in the post-modern and post-colonial era, in which the researcher’s place in the fieldwork arena and the politics of representation have become intricate subjects. Am I, an Ashkenazi [of European background] researcher gazing out of his academic ivory tower at the colorful rituals of the Moroccan “other,” not participating in a “practice of authentication, which presents the Mizraḥi [Jew from the Islamic world] as an essentialist entity of primordial traits of tradition, tribalism, and folk customs” (Ḥever, Shenhav, and Motzafi-Haller 2002, p. 291)? As such, am I not contributing to “the fixation and reproduction of a conceptual system that has defined the Mizraḥi as Israeli society’s underprivileged ‘other’” (Ibid., p. 294)? My reply is aimed at the critical

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reader who does not reject the very conduct of the study on the basis of political correctness, and comes in two parts. First, the interpretation that I offer to the initiatives of saints’ agents manifestly diverges from “the continuum between the definition of the Mizraḥi as a ‘problem’ and his presentation as the ‘victim’” (Ibid.). Although, as I will show, the new sites emerged against a background of both personal and social distress, this only serves to further underline the active coping power of the saints’ impresarios. They, after all, creatively exploited the cultural tools available to them to change their environments, even though they did not have extensive financial resources or the cooperation of the authorities. Their initiative and activity completely contradicts the view of the Mizraḥi as “exceptional, a passive element, who is unable to participate in creating the circumstances of his life” (ibid.).11 Second, even though the roots of the initiatives described in this book lie in the cultural traditions of the Maghreb, they have flourished in the Israel of the 1970s and 1980s. The background to this boom is the social, economic, and cultural transformations that have taken place in Israel during these decades, and which have contributed to the constitution of a new way of being Israeli. Without a doubt, this emerging Israeli identity includes a local construction of what it means to be Mizraḥi, as well as of an ethnicity marked by Moroccan extraction. But this ethnic identity is “imagined” within manifestly local experiences, both personal and collective, that have assumed, since immigration to Israel, a veneer that envelops and blurs memories from the old country. Since the focus of this work is a psychocultural analysis of the individual life stories of the four entrepreneurs, their political and socioeconomic substrate remains implicit in the four chapters that constitute the body of the book. But in this chapter, as in the concluding one, I will try to situate these new sites in a broader, manifestly Israeli, context. I will show their relationship to new ideologies that are penetrating broad sectors of society now that the bonds of the Zionist civil religion that was paramount during the pre-state period and the country’s earlier years have been loosened. And I will also discuss their connection with the nationalist and religious praxis of sanctifying the Israeli space. *** In presenting the life stories of the saints’ impresarios I have remained faithful to the epistemological horizons of the interviewees. I will therefore write, for example, that “Rabbi David u-Moshe began to reveal himself



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to Avraham ben-Ḥayyim in the spring of 1973,” or that “in these years… Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar vanished from Alu’s life.” I will not use qualified formulations that are liable to distance the readers from the world of the participants, such as “Avraham claimed that he began to see Rabbi David u-Moshe in his dreams in the summer of 1973,” or “Alu relates that she did not feel Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s presence in her life during these years.” Thus, I begin my investigation within the language with which they themselves define their lives, seeking to understand their life events and experiences as they were shaped within their cultural world and their religious faith. This entails more than a stylistic convention. Visions and revelations of the type discussed in this work are often entertained in the Israeli media and other public spheres as calculated manipulations and fabrications meant to bring in believers and donations, for the purpose of improving the visionaries’ social and economic status. Against such accusations, it is important to note that I accept everything told to me by the four protagonists, and other people around them, to be valid representations of their subjective experiences. I adopted this assumption during my field work, after numerous encounters and interviews with the impresarios. The better acquainted I became with their world, the more I became convinced that the huge investment that a person makes in vacating a room in his or her small apartment and setting it aside for a saint, turning it into a shrine open to all, must almost certainly be a sign of true religious fervor and of a sense of vocation. Nevertheless, I do not intend to present a sanitized depiction of the entrepreneurs, one that absolves them entirely from the desire to profit from their ventures and gain social status. As we shall see, the establishment of a covenant with the saint and the founding of a site in his honor are demanding, complex activities, most likely motivated by many factors. Presenting the stories from the point of view of the believers does not discharge me from applying to their accounts the conceptual tools and explanatory systems taken from my field of professional interest, psychological anthropology,12 in order to explain the central place of the saints in their lives. Before presenting these tools, it is important to state that the system of interpretations I present is comprehensive, but not without caveats. Precisely because my explanations do not blur the epistemological gap between me and my research subjects (in other words, the fact that my explanatory model does not grant the saints ontological status), I have chosen not to try to explain the peak experiences of revelation. My decision to leave these spiritual events inside “scholarly parentheses” derives from my reluctance to attach scientific labels to these special and complex

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

encounters, which pummel the individual and are strongly ineffable—in other words, resistant to unambiguous verbal formulations and definitions. I do not see the point in translating them into a rationalist conceptual system that will rob them of their rich subjectivity. It is not unusual for scholars to use psychiatric or psychological language to explain events in which believers hear the voices of saints, or in which saints appear before them in waking hours, not just in dreams. But, as I will attempt to show, indiscriminate use of psychiatric concepts, which reduce the experience of waking revelation to a clinical symptom or to an auditory or visual hallucination, is baseless. Similarly, the depiction of these events as special states of consciousness involving trance or ecstasy does not reach the core meaning of revelation. Note, however, that my interpretive restraint does not extend beyond the immediate encounter with the saint. The chapters that follow are principally “thick descriptions” (Geertz 1973), replete with interpretation. They seek to explain how the saints’ impresarios reached the pinnacle experience of revelation, and how this event affected their lives. The revelation is thus explained causatively or etiologically, in terms of external and internal events in the entrepreneurs’ lives, events that preceded the revelation and led to it. It is also explained functionally and teleologically, in terms of the goals they achieved through their revelations and the changes they made in their lives. But I will not seek to translate the experience itself into an extra-experiential language, whether scientific or otherwise. I will now return to the conceptual system I use in my attempt to explain the saints’ status in my protagonists’ life-space. *** The appearance of the saint in a dream, a phenomenon that drew my attention to these new sites, is far from the only way that they are present in the world of their believers. However, this manifestation illustrates the saint’s presence as a cultural idiom (Obeyesekere 1971; Crapanzano 1975) that mediates between the personal and biographical on the one hand and the collective and communal on the other. This location is the “impression point” (Stromberg 1985) at which a public symbol and personal experience merge or, in the words of the psychoanalyst Winnicott, the potential intermediate space that bridges internal and external reality (Winnicott 1971). The definition of the saint as a Janus-faced concept, blending personal and common meanings,13 is not necessarily correct with regard to all those



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who participate in the cult of saints. With regard to the cognitive salience and emotional depth of the saint’s image, there is great variance among participants. This variation distinguishes, for example, between marginal believers, for whom the saint is no more than a social convention or cultural cliché, and those who believe with all their hearts and souls, for whom he represents a profound and self-evident internal truth. It seems that fervent and devoted believers, like the saints’ impresarios, internalize their saint’s image and make it part of their emotional and motivational system (Strauss 1992; Spiro 1997). For them, he becomes a personal symbol (Obeyesekere 1981, 1990), as opposed to a public symbol (lacking psychological meaning) or a private symbol (that is not part of the common cultural code). A personal symbol is thus a collective representation to which complex psychological experiences have become connected, turning it into a mental representation (Spiro 1987). This symbol is hammered, literally reforged, on the anvil of the believer’s unique experiential world, as he or she attempts to cope with conflict and distress. Yet it also remains a part of the collective reservoir of common meanings. Such personal symbols—the matted hair that appears on the heads of female Hindu virtuosos as gift from a god (Obeyesekere 1981), the bleeding stigmata on the feet and hands of Catholic ascetics (Yarom 1992; Kleinberg 2008), and the saint who suddenly appears in the dreams of ardent participants in the Jewish cult of saints—are directed simultaneously inward and outward. Their dual character grants them a certain ambiguity, flexibility, and openness to personal variants— characteristics we will encounter again and again as we address the place the saints occupy in the protagonists’ life stories. By analyzing these stories, I will attempt to show that the very possibility of giving expression to experiences of distress through the cultural idiom of the saint as a personal symbol can be of therapeutic significance. Some see cultural symbols such as saints to be ready-made defense mechanisms, types of “collective symptoms” that, by being located in myths and rituals, offer a means of resolving conflicts widespread in society (Spiro 1965; Devereux 1980). Others see them as expressions of “the work of culture,” with the ability to sublimate behavioral expressions of distress and even reshape them in ways that bear acceptable social meanings (Schieffelin 1996; Obeyesekere 1990). The former carefully examine the behavioral uses of cultural resources and look for residues of psychopathology at their foundation, while the latter will view the ability to harness experiences of distress into a system of cultural understandings as a liberating and transformative form of expression. The tension between these two

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

approaches will resonate in some of the life stories I present below. This will happen when I confront the question of how to evaluate the changes undergone by the entrepreneurs in the wake of the saint’s manifestation. Are these regressive phenomena, expressions of mental disturbance disguised by a cultural veneer, or are they progressive, symbolic transformations that lead from distress to a sense of satisfaction and self-fulfillment? Cognitive psychologists and anthropologists would no doubt prefer the concept “cultural schema” (D’Andrade 1995; Strauss & Quinn 1997) to “personal symbol,” which comes from the psychodynamic vocabulary. But in fact the two concepts are not distant from each other. The saint’s cultural schema is a mental structure, constituting an abstract representation of cultural meanings attributed to the saints in different contexts of the social reality—in legends, miraculous cures, daily rituals, and saints’ festivals and devotees’ pilgrimages to sites associated with them. In the case of the saints’ impressarios, it is a potent cultural schema, one that has been well-learned and internalized from a young age. It has become part of the believer’s motivational and emotional system. The “power” of the schema expresses itself in the fact that it produces ongoing and widely applicable cultural understandings that have considerable behavioral consequences. In surveying the stories of Avraham, Ya’ish, Alu, and Esther, we will see that it is difficult to find a mental representation that guides their lives in the present and that grants them greater meaning than the cultural schema of the saint. Against the background of the sharp separation of body and psyche that is part of the modern Western concept of the human, there is a danger that the cognitive language, when it relates to mental structures and internalized representations, will turn the cultural schema (or personal symbol) of the saint into an incorporeal concept located only in the mind. Even without reference to the considerable anthropological and social scientific literature that seeks to exchange the sharp dichotomy of body and psyche for holistic conceptualizations, it is important to stress that the cultural schema of the saint has a manifestly physical dimension. Committed believers experience their saints with their bodies. Their hair stands up on end and they get goose bumps when they dream them (them, not about them) or when they recall their dreams. They feel the saint close to them, but their reception of him is not limited to the distal senses of sight and hearing. It also includes many types of physical contact, from a strong grip to soft caresses, from kissing to spitting. The saint can even take possession of the bodies of his believers and speak through their lips. As a type of “embodied memory,” he is embedded in them, part and parcel of their habitus (Bourdieu 1977):



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an entire range of habits, movements, and predispositions that shape their behavior. He is present in the unselfconscious posture of deference they adopt when they enter his room, ask his intercession, and light candles in his honor, and in the physical exhilaration of their entire being when they feel his presence and his intercession in their favor.14 Not only is he a cognitive representation of cultural beliefs, he is also part of his believers’ body language, “a word made flesh” (Johnson 1987; Strathern 1996). The four chapters following will be devoted to the central place of the saint in his believers’ lives, consciousness, and bodies. They constitute the bulk of the book, and center on each of the four saints’ agents and their sites. Each chapter opens with the life story of the agent, expands on one particular aspect of his or her project, and concludes with the status of the sites today, more than twenty years after they were founded. The aspects I have chosen to examine in detail in the second section of each chapter are meant to position the protagonists’ initiatives in a broader social or cultural context. In the case of Avraham I will discuss his family’s reaction to the appearance of the saint in their home; in the case of Ya’ish, the reaction of his community to the holy site he discovered, as reflected in the dreams that others have had about the site. In the chapter on Alu I will examine the popular literary genre she used to articulate her experiences and grant them meaning, while in the chapter on Esther I will survey the diagnostic and therapeutic means by which she cares for people under the aegis of the saint, and will note her healing repertoire’s feminine uniqueness. For the most part, the material I gathered in interviews has a manifestly narrative character. Even if we accept the conceptual definition of the saint as a personal symbol or social schema, it is worth remembering that in the believers’ experiential world, his image is always placed within a narrative sequence. The life stories of the saints’ impresarios, like the reports of dreams and miraculous cures by visitors to the sites, are narrative structures in which there is a chronology, development, complication, and resolution. Since these narrative materials are always retrospective accounts, replete with interpretations and subjective evaluations, and subject to the distortions of memory, they are problematic from the point of view of positivistic study. This is all the more true with regard to the book’s protagonists, men and women in mid-life surveying their past through the prism of the saint’s revelation, an ecstatic “peak experience” that changed their lives utterly. It would not be out of line to presume that they have recast their life stories in light of this peak experience, in a massive project of processing and filtering, a process meant to illuminate the events and incidents that prepared the way to the

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

saint and which wove them into a dramatic sequence with its own internal logic (Gergen 1984). But the validity of this critical claim is predicated on the research goals. When the purpose is precise recovery of the biographies of the saints’ impresarios, the retrospective and subjective nature of their reports indeed detract from the study’s reliability. But if our purpose is to understand how our protagonists (or other believers) try to impart meaning to events in their lives, to cope with their life-problems, and to articulate their experiential worlds using the cultural symbol of the saint and the literary genre of saints’ legends, there is no better material than this. The human need to impose narrative order of some sort on the flickering and endless occurrences and experiences that are called life is fundamental and crosscultural. Life stories provide a structure, continuity, and direction for this kaleidoscope, and in so doing contribute to a sense of identity (Sarbin 1986, Josselson & Lieblich 1993; Good 1994; Elms 1994; Bruner 1990; 2002). My interest in life stories fits in with the ideographic research tradition, which seeks to illuminate each case under study on its own, focusing on the rich experiential world of the individual and the unique and complex ways in which the individual structures his or her subjective world. And in fact, in the first part of each of the following four chapters, I will take full advantage of this approach to highlight the energy, initiative, and creativity of my protagonists. But the narrative paradigm can also serve nomothetic purposes. It can be used to produce generalizations and identify common patterns in the individual stories, and to formulate possible processes, mechanisms, and principles of action that influence the narrators’ behavior. While only a small number of cases are presented here, I will attempt, in the concluding chapter, to offer such a general scheme, built of components that come from the material. This will be in the spirit of grounded theory, rather than imposed on the material by all-encompassing and a priori theoretical conceptualizations (Glaser & Strauss 1967). The existence of common subjects and patterns across the biographies of the saints’ agents results, first, from the very initiative that unites them (and from the scholarly interest in it). All four stories are classic stories of a journey or a quest, depicting the road followed by the initiators to the saint. Since the saint is originally a cultural symbol (even if he appears in the garb of personal meaning), rather than a private and idiosyncratic symbol, it is hardly surprising that a saint’s presence and intervention in the different life narratives displays notable lines of similarity. The archetypal role of the saint is that of a person who saves his believers from suffering, and this shapes the traditional form of the saints’ legend as a drama in two acts.



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It begins with a crisis accompanied by a sense of distress, and ends with the protagonist being saved from that distress and feeling that he has experienced a miracle and spiritual elevation. The life stories of the four entrepreneurs can be interpreted as a broader, enhanced version of this basic formula. An especially profound anguish precedes the establishment of the covenant with the saints. However, this covenant leads to an ongoing spiritual transformation, not just short-term sense of well-being. In addition to this two-stage structure, the life circumstances of the protagonists, which partially reflect the collective experience of many Moroccan Jews during the twentieth century (the climax of which was the migration to Israel), contribute to reducing the disparity between the stories. Before proceeding to the chapters that present the four stories and the reverberations they produced in their community of believers, I will briefly survey the cult of saints in Morocco and the social circumstances that led to its revival in Israel. In the book’s final chapter I will offer a comparative view of the common themes in these life stories, and the attributes of the saint as a personal symbol placed within a narrative of mythic proportions. I will examine the singular portrait of the women among the entrepreneurs, and the historical context of the four initiatives in relation to other phenomena involving the sanctification of the Israeli space.

Roots in the West: The Cult of Saints in Morocco Jews were part of the local scene in North Africa long before the Muslim incursion of 670 C.E. According to one popular tradition, the first Jewish communities in what is known today as Morocco were founded as early as the sixth century BCE by Judeans fleeing the destruction of the first Temple by the Babylonians (Laskier 1982: 329). Another common thesis holds that many of today’s Moroccan Jews are the descendants of Berber tribes who embraced some form of Judaism in the pre-Islamic era (Chouraqui, 1968). While both theses have only meager historical evidence to support them (Goldberg, 1983:61; Hirschberg, 1963), they may be viewed as myths of origin alluding to the antiquity of the Jews in the region. Under Islam, Jews were considered dhimmi, or protected minorities, a legal status assigned to the followers of other monotheistic, Scripturebased religions. As dhimmi, they were entitled to protection and religious freedom, but at the same time they were subject to institutionalized forms of discrimination and humiliation (see Deshen, 1989; Lewis, 1984). As in other parts of the Muslim orbit, the extent to which the dhimmi ordinance was enforced varied enormously over historical periods and

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

geographical areas. Lewis (1984) maintains that in the Maghreb, because of the historical repercussions of the reign of the fundamentalist Almohads (1147-1269), the situation of the Jews was generally worse than in the North African and Middle Eastern territories that were under Ottoman rule. First, the persecution that the Jews endured during that dark period left them in a state of economic and spiritual impoverishment from which they found it hard to recover. Second, since the Almohads ruthlessly eradicated the Christian presence in Morocco, the Jews remained the only religious minority in an otherwise all-Muslim society—a situation, inhospitable to pluralism and tolerance, in which they often became a likely target for Muslim wrath at times of unrest. Since the history of the Maghreb was characterized by long periods of political instability, Jewish existence as a powerless minority was particularly vulnerable. Indeed, while Morocco boasts an unusual and long-lasting continuity of political sovereignty (interrupted only by the French Protectorate of 19121956), tribal divisions and the emergence of local-centrifugal religious foci of power (most strongly visible during the “maraboutic crisis” of the 16th century) have created a reality in which wide regions of the country often remained outside the effective rule of the sultan. The living conditions of the Jewish communities in the areas under government control (bled elmakhzen) and on the periphery where it was hardly felt (bled es-siba) were markedly different. In the former, mostly urban settings, Jews who found their living as peddlers, merchants and craftsmen normally enjoyed the protection of the government. To that end they were located in a special quarter, called the mellah, near the ruler’s palace. However, the proximity to the center of political power was two-edged, as it also exposed them to excessive taxation and episodic looting by avaricious sultans and harassment by rebels and rioters when insurrection broke out. The cities were also the loci of the Oulama, Muslim religious scholarship, from which pressures were often exerted on the sultans to enforce, with Jews as the target, the dhimmi ordinance with renewed vigor (see Deshen, 1989; Hirschberg, 1974; Lewis, 1984).15 Most of the Jews who lived in the small towns and rural mellahs of bled es-siba were concentrated in the Atlas mountains and the river valleys of southern Morocco (Flammand, 1959; Goldberg, 1983, Shokeid, 1971). They suffered less from religious intolerance than their urban coreligionists, but as a minority bereft of political power in territories seized by multitudinous intertribal feuds, they were vulnerable to the whims of local chiefs and belligerent tribesmen. As itinerant craftsmen and peddlers, forced to find



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their living far from home and exposed to assault and plunder on the road, their personal security was all the more precarious. But these hazards were mitigated to a large extent by the protective web of personal ties that Jews were able to forge with local allies among the Arabs and Berbers (see Rosen, 1972; Shokeid, 1980). These patron-client relations reflected a centuriesold life-reality in which Jews lived in physical and cultural proximity to the indigenous Muslims and provided them with vital economic services (Deshen and Zenner, 1982). The relations between the Jews and the Muslims were complex and multifaceted. Physical proximity, economic interdependence, and intimate relations between the groups promoted harmony between them, but could not entirely prevent tensions and conflicts resulting from religious and ethnic differences and political inequality.16 The scholarly debate about the precise nature of the relations between Jews and Muslims in Morocco notwithstanding, there has been a consensus that the two communities shared many cultural beliefs and customs, despite their religious differences. To generalize, in the entire Muslim space the cultural distance between Jews and non-Jews was smaller than in the Christian world (Sharot 1976, 1982). Without going into the causes of this difference, it seems that in Morocco, where the Jews were part of the local landscape for many centuries, the cultural proximity between the communities was especially notable. The saints’ cults, our major interest in this book, is a prime example of this propinquity. The folk-veneration of saints was an important component of the lives and identities of many Moroccan Jews.17 In scope and form, this cultural phenomenon bore the imprint of the local Muslim cult of saints, one of the most notable hallmarks of Maghrebi Islam (Westermarck 1926; Gellner 1969; Geertz 1968; Eickelman 1976; Dermengehm 1954; Crapanzano 1973). At the same time, however, it was also shaped by the concept of the tsaddiq or righteous man in classic Jewish sources, especially in its mystic incarnation in the kabbalah literature (Stillman 1982; Idel 2000; Goldberg 1983, 2000). The fusing of these two traditions created an impressively vibrant religious system. The historical circumstances that turned saints into foci of religious authority and political power in North African Islam are outside the bounds of this discussion. I will note only that the role assigned to saints in the monotheistic faiths, as mediators who act as a bridge between flesh-andblood believers and an abstract, distant God, took on redoubled force in the hierarchical social context of Morocco, in which mediators were a crucial element in all important acts of reciprocity. The Jews’ powerlessness and their considerable dependence on local patrons for their livelihoods and

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

security reinforced the religious concept of salvation via patron saints. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most important task they assigned to their saints was to save them from capricious harassment by Muslims (BenAmi 1984; Goldberg 2000). Jewish saints have usually been described as charismatic rabbis who combined sublime qualities, exemplary living, and proficiency in esoteric lore. This combination granted them special spiritual power, akin to the Muslim baraka (Westermarck 1926 I: 35-261; Rabinow 1975: 17-30; Crapanzano 1973). Such power did not dissipate after the saint’s death; his followers could benefit from it thereafter as well. Indeed, many Jewish saints attained their exalted positions only after their deaths. The miracles they were credited with were generally linked to their graves, which could be found throughout Morocco, particularly in the country’s south. Saints’ tombs were loci of pilgrimage and shrines of healing in Moroccan Islam as well, but among the Muslims many living saints were active and venerated as well. The saint’s baraka or divine gift was believed to derive from his illustrious descent, generally from the family of Mohammad the Prophet (Ben-Ami 1984; Westermarck 1926 I: 23). Many families in Muslim Morocco claimed to be descended from the Prophet’s family (shurfa), and the status of baraka was transmitted from father to son. The importance that Moroccan Jews attached to “the merits of the forefathers” (zekhut avot) as an abundant source of wondrous powers and miraculous feats demonstrates that the Jews were not indifferent to the widespread Muslim idea of lineage charisma. In fact, as will be shown below, dynasties of saints found their way into the Moroccan Jewish pantheon, and some members of these holy families were recognized as saints during their lifetimes. But the prevalent Muslim principle of heritable charisma did not put down such deep roots among the Jews. The Sufi groups and orders, which from the sixteenth century onwards organized themselves into centers (called, in the singular, zawiyya) around well-known saints and their heirs (Ben-Ami 1984: 189; Crapanzano 1973; Eickelman 1976), did not percolate into the tissue of the Jewish cult of saints. The lack of institutionalization in the Jewish veneration of saints should be no surprise given the potential that the orders had for consolidating political power—power that was put to use more than once in North African history. As dhimmi, the Jews lacked political power by definition. Therefore, they were neither permitted nor did they have any motivation to establish such centers of living saints, and largely restricted their cult to dead ones. The supernatural force of these saints, which did not translate directly into worldly power, is the classic



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weapon of the weak (Goldberg 1992: 237-238). It should be noted that the relative scarcity of saints’ dynasties, and the weakness of institutionalization and organizational infrastructure that characterized the Jewish cult of saints in Morocco up until the twentieth century, contrasted strikingly with the Hasidic model of the tsaddiq that prevailed in Europe from the end of the 18th century onward. Hasidic saints headed courts with wide-ranging organizational and educational foundations, and they established dynasties that ensured intergenerational continuity (Etkes 2000; Asaf 1997; Hundert 1991; Scholem 1965). The different development of the concept of holiness among Jews of the Maghreb and those of eastern Europe may derive from the sharper boundaries that separated Jews and non-Jews in the latter area as compared with the former. The Hasidic tsaddiq could in many cases become a powerful leader precisely because his drawing power was restricted to the Jewish community. In Morocco, in contrast, the Muslim and Jewish cults of saints were quite similar, so there was potential for Jewish saints to attract Muslim believers, if sanctity was attributed to the saint during his lifetime.18 Maghrebi Jewry was exposed to the Hasidic model of the tsaddiq only after World War II, when the Ḥabad (Lubavitch) Hasidic movement established a network of schools in Morocco (Goldberg 1992: 243; Levy 1995: 201-202). However, as I will relate, most of the institutional and organizational activity that characterized the cult of saints in the first half of the 20th century was the product of the country’s modernization, following the establishment of the French Protectorate (Ben-Ami 1984: 146; Goldberg 1983: 67; Schroeter & Chetrit 1991: 110). Unmistakable Hasidic influence on the Maghrebi cult of saints can be discerned in its revival in Israel. Revered figures such as Rabbi Yisrael Abu-Ḥatsera, known as Baba Sali, have been given the Hasidic title admor,19 and their charisma has been institutionalized by the establishment of religious and educational institutions reminiscent of a Hasidic court. But the increasing institutionalization of saints’ cults in Israel is mostly the result of the availability of political and material resources that did not exist in Morocco. The strong mystical orientation of Moroccan Jewish communities helped reinforce the saints’ cults and was fostered by it. In this it was like the Muslim cult of saints, in which mystical-Sufi traditions that spread through the Maghreb in the eleventh century played an important role. In contrast with most other Jewish communities, in which the halachic literature’s supremacy over kabbalah traditions was never in doubt, in North Africa, particularly in southern Morocco, the two traditions coexisted on a more or less equal

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

footing. The central place accorded to mystical traditions received spatial expression in the importance attached to cemeteries (where rabbis revered as saints were interred) alongside synagogues, and the equal importance attached to the mystical Zohar (Book of Splendor) and the Talmud. Indeed, it is difficult to find any parallel among other Jewish communities to the scope of ceremonial reading and magical uses of the Zohar as they were practiced in Morocco (Stahl 1979; Goldberg 1983: 66-67). The Zohar’s author according to tradition, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai (also known by the acronym of the initials of his name, RaShBY), a Talmudic figure from the Tannaitic period of the second century CE, became an intermediary between the saints’ cults and the mystical tradition. As a result of the Zohar’s sacred status in the kabbalah literature, Rabbi Shimon was viewed as the first and foremost Jewish mystic, and in Moroccan Jewry’s pantheon of saints he took on a special status as a revered exemplar of piety, esoteric knowledge, and performer of miracles. The geographic distribution of saints’ tombs reflected the traditional distribution of Jewish communities in Morocco. But massive emigration from rural areas in the country’s interior to urban centers after the establishment of the French Protectorate changed the map of Jewish settlement, and left many tombs in places where the Jewish population became sparse or even disappeared (Goldberg 1983: 67; Levy 1994; Schroeter 2000). Issachar Ben-Ami located no fewer than 652 Jewish saints’ tombs throughout Morocco (Ben-Ami 1984), but there can be no doubt that this is far from the real number. It would seem that every Jewish community in Morocco had at least one patron saint of its own. Most grave markers of saints were in local cemeteries and were distinguishable from other graves by only a small number of particulars, such as a simple roof over the grave, a larger headstone, or a detailed inscription. Graves outside cemeteries were sometimes marked by a prominent natural feature, such as a cave or a large tree, or by a small structure reminiscent of those built over the graves of Muslim saints, but smaller and less impressive. Most of the saints were of a manifestly local nature, whose reputation did not extend beyond their community. Some, however, won wider recognition. The wide dispersion of Jewish communities throughout the country, and insecurity of travel between them, made it very difficult, before the French Protectorate, for a saint’s cult to extend across the country. In recent generations, however, the tombs of a few saints have achieved a popularity cutting across local and even regional boundaries. Among these were the tombs of Rabbi David u-Moshe in the western High Atlas Mountains, next to



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the Mellaḥ of Tamzert, Rabbi Amram ben-Diwan near Wazzan, Mulai Irhi and Rabbi Daniel Ha-Shomer Ashkenazi in the high Atlas near Arba Tigana, south of Marrakech, and Rabbi David Dra ha-Levy near Demnat. Some of the saints were well-known figures, anchored in clear spatial and temporal coordinates. Others, however, lacked any well-defined historical identity. The historical saints were quite heterogeneous in their background and status. Among them were humble local sages from recent generations who held religious positions (for example, as ritual slaughterers or Torah teachers) in small communities whose members kept their memories alive. This group also included renowned scholars and kabbalists who headed or belonged to dynasties of saints. The most famous saintly families were AbuḤatsera, Pinto, and Ben-Baruch (Ben-Ami 1984: 33-38). Given the fact that in most cases the individual’s saintly status was discovered only after his death as a result of a series of miracles associated with his grave, it is not surprising that many of the most popular saints lacked a distinct historical identity. Many of the latter saints were portrayed stereotypically as rabbinical emissaries—rabbis from the Land of Israel who were sent to North Africa to collect donations to support the Holy Land’s Jewish inhabitants and yeshiva students. They made their way from one community to another, and frequently died on the road in remote and distant locations before completing their missions. Often, their places of burial were revealed in a dream in which the saint appeared to a local inhabitant—Jew or non-Jew— and directed him or her to the unknown site (Ben-Ami 1984: 25-27, 39-45, 7984). The status of the newly-discovered grave was generally established by a rush of miracles that occurred when local inhabitants first visited the site. These miracles, generally the resolution of various life-problems, ranging from serious illness to injury suffered at the hands of a Muslim assailant, were of course attributed to the saint’s intercession. The typical life story of the non-historical saint reflects the tension between mother country and exile, a constant feature of Jewish life in the diaspora. Like the forefathers of their Jewish adherents, these saints left the Holy Land and went into exile. In some cases, this leave-taking was even described as compulsory, the result of a decree (Ben-Ami 1984: 41). Just as their believers’ longing for Zion was never realized, so the saints died and were buried in exile. The dialectic aspect of this tension is expressed in a centrifugal turn of historical irony. The failure of the aspiration to return to the Land of Israel, reflected in the saint’s death in a remote place of exile, leads to the establishment of an alternative center, a hallowed site outside the Holy Land. This process would seem to mirror the position of Jewish communities

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

that put down roots in a foreign land, at the same time as it reinforced this acclimatization. In the wake of the mass migration to Israel, however, the Israeli origin of the rabbinical emissary-saints interred in Morocco helped the impresarios establish shrines for their saints in their homes—since it was only natural (that is, culturally logical) that the saints would follow their former devotees and return to the place from which they had come. The central event in the saints’ cults was the pilgrimage to their tombs on the anniversary of their death, and the festival held on that occasion. Jews referred to this practice by its Arabic name, ziyyara (visit), or used the word hillula, an Aramaic term for a wedding party. The puzzling connection between death and a wedding comes from the mystical belief that a saint’s soul ascends to heaven after his death in order to become one with the feminine divine presence, the Shekhina.20 This mystical meaning is consistent with the displays of gaiety and joy that were part of the hillula celebration. The anniversary of the saint’s death was considered an especially auspicious time for believers to prostrate themselves on his grave, because on this day his presence at the site could be felt with great force, and he was amenable to fulfilling their requests. When the saint’s date of death was unknown, the hillula was generally celebrated on Lag B’Omer, the day of the “great hillula” (l-hillula al-kebira) held in honor of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai. During the period of the Protectorate, the better-known of these saints’ festivals turned into huge events that drew thousands of believers from various regions in Morocco. They spent several days at the burial site, living in tents or in special guest rooms, and devoted their time to feasting, singing, dancing, praying, and lighting candles. All these activities, spiritual and physical, were in honor of the tsaddiq. The Jewish hillulot (pl.) were similar in many ways to the celebrations Muslims held at the tombs of their saints, although the displays of riotous ecstasy that were typical of the Muslim celebration, or musem, which included shooting in the air and racing horses, were absent from the hillula. As high points of community life, which expressed brotherhood and solidarity, the hillula bore the spirit of communitas, or community of equals. This is the special ambiance of equality and barrier-shattering cooperation that, according to Victor Turner, characterizes pilgrimages (Turner 1969, 1974).21 A prominent example of this spirit of brotherhood can be found in those saints’ celebrations in which the organizers made a point of providing an identical meal to all worshipers from a common kitchen, without regard to the food supplies contributed by each adherent, and prevented people from preparing their own meals. But in many places the hillula also reflected existing social polarization



Roots in the West: The Cult of Saints in Morocco

25

and even reinforced it, by enabling the rich to flaunt their wealth through conspicuous consumption and comportment. This could be seen, for example, when candles and cups of oil for lighting in honor of the saint were auctioned off, with the proceeds going to cover the costs of the hillula (Ben-Ami 1984: 94-96; Bilu 1988). In addition to collective pilgrimages, visits to saints’ sanctuaries were also made on an individual basis in times of plight or to fulfill a vow, once a supplication had been granted. These visits were based on the belief that, as an intermediary between his believers and God, the saint was able to offer succor for a wide range of problems. Those in need beseeched him and vowed to bring a thanksgiving feast to his tomb if he interceded in their favor. But the saint’s power was felt well beyond the sacred marker of his grave. He was a constant presence in his believers’ lives; they dreamed about him and cried out his name when in dire straits. When the resolution of a difficulty or the end of an illness was credited to him, his adherents lit candles at home in his honor one or more days a week, and sometimes each night as well. The entire family would gather, together with friends and neighbors, for a thanksgiving meal in his honor. A common impetus for holding such a feast was the birth of a baby boy, who was often named after the saint. In short, the saint played a central role in the social lives of Moroccan Jews, and people often maintained a symbiotic relationship with him throughout their life cycle. Many aspects of the cult of saints are reminiscent of women’s religions.22 The large number of saints, and the lack of an institutionalized hierarchy among them, made it possible to revere several holy figures simultaneously. This gave the cult polytheistic-like quality, a characteristic of women’s religions. Many daily ritual activities, such as lighting candles and holding feasts, were conducted at home, like the home rituals conducted in women’s religions, which do not sharply distinguish between the sacred and the profane. The veneration of saints, like women’s religions, was directed at mundane affairs, largely relieving current distress and suffering. The typical problems placed before saints were matters of health, fertility, and childrearing—traditional areas of female responsibility. The importance of cooking in the feasts conducted at home in honor of the saint and at his hillula are consistent with the central role that food plays in women’s religious frameworks. There, religion undergoes a process of domestication, and the sacred mingles with daily routine (Bynum 1987; Sered 1992: 293). With their special ontological status as intermediaries between the believer and God, Moroccan Jewry’s saints are reminiscent of sacred figures

26

The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

in female religions. Their human origin is not denied, despite the great reverence in which they are held. In consequence, they are perceived as being sensitive and attentive to the suffering of their followers. They are figures with whom the believer can have an emotional relationship and conduct personal dialogue. They can be partners in negotiation and in striking bargains; they can even be out-maneuvered.23 The relative lack of structure characteristic of the saints’ cults, especially of the hillula celebrations, which lack a formal ritual framework and are governed by an atmosphere of joy and manifestations of personal devotion, are reminiscent of the rites of women’s religions. Finally, the fact that the saints’ cults are not grounded in a sacred text but rather in a passionate personal, often ecstatic, relationship, distances it from arenas of public ceremonial practice, such as the synagogue, mosque, or church, which are controlled by men, and allows women to express their faith and devotion on a par with men. Given these characteristics, it is hardly surprising that women were prominent in the Moroccan Jewish saints’ cults and took an active part in them. The conspicuous presence of women at hillula festivities, in the company of men, especially the manifestations of morally improper behavior (such as heavy drinking and sexual advances) by the participants in the crowded, rowdy, joyous atmosphere at the climax of the hillula, often incensed Moroccan community rabbis. They did their best to restrain these phenomena, but seldom enjoyed much success. Nevertheless, it should be noted that, for the believers, the saints’ cults were an inseparable part of their Jewish identities. Furthermore, the male hegemony in Judaism’s heaven (like that of the other monotheistic religions) was not challenged. Despite the notable presence of women in the public arena of the hillula, their representation in the pantheon of saints was negligible. Of 652 tsaddiqim, only 25—less than 4 percent—were female (Ben-Ami, 1984: 574615). With the notable exception of Sol Hatshu’el (Lala Soulika) of Tangiers, the famed martyr buried in Fez in 1834 (Ben-Ami, 1984: 577-581), all of them enjoyed but a modest, circumscribed reputation, of secondary importance. In contrast with the central position of saints in the Catholic church, and the official recognition they received through a lengthy process of institutionalization and canonization, the cult of saints in Judaism and Islam was of a popular nature, lacking central oversight. Reactions to it were ambivalent. Sometimes it was vigorously condemned by the orthodox establishment of both religions. Besides the above-mentioned censure by rabbis as a result of the frivolous and wanton behavior of pilgrims at hillula celebrations, there were both Muslim and Jewish sages who sharply



Roots in the West: The Cult of Saints in Morocco

27

criticized the veneration of saints and prostration on their graves. In their judgment, these practices were tantamount to denying God’s unity (Eickelman 1976; Stillman 1982). It may well be that it was precisely the distance between the popular cult and the religious establishment in both faiths that allowed Jewish and Muslim worshipers to adopt common traditions of pilgrimage, and to seek the aid, with relative ease, of saints from the other religion, without feeling that this detracted in any way from their religious identities. These traditions of saints common to both communities were a concrete expression of the mutual links between the Jewish and Muslim saints’ cults in the Maghreb (Voinot 1948; Ben-Ami 1984, 166-184). To sum up, the saints in Morocco were both “very Jewish” (because they were buried in Jewish cemeteries, were known for their scholarship and religious devotion, and defended Jews with their miracles) and “very Muslim,” given the similarities between the Jewish cults and those conducted in Moroccan Islam (Goldberg 1983, 68). It is important to emphasize that the image of Jewish Maghrebi hagiolatry as a traditional system, preserved intact as a fossilized remnant of the past, is far from appropriate. It was a dynamic system, very sensitive to changing historical circumstances. Saints and their graves appeared, vanished, and reappeared. The cult’s golden age was in fact the years just before and after World War II, when French rule established itself. This was a period characterized by rapid modernization. Before the Protectorate, given the considerable economic and geopolitical constraints, the saints’ cults were local affairs. The great poverty of the country’s Jewish communities and the lack of security on rural roads in the south, where the greatest concentration of saints’ graves was, made it very difficult for these sites to become centers of pilgrimage that drew people from beyond the immediate vicinity. Only when the French succeeded in imposing their authority on these far-flung mountainous regions in the 1930s were conditions created in which new saints’ miracles could be publicized and circulated, and in which pilgrims could travel relatively quickly and securely to their graves. The economic opportunities resulting from colonial rule produced a new class of prosperous Jews who provided for the upkeep of graves and established associations for this purpose (Ben-Ami 1972, 1980, 1984: 164-165). Modernization not only helped create the physical infrastructure of the spread of the saints’ cults, but also reinforced the psychological matrix that created the need to seek the help of saints. The rapid changes in ways of life produced by urbanization, industrialization, internal migration, and secularization rent the traditional fabric of stable communities and families,

28

The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

leaving many Jews without proper social support as they faced the complexity of modern life and its inherent insecurity (Abitbol 1981; Tsur 2002; Tsur and Hillel 1995; Chouraqui 1975). In this condition of a society in transition, in which most Moroccan Jews exposed to the process of modernization and secularization had still not detached themselves from their traditional culture’s symbols and values, holy graves were islands of stability. They offered succor and comfort in times of crisis. The patently individual nature of the saints’ cults, which allowed every participant to approach the saint as an individual and plead their personal case, even thought they were surrounded by thousands of worshippers, seemed especially appropriate for a modern way of life that stressed personal achievement. In these circumstances, the saints became suitable recipients of pleas relating to various problems, precisely during the potent social changes brought on by modernization. In addition to their role as healers for all troubles and tribulations, the saints’ graves served other important social purposes. The large hillula celebrations brought to these holy sites many Jews who had lived close by in the past, but now lived far away, generally in cities. Even if the old local communities were resuscitated only for a brief moment, these gatherings reinforced group solidarity among the Jews, as well as reinforcing their claim to physical ownership of the sacred piece of land, in places where their presence had grown sparse or even non-existent. This territorial claim (on the part of a group that had lacked property rights) made it difficult for Muslims to oppose them, because it was consistent with their own religious beliefs. This mid-century golden age did not last long. Of the nearly quarter million Jews who lived in the country in 1947—the largest Jewish diaspora community in the Islamic world—less than 5,000 remained half a century later. The great majority of those who left made their way to Israel.

From West to East: Moroccan Jewry in Israel The great Jewish migration from Morocco to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s was motivated by a number of pull and push factors. They were all connected to historical and geopolitical processes that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and an independent Morocco in 1956. The Jewish migration to Israel from the Maghreb was part of a larger Jewish exodus from North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe after the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state. Zionist institutions inside and outside Israel, which saw the ingathering of the Jewish people in exile as the raison d’être of the Jewish state’s existence, made every effort to make this vision a reality. This was especially true regarding the diaspora in the



From West to East: Moroccan Jewry in Israel

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Arab world, the communities of which were perceived as being at risk. In the traditional communities of Morocco, in which the longing for Zion was inseparable from the fabric of Jewish life, the establishment of Israel was painted in intense religious-mystical colors that reinforced the desire to settle in the new country. Push factors, which were no less important than the attraction to Zion, grew out of the fissures that opened up in Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco in the wake of the armed conflict in the Middle East and the establishment of Israel, and of the Moroccan independence struggle of the early 1950s (Abitbol 1980; Stillman 1991; Lasker 1994; Tsur 2002). Many Jews were anxious about what would befall them when the French left, because the independence struggle was founded on a nationalist ideology that included potent strains of Arabism and Islam (Entelis 1989). The achievement of Moroccan sovereignty ended the Protectorate, which had produced major changes in the way Jews lived. The Protectorate had exposed many of them, especially those living in the large urban centers, to French colonialism and the educational and economic opportunities it offered. The Alliance Israelite Universelle school system, which by the mid-20th century had extended its reach into Morocco’s mountainous and inland regions, inculcated many members of the younger generation with French language and culture (Laskier 1983; Tsur & Hillel 2005). The French regime’s influence was also evident among the Muslims. But Jews, liberated from the inferior dhimmi status assigned to them by Islam, were much more sympathetic to colonial rule. This pro-French stance in turn exacerbated the tension between them and the Muslims as Muslim protest and rebellion against foreign rule escalated (De Nesry 1958; Tsur 2002). More than three-quarters of Morocco’s Jews chose to emigrate to Israel, a much higher percentage than that of Tunisia’s and Algeria’s Jews. The latter, who held French citizenship, largely preferred to emigrate to France or Canada. These differences reflected France’s briefer rule over Morocco, where it did not have the time to become as deeply rooted as in these other French possessions. Among Morocco’s Jews, those who chose to move to Israel came largely from more traditional backgrounds and had been less exposed to French influence than those who chose non-Zionist options. Until the mass immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union to Israel in the 1980s and 1990s, the Moroccan immigrants and their descendants were the country’s largest single ethnic group according to country of origin.24 But their absorption into Israel was fraught with difficulties and they became, more than any other Mizraḥi group, the prototype of the “ethnic problem.”25

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

The objective problems of the absorption of Mizraḥi Jewry in the difficult and resource-poor years after the War of Independence were exacerbated by the expectations and images of the collectivist Zionist ethos of Israel’s founding generation, which framed how the immigrants were perceived by the absorbing society. On the one hand, they were, after the extermination of most of Europe’s Jews in the Holocaust, the principal available pool of manpower for the resurrection of the Jewish nation in its homeland. On the other hand, most came from traditional societies, saturated with Arabic culture. Both these characteristics rankled the Ashkenazi establishment, both because of the historical animosity between Zionism and Arab nationalism, and because Zionism had shaped itself as a modern national liberation movement of the nineteenth-century European type. Negative images of Oriental Jews, especially those of North Africa, appeared in the Israeli press and public discourse in the 1950s, creating an unflattering (to say the least) collective portrait that questioned the ability of some members of these communities to become part of the Zionist revolution.26 But the profound disappointment with the poor human and cultural capital provided by the new immigrants simply reinforced the moral imperative inherent in the utopian Zionist world-view. The Zionists believed it their mission to redeem the newcomers from the yoke of their degenerate heritage. The ingathering of the exiles was only the first step towards unifying all Jews. Through a rational, premeditated, and systematic process, the immigrants were meant to shed the traditions, values, and world-view they had brought with them from their countries of origin, and to undergo reeducation according to the socialist-Zionist model of the “new Jew.” This ruling melting-pot ideology of the country’s early years also reverberated in the discourse of Israeli social science of the time. It focused on identifying social processes that accelerated or delayed the immigrants’ absorption and their integration into Israeli society, through the use of terms such as “assimilation,” “changing social roles,” “desocialization,” and “resocialization” (Eisenstadt 1954; Bar-Yosef 1959; Ben-David 1962). Although sociologists at that time tended to minimize the importance of ethnic and cultural factors in shaping distinct systems of meaning and identity, they explained socio-economic disparities between the Ashkenazi and Mizraḥi communities by claims of cultural inferiority and a lack of a nurturing environment. The early emphasis was placed on a lack of cultural preparedness and a need for resocialization. This reflected an establishment approach, which discounted the importance of inequality in the power relations between



From West to East: Moroccan Jewry in Israel

31

absorbers and absorbees in the creation of the ethnic gap. But as the years went by, the Ashkenazi-Mizraḥi discrepancies in education, employment, and income were not reduced in any significant way (Smooha 1978; Peres 1976; Bernstein & Antonovsky 1981; Ben-Refael & Sharot 1991). Scholars with a critical approach then began pointing to institutional discrimination as the source of the problem. Their central claim was that the accelerated processes of development and financial well-being that the members of the dominant Ashkenazi group had enjoyed derived largely from shunting Mizraḥi immigrants who lacked resources to the margins of Israeli society, both in terms of employment and geography (Swirski 1981; Bernstein 1980, 1981). Sending them to the country’s undeveloped frontier regions simply perpetuated their political and economic dependence on the government. The immigrants became laborers and “reluctant pioneers” (Weingrod 1966). According to this critical approach, the boundaries between Mizraḥi ethnicorigin communities increasingly dissolved in this process of “internal colonialism,” and they fused into a single ethnic class. Other, more pluralistic, approaches tried to integrate insights offered by the earlier approach, which stressed the immigrants’ lack of preparedness and cultural cultivation, and the critical factors of power relationships and class conflict. They assumed that the ethnic gap was a complex phenomenon growing out of the combined operation of several factors (Smooha 1978, 1984). The traditional background of many immigrants, which did not train them properly for the social reality of Israel, was presented as an obstacle to their absorption, as were the objective economic difficulties of the mass immigration. But no less a factor in the ethic problem was the government’s effort to harness immigrants of “impoverished assets” to nation-building tasks, and institutional discrimination by the authorities. Why did absorption difficulties and the ethnic gap plagued Moroccan Jewry more than other Mizraḥi groups? Early explanations argued that the reason was the profound social changes that shook Morocco’s Jewish communities during the French Protectorate, tearing the traditional fabric of their lives and their sense of identity (Bar-Yosef 1959; Ben-David 1962). The widening gap between traditional Jews and newly well-off and educated Jews who were integrated into French culture was translated in the 1950s and 1960s into distinct immigration tracks. The former preferred to move to France, Belgium, and Canada rather than Israel. This further weakened the immigrant community, many of whose members were said to suffer from “impoverished assets,” lacking as they did formal education and professional skills, as well as being members of large families (Bensimon-

32

The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

Donath 1971; Inbar & Adler 1977). However, as part of a traditional community, which had already been influenced by modernizing trends in the years before their immigration, they possessed unrealistic expectation of rapid social mobility. The failure of these expectations to materialize added to their resentment and difficulties. Later, this claim of a “community in transition” was used to point out the absorbing society’s role in Moroccan Jewry’s absorption difficulties. The community’s ambiguous position between traditionalism and modernism made it difficult to classify the Moroccan immigrants as a traditional-exotic “indigenous” group, as the Yemenites were. But the high expectations of many of its members, and their unwillingness to accept harsh absorption conditions (as opposed to the passive-accepting image attributed to Kurdish Jews, for example) made them a convenient target for projecting some of the anxieties, frustrations and tensions felt by the veteran citizens of the poor, problem-ridden country, which had doubled its population in its first five years (Tsur 2000). In this hostile atmosphere, the word “Moroccan” became an insult laden with negative connotations. This negative image, pervasive in the media and political discourse, found support in the blunt words of then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion: Moroccan Jews have no education. Their customs were borrowed from the Arabs. They love their wives but beat them up.... Perhaps the third generation will come out as something different, but I cannot see it coming yet. The Moroccan Jew absorbed many things from the Moroccan Arabs; (and) I do not want Moroccan culture to find a place here (quoted in Smooha, 1978: 300).

The research pendulum, which in the 1950s and 1960s pointed to the paucity of the immigrants’ resources or their unrealistic expectations, swung during the 1970s and 1980s in the direction of the severe constraints of absorption faced during the mass immigration period. It identified these as the central factors in the ongoing difficulties of Moroccan Jews in Israel. Perhaps the most decisive of these was the historical concurrence of the government’s policy of population dispersal during the country’s early years and the huge waves of immigration from Morocco. As a result of this policy, which was founded on both socio-economic and defense considerations, many immigrants from the Mahgreb found themselves in semi-collective farming villages (moshavim) and development towns (ayarot pitu’ah) in



From West to East: Moroccan Jewry in Israel

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the country’s outlying and sparsely-populated regions. There they were compelled to fulfill pioneering roles that the veteran population refused to accept. In the farming villages, Moroccans had to making their living from agriculture, even though the great majority of them had not been farmers before. In the development towns, built hastily without proper economic and educational infrastructure, they served as cheap labor in low-technology factories, largely in the textiles and food processing sectors. The troubles produced by these difficult jobs, great dependence on state resources, and a weak educational system were made even more acute by the rapid turnover of the population. Many talented young people who sought to improve their lot left the towns, leaving the weakest behind (Aronoff 1973; Kramer 1973; Inbar & Adler 1977; Cohen 1970; Matras 1973; Semionov 1981; Spilerman & Habib 1976). As we will see, some of these development towns later became central arenas for the revival of Moroccan Jewry’s cult of saints. The Moroccans vented their feelings of discrimination, frustration, and anger, produced by the problems of absorption and the entrenchment of the ethnic gap for many Mizraḥi Israelis. They were among the first to turn these feelings into social protest. They led the ethnic riots that broke out in Wadi Salib in Haifa in 1959, and were prominent among the radical activists of the Black Panthers at the end of the 1960s (Cohen 1972; Bernstein 1984). Political activists of Moroccan extraction were involved in the 1980s in the establishment of two Mizraḥi political parties: Tami, the initial success of which broke a longstanding taboo against ethnic voting in Israel; and Shas, which over the final decade of the twentieth century grew to become Israel’s third-largest party. More than any other ethnic group, the public identified the Moroccans with the political upset of 1977. In that year’s elections, Likud, led by Menachem Begin, came to power and ended the labor movement’s long hegemony. Since that election, Israelis have voted more and more along ethnic lines, with the Likud being depicted as a largely Mizraḥi party and Labor as a more Ashkenazi party (Peres & Shamir 1984; Arian & Shamir 1983; Diskin 1985). Mizraḥi support for Likud looked like a protest against the arrogant Zionist-socialist establishment, which the Mizraḥim held responsible for their absorption woes and for the institutional discrimination that entrenched the ethnic gap and the existence of what was termed “the second Israel.” Likud’s nucleus, the Herut party of Menachem Begin, had been in the opposition during the country’s formative years, and Mizraḥim therefore perceived it as a fitting political framework in which to express

34

The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

their protest against the powers of the time. Furthermore, Likud did not demand of the immigrants that they shed their cultural traditions and adopt the secular values of the “new Israelis.” Likud’s doctrine linked Judaism to nationalism, offering many Mizraḥim a form of identity that was consistent with their traditional values. Likud’s hawkish political ideology also struck home with many Mizraḥi immigrants, whether because they aspired to establish a clear boundary between themselves and the Arab nature of their countries of origin, or because of the humiliation and discrimination they had suffered there. Finally, from a class perspective, it was argued that the Mizraḥi proletariat distanced itself from the Labor Party as the latter became the champion of the middle class (Ben-Raphael & Sharot 1991: 177-179). The link between Likud and the Mizraḥim, in particular Moroccan Jews, was especially notable in the early 1980s, the time when I conducted the major part of my field work on new saints’ sites. This connection weakened during the 1990s, however, when many Mizraḥi Likud supporters began to transfer their loyalties to Shas. (That trend seemed to reverse itself, however, in the elections of January 2003, leading to the establishment of a government led by Ariel Sharon. Shas remained outside the ruling coalition for the first time since it was founded in 1984.) I have described here, in broad strokes, some of the social, political, and cultural processes that have shaped the Israeli identities of Moroccan Jews and which form the background to the revival of the saints’ cults. As I have noted, during the initial years after the establishment of the state, Mizraḥim felt heavy pressure to shed what were perceived by the country’s elite as their primitive and irrational traditions, as part of forming a modern Israeli identity. In this cultural campaign, the veneration of saints seemed to be a particularly vulnerable custom, given the fact that migration to Israel left the Moroccan saints’ graves, the heart of the cult, far off and inaccessible. Among the consequences of the decision to leave Morocco was a painful separation from these revered tsaddiqim. The Jews could bear their Torah scrolls, the sacred centerpieces of their synagogues, to Israel with them. The holy graves had to be left behind. In the short run, the fervor of having reached longed-for Zion overshadowed the pain involved in “deserting” the saints, but it was unable to expunge them from their believers’ minds and hearts. On the contrary, the need for their intercession and aid only grew during the difficult years after arriving in Israel, as the immigrants faced crises and misfortunes. But, as a result of the culture shock the Moroccans experienced, and the physical disconnection from their cult centers, the great hillula festivities waned and decentralized.



From West to East: Moroccan Jewry in Israel

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In the 1950s and 1960, they were generally celebrated in limited form, as modest family meals or in the local synagogue (Ben-Ami 1984; Deshen 1974; Stillman 1995; Weingrod 1985, 1990). The great reduction in the extent of acts of reverence for saints did not end with the complete disappearance of the cult, as melting pot ideology prophesied and demanded. Instead, the opposite happened: these repressed traditions returned to the center of the social stage. What social processes lay at the foundation of this reversal? First, socialist Zionism’s revolutionary fervor, which was the basis of many of the experiences of cultural repression felt by the immigrants, waned over the years and made way for a more pluralistic approach. The fundamental idea of democratic participation gradually changed “from an equal right to the similar (symbolized by the slogan of the melting pot) to an equal right to the different (symbolized by renewed ethnic pride and selfconsciousness and a growing mutual tolerance and respect among differing cultural traditions).” (Cohen 1972: 101). This change derived largely from huge demographic, political, socio-cultural, and religious changes that Israeli society underwent during the first decades following independence. Nevertheless, Israel remained a country with a strong European orientation, even after the establishment adopted an ideology of cultural pluralism. Most of the Mizraḥi cultural traditions that seeped into Israeli society, from food and music to ethnic costumes and folklore, did not extend beyond the fabric of popular material culture. The common term “edot ha-mizrah,” (Mizraḥi, or Oriental, ethnic communities) connoted that only the Mizraḥim had ethnic traditions and folklore, while the behaviors and traditions of the unmarked Jews of European origin constituted the “standard culture” and “normal life” (Goldberg 1987: 44).27 In any case, in comparison with the ethnocentric ethos that prevailed during the country’s first decade, the cultural climate in Israel indeed changed in the direction of more openness and diversity. In parallel with these changes, Mizraḥim began evincing with greater pride and determination the cultural traditions that had declined after immigration. The empowerment of ethnic consciousness occurred during a period in which, paradoxically, some of the cultural distinctions that had separated Mizraḥim and Ashkenazim began to blur, as a result of the growing integration of Mizraḥim into the dominant culture. The waves of secularization that swept up many young Mizraḥim after their immigration, the high rate of Mizraḥi-Ashkenazi marriage (which by the mid-1980s accounted for close to a quarter of all Jewish marriages in Israel), and the

36

The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

increasing erosion of traditional norms regarding family structure and size and gender roles are all measures of cultural integration (Deshen 1979; Eisenstadt 1983; Shokeid 1984a; Ben-Rephael & Sharot 1991). While the ethnic gap did not disappear, the improvement in the economic status of some Mizraḥim strengthened the process by which ethnic differences eroded, especially among young people. However, these changes did not prevent the reassertion of cultural traditions from the diaspora. This complex picture, which highlights a powerful aspiration for social integration alongside a desire to preserve a certain kind of ethnic distinction, is not unique to Israel. The experiences of immigrant-absorbing societies show that a strong desire for integration into the prevailing culture does not contradict the intensification of separate ethnic consciousness and pride. This selective development of distinct consciousness and identity in immigrant communities that ostensibly seek integration into the absorbing society (Bennet 1975; Novak 1979; Eisenstadt 1980) has been called the “new ethnicity” (Bennet 1975; Novak 1979; Eisenstadt 1980). One line of investigation of this phenomenon has been via the analytic distinction made by the anthropologist Frederick Barth between content and processes in ethnic research. Barth diverted the scholarly spotlight from the search for the fundamental cultural items that characterize ethnic groups to the mechanisms that serve to define their boundaries (Barth 1969). This new focus has made it possible to address ethnic identity in a relatively flexible way, one that seems a better fit for the dynamic Israeli context. Hillula celebrations and other ethnic festivals like the Mimouna28—small in number but impressive and exhilarating—are amenable to this type of analysis, because they are significantly prominent and exceptional to preserve and reinforce a separate sense of Moroccan Jewish identity, despite the ongoing erosion of North African traditions in Israel. Following Barth, the conceptualization of ethnic identity as situational and contextual gained strength. Instead of addressing this identity as a fixed essence involving full and ongoing membership in the group, it became possible to frame it as a category of symbolic resources, put into operation in order to achieve certain objectives. This characterization of ethnic identity as something that can be chosen from a menu of identities identifies it as a sign of individualism and personal expression, appropriate for the ethos of the modern world. The anthropologist Shlomo Deshen, who applied the idea of situational identity to the Jews of southern Tunisia in Israel (Deshen 1971, 1984), argued that ethnic identities can, most of the time, remain overshadowed by more comprehensive affiliations, such as



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national or religious ones. Their imprint on daily life remains minuscule, finding expression in accent, culinary traditions, and fine distinctions in the form of prayer. But on festive, impressive occasions like hillula celebrations, which Deshen indeed presented as key symbols of south Tunisian ethnicity, they become prominent and salient. In Deshen’s view, ethnic identity mediates and bridges the poles of general Israeli identity and distinctive Tunisian identity. In the 1970s and 1980s, the period in which the saints’ cults described in this book began to flourish, the anthropological study of ethnic identities in Israel began to view the symbolic cultural-religious arena as the central legitimate territory for the expression of ethnic sentiments. This preference derived from the sense that the ideological pressures for the integration of the immigrants and for unity effectively constrained ethnic-based political organization. At the time, anthropological discourse consequently stressed the historic, symbolic, expressive, irrational, and group-specific aspects of ethnic identity. It looked less at socioeconomic, political, instrumental, rational, and pan-Mizraḥi aspects, which were studied more by sociologists.29 But the distinction between cultural ethnicity and political ethnicity is only analytical. After all, one can find cultural aspects alongside political ones in every social process. It cannot be denied, however, that in the period under discussion the favored idioms for expressing ethnic feelings were cultural and religious. The generalization that political organization on an ethnic basis was doomed to failure in Israel was challenged in the 1980s by the achievements of two parties that appealed to the Mizraḥi voting public, Tami and Shas. Tami’s success was short-lived, and in the case of Shas it is difficult to isolate the ethnic from the religious component in its growing success. But even before Shas’s rise, from the time of the political upset of 1977, Israeli voting patterns had arranged themselves to a considerable extent along ethnic lines: 70 percent of Likud’s voters were Mizraḥi, and a similar proportion of Labor voters were Ashkenazi. Yet this pattern only serves to highlight the extent to which political ethnicity had remained secondary until the 1990s. The platforms of the two major parties focused on unifying national themes and avoided the promotion of narrow ethnic interests. Apparently, the ethos of the integration of exiles still eclipsed ethnic ideology stressing conflict and separatism. The success of Shas and of Russian ethnic parties in the elections of 1996 and 1999 marked a clear turning point in Israeli society’s hierarchy of values. Since this defining moment came to fruition for the most part after

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

the revival of the saints’ cults discussed in this book, I will not address it here. Suffice it to say that the Israeli civil religion’s unifying bonds, based on traditional Zionist ideology, have gradually loosened over the last decade. This development has led many scholars to treat Israeli society at the turn of the millennium as “post-Zionist” or composed of sectorial tribes, with the ideological glue that unites them disintegrating (Cohen 1995; Kimmerling 2001). In the case of Shas the picture is more complicated, as noted, because the distinctive ethnic aspects of this Sephardi party are packaged with the Jewish religion as a manifestly inclusive ideology (Peled 2001). The heavy constraints imposed in the past on ethnically-based political organization and expression led sociologists Ben-Raphael and Sharot to argue, in the early 1990s, that “the only significant institutional area in which ethnic pluralism can gain legitimate expression in Israel is religion” (Ben-Raphael & Sharot 1991: 84). The tendency of many Israelis of Mizraḥi extraction to express their ethnic feelings through religious idioms should not be surprising given the hierarchical relations between religiosity and ethnicity in Israel. Prior to the mass immigration from the former Soviet Union, religion was perceived as superseding and encompassing ethnicity. As a result, religion played a central role in shaping the ways in which ethnic traditions and distinctions were perceived and preserved. It would seem that turning to (or returning to) religion in order to express ethnic affiliation was reinforced by the Israeli establishment’s patronizing attitude towards Mizraḥi heritage—an attitude that did not vanish even when the flag of cultural pluralism was raised. The political reality of the Israel-Arab conflict, which made all the more problematic the partial similarity between Mizraḥi heritage and the Arab cultures of their countries of origin, at the same time amplified the attraction of Judaism’s unifying religious elements.30 The Mizraḥim’s desire for, on the one hand, full integration into Israeli society and, on the other hand, their alienation from the hardnosed versions of Israeli nationalist secularism, motivated many of them to adhere to a vision of religion-based Jewish-Israeli solidarity. The revival of popular Mizraḥi forms of religious expression, some of which I address in this book, should be considered in this context.31 How can we reconcile the preservation, and even reinforcement, of Mizraḥi religious expression with the massive wave of secularization that swept up many Mizraḥim during the initial years after their migration to Israel? First, despite their desire to be integrated into the absorbing culture, Israelis of Mizraḥi extraction remained more religious than Ashkenazi Israelis did. Even Mizraḥim who underwent a process of secularization did



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not cut themselves off from religion entirely. Many of them are classified by students of Israeli society as “traditional”; while they do not carefully observe all the precepts, they remain comfortable with their religious faith. Anthropologists Moshe Shokeid and Shlomo Deshen pointed out that, for North African Jews, religious experience was inextricably woven into the fabric of community and family, and as such was a central component of the individual’s identity. This residual religiosity was preserved even when religious observance declined in the lifestyles of many Moroccan Jews in Israel (Deshen 1979; Deshen & Shokeid 1984; Shokeid 1984a). The saints’ cults portrayed here played an important role in the reappearance of ethnic religious expression among Israelis of Mizraḥi origin in general, and among Moroccans in particular. It does not, however, exhaust the entire varied range of these forms of expression. Another set of phenomena that radiates “ethnic pride” are the ethnic holidays that reemerged in Israel: the Moroccan Mimouna (Goldberg 1978; Maman 2001), the Kurdish Saharana (Halper & Abramovitch 1984), the Persian Ruz-ebegh, and the Ethiopian Sigad (Ben-Dor 1987). Mimouna is of particular interest in the present context, since it resembles the saints’ cults in its Moroccan origin and its path to renewal in Israel. Like the major hillula celebrations, the Mimouna, conducted on the day after the Pesach holiday. was almost forgotten after immigration; and like them it returned and gradually gained new popularity until it came to be observed in many locations by large numbers of participants. It has even entered the official Israeli calendar as an “optional vacation day.” Politicians and public figures participate, as well as non-Moroccan Israelis. Mimouna’s transformation into a pan-Israeli celebration, under the slogan “tribes of Israel together” (Deut. 33:5) constitutes an impressive testimony to the central place taken by the Moroccans in Israel’s ethnic mosaic. At the same time, given the fact that expressions of ethnic identity are perceived as legitimate only in the framework of a discourse of integration, the ideology of the integration of the exiles continues to reverberate here. Another area in which Mizraḥi ethnicity finds expression in Israel is a rich variety of popular mystical and magical beliefs and practices, performed by charismatic figures of various types: sages, mystics, folk-healers, fortunetellers, divinators, mediums, and exorcists of spirits and demons. Mizraḥim are especially prominent among the consumers of these popular resources, the use of which has grown since the country’s early years, although others increasingly use them as well (Deshen 2004). Given the central place of saints’ cults in the lives of many Moroccan

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

Jews in their home country, it is hardly surprising that this tradition has been more prominent than others as a “festival of ethnic revival” among Moroccan Jews (Weingrod 1990). As a concentrated expression of religious faith that does not demand the observance of precepts over time, the participation in hillula celebrations has been particularly convenient for “traditional” Israelis of Moroccan origin, who remained believers in their hearts but were no longer fully observant. The colorful nature of the hillula celebrations, which combine fervor and spirituality alongside earthly pleasures like eating and drinking, has made them attractive to a wide and varied population. Young people who have grown distant from religion find the hillula to be a convenient way to spend time outdoors and meet members of the opposite sex. For women, as noted, the hillula is a rare opportunity to break free of the wearing burden of housework and to express their devotion to the saint publicly, without constraints, as equals among equals. Finally, the mass gatherings are a fine opportunity for getting together with family and friends (and even strangers who have become friends) who come to the hillula from all over the country. Scholars are divided about the significance of the hillula celebrations as ceremonies of ethnic renewal. Some have seen them as classic expressions of the retreat into traditions that characterized Jewish life in the communities of the Maghreb, and as such a rejection of the new Israeli identity and a refusal to accept its values. Others have, however, viewed the renewal of the hillula in Israel as an utterance of deepening attachment to the local space, evidence of the participants’ stronger sense of belonging to Israeli society. I will defer a discussion of the extent to which the hillula is “Israeli” to the final chapter, in which I will offer an explanation that will combine both claims rather than presenting them as polar opposites. The socio-political and cultural-religious changes that Israeli society has undergone since the 1970s are the soil from which the revived saints’ cults have grown, alongside other expressions of Mizraḥi ethnicity. Without entering into a detailed discussion of these changes, I will again note that these are partially linked to the creation of a more congenial cultural climate for phenomena of spiritual uplift, mysticism, and esotericism in Israel. The ethos and values of collectivist secular Zionism, which in the young Israel unified the ranks and granted meaning to the lives of many citizens, began to crack and lose their vitality at least as early as the mid-1970s (Liebman & Don-Yeḥiya 1983). While the waning of the Zionist civil religion was gradual and had many causes, the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 marked more than any other event the fault line between the old and new Israel. Out of the



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ruins of the old Zionist certainties, which were shattered by the bloody war and the self-examination that followed it, sprouted alternative ideologies that had previously been on society’s sidelines. Particularly notable among the cultural phenomena that appeared or gathered strength during this period was the return to religion and, alongside it, to a lesser extent, the appearance of other forms of spiritual renewal, such as new religious movements and Far Eastern cults. Additional channels of the search for personal salvation included increasing interest in New Age spirituality, techniques of personal empowerment and enrichment from the field of established and marginal psychology, alternative medicine, esoteric lore, and magic (Beit-Hallahmi 1992). To make a generalization, the common denominator of this wide range of phenomena, many of which established a foothold in the largely Ashkenazi secular center of Israeli society, and of the Moroccan cult of saints, was the fundamental human search for meaning, intensified and magnified by crisis and sharp social changes. This happened when the old ideologies were no longer accepted as good maps of social reality. The cult of saints grew within crisis-ridden matrix as a system of cultural significance of a manifestly popular-religious character, adopted largely by “traditional” Mizraḥi Jews, North Africans in particular, as a way of coping with personal and collective problems of life in Israel.

Native Saints and Immigrant Saints: The “Sacred Geography” of Moroccan Jews in Israel Although saints’ cults in Israel are too wide-ranging and varied to be the sole property of a single ethnic group, the imprint of Moroccan Jews is clearer than any other in the revival of hillula celebrations and ritual expressions of veneration for saints. This is not surprising given the central place held by saints in the lives of many Moroccan Jews before their move to Israel. Before offering detailed portraits of four saints’ agents and the sites that they placed on the map of holy sites, I will describe that map in general. I trace here six paths along which Moroccan Jews in Israel have expressed their veneration for saints. The first path includes the adoption of well-known local holy graves, whose status is based on long traditions of pilgrimages. Prominent among these sites that have dotted the country since ancient times are tombs identified with charismatic historical and meta-historical figures from the Bible and Talmud, venerated halachic authorities and mystery-swathed kabbalists from the Middle Ages and early modern period, and Hasidic

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rabbis of recent centuries (Ilan 2007; Vilnay 1963; Reiner 1988). Among the central sites on this sacred map within the Green Line (Israel’s pre-1967 borders) are the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai on the slopes of Mt. Meron, the tomb of Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes near the hot springs of Tiberias, the tomb of Yonatan Ben-Uziel at Amuqa near Safed, and the cave of Elijah the Prophet on the outskirts of Haifa.32 The hillula celebrations of Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Meir are the most important pilgrimages among the venerable saints’ cults in Israel. The mythical and mystical halo that surrounds Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai as the author of the Zohar has made his hillula a colorful festivity that attracts huge crowds from all over Israel. It is celebrated on Lag B’Omer, the 33rd day of the count of 49 days between the Pesach and Shavu’ot holidays. In rabbinic legend, this is the day that a plague that killed the students of Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Shimon’s teacher, came to an end. As a result, the mourning practices associated with the counting period are suspended on Lag B’Omer. The tradition identifying Rabbi Shimon’s grave at Meron goes back at least to the Middle Ages and received a significant boost in the sixteenth century, when nearby Safed became a center of mystical thought and activity under the leadership of Spanish-born mystics, led by Rabbi Yitzḥak Luria (called “the Ari”) and his disciples. The mythical crowns that Rabbi Luria and his students attached to the figure of Rabbi Shimon as the greatest of the kabalists lent an additional mystic component to the popular celebration that local Arabic-speaking Palestinian Jews (Musta’arbin) had long conducted (Benyiahu 1962; Braslavi 1957; Ya’ari 1962; Reiner 1988). Rabbi Meir, another of Rabbi Akiva’s students and a charismatic rabbi of the Tannaitic period, the second century CE, became in popular tradition an important intermediary between believers and God as a result of the healing powers attributed to him.33 The tradition identifying his grave at the edge of Tiberias is an ancient one, but the date of his hillula on Pesach Sheni, “Second Passover” (14 Iyyar, a month after Passover) was set only in the second half of the 19th century. Tiberias’ elders chose this date, close to Lag B’Omer (18 Iyyar), so as to divert to their town some of the pilgrims who headed for Mt. Meron at that season (Friedhaber 2001). The presence of Moroccan immigrants at the hillula festivities of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and Rabbi Meir was notable already in the 1960s, and increased in the decades that followed (Ben-Ami 1984; Shokeid 1999, Bilu 1988). These saints’ special drawing power among the immigrants derived from the central place they had held in the pantheon of saints in Morocco.



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Now it was possible to demonstrate the huge veneration in which they were held by visiting their tombs, which were nearby and accessible. Tens of thousands of Mizraḥi and Ashkenazi celebrants, representing all ethnic communities, attend these events, but Moroccans are especially prominent and lend the hillula a manifestly Maghrebi character. The forms of Moroccan celebration, like those of many other Mizraḥim, are notably in contrast with those of Ashkenazi Hasidim, even though both groups venerate the divine mystics. Moroccans prefer to come in large family groups, and many make arrangements to spend several days in the tent city that springs up in the woods around the site at Mt. Meron. Here, in the outdoors, they spend their time together, eat and drink, sing and laud the saint, meet old acquaintances, and shop at the stands that spring up, like a colorful fair, on the path to the tomb. From there they ascend to visit the graves of Rabbi Shimon and his son Rabbi Elazar, to ask their intercession and to offer fulsome thanks for wishes fulfilled. As an expression of their gratitude they bring trays piled high with sweets for other worshippers. The Ashkenazi Hasidim at Meron stand out with their uniform dress and their attendance of the hillula’s central ceremonies, but they spend less time at the site, and generally do not sleep there. They hurry past the places of fun and leisure, which they abhor as secularly hedonistic, especially because men and women mingle there. Squeezing into the central hall in which the pair of tombs are situated, and into the adjacent synagogue, into the balconies and onto the roofs of the site and its inner court, they dance and sing ecstatically in honor of the tsaddiq. Fathers bearing their threeyear-old sons on their shoulders dance, surrounded by circles of Hasidim and yeshiva students, in observance of the halaka, the first haircut (Bilu 2003). Women pour out their hearts in the women’s section of the hall and watch the men dancing and the haircutting ceremonies from the places set aside for them. The prominence and energy of the Ashkenazi Hasidim at the Rabbi Shimon hillula led Kenneth Brown, an English anthropologist who visited Mt. Meron at the beginning of the 1980s, to view the activity there as a symbolic expression of the relations between Ashkenazim and Mizraḥim in Israeli society at large: “The pilgrimage fair at Meron brought together Oriental and European Jews but it did not integrate them. The separation existed here as it did in most sectors of life in Israel. The inequalities and imbalances should be noted: the Ultraorthodox European Jews, a minority but nonetheless at the center, dominated the ritual aspect of the pilgrimage. The Oriental Jews, although a majority, remained on the

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periphery” (Brown & Mohr 1982: 44). Brown’s symbolic reading of the pilgrimage, although suggestive, appears overstated. The Haredim (ultraorthodox Jews), despite their growing political power in Israel, are hardly classic representatives of the Israeli elites. Furthermore, the dispersion of the Mizraḥim, Moroccans among them, in the woods around the site seems to be more a reflection of their traditional patterns of celebrations at saints’ graves rather than evidence of rigid control of the hillula by the Ashkenazim. As a counterweight to Brown’s view, it is instructive to quote Yosef Haglili, one of the site’s oldest and most loyal adherents, lamenting the Mizraḥi takeover of the shrine: Where are the dancers of olden times? The joy, the exuberance, the ecstasy? An unrecognizable monster, difficult to describe, has emerged in their place, a kind of mass, unorganized picnic, on the order of the Wild West, or an Oriental fantasia. Something like the ziyyara of Nebi Rubin in the sands of old Yavneh, or alternatively the fantasia of Nebi Musa in the 1920s.… Some hundred thousand people make the pilgrimage to Meron, may their numbers increase, most of them from among the new immigrants. And they did not have the privilege of drinking in the glory-draped atmosphere of old times, which was the lot of the elders of the old community. These pilgrims celebrate in accordance with their own notions, and in the ways they saw among their neighbors in the lands of their exiles (Haglili 1988: 93-94).34

Indeed at Meron, as at other large hillulot, both old and new, the distinct celebratory style of Moroccans has become increasingly evident. It can be seen in the widespread use of the Jewish dialect of Maghrebi Arabic, heard in the Moroccan-style music played and sung by the pilgrims, in the Moroccan dress donned by many participants—like the white robe (jelaba) and red fez—smelled in the aroma of traditional Moroccan dishes and araq liquor, and experienced in the large Moroccan-style welcoming tents, some of which display, alongside photographs of Israeli leaders and the banners of Israel Defense Forces units, portraits of the king of Morocco. Being an old and established tradition, the Lag B’Omer hillula at Meron lies outside the scope of the chapters that follow. But Rabbi Shimon BarYoḥai’s name will reappear in Chapter 5, in the role of patron saint to Esther Suissa, one of the two female saints’ agents presented here.



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The second path along which Moroccan Jews renewed their link to saints also involves the “expropriation” of an Israeli pilgrimage tradition, if on a more modest, local or regional scale. Moroccan Jews, more than any other Mizraḥi community, have adopted the graves of tsaddiqim they discovered in the vicinity of their homes in development towns and farming villages, and began to celebrate hillulot at these sites in the familiar Moroccan style. While these festivities do not attract large crowds, the ritual forms are very similar to that of the traditional ziyyara in Morocco. These latter celebrations, as previously noted, generally involved believers from a single community or a small group of communities, who gathered at the grave of their patron saint. The best-known case of this is the establishment of the hillula of Ḥoni Ha-Me’agel (Ḥoni the Circle-Maker), a legendary miracle-worker from the Second Temple period, in Ḥatzor Haglilit in the upper Jordan Valley.35 The identification of Ḥoni’s grave at an ancient burial cave on the eastern slopes of the Biria range, a few kilometers north of Rosh Pina and not far from Safed, stems from an ancient tradition already known in the thirteenth century. But the tradition did not include a date for celebrating a hillula, so there were no regular pilgrimages to the site. It was visited largely in times of drought, because rain-making is depicted in the Talmud as Ḥoni’s “specialty.” The grave’s importance gradually increased after the establishment of the development town of Ḥatzor Haglilit nearby, most of whose inhabitants were Moroccan and Tunisian Jews. It peaked quickly, reaching two pinnacles, first after the Six Day War of 1967 and again after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The town made it through both wars unscathed, despite its proximity to the battles and bombings on the Syrian front. The fear and losses of both wars gave way, for many of the town’s residents, to a sense of relief, and they related that the saint appeared in their dreams and protected the town during the war. The local saint’s patriotic contribution to the town’s defense seems to have motivated Ḥatzor Haglilit’s leaders to establish Israeli Independence Day, 5 Iyyar, as the hillula of Ḥoni HaMe’agel (Ben-Ami 1981). A similar pattern of a community paying tribute to a local patron saint appeared also in other places. In Yavneh, for example, the locals adopted the Muslim tomb in the center of the town, which Jewish tradition had, from the 13th century, assigned to Rabban Gamliel. As in the case of Ḥoni Ha-Me’agel, the hillula date was set by local initiative. This time, however, the person who made the decision was the mayor. He, as it happened, was the son-in-law of a Moroccan saint, Rabbi Yisrael Abu-Ḥatsera, buried

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in Colombe-Bashar, Algeria. The mayor decreed that the hillula would be held on 18 Nisan, simply because that was the day of his revered father-inlaw’s death (Ben-Ami 1984: 436).36 Similar local cults developed around the graves of Rabbi Yishma’el the High Priest in Karmiel and of Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Baba near Kiryat Ata. Later, in the 1990s, the same thing happened with the grave of Rachel, wife of Rabbi Akiva, which was rediscovered in the Muslim cemetery in Tiberias (Gonen 1999). A special place is occupied by the graves of Arab sheikhs revered in the past by local Muslims, but which in Jewish tradition were identified as the graves of the sons of the patriarch Jacob. These include the graves of Judah in Yahud, of Dan not far from Beit Shemesh, of Benjamin near Kfar Saba’s Yoseftal neighborhood, and of Reuben near Yavneh and Ashdod (Zenner 1965; Sasson 2001). As noted, Moroccan Jewry’s cult of saints was not static over the generations. It developed dynamically, as the stars of new saints rose. This process, which grew stronger during the first half of the twentieth century, continued in Israel, when rabbis who died in the new country were recognized as saints and their tombs became loci of pilgrimage. This is the third path—that of the creation of new, modern saints. The most impressive process of sanctification of this sort is undoubtedly the rise of Rabbi Yisrael Abu-Ḥatsera, popularly known as the Baba Sali, to the rank of an Israeli national saint in the 1980s and early 1990s. Baba Sali, who died on 5 Shevat 1984 at the age of 94, was recognized as a saint during his lifetime. An ascetic who devoted himself to kabalistic study, prayer, and healing, he was perceived as an unrivaled and worthy scion of his family, headed by his grandfather, the celebrated kabalist Rabbi Ya'aqov Abu-Ḥatsera (1807-1880). The multitudes that thronged his modest home in Netivot, a development town in the Negev desert, in order to receive the special blessing that Rabbi Ya'aqov bequeathed to his descendants, customarily brought with them bottles of water. The water absorbed the kabbalist’s blessing and became a powerful curative. Baba Sali was recognized as a man of exceptional attributes in his lifetime. After his death, his tomb in Netivot quickly became the site of the most popular hillula in Israel, after those of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes. This had a lot to do with the initiative, energy, and organizational ability of his son, Rabbi Baruch Abu-Ḥatsera (known as Baba Baruch). Baba Baruch was not initially well-placed to be his father’s heir, to put it lightly—he had lived a controversial life, and pursued a political career in the National Religious Party that aborted when he got caught up in criminal activity, and served a prison term of several years. But the



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intense faith in the heritability of his ancestors’ saintliness helped him gain acceptance among some of his family’s adherents as his father’s successor. He was even able to turn his father’s charisma into a valuable trademark. The Baba Sali hillula is characterized by advance planning and energetic “marketing,” including extensive media coverage, official invitations, special buses to bring pilgrims from all over the country, and a wellorganized street fair. The fair offers visitors the latest items from the Baba Sali “holy industry”—dozens of trinkets bearing the image of the elderly kabalist or of his tomb, prayer books, bottles of arak, audio cassettes of odes in praise of the saint, video cassettes containing footage of previous hillula celebrations, key chains, throw rugs, and pendants. The country’s leading political and religious figures adorn the stage adjacent to the site, and their welcomes to the pilgrims are broadcast on huge screens on both sides of the huge square where the pilgrims gather. Baba Baruch’s principal effort has been invested in the tomb, located on the edge of the municipal cemetery so that it can accommodate the crowds, and in the house he inherited from his father. The tomb is crowned by a bright whitewashed dome in traditional Maghrebi style, and adjoining it is a synagogue with hewn stone walls. The impressive tomb site includes parking lots, a picnic area, stalls, and bathrooms. The father’s house, renovated and enlarged, and an adjacent structure holding offices are the heart of the “Baba Sali village,” which also includes a yeshiva, a Talmud Torah (a religious elementary school for boys), and a preschool. The complex, the elaborate Maghrebi-Andalusian style of which stands out among the dreary housing projects that surround it, is run by a professional staff backed up by a public non-profit organization. The staff and organization do not limit their operations to Netivot. They resourcefully promote the Baba Sali’s memory and heritage throughout Israel through the establishment of educational institutions (principally kollelim, seminaries for married men who devote themselves to religious study), and by organizing festive assemblies and hillulot. This work received official sanction in 1996 when the minister of religious affairs, Shimon Shitrit, placed Baba Sali’s tomb on his ministry’s official list of holy sites. In the wake of this recognition, the Keren Kayemet Le-Yisrael, a semi-governmental body with responsibility for national lands, landscaped the area between the tomb and the complex and established the Baba Sali Park, shaped like a ḥamsa, the Oriental symbol of good luck—a hand with spread fingers (Weingrod 1990; Bilu & Ben-Ari 1992; Kupferscmidt 2002). Baba Baruch is not the only member of the Abu-Ḥatsera family to gain

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standing and prestige as a result of his descent. Far from the spotlight, his cousin, Rabbi Elazar Abu-Ḥatsera, whose devotees include many businessmen, has built a wealthy and extensive court in Beersheba. Other members of the family, like Rabbi David Abu-Ḥatsera of Nahariyya and Rabbi Yeḥiel Abu-Ḥatsera of Ramla, have also gained an aura of saintliness from their membership in the family. Furthermore, Netivot’s meteoric leap into the center of Israel’s sacred geography, thanks largely to the efficiency of the organization and marketing system that Baba Baruch established, has produced a number of imitators from outside the family, turning the southern town into the “Israeli Varanasi (Benares).” Prominent among these other kabalists who have established themselves in Netivot is Rabbi Ya'aqov Ifergan, a young man who in the 1990s developed a reputation for his powers of diagnosis and prognostication, attributed to powers of vision that earned him the title “the X-ray.” He conducts ceremonies of mystical mending at the tomb of Yonatan BenUziel in Amuqa, near Safed, and more recently in Netivot as well. If Baba Sali is perceived as a classically traditional saint, and Baba Baruch as a contemporary seeking to enhance and market his family’s charisma by modern means, “X-ray” looks like a resourceful post-modern saint, with a talent for attracting to his thrilling nighttime mystical ceremonies a heterogeneous public including many young, educated, and non-religious Israelis who seek passionate spiritual experiences. His devotees, who include celebrities, businessmen, and leading members of the political and legal establishment, do not constitute the traditional cross-section of participants in saints’ cults. Like Rabbi Baruch Abu-Ḥatsera, but with much greater sophistication and ambition, Rabbi Ifergan’s activities, which blend mystical, medical, and educational services managed by four non-profit organizations, extend throughout the country. The jewel in the crown of his presence in Netivot is undoubtedly the elaborate tomb he built for his father, Rabbi Shalom Ifergan, in the municipal cemetery, a stone’s throw from Baba Sali’s tomb. Constructed in the form of a truncated pyramid, faced with marble, it contains an air-conditioned interior space. It stands out for its avant-garde architectural audacity, sharply contrasting with Baba Sali’s traditional tomb with its white dome. At this writing, it looks as if “X-ray” represents the future of saints’ cults in Israel no less than does Baba Baruch, who is trying in vain to eject his rival from Netivot. Rabbi Ifergan’s success in turning his father’s grave into a holy site, an object of pilgrimage, and a place for conducting midnight mystical rites, is especially impressive because his humble father, unlike



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Baba Sali, was not recognized during his lifetime as a holy man and miracleworker. In turning his father into an unrecognized saint, bearer of a halo of sacredness and the son and grandson of saints, Rabbi Ya'aqov Ifergan has succeeded in acquiring a patrimony and in backing up his own not inconsiderable personal charisma with the same kind of “meta-historical depth” that Rabbi Baruch Abu-Ḥatsera had from the start. In so dong, he added another modern saint’s site to Israel’s sacred map.37 Some two decades before Netivot’s cemetery turned into a sacred compound,38 an extensive cult developed in Beersheba around the grave of Rabbi Ḥayyim Ḥouri, a Tunisian sage born on Djerba Island. He served as rabbi of the city of Gabes and actively promoted emigration from Tunisia to Israel. Rabbi Ḥayyim died in 1957, about two years after arriving in Israel, and was buried in his home city of Beersheba. Unlike the tombs of Baba Sali and Rabbi Shalom Ifergan, deliberately built on the edges of the Netivot cemetery in order to provide space for the crowds attending their hillulot, Rabbi Ḥayyim Ḥouri’s grave lies in the middle of Beersheba’s cemetery and is not easily accessible. In other words, his status as “the saint of Beersheba” was not planned in advance (Weingrod 1990). Indeed, according to reports from members of his family who are the chief organizers of his hillula, in the early years after his death only a small number of relatives and acquaintances gathered at his grave on the anniversary of his death, 24 Iyyar. The number of participants grew gradually, and the ritual pattern of a hillula established itself, turning it into a mass event that draws thousands of pilgrims, mostly from southern Israel. The crowd holds a feast in the cemetery, spread out between the gravestones, and shops at the colorful stalls that sprout up on the site. For a day, the cemetery turns from a place of loss and sorrow to one of delight and joy. The hillula is a classically North African event, and Moroccan Jews are the most visible group there, despite the saint’s Tunisian origin. The cults that have developed around the graves of Rabbi Ḥayyim Ḥouri, Rabbi Yisrael Abu-Ḥatsera, and Rabbi Shalom Ifergan do not exhaust the paths by which modern saints are created. The phenomenon involves Ashkenazi Hasidim no less than Mizraḥi believers. Among the other cult sites frequented by Moroccan Jews is the grave of Rabbi Moshe Pinto in Ashdod (Levy 2001). Like the Abu-Ḥatsera family, the Pintos were also known in Morocco for the many saints they produced. The family has also sought, as we will see below, to establish a site devoted to its saintly ancestors in Israel. It could be that the reason that Beersheba, Netivot, and Ashdod have become the most important locales for modern saints in Israel is that the

50

The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

graves of ancient saints lie mostly in the country’s north. The three paths to sainthood surveyed here—the adoption of national and local traditions regarding gravesites and the creation of modern saints—have offered alternatives to the saints’ graves left behind in Morocco, because they have made it possible to reestablish Moroccan Jewry’s saints’ cults on a new foundation. The fourth path, involving the transfer of North African saints to Israel via dreams, seeks to restore the saints of the past, not just compensate for their absence. This is the spontaneous initiative of ordinary men and women, to whom a revered saint from the Maghreb appears in a dream and tells them that he has decided to settle in the Holy Land, close to his former believers. In all these cases, the saint enjoins the dreamers to set aside a place for him in their homes, to announce his arrival to the Moroccan community, and to invite them to celebrate his hillula in his new abode. Since Avraham ben-Ḥayyim and Alu Ezra, two of the four saints’ agents whom I will discuss below, belong to this path, I will restrict myself at this point to citing central sites of immigrant saints. A number of sites devoted to Rabbi David u-Moshe have been established in Israel, the most notable being in a housing project in Safed’s Canaan neighborhood (in the home of Avraham ben-Ḥayyim), in Ashkelon, and in Ofakim (Ben-Ami 1981; Ben-Ami 1984). Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar found a new home in Beit She’an, in the home of Alu Ezra. Rabbi Makhlouf Abu-Ḥatsera is in Kiryat Gat, and Rabbi David ben-Baruch in Or Akiva. The cult of Slat al-Gtar, a female Tunisian saint, has been renewed in Ramla (Shabtai 2003); Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana has an Israeli site in Beersheba (Bilu 1997). The fifth path also involves the establishment of a holy site following the appearance of a saint in a dream (or in some other special state of consciousness), and it also is associated with a manifestly individual initiative. But in this case it involves the creation or renewal of a local tradition, not the transfer of a tradition from Morocco to Israel. The other two saints’ agents I will present here, Ya’ish Oḥana and Esther Suissa, belong to this group. Ya’ish, it will be recalled, discovered the “gate of paradise” in his yard in Beit She’an, producing a concrete expression of a tradition cited in the Talmud. The inspiration for this ambitious initiative came from Elijah the Prophet, who appeared in Ya’ish’s dreams and became the site’s patron saint. Esther became a healer with the power of Rabbi Shimon BarYoḥai, who dwells, she claims, “above her head” in her home in Yeruḥam. Additional sites belonging to this group are the tomb of Isaiah the Prophet, discovered in the Dishon riverbed in the Upper Galilee, and the tomb of



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Gideon, of the book of Judges, recently discovered on a hill east of Itamar, in the West Bank.39 The sixth and final path, the transport of the remains of Jewish saints from North Africa for reburial in Israel, would ostensibly seem to represent obvious continuity between the saints’ cults in the Maghreb and Israel. However, since the Moroccan authorities have usually objected to transferring the bones of the dead to Israel, only a few cases fall into this category. Worthy of mention are those of Rabbi Ya'aqov Shitrit, whose bones were interred in the Sederot cemetery; Rabbi Moshe Zarihan, reburied in Haifa; Rabbi Shlomo ben-Ḥamo, in the moshav (farming village) of Nehora; and Rabbi Nisim Idan, whose remains were brought from Tunis to Netivot. The case in this category that had the largest repercussions was that of Rabbi Ḥayyim Pinto of Ashdod, who serves as the chief Sephardi rabbi of the town of Kiryat Malachi. Rabbi Ḥayyim was the son of the previouslymentioned Rabbi Moshe, a contemporary saint buried in Ashdod and scion of an esteemed family that competed with the Abu-Ḥatsera family in Morocco in the number of holy men it produced. In a daring operation, Rabbi Ḥayyim managed to smuggle the bones of four of his holy forebears out of Morocco for reburial in the Kiryat Malachi cemetery. An imposing structure built over the four-part tomb attracts a large number of visitors. The new site in Kiryat Malachi, which establishes a broader distribution of saints’ tombs in Israel and perhaps even challenges the hegemony of the Baba Sali complex in Netivot, indicates that the rivalry between the Abu-Ḥatsera and Pinto families for the hearts and wallets of believers continues in Israel. It is interesting to note that the locations of the families in Morocco and Israel reflect an impressive ecological continuity. The Abu-Ḥatsera family, who belonged to the older sector of Moroccan Jewry, called the “residents,” lived for the most part in the country’s interior, in the Taflilalet oasis on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The Pinto family, whose name reveals its Portuguese ancestry, belonged to the “expellees,” the community of exiles from Spain and Portugal, which in Morocco resided for the most part in the cities on the coast to which they arrived, especially in Essaouira (Mogador) and Agadir. In Israel, Baba Sali, the senior member of the Abu-Ḥatsera clan, chose to live in Netivot in the desert (after previous attempts to settle in Jerusalem and Ashkelon), while the Israeli Pintos concentrated in Ashdod and on the Mediterranean coast. ***

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

The six paths I have sketched here are meant to offer a general picture of saints’ cults that were revived by Israelis of Moroccan origin. In enumerating them, I make no pretense of surveying all the sites, beliefs, initiatives, ceremonial and organizational activities, and other phenomena included in this diverse cultural system. Cult patterns could be mapped in other ways, and even my mapping could be broadened to include more examples from each course. The map I have presented here is also incomplete because of the methodological problem of focusing on the “Moroccans” as a distinct cultural group with clear boundaries. This fundamental problem should be explained. Even if Moroccan Jews are one of the Israeli society’s most “marked” groups, abounding in stereotypical traits, and even if their imprint on the cult of saints in Israel is more salient than that of any other ethnic group, these cults are not limited to Maghrebi heritage and encompass much broader and more heterogeneous sectors of Israeli society that have no hard and set borders between them. Moroccan Israelis are also involved in nationalist-religious groups battling for possession of holy tombs beyond the Green Line, most of which have become focal points of tension and violence in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The most important of these are the Tomb of the Patriarchs at the Makhpela Cave in Hebron, Rachel the Matriarch’s tomb at the edge of Bethlehem, the tomb of Samuel the Prophet (Nabi Samu’el) northwest of Jerusalem and the tomb of Joseph in Balata, next to Nablus, utterly destroyed by the Palestinians at the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000. They can also be found among the mystical sect of the Birkat Shmuel Hasidim, which has turned the tomb of the prophet Habakkuk near Kibbutz Huqoq into its central cult site (Daryn 1998); among the newly-religious neophytes of the Braslaver Hasidim, some of whom have formulated abortive plans to transfer the bones of the sect’s founder, Rabbi Naḥman, from the Ukraine to the tomb of King David on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem; and perhaps even in Haredi activist groups, such as Atra Kadisha (Holy Place in Aramaic) and the Association for the Preservation of the Graves of the Ancients in the Holy Land, which fight to preserve and maintain traditional holy sites. None of these sites and activities are included in the map I drew, because they include no distinct markers of ethnic identity, and the cultural heritage of the Maghrebi cult of saints did not play a central role in them. Nevertheless, the distinction I have made is far from being absolute in Israel’s current ethnic makeup. The fact is that the boundaries between



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specific ethnic groups among the Mizraḥim have become blurred in many areas (such boundaries have nearly disappeared entirely among the country’s veteran Ashkenazim). Furthermore, even with regard to the sites ostensibly controlled by Moroccan Jews, it can be argued that the cultural praxes they involve are first and foremost an expression of a new Israeli identity in formation, rather than of a conservative Moroccan Jewish identity. From a postmodernist point of view, which seeks to “work against culture” in its classical sense, as a unitary and fixed system of beliefs and practices shared by all members of a community, and to stress instead the elusiveness and contradictory meanings of these beliefs and practices and the lack of consensus about them (Abu-Lughod 1991), the exclusive focus on “the cult of saints of Moroccan Jews in Israel” is liable to seem like an essentialist bias. A partial response to this critique will be offered in the four chapters following, which comprise the body of my research. This book has a manifestly ethno-cultural placement because it centers on two men and two women who came to Israel from Morocco, and whose identities, as constructed in their life stories, are organized around a symbiotic connection with a patron saint that they accommodate in their homes. All four have taken their inspiration from Moroccan saints’ traditions, which were part of their close family and community environments, and which became part of their personal lives in their formative years in Morocco. All of them internalized the saint as a personal symbol. This internalization, accelerated by special life circumstances, spread through communities of believers in Israel like ripples on a lake via the saints’ sites they established. Even though the believers differ in the extent to which they internalize the cultural symbol of the saint, for many of them he is a potent cultural schema capable, as they stated, of producing ongoing and robust cultural understandings, which have significant behavioral outcomes. The sweeping claim of “working against culture” loses its validity in the situations discussed here, in which cultural symbols are strong and internalized from childhood. Nevertheless, it is not my intention to claim that the revival of the saints’ cults derives clearly and simply from the power contained within internalized cultural symbols. I will repeatedly argue that the central factor in the success of the new sites is the establishment of an effective logistical framework, without which the power of the saints as cultural symbols would be fairly limited. It is not the inspiration of the saints’ dream appearances, but rather intelligent navigation between local political factors, the construction of a network of social support, and overcoming prosaic and

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

quotidian constraints, that are the basis of the sites’ success. This claim was illustrated in my visits to the four entrepreneurs twenty years later. As will be seen in the chapters to come, not all the new sites have made an enduring imprint on Israel’s sacred geography. Likewise, the claim made at the opening at this book will be reasserted below: the roots of these four saints’ agents are planted in Morocco, but their initiatives have developed here and now in the local landscape, as part of the new life circumstances of Israel’s immigrant society.



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NOTES I will use the term tsaddiq (singular) and saint (kadosh) interchangeably, as did my interviewees. 2 For the conceptualization of the manner in which dreams turn from experiential representations of the world into “things” in the world, see Stewart 1997; Urban 1996, 1997. 3 There is a large and diverse literature on the cultural construction of dreams. See D’Andrade 1961; Devereaux 1969; Grunebaum & Caillois 1966; Lincoln 1935; O’Nell 1976; Tedlock 1987. On the cultural construction of dreams in Morocco, see Crapanzano 1975; Kilborne 1981, 1987. 4 The folklorist Issachar Ben-Ami, a pioneer in the study of Moroccan Jewry’s culture, was the first to study the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, and to gather together many of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim’s dreams (Ben-Ami 1981). 5 I have written at length about the complex interrelationships between the researcher and the object of his or her research, in the context of the cult of saints in Israel, and on the complex balance of gain and loss that these relationships involve. See my analysis of the metamorphosis of Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana, the protagonist of my book Without Bounds, into a focal point of a cult in Beersheba (Bilu 2000: 153-167). 6 Motti Asoulin, my research assistant at the time, played an important role in interviewing visitors to the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe and the Gate of Paradise. 7 My emphasis on the importance of personal initiative motivated, as we will see, by unique life circumstances, is consistent with the importance that psychological anthropology assigns to the activities of individual social actors in shaping social and cultural processes. This contrasts with classic sociology or “culturology,” and with current neo-Marxist and postmodern approaches. See Strauss & Quinn 1997, Hollan 1997, 2001. 8 On the rhetorical and narrative ploys of traditional ethnographic writing, see Marcus & Fisher 1986; Marcus & Cushman 1982. 9 On the ethical questions involved in ethnographic research, and on the researcher’s duty to respect the privacy of his interviewees, see Spradley 1979; Hopkins 1993. 10 There is a large literature on the link between states of distress and mystical illumination. See, for example, Ullman 1989; Obeyesekere 1981, 1990; James 1961; Aberbach 1987, 1996. 1

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

For a discussion on views that emphasize the apathy and levantinization of development towns, see Ben-Ari & Bilu 1987. 12 For the central sources of the approaches and concepts of psychological anthropology, see Bourguignon 1979; Levine 1982; Shweder 1991; Ingham 1996; Nuckolls 1996; Moore & Mathews 2001. 13 On bifaceted concepts or swing concepts, see Kracke 1994. Victor Turner (1967) noted the bipolar character of symbols in rituals, which combine central values of the collective with the deep emotional life of the participants. 14 On embodiment experiences, see Csordas 1993, 1994. 15 Some argue that the sharp distinction between the Arabs and the Berbers, and between bled el-makhzen and bled es-siba, originated in French historiography, and were meant to justify colonial rule (see, for example, Rabinow 1976). 16 Historians have principally stressed the aspects of conflict and tension in Jewish-Muslim relations. See Lewis 1984; Stillman 1976, 1978; Bat-Yeor 1985. The anthropologist Lawrence Rosen is a prime advocate of the thesis of harmony between the communities (Rosen 1972, 1984). A more complex picture of JewishMuslim relations can be found in the works of Shokeid & Deshen 1999: 22-44; Munson 1996; Meyers 1982; Deshen 1989; Bilu & Levy 1996; Shokeid 1971. The complicated relations between the communities in Morocco can also be seen in the differing accounts of relations given by Moroccan Jews themselves. See the series of articles and responses in the weekend magazine section of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz, in the issues of October 6, 13, and 20, 1995. 17 See note 1. The term tsaddiq is more common in speech, while kadosh (saint) appears more frequently in the devotional literature on these exemplary figures. 18 This idea was developed by Harvey Goldberg (1992: 245). The tombs of Jewish saints did indeed attract Muslim devotees as well. See Ben-Ami 1984: 166-170; Voinot 1948. 19 Acronym for “our master, teacher, and rabbi.” 20 The source of this belief is the mystical Zohar (Book of Splendor), which describes how Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai’s soul left him during his spiritual intercourse with the shekhina, which the book refers to as a hillula, or marriage ceremony. See Liebes 1982, 236-287. 21 Turner’s notion of communitas has many critics. See, for example, Bilu 1988; Eade & Salnow 1991. 22 My discussion of the feminine characteristics of the cult of saints is based on Susan Sered’s comprehensive work (Sered 1994) on women’s religions. 23 On brazen bargaining with saints and defiance of them, see Ben-Ami 11



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1984: 46-47. On similar but even more blatant phenomena regarding Christian saints in Europe during the Middle Ages, see Geary 1994: 95-124. 24 At the end of the 1980s, 13 percent of Israel’s inhabitants were of Moroccan descent. 25 It is a geographical irony that the term “Mizraḥi,” which means “eastern” or “oriental,” has been attached to Jews from the Maghreb, a term that derives from the Arabic al-Maghreb al-Aqsa, the far west. The term “Sephardi,” commonly used as a synonym for “Mizraḥi,” is in its literal sense applicable only to a part of Morocco’s Jews—those whose ancestors left the Iberian peninsula during the time of the expulsions from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1498). These émigrés arrived in Morocco in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and found there a large population of local Jews. On the problematic nature of these terms, see Goldberg 1977; Lewis 1985; Dominguez 1989. 26 In the country’s early years, Jews from Arab countries were perceived as “primitive” and “uncultured” (Patai 1970), and as suffering from cognitive and social disabilities (Frankenstein 1979). They were deemed lazy, impulsive, violent, puerile, superstitious, and as lacking proper hygienic habits (Lewis 1985). On the potent stereotypes of Moroccan Jews in this period see Torstrick 1993; Tsur 2000). 27 For a critical analysis of the Israeli discourse that distinguishes between Ashkenazi “culture” and Mizraḥi “heritage,” see Dominguez 1990. 28 A folk festival celebrated by Moroccan Jews directly after Passover, with special dishes and sweets symbolizing the blessing of the spring season. The celebration, devoid of manifest religious content, includes indoor feasts and outdoor picnics in an atmosphere of gaiety, spontaneity, and well being (Goldberg 1978) 29 On the anthropological emphasis in the study of Israeli ethnicity, see Deshen & Shokeid 1984a; Ben-Raphael & Sharot 1991; Deshen 1974, 1984; Goldberg 1984, 1987. As with any generalization, there are exceptions to the rule that highlight the distinction between anthropologists taking an interest in cultural aspects of ethnic identity and sociologists occupying themselves with its political aspects. The anthropologist Alex Weingrod linked ethnic consciousness in Israel to the rise of the “Mizraḥi ethno-class” (Weingrod 1985), while the sociologists Ben-Rafael and Sharot defined ethnic consciousness in Israel as a “primordial orientation assigning sanctity to the group’s central heritage (Ben-Rafael & Sharot 1991: 52). 30 Ḥever, Shenhav, and Motzafi-Haller note that “the boundary lines of Jewish Israeliness block a variety of hyphenated identities, for example a Jewish-Arab identity that is a version of Mizraḥi secularism” (2002: 22).

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The Folk veneration of Saints in Morocco and Israel

On the reasons for choosing a religious alternative as a preferred cultural framework among Mizraḥim, see Peled 2001; Dominguez 1990; Ben-Raphael & Sharot 1991. Nevertheless, some claim that the religious establishment tended to see these popular forms, such as the saints’ cults, as folklore and not a proper religious alternative. See Goldberg 2001. 32 Elijah, who ascended alive to heaven, does not, of course, have a tomb. 33 Rabbi Meir’s wondrous powers produced a special prayer: “Eloha deMeir aneni” (“God of Meir, answer me,” Babylonian Talmud, Avoda Zara 18b). 34 Haglili here compares the hillula of Rabbi Shimon at Meron to the popular pilgrimages made by Palestinian Muslims before 1948. The writer’s ethnocentric position emerges from the comparison he nostalgically makes between the hillula in the early part of the century to “a huge family celebration, like the immense and extravagant weddings in the East European Hasidic courts” (Haglili 1988: 93). 35 Ḥoni’s story appears in the Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 23a. 36 Rabbi Yisrael Abu-Ḥatsera of Colombe-Bashar is not the same person as his saintly namesake, known popularly as the Baba Sali, who is buried in Netivot. 37 On Rabbi Ya'aqov Ifergan’s nighttime rites, see Zarfati (2000). On his extensive operations and the social connections he has woven, see Yediot Aharaonot, July 27, 2001. 38 Other local rabbis buried in the Netivot cemetery, among them Rabbi Meir Zaguri, Rabbi Ya'aqov Dadon, Rabbi Yosef Malul, and Rabbi Rafael Abergil, also have impressive tombs that draw visitors from near and far. 39 On the discovery of Gideon’s grave, see Lavie 2003. 31



II

A Dream Journey to the Saint

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Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim and Rabbi David u-Moshe

A Dream Journey to the Saint In the autumn of 1973, a leaflet entitled “An Announcement to the Public” appeared in Moroccan synagogues throughout Israel. Its author was Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, a forestry worker in his early forties from the Galilean city of Safed. Ben-Ḥayyim wrote that he wished to convey “a message from … the tsaddiq Rabbi David u-Moshe,”1 one of Moroccan Jewry’s most important saints. The tsaddiq had appeared to him in a dream, the author wrote, and said that he was leaving Morocco and would henceforth reside in Ben-Ḥayyim’s apartment in Safed’s Canaan housing project. Following this dream and further epiphanies from the saint, BenḤayyim turned one of the rooms in his small home into the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. He urged the readers of his leaflet to make pilgrimages to the new shrine. Word of Rabbi David u-Moshe’s appearance in Canaan spread quickly, and the first hillula at the new site, on the first day of the month of Heshvan in 1973, immediately after the Yom Kippur War, was attended by hundreds. Rabbi David u-Moshe has other shrines in Israel, including one that is older, but they do not detract from the popularity of the site Avraham established in his home.2 From the perspective of the years that have passed since then, it can be stated that the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe in Safed has won a place of honor among Israeli holy sites. In light of this success, Avraham has become a model imitated by other saints’ impresarios. Rabbi David u-Moshe belongs to a small, select group of Moroccan saints whose popularity transcended local and regional boundaries.3 His centrality was all the more notable given that his grave was situated in the remote high western Atlas Mountains near the villages of Tamzert and Tamestint. But this remoteness characterized many well-known saints, “interred in distant places, on mountaintops or in placid valleys” (Ben-Ami 1984: 219).4 Rabbi David u-Moshe’s life story rehearses is typical of ahistorical tsaddiqim. He is said to have been a Torah scholar from Jerusalem who traveled as a rabbinical emissary to Jewish communities in the Atlas Mountains, where

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he met his death.5 According to one of the miracle stories, the tsaddiq gave his life to end a horrible plague that killed many of the area’s inhabitants, both Jews and Muslims (Ben-Ami 1984: 318). Visitation dreams, in which the saint appeared to local inhabitants, led to the discovery of his grave and its transformation into a major pilgrimage site. When the French scholar Voinot visited the site in the first or second decade of the twentieth century, “there was [only] a rock at the holy site, not a tombstone or buildings” (Voinot 1948: 81). But by mid-century an impressive set of structures had been built there, including a tombstone and enclosing tomb structure, places for lighting candles, and lodgings. During the hillula season, the site drew thousands of celebrants from nearby and far away.6 The Canaan section of Safed, consisting of monotonous and shoddy apartment buildings constructed with public funds, looks more like an Israeli development town than the old city of Safed, which lies at its feet, on a lower peak to its southwest. The neighborhood’s oldest section contains modest two-story apartment buildings, some of which have been renovated and enlarged over the years. The tsaddiq’s new abode is a corner room on the ground floor of one of these homes. A marked path leads visitors from the street to the home of the Ben-Ḥayyim family. The site was originally accessed through the apartment, but over the years the saint’s room was enlarged and a separate entrance was installed. Three signs mark the door. The sign to the right, decorated with a menorah (the seven-branched lamp of the Holy Temple) and olive branches—the official seal of the state of Israel—proclaims that “this abode is dedicated to the great tsaddiq Rabbi David u-Moshe, may he protect us, amen.” The upper of two signs on the left displays the times at which the site is open to the public (Sunday through Thursday from eight in the morning to ten at night; on Fridays from eight in the morning until the beginning of the Sabbath, and on Saturday nights from the end of the Sabbath until ten at night). The lower sign requests men visiting the site not to enter without covering their heads, and women not to enter during their impure period—that is, during menstruation and for a week thereafter. The foyer is furnished with a bookcase laden with several editions of the Zohar, the Shulḥan Arukh (a classic 16th century compendium of Jewish law), the Pentateuch, and Books of Psalms. There are also two large pictures of the saint’s site in Morocco. Prominent in the room itself is a large marble plaque inscribed with the message “This site is dedicated to the great rabbi, practiced in miracles, our teacher and master Rabbi David u-Moshe, may he protect us, amen.” For visitors it serves as a surrogate for the tombstone at the original site. Below the plaque is a



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collection box, and on either side, on a counter along the wall, sacred objects are scattered: Books of Psalms, prayer books, prayer shawls, tiny decorated Torah scrolls, and huge, colorful candles. The walls of the room are hung with multihued parochot (curtains normally hung in the holy ark, where Torah scrolls are housed in synagogues), amulets, an electric eternal light, and three additional photographs of the saint’s tomb in the Atlas Mountains. All of these have been donated by visitors. Thousands of pilgrims arrive from all over the country for the hillula. They stream in from the morning hours, arriving in chartered buses and private vehicles, and fill the tiled yard in front of the house, as well as the spaces between the nearby buildings. The vast majority are Moroccan Jews, although here and there one can find representatives of other ethnic communities, principally Jews from Tunisia and Libya. On their way from the backed-up street to the saint’s room, the celebrants pass beggars, old men offering blessings, and hawkers of candles, oil, pictures of tsaddiqim, food, and knickknacks. The pilgrims position themselves on any free patch of ground in the area, in clutches of family members and friends, mostly out in the open but some in tents. They spend their time eating, drinking, singing, and dancing in honor of the tsaddiq, and vie with each other in telling tales of the miracles the saint has performed. The companionship, and the stirring proximity to the saint, seem to make up for the crowded and uncomfortable conditions in a place that was not designed to host such a huge event. From the early evening hours the line at the entrance to the apartment grows longer and longer. In the past, brawny bouncers regulated the flow of visitors into the room at peak hours, alternately permitting groups of men, then of women, to enter. Today, however, the main door is used by men; women continue to enter through the old door. No separation of the sexes is observed inside the room. The atmosphere there is charged with emotion, at times with manifestations of ecstasy. The believers, most of them women, most of whom make demonstrative gestures of submission when entering and leaving the room,7 tender their requests to the saint and offer their prayers before him, ardently kiss the plaque that represents his presence at the site, and slip their contributions into the collection box. In the past, when visitors had to go through the apartment to access the saint’s room, many of them inspected the rest of the home with great interest, oblivious to the gentle protests of Avraham’s children. But even today, when there is a separate entrance to the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, the family’s home is not completely isolated from the holy site. One can sense the surprise of newcomers at seeing the odd placement of

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the saint’s monument in a family’s apartment. After offering their supplications in the room, visitors go to a marblefaced domed structure at the far end of the entry yard, lighting candles inside it. At the height of the hillula, as emotions rise, entire packages of candles are thrown into the fire and rivers of wax flow out of the flames. Other points of interest in the yard are two small sheds, where members of the family and neighbors help hand out food and drink in plastic plates and cups to the celebrants. A tradition of the site is to grant each visitor a generous portion of the saint’s feast. The food, which includes couscous, meat, and baked goods, is prepared by volunteers in the tiny kitchen at the entrance to the apartment, during the week preceding the hillula. But the purchase and storage of foodstuffs begins months beforehand, and this uses up most of the donations the site receives. In the past, the cooking operation was led by Avraham’s wife, Masouda, but when her eyesight grew weak her daughters and daughters-in-law took command of the food preparation. Another shed at the edge of the yard is used for slaughtering animals and preparing the meat for the feast. In years past, Avraham raised sheep in his yard in order to meet the needs of celebrants who wanted to do more than share the festive feast handed out at the site. Avraham assigns these devotees, who belong to the shrine’s inner circle, special places to conduct their feasts. He has dug a large basement under his apartment that can accommodate about 200 people, and has constructed a large storeroom at the end of the yard that can hold another 50. As night approaches the celebration grows larger and more intense. Policemen from the nearby station keep an eye on movement in the nearby streets. In the packed, well-lit front yard, women whose prayers have been answered hand out cookies, dried fruit, and sweets to the crowd, in fulfillment of the vows they main to the tsaddiq. Vocalists croon hymns in Arabic and Hebrew, glorifying and praising Rabbi David u-Moshe. Local political figures, including Safed’s mayor and his deputies, come to welcome the pilgrims. Rhythmic dancing accompanied by singing and the ululations (zagharit) of the women break out spontaneously from time to time in different corners of the yard. A spirit of brotherhood, joy, and wonder pervades the yard, breaking down difference of class and origin.8 The hillula moves rather sharply from its climax to its end. At around midnight the yard empties of visitors; only a few remain in their tents or in the covered accommodations until the next day. A small group of neighbors and friends—joined in recent years by Safed municipal maintenance workers— help the family clean up and put the yard in order. When the last of the



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pilgrims leaves, the neighborhood reassumes its faded everyday appearance. A passerby the next day would find it hard to believe that just a few hours ago it had been packed with thousands of devotees from all over the country. It should be noted, however, that a small but steady flow of pilgrims continues throughout the year, increasing on the central hillula dates of other saints. On Lag B’Omer, in particular, the site fills with visitors who are on their way to or back from the hillula of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai at nearby Meron. *** Avraham, the man behind the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, was born in 1930 in Imi-n-tanout, a large village ninety kilometers southwest of Marrakech, and lived there until his emigration to Israel in the 1950s. His mother’s family boasted rabbis and scholars, some of whom were recognized as saints by the local community. His father, in contrast, came from a family of no distinction. The father’s father, for whom Avraham is named, died when Avraham’s father was a small child, so Avraham’s father had to leave his studies and help support his family. In his trade as an itinerant shoemaker, he spent his days traveling among the region’s Berber villages, repairing and patching shoes in Muslim homes. Given the physical proximity between Avraham and his father—the two lived as neighbors in Israel as well—it was surprising to discover how little the father was involved in the holy site his son established. During the hillula, Avraham’s father could be seen peddling candles at a stand near the entrance to the saint’s room. Avraham’s earliest recollections included visits to the domestic saints of Imi-n-tanout, Rabbi Avraham Der’i, Rabbi Yitzḥak Halevi, and Rabbi Mas’oud Mani, who were buried on the peak of the neighboring mountain of Imi-n-tamouga. This fact in itself does not set him apart from many other Moroccan Jews, who were inculcated with reverence for saints from an early age. Note, however, that the events of these ahistorical saints’ lives and their burial places, including Rabbi David u-Moshe’s, were not known to the local Jews until they were revealed in dreams (Ben-Ami, 1984: 26, 243). The same kind of dream revelation led Avraham to establish the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe in Safed. Unlike the local tsaddiqim, whose names all the locals knew and whose graves they visited with great frequency, Rabbi David u-Moshe did not occupy a central place in the lives of the inhabitants of Imi-n-tanout. “We only knew that he was at the end of the world,” said a woman who had been Avraham’s neighbor in Morocco. Avraham himself claimed not to have known of Rabbi

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David u-Moshe before his revelation in 1973. While this ignorance was not complete, as will be seen below, it was consistent with the local character of the cult of saints, a product in part of the inaccessibility of distant saints’ graves. While the holy triad of Imi-n-tanout were recognized as the village’s patron saints, Avraham’s first loyalty was to the holy men of his own family, a perennial source of blessing and zekhut avot—familial merit. Unfortunately, all these saints belonged to his mother’s family. This placed him in an inferior position to his mother’s brothers and their sons in the rivalry for inheritance of the family’s blessings.9 Would it be going too far to presume that one of the forces behind the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe was an ostentatious attempt to validate his less than firm right to this saintly inheritance? As I will show, a broad web of connections leads from Avraham’s saintly forefathers to the holy site he established in Safed. The most renowned tsaddiq among Avraham’s ancestors was his great-great-grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Timsut. The wonders he worked are recorded in a number of sources (Ben Nayyim 1975: 117; Ben-Ami 1984: 563565; Noy 1967: 73). Like many other saints, Rabbi Shlomo’s amazing power was first revealed publicly only after the events surrounding his death, which according to family tradition were of an especially tumultuous nature. The wife of a local governor (qa‘id) lusted for the handsome Jew, invited him to her home, and tried to seduce him. Rabbi Shlomo, like the biblical Joseph, resisted her advances, but paid with his life when the incensed qa‘id’s wife ordered her servants to kill him. To conceal this reprehensible act, they hacked his body to pieces and entombed them in the walls of the qa‘id’s house. But the dead saint appeared to his widow in a dream and told her the story of his murder and the location of his remains. When, after a long search, diggers sent to unearth his body were ready to give up, the angry qa‘id threatened to unleash his anger at the Jews who had slandered his wife. At that moment Rabbi Shlomo’s hand emerged from the wall, and after that the other pieces of his body were also discovered. The qa‘id had no choice but to have his wife and her servants executed, and Rabbi Shlomo was brought to burial in a public ceremony in the Jewish cemetery in Marrakech. Not long after that, the grave became a popular object of pilgrimage, as a result of the numerous miracles that took place there. As a child, Avraham heard myriad stories about the posthumous miracles worked by Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, and he later visited the saint’s grave a number of times. This does not justify, however, jumping to the conclusion that the residues of this story percolated into the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe in Safed. True, two of the motifs in the story—the dream



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revelation and the establishment of a new burial site for a saint—appear in the new site as well. But keep in mind that these elements are not at all exceptional in saints’ legends. A more explicit association between the family tradition and the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe can be seen in a story that Avraham heard about an event that occurred after the death of his great-grandfather, Rabbi Ya’aqov Timsut. One month after the deceased rabbi was buried in Marrakech, a letter arrived from Jerusalem announcing the marvelous appearance of a tombstone with the name of Rabbi Ya’aqov Timsut in the well-known cemetery on the Mount of Olives. So, in his own family, Avraham had a model for the transfer of a Jewish saint from Morocco to Israel, a very rare event in Jewish Moroccan hagiolatry.10 The miracles associated with the deaths of earlier saints from his immediate family made a great impression on Avraham. But for him the family’s merit was embodied principally in his mother’s father, also called Rabbi Shlomo, whom Avraham knew intimately. Rabbi Shlomo, a rich merchant who also served, when there was a need, as a ritual slaughterer (shokhet) and circumciser (mohel), lived in a large house adjacent to the home of Avraham’s parents in Imi-n-tanout. According to Avraham, whenever he could, he fled his mother’s embrace and ran over to his grandfather, with whom he spent more time than with his parents. In Rabbi Shlomo’s house he had ample opportunity to witness the expressions of respect and admiration lavished upon the old patriarch as well as the latter’s hospitality and generosity. Being independently wealthy, he would never accept payment for his ritual services. Whenever he slaughtered a cow for a neighbor, he was given a choice portion, which he in turn distributed among the needy. Each Saturday night, when the Sabbath ended, many of the village’s Jews gathered at his home to receive his blessing—and, no less so, to enjoy the tea his wife, Avraham’s grandmother, served from a huge and, as it seemed to the young Avraham, inexhaustible teapot (brad). Rabbi Shlomo’s precious collection of old, mostly hand-written books of mysticism was another source of attraction for Avraham. However, all of his attempts to examine the books were firmly thwarted by the old rabbi, who admonished his curious grandson that the secrets contained in these books could prove fatally dangerous for an immature reader.11 Unlike his two distinguished ancestors, Rabbi Shlomo was recognized as a saintly figure in his lifetime, an uncommon privilege in Jewish Moroccan hagiolatry (see Ben-Ami, 1984: 21). His rapid rise to the position of a tsaddiq may be explained by the fact that he was born into a dynasty: the fact that

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his forebears were recognized as tsaddiqim granted him their cumulative merit. It may also be the case that a small village like Imi-n-tanout was a more appropriate environment for saints than was Marrakech, the big city, the home of the family’s earlier saints. Prominent among the younger Rabbi Shlomo’s miracles were his prophetic powers, a classic indicator of saintliness for both Jews and Muslims in Morocco (Ben-Ami, 1984: 61; Westermarck, 1926I: 158). Rabbi Shlomo died in the early 1940s, when Avraham was thirteen years old. The sense of loss that overwhelmed the grandson was intensified by the unusual circumstances of his death. Although he lived in Imi-n-tanout, Rabbi Shlomo died in the Atlantic coastal town of Essaouira (Mogador), where he had been taken for medical treatment during the last months of his life. When the Jews of Essaouira learned of his distinction, they hastened to bury him in the local cemetery, so they would benefit from his blessings. The young Avraham, who loved his grandfather with all his heart, was especially hurt. The distant burial meant that there was no accessible grave to visit. It may well be that in establishing the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, Avraham was unconsciously compensating himself for the void left by his grandfather’s disappearance. This primal loss, in which a saint from his family was “abducted” by strangers and buried far away, was healed by Avraham’s bringing a saint who was a stranger to him from far away and turning him into a family tsaddiq by installing him in his own household. Avraham’s sense of loss seems to have been exacerbated not only by the circumstances of Rabbi Shlomo’s death, but also by its timing. He lost his grandfather, a concrete symbol of spirituality and erudition, on the verge of his ceremonial transition from boyhood into an adult member of his community. At just this time, right after his bar mitzvah, Avraham abandoned the sacred studies he had been pursuing in the local synagogue (sla) and became a shoemaker like his father. He pursued this craft for more than a decade, until his move to Israel. This does not mean that the boy abandoned his studies because of his grandfather’s death—in Imi-n-tanout, as in other villages in rural Morocco, only a few boys continued to study after bar mitzvah age, and to do so they had to attend schools in distant large cities. Avraham, who on his mother’s testimony frequently played hooky from his “classes and prayers,” apparently lacked the talent and persistence that was characteristic of the handful who persevered with their studies. Nevertheless, the age of thirteen was a symbolic turning point in Avraham’s life. The death of his grandfather, a potential guide into a life of learning and spirituality, left him with only memories that appeared from time to time



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in his dreams. Avraham chose to enter his father’s profession. Thirty years would pass before Avraham succeeded, through the shrine he built in his home, to regain some of the sanctity he felt in his grandfather’s presence. Throughout these three decades, Avraham never stopped missing his grandfather. These longings found expression in a number of ways, among them his many attempts to obtain a physical memento. He pleaded with his uncle, Rabbi Shlomo’s son and heir, to give him one of his grandfather’s books, as well as the giant teapot that had fascinated him in his childhood. But the uncle equivocated by claiming that all the property had been left behind in Morocco. Avraham seems to have yearned for a book and for the teapot because these two items, taken together, represented the righteous rabbi’s devoutness and learning with his wealth and abundant generosity. Was Avraham seeking to recreate this same combination, which reflects the ideal past of his childhood, in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe? Whatever the case, nostalgia for his life in Morocco pervaded his conversations with me. He recalled his village fondly despite the poverty and austerity he had experienced there. Frequently, he harked back to the freedom he had enjoyed as a shoemaker, as his own boss and the master of his own time, living a natural and simple life in a fertile and abundant agricultural region, with the close relations and mutual aid of the traditional Jewish community and, more than anything else, pursuing the straightforward, uncompromised religious faith of the community’s members. At the age of twenty-two, Avraham married Masouda, the daughter of neighbors in Imi-n-tanout and eight years his junior. Two years later, in 1954, a short time after the birth of their eldest daughter, Aliza, the Moroccan chapter of the couple’s life came to an end. They emigrated to Israel along with most of Morocco’s other Jews. Avraham and his family endured the same difficulties experienced by most of the immigrants of the 1950s, but he felt lucky to have been sent to live in Safed, one of the country’s four holy cities, even if his living and working conditions in the town’s Canaan neighborhood were no better than in the new development towns. Avraham’s parents were also housed in the neighborhood, as were most of his nine younger brothers and sisters. During my visits to the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe in the 1980s, I found that the family had remained close and, in fact, had become even closer. Avraham’s married children, nieces, and nephews showed an overwhelming preference for settling near their parents. Avraham’s own parents were still alive when his first grandchildren were born, so Safed was home to four generations of the Ben-Ḥayyim family. This continuity is intimately connected with the holy site Avraham created.

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Life in Safed in the years following the mass immigration was not easy. The apartment that Avraham and Masouda received was tiny, and during their first year of residence it lacked running water and electricity. Like most immigrants, Avraham had to work as a forestry laborer, the principal public job of the 1950s. Most of his fellows eventually found other employment, but Avraham stayed with Keren Kayamet Le-Yisrael, the quasi-governmental body responsible for public lands, until he retired. His small salary was insufficient to support his growing family, so Masouda worked for years in the evenings as an office cleaner, retiring only after the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Avraham’s choice to continue as a forestry laborer was not due to any lack of initiative or talent on his part. For most newcomers in Israel, Keren Kayemet work epitomized the harsh conditions and humiliations they suffered after immigrating. But Avraham genuinely loved nature and village life, and spent much of his free time turning his rocky front yard into a flourishing garden. Since he lacked formal education or skills that were in demand, he did not have many choices. In his forestry work he gradually accumulated experience and expertise, which led to a considerable improvement in his working conditions. After the initial years, when he and his fellow-workers were hauled through the Galilee to prepare land and plant trees, Avraham was assigned to care for an experimental plot of pistachio trees in the Biriya Forest, next to Safed, one of the few such orchards planted in Israel in those years. While it is risky to offer interpretations after the fact, it is tempting to see the orchard where Avraham spent thirty years as an additional inspiration for his project. The trees stand in a place of beauty and tranquility: a picaresque valley, surrounded by wooded peaks. Since the work was not intensive except during pollination season, Avraham had most of his time for himself, and could spend a great deal of it reading psalms, morality tales, and legends of saints. He had long conversations with his colleagues, during the summer in the shade of the trees and in winter in the corrugated metal shed in the orchard, in front of an improvised fireplace. Since his day in the orchard began at dawn, he was already at home in the early afternoon. This schedule was important from the mid-1970s onward, when managing the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe began to demand a great deal of his time. The orchard in the Biriya Forest is not just beautiful—it is infused with spirituality. The nearby slopes are dotted with tombs attributed to holy figures from different periods. Among them are Benayahu Ben-Yehoyada, commander of King Solomon’s army, and Yonatan Ben-Uziel, who translated



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the prophetic books of the Bible into Aramaic, as well as a famous pair of Talmudic rabbis, Abaye and Rabba.12 As we shall later see, the burial cave identified as that of Abaye and Rabba played an important role in Avraham’s first steps as a saints’ impresario. But he was acquainted with saints’ graves outside the Biriya area as well. During his early years of work, when he traipsed over the Galilee’s paths, he became familiar with most of the holy sites in the region. He was proud of his expertise, which enabled him occasionally to serve as a guide for Jews who came to the area to visit the graves of holy men. Avraham evinced a tolerant attitude to the rival traditions evident on the Galilean map of saints. He was not apologetic, for example, about the existence of different traditions regarding the burial place of Rabbi Meir. The central tradition, as we have seen, locates his tomb in Tiberias, but a secondary tradition puts it in the village of Gush Ḥalav. The usual explanation is that the graves belong to two different rabbis of the same name.13 Avraham says: “Some say he is buried here, others there. You can visit either there or here, or both places.” This unabashed flexibility is not surprising given the fact that the site he himself established is an alternative to one of the most famous holy sites in southern Morocco. Even though Avraham reestablished his attachment to the cult of saints via the graves of Galilean tsaddiqim, every cord in Avraham’s soul was still tied to the saints of his youth, and in particular to his revered grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo. The painful separation from his family saints and the need for their help became especially acute in the first year of his life in Israel. The young family found itself in severe financial straits. It is hardly surprising that Rabbi Shlomo appeared several times to Avraham in dreams then. The last of them was of particular significance given the fraying fabric of ties to saints caused by the move from Morocco to Israel. The familiar tsaddiqim were not available and the local ones were not yet familiar. The dream was preceded by a crisis that ended well. At the end of one week, Avraham realized that he did not have enough money to buy food and other necessities for the Sabbath. On his way home, distracted and forlorn, he tripped on a stone and fell on his face. As he rubbed his aching limbs, he suddenly saw a number of coins in a hollow in the ground near him. The small treasure enabled Masouda to prepare a splendid Sabbath meal. His dream that Friday night continued the happy event: On that night I saw the tsaddiq, Rabbi Shlomo, in a dream. He says to me: “Listen, look who is standing next to you.” I turned

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my face and I saw Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai. He [Rabbi Shlomo] said to me: “Here he is [standing] next to you. If you need anything, you just come to him. He will give it to you.” Rabbi Shimon took a loaf of bread, handed it to me, and said: “Go make your Sabbath, from now on you won’t lack anything.”

The message of the dream is quite explicit. In Morocco, Rabbi Shlomo had been Avraham’s support and shield. In Israel, far from the place of his abode, Rabbi Shlomo handed him over to the custody of Rabbi Shimon, the first and foremost of Israeli saints, buried on Mt. Meron, not far from Safed. This way, the move from Morocco to Israel was completed through a symbolic transfer of patron saints. It should be noted that when Avraham established his covenant with Rabbi David u-Moshe eighteen years later, Rabbi Shimon appeared in a number of his revelation dreams, just as Rabbi Shlomo did in the one above. In dream language, the meaning might be that the new saint did not supplant the old one, but rather “incorporated” him. Indeed, Avraham’s version of Rabbi David u-Moshe is a composite figure, molded out of several disparate tsaddiqim, some of them from Avraham’s family. Avraham’s connection to local tsaddiqim, which grew stronger after his move to Israel, is also reflected in the names Avraham gave to the first two of his children born in his new country. The older one, who arrived around the time of the dream recounted above, was accordingly named Shimon. The second, born two years later, was named Meir, after Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes. The two older sons thus bear the names of the two most important figures in the cult of saints in northern Israel, whose tombs, at Meron and in Tiberias, are not far from Safed. Avraham named his fourth child (and third son) Shlomo. It was only when his fifth son was born, after three girls, that Avraham conferred the name of his father, Yitzḥak. This long delay in honoring his father is exceptional, since many Mizraḥi communities, among them the Moroccans, honor the grandfather by giving his name to the oldest grandson (Zimmels 1975; Chill 1979). Unlike the other saints’ impresarios presented in this book, who grew distant from religion when they were young (only to return years later), Avraham never abandoned the traditions of his fathers. He found an appropriate channel for his religious belief, as well as his devotion to tsaddiqim, in his position as gabbai (organizer of prayers) in his neighborhood synagogue, Or Ha-Ḥayyim, which he helped found.14 In retrospect, it would seem that this position helped prepare him for the task of managing the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe (and perhaps motivated



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him to create it). As gabbai, Avraham helped each year to prepare a festive meal in honor of Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, on the day of this tsaddiq’s hillula, the twentieth of Tevet.15 But in the early 1970s, a dispute within the congregation threatened to prevent the observance of the feast. Frustrated by his fellow-worshippers’ refusal to set aside their differences out of respect to Rabbi Ya’aqov, Avraham announced that he would organize it at his home, with his modest means. This public commitment, in which a personal initiative replaced an institutionalized activity with the goal of preserving a hagiolatric observance, was a milestone along the way to the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe.16 Testimony to the importance of this event is the fact that it also ended with a dream, in which Avraham received the blessing of the saint whose battle he fought: I saw myself in the mountains, on a flat and sandy place, it was terribly hot there. Then I was running together with all those people [from the synagogue], who said “Take the feast home.” Suddenly I saw… [it], I was so thirsty I almost fainted. When I saw I was thirsty I began to tremble. Suddenly I saw a mountain, and on the mountain was a rabbi sitting with a large book. All the grass around him was made of big snakes. He took [control of] the place and said: “Woe to the one who enters this place, I’ll send the snakes against him!” I stood up and he said: “No, you can come; you shouldn’t be afraid, hold this staff! All the snakes lowered their heads, and I entered. He filled a glass of water for me and I drank it. He said: “Do you know who I am!” I said: “No.” He said: “I am Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera.” Then he said: “You should proceed (on your way.) You won’t lack anything.

The action in this dream, which depicts the dreamer’s singular success in achieving contact with the tsaddiq despite the obstacles on his way, conveys Avraham’s sense of calling, precipitated by his public commitment to Rabbi Ya’aqov. In keeping with the common pattern of dreams of saints, Avraham did not immediately identify the tsaddiq in his dream (Bilu &Abramovitch 1985), even though the image of “a rabbi sitting with a large book” is probably inspired by a popular picture of Rabbi Ya’aqov. The saint’s grace is bestowed on him alone—all of the other worshippers from the synagogue fail to gain access to the tsaddiq. This motif of contention

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with others in his immediate surroundings, which might be given the psychoanalytic label “sibling rivalry,” greatly preoccupies Avraham, as will be seen in his dreams of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Water for the thirsty is a common image for the word of God bestowed in abundance on his faithful devotees (Shir Hashirim Rabba 1:19; Shinan 2008), but a closer association in this case is the cure most associated with the Abu-Ḥatsera family and originated by Rabbi Ya’aqov himself: water which has been given a special blessing. The juxtaposition of snakes and a staff in a context of rivalry is, of course, reminiscent of the staff of Moses, which turned into a snake (or serpent) during his contest with the Egyptian sorcerers.17 This association again takes us back to the Bible, but Egypt, specifically Damanhur near Alexandria, is the site of Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera’s grave (Ben-Ami 1984: 409). The dream’s ecology—a sandy plain and unbearable heat—fits the dreamer’s image of Egypt as a desert. Beyond these associations, the dream seems also to derive from a recent personal experience. During the summer, Avraham and his fellow workers took shade from the burning sun in the ancient burial cave near Biriya that has been identified as the tomb of the Talmudic rabbis Abaye and Rabba. On Fridays they even stored a bottle of wine in the chilly cave, which they later drank in honor of the approaching Sabbath. One day the laborer who had been sent to bring the bottle returned terrified at having encountered a snake at the opening to the cave. Others of the laborers also tried to enter, but returned in fright. Only Avraham was able to safely enter and leave the cave—the bottle of wine in hand. He said nothing to his friends, but in his own mind he took this as a sign of divine favor. Did some of this seep into the dream about Rabbi Ya’aqov? The fact that some of Avraham’s fellow workers also attended his synagogue makes this all the more likely. The realistic description of the event in the cave of Abaye and Rabba may well sound a bit less real when we consider that a snake blocking the entrance to a burial gave is a common motif in saints’ legends in general,18 and in Moroccan Jewish ones in particular, including some legends about the grave of Rabbi David u-Moshe (Ben-Ami 1984: 6-67, 194, 328). Furthermore, long before this event, whether true or imaginary, Avraham bore with him a family tradition about a similar event involving his murdered great-great grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo (the first): “They built him a grave next to the cave [cemetery] in Marrakech. If a woman who is not good [tries to enter], a snake immediately comes out and closes the door.19 No one could go in. And if a man arrives sick, it takes a week there. Before the week is over, he [the tsaddiq] sends out a small spring and says to him: ‘Take water, wash in it, and go.’”



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This family tradition’s relevance to the previous episode is clear—in both there is a snake, and the wine and water are parallel. This is reinforced when Avraham says proudly that, unlike all the others, who were unworthy, he was given the privilege of entering Rabbi Shlomo’s tomb and drinking its curative waters. Avraham’s store of family myths seems to have provided him with an abundance of scenarios for constructing and organizing special experiences. In the terms used by Berger and Luckmann (1966), his saintly forebears serve as primary orientation points for granting meaning to life experiences. Below I will present several events in the lives of Avraham’s children which, as presented by Avraham, seem to reenact stories from the family saga. The timing of the two dreams I have presented here, both of which occurred before the revelation of Rabbi David u-Moshe, preclude the possibility that the latter saint’s appearance was an unexpected event of sudden inspiration. It would be more credible to see in the revelation the culmination of a long search during which a veteran participant in the cult of saints moves between patron saints until he locates “his” saint. The transitions point to a logic hidden in the process. Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, Avraham’s grandfather, indeed “belongs” to Avraham by right of descent (as opposed to the other saints, who are not members of his family). But he is also a specifically local saint, not well-known to the Moroccan Jewish community in Israel. Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, the foremost tsaddiq of all times and places, is the sublime personification of Jewish mysticism. But the tradition identifying him with Meron is ancient, well-established, and beyond challenge.20 The same is true of Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, a historic saint whose many descendants jealously preserve their rights to his legacy against all claimants. Rabbi David u-Moshe, a tsaddiq that Avraham contends he did not know previously, seems like a good candidate for appropriation. On the one hand, he was one of the most famous tsaddiqim in southern Morocco, and his former devotees, spread throughout Israel, sorely missed the tradition of making a pilgrimage to his grave. On the other hand, as a legendary saint (or, to be more cautious, one who lacks a historical context), he has no descendants or heirs who will try to protect their rights to him from strangers. Avraham’s life in the early 1970s, prior to Rabbi David u-Moshe’s revelation, was more or less stable. He continued to live in the same housing project apartment he had moved into in 1954, continued to work in forestry, and to maintain close relations with his parents and the families of his brothers and sisters. His modest income was supplemented by Masouda’s

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work, and the family’s finances improved in comparison with the early years after their immigration. At this stage he had already lived close to half his life in Israel, and his Moroccan years faded into the past. As he approached middle age, the growth of his family slowed. In 1970 he already had eight children, four sons and four daughters. The relationships between the generations were generally harmonious, but Avraham was concerned at this time by his teenage children’s growing distance from religion. Like his younger brothers and sisters, some of whom had ceased to observe the precepts of the Torah after their move to Israel, his children also found it difficult to resist pleasures forbidden on the Sabbath, such as the municipal swimming pool and the cinema. As we will see, the tsaddiq’s appearance helped put an end to the family’s slide toward secularism. In 1972, about a year before Rabbi David u-Moshe’s first appearance, Avraham’s serenity was shaken by an unexpected tragedy. His beloved brother, who was also his neighbor in the Canaan housing project, was killed in by what started out as a relatively minor event in a moving vehicle. None of the other passengers were hurt and the vehicle suffered no damage. The different versions of this event that I collected from Avraham and his family are characterized by a rhetorical style that I later encountered among other saints’ impresarios when they related key events in their lives. The story’s drama is heightened by infusing every detail with exceptional significance. In this case, the details come together into a narrative whole with an explicit moral: the brother’s death was inevitable, despite the extreme unlikelihood of his being killed in such an accident. In fact, the brother brought on his own death. Sitting in the front seat of an army van that was on its way to the base where he worked as mess sergeant in the standing army, he was momentarily and unnecessarily alarmed when the driver panicked and swerved. He threw open the door and leapt out of the vehicle. Although the van was moving slowly, he lost his balance, banged his head on a boulder at the side of the road, and lost consciousness. He was rushed to the hospital, but the doctors were unable to save him and he died a day later without waking. The sense that his death was illogical was augmented by other coincidences. The brother was not supposed to be in the car at all. He had volunteered to take a friend’s shift. At first he sat in the back of the van, where the driver’s cry of alarm was not even heard. But, since he was the highest-ranking passenger, the others deferred to him and insisted that he move to the more comfortable front seat. Further details reinforce the sense that the death was predestined. According to Avraham’s elder



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daughter, the brother (her uncle) suspected that a neighbor woman had cast the evil eye on him, because she was jealous of the respect with which he treated his parents. He sensed that his life was in danger. On the night preceding the accident, Avraham surprised Masouda by covering himself in bed with a black blanket, despite his longstanding revulsion for this color, because of its association with death.21 In fact, Avraham firmly forbade his family to wear black garments. That same night, Avraham met his grandfather in a dream. He saw Rabbi Shlomo praying over an unidentified body, which was wrapped from head to foot in a large tallit. He turned to Avraham and said sadly: “It is all over now, nothing can be done, the verdict is sealed.” This dream is an important link in the sequence of events comprising the story of his brother’s death. Explicitly, it provided further “proof” that the death was inevitable. But perhaps it also indicated, less explicitly, Rabbi Shlomo’s inability to intercede to have the judgment against his grandson revoked? Did the disappointment that presumably resulted from this failure, as veiled as it might have been, pave the way for preferring an unfamiliar tsaddiq, Rabbi David u-Moshe, over the family tsaddiq? Agitated by his inauspicious dream, Avraham sought to forestall its adverse consequences by fasting and lighting candles to tsaddiqim, but to no avail.22 The presumption that these expiations disclose a covert sense of guilt is corroborated by the distressing circumstances following the accident. According to one version of events prevalent in the family, word of the accident arrived only after a long delay, so that Avraham missed the opportunity to bid his brother farewell before his death. Moreover, at the time his brother was breathing his last, Avraham was eating and drinking at a memorial meal held by friends for a member of their family. Even if it resulted from an innocent lack of knowledge, this upsetting conclusion of the story bears within it a vaguely sinful feeling. Any attempt to identify the source of this presumed feeling necessarily requires some interpretive latitude. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Avraham may well have considered in passing that the dream’s subject was his own death, not his brother’s. The shrouded figure’s identity was left indeterminate in the dream, and in dream language, this indeterminacy can be seen as a way of leaving the dead man’s identity open. It could represent more than one person, and it could be a way of eluding the terror of confronting the dead man (and of verifying his identity). The parallel between the dreamer and the image in his dream is inescapable. Both lie in the same position, both are wrapped in coverings

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that symbolize death. But this can be interpreted in different ways that are not mutually exclusive. In light of the fact that it was his brother who died in the end, the parallel can be interpreted “simply” as a premonition of the brother’s death. But the similarity may also be taken to indicate that the dreamer and the dead man in the dream are identical, leading Avraham to fear that he was fated to die—in which case, perhaps, he understood his brother’s death as an expiation for his. An intimation that Avraham was preoccupied with his own death at the time may be seen in a dream he had after receiving the news about his brother, which I will recount below. These complex personal implications of his brother’s death, as speculative as they may be, are consistent with Avraham’s overwrought reaction to the calamity, which went far beyond “normal” mourning. The absurd circumstances of the accident, and in particular Avraham’s close relationship with his brother, undoubtedly magnified his sense of loss. From the descriptions offered by Masouda and by Aliza, their eldest daughter, Avraham sank into a depression that lasted for several months. He rejected all consolation. Only Rabbi David u-Moshe was able, in one of his first manifestations, to draw Avraham out of his dejection. The tsaddiq’s decisive role in helping Avraham shake off his deep depression is consistent with the importance I assign to this event as a catalyst in the establishment of the site. The life stories of religious adepts of various types show that distress and unresolved emotional turmoil growing out of an acute sense of loss are fertile ground for dramatic life changes (James 1961; Eliade 1964; Obeyesekere 1981; Aberbach 1996; Avshalom 2000, 2001). The characterizations of the fateful accident by Avraham and his family display a sharp awareness of human vulnerability and fragility. The tsaddiq is enlisted to cope with this vulnerability. The message is crystal clear: without the protection of a powerful and proximate spiritual patron, the tiniest of risks can be fatal. After Rabbi David u-Moshe revealed himself, several other members of Avraham’s family were involved in automobile accidents, which they described dramatically as horrible and dangerous. But they emerged unscathed, a fact that they all attributed, of course, to the tsaddiq’s miraculous protection. The disparity between the discourse of weakness and vulnerability and that of strength and security is all the more evident when the family’s accident stories from before and after the saint’s appearance are placed side by side. A specific association between the late brother and Rabbi David u-Moshe came up in the version of the revelation story told by Avraham’s mother. As we will see, this story has more than a little self-aggrandizement



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to it. She maintains that Avraham presented his new patron to her in this way: “Do you remember how my brother of blessed memory used to collect donations for Rabbi David u-Moshe [as a boy in Morocco]? Now he [the saint] himself has come to me.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that the deceased brother played a significant role in the only childhood event of his that Avraham links to Rabbi David u-Moshe—an event that he says he entirely forgot, so that he did not recognize the tsaddiq when he first appeared. The memory resurfaced only afterwards. When Avraham reconstructed the event, he also said that his late brother had been his partner in collecting donations for the tsaddiq. Avraham’s ninth child was born several months after the tragedy. Avraham named this fifth son after his brother. Ten years later, the boy told me about how the uncle he had been named after died, but in an ambiguous way: “The car flipped over in a storm, and he [the uncle] disappeared in the snow.” The boy seems to have added his own link to the family saga of vanishing saints, which begins with the disappearance of the dynasty’s founder, Rabbi Shlomo of Marrakech, in the house of the governor, and continues with his grandson, Rabbi Shlomo of Imi-n-tanout, who “disappeared” in Essaouira. On the other side of the family myth, in a process of narrative compensation, appears the miraculous revelation. Rabbi Shlomo of Marrakech appears wondrously after his murder, and Rabbi Ya’aqov’s grave materializes miraculously on the Mount of Olives. Avraham’s ninth child, named after his brother, may be seen as a current incarnation of this complementary narrative. The appearance at the family home in Safed of the tsaddiq with whom the deceased brother had a passing association in childhood is another manifestation. To sum up, Avraham’s brother’s death was a central emotional and motivating factor in the events surrounding the revelation. But the catalyzing event occurred only a year later. After considerable hesitation, Avraham decided to leave his apartment in the Canaan project, which was too small to house his large family, and move to a comfortable and spacious home in another neighborhood. The saint’s appearance in the old apartment, and his insistence that it was his chosen sanctuary, averted the move at the last minute. Instead of leaving, Avraham was tied to his home with unbreakable bonds. The dedication of a room to the saint who had moved in made the family’s shortage of space even direr, but this was alleviated later when the adjacent apartment fell vacant and was joined to Avraham’s home. A firm decision to move out of a home also lay behind the establishment of other saints’ shrines in Israel, among them the three initiatives presented

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in the coming chapters. Unlike Avraham, all three of these other saints’ impresarios intended to leave their home towns and move to Israel’s central metropolitan area. The regularity of this phenomenon, in which a plan to move precipitated an epiphany in which a saint appeared and nullified the plan, indicates that its meanings lie in the collective social arena no less than in personal psychology. Without entering into a detailed discussion of these meanings, which I will reserve for the concluding chapter, I note here that the intention to leave a home and a willingness to bring in another person are inverse processes that provide an amenable platform for correcting the “historic injustice” of abandoning a childhood saint at the time of the move from Morocco to Israel. Avraham’s sense of guilt at having ostensibly forgotten Rabbi David u-Moshe, hinted at in his first public announcement (and supported by his recovered childhood memory of the donations he and his brother collected for the saint), was most likely fed by his “abandonment” of his family saints, and in particular his grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, when he moved to Israel. In addition, in preventing the move and instigating the establishment of a shrine, the formerly undesirable home gains an aura of sanctity, and its residents become inseparably bound to it. This reversal can indicate that their ties to their home intensified through a natural process, as the saints’ impresarios grew accustomed to their new lives, communities, and landscapes. From this point of view, the burgeoning saints’ shrines in Israel’s urban hinterland can be seen as a transformative cultural mechanism that has enhanced the value of these places in the eyes of their veteran inhabitants and had made them more central to their lives. Safed is not a typical development town, but precisely because of its tradition of sanctifying the graves of mystics in its ancient cemetery and other sites in its Old City, the holiness of the Canaan project, credited to Rabbi David u-Moshe, cannot be taken for granted. Rabbi David u-Moshe began to reveal himself to Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim in the spring of 1973. After a period of hesitations and doubts, Avraham put his first initiation dreams into writing with the help of local rabbi and disseminated them as an Announcement to the Public to Moroccan communities across Israel. Two initial announcements were issued several months apart, the first at the end of the summer of 1973, the second at the beginning of 1974. Together they document the charismatic, turbulent, and inspirational stage of the revelation, before its radiance dimmed somewhat because of the routine associated with an established site. Here is the text of the first announcement:23



A Dream Journey to the Saint Announcement to the Public I, Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, residing at number 172 in the Canaan Housing Project in the Holy City of Safed, have been privileged by God to see wonders, and as I have been commanded, I most respectfully inform you of tidings from our lord the tsaddiq Rabbi David u-Moshe, may his righteous memory be blessed, who has revealed himself to me many times. In my first dream I saw standing beside me a man dressed in white and the radiance of his face was like that of an angel; he approached me, grasped my hand, and led me to high mountains, and among huge boulders I saw a white clearing. Upon arriving in the clearing, he sat on the ground and said to me: “Behold, only ten people celebrate and mark my hillula day and I ask you why have all those who departed from Morocco left me and abandoned me? Where are all the myriads, my adherents and devotees?” I answered him: “But do you want them to return from Israel to Morocco to hold your hillula?!” The man grasped me again by the hand, turned me around, and asked: “What is this place?” I answered him: “This is my home.” The man went on and said: “In this place I want you to observe my hillula each and every year!” I asked him: “What does my lord wish?” He replied: “I am the man who revealed himself to his adherents in Morocco—I am Rabbi David u-Moshe!!! I am the man who beseeches and prays to God each day to watch over the soldiers of Israel on the country’s borders! Then why have the Moroccans left me? Now, here I am in the Holy Land, and my request is that they renew the celebration of my hillula.…” Two days later he again revealed himself to me in a dream at an hour when I was half asleep and half awake. He awakened me and said to me: “My son, you erred in telling people you saw me in a dream, you should have told them that you saw me eye to eye, but no matter, I absolve you of that! Now listen to my words: I have left Morocco and come here because this place is holy, and I have chosen you to be my servant in sanctity. And this you will do:

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“1. Make a place where candles will be lit in my memory, and each person who comes to pray and plead for his soul will light a single candle! “2. Next to the location of the candles, place a collection box, and each person will donate as he sees fit and in accordance with his ability! “3. All who approach the place of the candle will approach in awe, love, and with a full heart! “4. Each person who enters this place must be clean of body and of deed! “5. The candles for lighting and the memorial glasses must not be traded and sold, rather each person who so wishes will light a candle, so long as he is clean, as stated! “6. The place will be open to the public day and night. “7. At my hillula feast there will be no difference between small and great and between poor and rich, rather all will be equal! “8. My hillula will be held on the eve of the first day of Heshvan, and if the first day of Heshvan falls on a Friday, it will be held on the preceding Thursday! “9. Warn your wife and family against allowing any man or woman who is not clean to enter this place. “10. With the donations that collect in the box you will enlarge the place so that it may contain myriads of people, who will come here to celebrate and to pray!” Three days later the tsaddiq appeared to me again in a dream at night, and this time he was accompanied by two men. He turned to me and asked: “Do you know these men?” I responded: “I saw one of them with you in the second dream and the second I know from another dream.” The tsaddiq went on and asked, “Did you know who they were?” I answered him: “The first is Elijah the Prophet of good memory, and the second is Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera may his righteous memory be blessed.” The tsaddiq nodded in agreement and concluded his words by saying that I must allow into this place only people clean in body and in soul.



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At the request of the tsaddiq, we will hold with God’s help the hillula on the eve of the first day of Heshvan this year and every year in my home as noted. …so will God aid us with the word of his great name!

In the first investiture dream, the tsaddiq explicitly mandates the transfer of his original place of worship in the Atlas mountains to Avraham’s home in the Canaan project. The tsaddiq accomplishes the move, and he motivates the passive dreamer by regulating Avraham’s physical postures, as if Avraham lacks a will of his own: “he grasped my hand and led me”; “grasped me again by the hand, turned me around.…”24 The grievance the tsaddiq makes in the first meeting, “why have all those who departed from Morocco left me and abandoned me? Where are all the myriads, my adherents and devotees?” is to my mind the key to understanding the enthusiasm with which the Announcement to the Public was greeted by the Moroccan community in Israel. On the personal level, to carry one step further my claim that Rabbi David u-Moshe represents for Avraham his saintly forefathers, it would seem that the tsaddiq’s grievance is a projection of the dreamer’s guilt feelings at having abandoned Rabbi Shlomo and the other tsaddiqim of the Timsut family who remained in Morocco. But this individual dynamic strikes a communal chord here, representing a collective experience of many Moroccan Jews in Israel who are former devotees and participants in the cult of saints and who left behind their venerated tsaddiqim. Even if the foundation of Avraham’s dream is a wish deriving from family and personal distress, the separation of the community from its saints grants the tsaddiq’s complaint a clear socio-dynamic dimension that explains why his announcement was so rapidly accepted by the public. Avraham’s response to the tsaddiq’s complaint: “do you want them to return from Israel to Morocco to hold your hillula?!” constitutes the dream’s dramatic dilemma. It hints at a possibility that generally does not get expressed publicly—that the severance of the immigrants from their abandoned saints in Morocco could be repaired by the immigrants’ return to their country of origin. But the tension dissipates when the tsaddiq shows Avraham to his home in Safed and asks him to celebrate his hillula there. This solution does not require Moroccan Jews in Israel to “descend” to their former home, but rather enables the tsaddiq to “ascend” to Israel in their wake. In contrast with the ungratefulness displayed by his former devotees who turned their back on him, the tsaddiq is presented as being attentive

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to his adherents’ current plight—he prays for the safety of the soldiers who defend the country’s borders. In Rabbi David u-Moshe’s second visit, the boundaries between sleeping and waking are blurred. Avraham is “half asleep and half awake” when the tsaddiq appears to him, wakes him (from his dream? Or within the dream?) and explains to him that his first revelation actually took place while Avraham was awake.25 To jump ahead, as years passed and Avraham became more secure in the success of his project, he became more assertive of the claim that his encounters with Rabbi David u-Moshe took place while he was awake. In any case, the claim that his second meeting with the tsaddiq was a face-to-face (“eye-to-eye”) one fits the importance of the unambiguous message conveyed on this occasion: “I have left Morocco and come here because this place is holy, and I have chosen you to be my servant in sanctity.”26 The encounter ended with ten positive injunctions (perhaps paralleling the Ten Commandments), which lay out the nature of the shrine and how visitors are to behave there. The saint emphasizes the physical and spiritual cleanliness as a prerequisite for personal pleas and the lighting of candles, which are the principal ritual activities at the site. Its egalitarianism and accessibility are stressed, in the spirit of a pilgrimage communitas.27 The collection box is not forgotten, but visitors are to contribute as they see fit and in accordance with their abilities, and the money is intended for their own welfare. The emphasis on equality at the hillula feast, at which “there will be no difference between small and great and between poor and rich,” continues the special character of the hillula of Rabbi David u-Moshe in Morocco. There, upon arriving at the tsaddiq’s grave, pilgrims were required to hand the meat they had brought with them to the site’s attendants, so that food could be distributed equally to all (Ben-Ami, 93-94). This custom was preserved and taken one step further at the hillula in the Canaan project, where each participant was provided with an identical portion of food paid for out of the collection money. The prohibition against the sale of candles refers to the auctioning of candles and oil glasses, a custom at many hillulot and feasts in Morocco and in Israel, and which serves as an important source of income for the upkeep of shrines. This stricture was indeed observed conscientiously at the hillulot I observed. The repeated use of the motif of three at the end highlights the Announcement’s use of the folktale form (Olrick 1965). The third encounter takes place after a three-day interval and involves three sacred figures: Rabbi David u-Moshe, Elijah the prophet, and Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera.28



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Elijah’s presence in the dream apparently derives from his central role in popular Jewish tradition as a divine emissary who saves people from their troubles. As we will see below, he is the patron saint of the Gate of Paradise in Beit She’an. Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera’s presence apparently reflects the covenant that Avraham made with him after he took upon himself to hold the tsaddiq’s hillula in his own home when it could not be accommodated in the synagogue. Almost certainly this event, which took place less than two years before the revelation and which left its mark on the dream of snakes and water, was deeply etched in Avraham’s consciousness. Presumably it is to this dream that Avraham refers when he says that he knows the tsaddiq “from another dream.” Rabbi Ya’aqov’s appearance in this dream is consistent with others of Avraham’s visitations, where several tsaddiqim are present. Such was the case in the dream in which Rabbi Shlomo Timsut handed Avraham over to the protection of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, as well as in later dreams, in which Rabbi Shimon accompanied Rabbi David u-Moshe. Beyond Rabbi David u-Moshe’s multifaceted image, shaped in the mold of Avraham’s forefathers, the open and tolerant character of the cult of saints is evident here. When Avraham makes a covenant with a new tsaddiq, he does not send away the tsaddiqim he had been connected to in the past. Avraham’s multiple allegiances to tsaddiqim can be seen in the six other saints’ feasts he conducts in his home, in addition to the central one for Rabbi David u-Moshe. Avraham was 43 years old when Rabbi David u-Moshe appeared to him and caused a sweeping spiritual metamorphosis. It may well be seen as a traditional variant on the standard “mid-life transition”—for Avraham and Masouda, the saint’s appearance marked the end of their fertile years and of the growth of their family (Levinson 1978; Colarusso & Nemiroff 1981). The couple’s tenth and last child was born in 1973, a few months after the revelation. He was named Moshe, after the tsaddiq, of course.29 The link between the saint’s revelation and the end of childbearing is hardly coincidental, given the fact that the room set aside for the tsaddiq had been Avraham and Masouda’s bedroom. After the revelation, the couple began to sleep in separate rooms.30 Rabbi David u-Moshe’s constant presence in the home was thus manifested in a flesh-and-blood child with his name. Beyond sharing a name, the tsaddiq and the youngest child have in common a time and a place. Both were “created” at the same time, in the same room, which became the tsaddiq’s shrine, perhaps even in the same bed. They appeared in the family home simultaneously. Given these parallels, it is hard not to depict Rabbi David u-Moshe as a new member of the family, a more than

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adequate compensation for the end of childbearing. An echo of the tsaddiq’s image as a surrogate child can be heard in the version of the saint’s revelation to Avraham told by a neighbor in the Canaan project. In her words, “He [Avraham] had two [adjacent] apartments and wanted to open a door between them, one apartment for the children and one for himself. That same night the tsaddiq came to him and told him: ‘this [the children’s] apartment is for me.’” In this version, the tsaddiq explicitly takes the place of the family’s children. The image of the saint as a child does not, of course, preclude his other image as an authoritative and protective father who is the patron of Avraham and his family. Apparently, at the midpoint in Avraham’s life, when his elderly father ceased to be a source of authority, and when his older children were no longer dependent on him, he transferred his filial deference and paternal support to the saint. Avraham himself admitted that his initial response to Rabbi David u-Moshe’s revelation was hesitant and sluggish. He related the dreams to his astonished family, and after many doubts decided to allot a small corner in the apartment for lighting candles to the tsaddiq (on top of the old family radio, according to his mother and his eldest daughter). But when Rabbi David u-Moshe continued to appear in his dreams, Avraham’s loyalty to the saint increased. He began the process of founding the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe by sending out his first Announcement to the Public and by preparing his home to receive pilgrims. His family was incredulous when he tore out the flourishing garden in the front yard, in which he had invested a great deal of labor, and covered it with gravel. The transformation of the exuberant flower beds into a tightly packed and practical surface is indicative of the revolution Avraham experienced in his life: the saint’s appearance signaled the end of fertility and growth in the garden as well as in the family. Perhaps this metaphoric reading of his paving of his garden seems far-fetched, but it fits with Avraham the forester’s penchant for botanic images and metaphors. Here is how he described his father’s declining health: “I have an old plant in my garden. It is dry and no longer bears fruit.” Furthermore, the garden motif appeared in one of the first visitation dreams involving Rabbi David u-Moshe—a dream directly connected to the traumatic death of Avraham’s brother. Avraham’s subsequent depression made it difficult for him to cope. In the dream, the tsaddiq takes Avraham to a beautiful garden with flowers of all colors. The tsaddiq then picks a lovely rose, telling Avraham that this is how God chose the purest souls to come to reside in his presence.31 To ensure that the symbolic meaning of picking the flower is properly understood, the tsaddiq



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insists that Avraham end his mourning. According to Masouda, Avraham indeed emerged from his depression following this dream. The experience deepened Avraham’s faith in the healing powers of the saint who had come to reside in his home. The timing of the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe is clearly significant in Avraham’s life cycle. On the collective level, there is a historical context to the revelation, linked to the national life cycle. The first hillula in the Canaan housing project was celebrated on the first day of Heshvan 1984, just after the end of the Yom Kippur War. The war offered fertile ground in which to plant the new shrine. Anguish caused by the war made the need for help from a tsaddiq more acute (Ben-Ami 1977). During the first, bloody days of fighting, large numbers of visitors came to the site, especially mothers and wives of soldiers who feared for the lives of their loved ones as they heard news from the front. The first miracle stories that tell about Rabbi David u-Moshe in his new home were about how he saved the lives of soldiers, helped find missing men, and healed the wounded. In fact, Avraham attributes the occurrence of the first hillula to the miraculous intervention of Rabbi David u-Moshe. He had no heart for announcing the hillula in his home as long as the fighting continues, even though the tsaddiq entreated him to do so. Avraham demured because of the gloom and anxiety of the time and because of the total blackout that was in force for the war’s duration. But suddenly, just before the date of the hillula, a cease fire was announced and the blackout revoked. A crowd could now gather in front of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, light candles without fear, and thank the tsaddiq while feeling a sense of relief and of renewed hope. The tsaddiq’s intervention in matters of defense did not halt with the end of the war. During the decade that followed, until Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the northern border remained tense, and Avraham continued to receive reassuring messages from his patron. “During the entire time I have lived in this house, not a single terrorist has entered Safed,” he declares. The Upper Galilee was hit by katyusha rockets and terrorist attacks during this period, but Safed remained tranquil. The link between the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe and the Yom Kippur War should be examined from a wider perspective as well. In the previous chapter I noted that this war was a critical turning point in the process by which the inclusive national ideology of secular socialist Zionism weakened, while particularism, religion, mysticism, and nationalism came to the fore in Israeli society. The Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, the first of the new shrines established by Moroccan Jews in Israel, was inaugurated

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at the very end of the war and cannot be seen as a direct reaction to the collapse of hegemonic Zionist ideology. But it is reasonable to presume that the popularity it gained as the years went by had much to do with the social climate, which became more tolerant of saints’ cults and popular religion as part of its new openness to alternative systems of meaning. Avraham sent out his second Announcement to the Public at the beginning of 1974, after the site gained initial credence among believers. It is utterly different from its predecessor in its content and spirit. Announcement to the Public I, Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, residing at number 172 in the Canaan Housing Project in the Holy City of Safed, have been privileged by God to see wonders, and as I have been commanded, I bring to the knowledge of your honors tidings from our lord the tsaddiq Rabbi David u-Moshe, may his righteous memory be blessed, who has revealed himself to me many times. In one of the dreams the tsaddiq asked me to write these things in a simple and clear way so that the entire House of Israel may understand them. On the Sabbath, in the early morning, I see in my dream that I am walking on a narrow earthen path, and I reached a hill, and from the top of the hill I see a small city surrounded by a sealed wall with no entry at all. I continued to walk on the earthen path, and I meet two soldiers. These asked me where I was going and warned me that the place was very dangerous and that many guards were on the path who would prevent me from entering beyond the walls. After I told the soldiers that I am an emissary of Rabbi David u-Moshe, may his merits protect us, amen, they gave me a bottle of oil and told me: “proceed on the path, and we request that you pray to the tsaddiq that he ask mercy for us.…” Before I left them they told me that along the path on both sides there would be three soldiers stationed every five meters. I went on my way and I meet the first three soldiers. Upon sighting me they aimed their rifles at me. I immediately called out: “Rabbi David u-Moshe.” They immediately lowered their rifles and said to me: “Forgive us, we didn’t know that you are the



A Dream Journey to the Saint emissary of the holy tsaddiq.” They gave me a bottle of oil and asked me for the tsaddiq’s blessing. I continued on the earthen road by the light of the wall and the light of the moon. At the end of the path I met an elderly woman who said to me: “If you have reached this point, come entreat for mercy in the place Rabbi David u-Moshe passed through.” I walked in the direction the woman pointed and I saw a huge crowd of people standing at the opening to a cave. A guard stood by the gate and prevented the people from entering. I made my way among the people and reached the entrance of the cave, the guard warned me, but I went in and began to descend a staircase. There was a bit of light in the cave at the beginning, but afterwards it faded away. I continued to walk in the dark and after a while I began to sense sparks of light. I reached the place of the light and then I saw a guard. The moment he spied me he turned to me and said: “Why did you come?” I explained to him that I am the emissary of the tsaddiq and that I am interested in seeing him. He replied: “Go forward and there you will meet two guards by an iron door.…” I reached the two guards, and they cautioned me that if I were to touch the iron door, I would burn up … despite this I did not fear, and the guards took their distance from me. I approached the door, opened it, and went inside. Inside I saw elders sitting and studying Torah, and I discerned among them the holy Rabbi David u-Moshe, whom I recognized from previous dreams. He immediately addressed me: “Why have you come to me?” I said: “You come to me once fortnightly or once a month, but that is not sufficient for me, so I have decided to come to you and to take you to my home.” Forthwith I grasped the rabbi’s hand and told him: “I would like to bear your holiness to my home.” So, with him on my back, I reached the mouth of the cave. The guard turned to the people outside, pointing at me: “You see, he is taking the rabbi to his home, you have nothing more to do here … whoever wants the rabbi will please go to the new place.…” I reached my home. The rabbi saw candles burning at the entrance to his room and addressed me: “Why do you light candles?” I responded: “Your holiness knows that the people

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have already become accustomed to lighting candles.…” He nodded. After I entered the room I put him down. He gave me a number of warnings: 1. Notify all the people who make the hillula in his memory to cease doing so separately. They should come here and make a great common hillula. 2. All those who have a collection box in the name of the tsaddiq should empty it only in the place where he resides. 3. Each donor must make his donation in love and purity. Each should go into the room in turn, and each one who enters should bathe first. Only a single candle should be lit. 4. The rabbi grants his blessing to the entire Israel Defense Forces and to all the people of Israel, and announces to the entire House of Israel that he may now be found in the holy city of Safed and has come here to supplicate the Holy One Blessed Be He to revoke all evil decrees and to perform miracles and wonders. 5. He who makes a vow must keep it, or else he should not make vows at all, even only in his mind. Afterwards the tsaddiq said to me: “Now I am here and reside here continually and I will not leave your home, which is my home, even for a moment.” I therefore bring the events of this dream to the knowledge of the public at the request of the rabbi, and wish a blessing of peace and health to the entire House of Israel. From: Ben-Ḥayyim Avraham 172 Canaan Housing Project, Safed The Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, may his merits protect us, amen

The dramatic series of adventures narrated in the Second Announcement is enveloped in a sense of greatness and power, presumably reflecting Avraham’s burgeoning self-confidence at the realization of his vision. The story sounds like a version of a classic quest myth, in which the hero travels a treacherous road to the ends of the earth, and with determination and daring overcomes the obstacles and dangers along his way, achieves



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his goal, and returns home with his heady experiences and new insights (Raglan 1956; Eliade 1964; Segal 1990). Avraham’s long, obstacle-ridden dream quest of the tsaddiq has the transformative quality of an initiation rite, with its crossing of boundaries and of passages through doors (Van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969). The climax is the descent into the cave, a gradual passage from light to dark and back again, and the opening of the burning-hot door.32 As in many cultures, the encounter with the holy man in the depths of the earth is described as a symbolic peak experience of rebirth (Duerr 1985; Eliade 1941). But even before this the dreamer, being the tsaddiq’s emissary, bears a sense of invulnerability that allows him to overcome the dangers that come his way. The conversation in the cave between the dreamer and Rabbi David u-Moshe indicates, in retrospect, how ambiguous was the tsaddiq’s connection to his new abode in Safed. At this point, some months after its establishment, the saint’s base was still his burial site in the Atlas Mountains. He visited his new dwelling only from time to time, “once a fortnight or once a month.” Unawares, the dream reveals the explanatory model by which Avraham resolves (for himself, and thus for others as well) the paradox of the tsaddiq who would seem to be present at two sites at the same time. Now, after the first hillula and the wartime miracles, when the new shrine’s success seems assured, Avraham is not willing to make do with scattered visits. The message of the meeting in the cave, in the dream’s concrete language, is that Rabbi David u-Moshe’s move to his home in Israel has been completed. From this point he is a permanent boarder in Avraham’s home. Note that the motif of restricted access to the tsaddiq, which we encountered in the dream of the snakes and Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, is even more pronounced here and expressed by a variety of images: the city surrounded by “a sealed wall with no entry at all”; the road blocked by soldiers; and above all the obstacles to entering the cave, preventing the crowd at its mouth from meeting the tsaddiq. If the restricted entrance in this version indeed testifies to a conflict over competition with “sibling others,” it would seem that Avraham’s identification in the dream as the chosen and unchallenged emissary of the saint is the fulfillment of a wish, meant to put to rest all doubts about his status. The narrative of the dream in the second Announcement is a perfect mirror image of the initiation dream of the first. In the latter, Rabbi David u-Moshe appears as an authoritative figure who initiates and acts, himself the executor of his move from Morocco to Israel. The dreamer is the passive object of the tsaddiq’s will, whose every action is directed by the tsaddiq.

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In the second dream, however, the dreamer is a hero of mythic proportions, brave and invincible, while the tsaddiq is portrayed as inert, lacking a will of his own. True, in the cave Avraham politely asks the tsaddiq if he may bear him home on his back, but this demonstrative act of respect comes together with a physical initiative (“Forthwith I grasped the rabbi’s hand and told him…”) that, in the first dream, was the province of the saint. Moreover, the dreamer allows the tsaddiq no option to oppose his decision. Curled up like a clueless baby33 (or old man) on Avraham’s back, he is borne the entire way to his new abode.34 Only when he reaches his room does Rabbi David u-Moshe recover and convey to Avraham a list of precepts regarding the operation of the site. The tsaddiq’s opposition to the decentralization of the hillula, not stated explicitly in the “ten commandments” of the First Announcement, appears here as the first injunction. Presumably it reflects the dreamer’s wish that the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe become the saint’s central shrine, a magnet for visitors and donations. Avraham’s efforts to preclude other celebrations of his tsaddiq’s hillula will be discussed later in this chapter. The saint’s fourth injunction states explicitly that “he may now be found in the holy city of Safed,” and as if to eliminate all doubts, he concludes his revelation by stating: “Now I am here and reside here continually and I will not leave your home, which is my home, even for a moment.” Rabbi David u-Moshe’s immigration from Morocco to Israel is thus consummated. The next announcement to the public, the third, issued in the summer of 1975, no longer addresses the story of the saint’s emigration to the Holy Land. For all intents and purposes, it lacks a narrative. It consists of an exhortation by the tsaddiq, calling on his devotees to observe the Torah’s precepts, with an emphasis on Sabbath observance. It also details the catastrophes that will befall the public as a consequence of slack observance. This is the last of the announcements to the public. Apparently, the rapid pace at which the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe established itself on the map of holy sites obviated the need for any further public notices. Avraham’s burgeoning self-confidence is indicated in the poetic conclusion of the Third Announcement: “The word of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, who writes and anticipates mercy, emissary of Rabbi David u-Moshe, may his memory protect us amen.” However, Rabbi David u-Moshe continued to visit Avraham in his dreams on an almost daily basis, deepening in Avraham his consciousness of having undergone a dramatic spiritual metamorphosis. In one of these visitation dreams, this transformation is depicted in terms of death and rebirth, the classic metaphor for a drastic change in life. The



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dream was a lengthy one, so I will recount its narrative briefly. It opens with a declaration by an emissary of the divine court that Avraham’s life has come to an end. In the next scene, Avraham indeed finds himself prostrate on the ground “as if I were dead,” listening helplessly to the calumnies of the people around him: “This man, with all his lies, speaks about the tsaddiq.” Suddenly, Elijah the prophet appears, accompanied by Rabbi David u-Moshe and Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera. Elijah passes his hand over Avraham and resurrects him. Elijah points to Rabbi David u-Moshe, who is wrapped in his tallit (prayer shawl) and indicates that it is he who has granted Avraham new life through his prayers, as recompense for Avraham’s work on behalf of the saint. After performing a complex computation, Elijah notifies Avraham that he will have the privilege of conducting another seventy hillulot—a number six less than the number of days remaining until the next hillula. Later in the dream, Rabbi David u-Moshe relents and decides to add another two years to the seventy he had originally granted. He promises that, when the right time comes, he will close accounts with the slanderers, and bring those believers who have conducted separate hillulot to celebrate at the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. He also shows Avraham detailed construction plans for the Abode, to be carried out with donations collected at the shrine. During the site’s first year, Avraham faced, in addition to enthusiasm, suspicion and disbelief. This dream’s opening seems to display some of these responses, and may also reflect some of Avraham’s own doubts and concerns at the start of his new path in life. His sudden, untimely death would put an end to his enterprise and call into question his virtue and motives—which are indeed denounced by the slanderers around his body. The trinity of tsaddiqim familiar from the First Announcement to the Public— Rabbi David u-Moshe, Elijah the prophet, and Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera— rush in to avert the decree and grant him another seventy-two years of life. It is interesting to note that Elijah is Avraham’s interlocutor, perhaps because of his mythic status as a teacher of secret lore and a figure who raises the dead to life.35 But the initiative for ameliorating the judgment on Avraham comes explicitly from Rabbi David u-Moshe, who during the course of the dream becomes the central speaker. Since Avraham was in his forties when this “rebirth” occurred, the promise brings his term of life close to 120, the archetypical lifespan in Jewish tradition. The computation may derive from midrashic and kabbalistic sources, according to which Adam, the first man, donates seventy years of his life in order to lengthen the life of King David.36 The addition of two more years may be connected to

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the prominence of the 72-letter name of God in Jewish mystical tradition.37 It is not impossible that in this context—the discussion of Avraham’s lifetime—the number is also intended as four times eighteen, the number of the Hebrew word hai, life. One may conjecture that the death and rebirth Avraham experiences in the dream may be more than a fitting metaphor for the spiritual change in his life. It may also have been motivated by his own psychological needs. While these needs are not known to us, it is possible that they are linked to his brother’s death. We have suggested that Avraham’s great distress at this tragic event were a motivating factor for the appearance of the tsaddiq. In my discussion of how the event unfolded, especially with regard to the mysterious dream Avraham had on the eve of the accident, I proposed that he may have been plagued by thoughts of his own death—recall the comprehensive prohibition against wearing black that he issued to his family. Note the similar openings of both dreams. In both, the tsaddiq prays for the dead man at his feet. In the dream prior to the accident, the saint is unable to avert the judgment and save the victim. In the present dream, Avraham is saved from his brother’s awful fate and receives a promise of long life, thanks to the protection of the three tsaddiqim, Rabbi David u-Moshe at their head. If Avraham indeed feared for his life at this time, the final dream “actualizes” these fears—in order to wipe them away in an instant.38 Since this turning point in his life—his rebirth, if you wish—Avraham has been guided by his patron in all he does. This intimacy is hinted at the end of the dream in which Rabbi David u-Moshe appears as the architect of his new shrine. He also commits himself to settle scores with Avraham’s rivals and to bring his devotees to his abode. The demand to refrain from conducting separate hillulot, which appears as a direct commandment in the Second Announcement, touches on the most difficult challenge Avraham had faced at the beginning. After the immigration from Morocco, during the period of separation from the tsaddiq, it became customary, in the absence of a central pilgrimage site, to conduct separate festive meals and celebrations among family, friends, and neighbors. Avraham, who places his trust in the tsaddiq in his battle against this decentralization of the cult, is surprised to discover that he himself has not been entirely innocent in the saint’s eyes. When he lights a candle in honor of Rabbi David u-Moshe in his brother-inlaw’s apartment in Tiberias, the tsaddiq takes him to task: “I extinguished the candle. … I do not want you to light [a candle] here, only at the place where I reside.” The tsaddiq was no less strong-minded regarding his collection boxes: “If someone comes to take the collection box [to use it elsewhere],



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don’t give it to him! Anyone who wants something should come here and put [his money] here [in this box].” In another dream he rebukes Avraham for allowing a visitor to take food from the hillula meal home from the shrine. When the dreamer asks why this is forbidden, the tsaddiq says simply: “If someone takes [from the meal] and gives it to someone else, they will not come. But if everyone comes here, they will eat here and be thrilled.” After the exhilarating and inspiring period of the initial revelation dreams had passed, Avraham began to turn his energies to institutionalizing the site’s charismatic aspects (Weber 1968; Lindholm 1990). This meant creating an infrastructure that would allow as many visitors as possible, ensuring a solid financial base for the hillula, and formalizing its practices. The magnificence and force of epiphanies are liable to outshine the mundane, so the true test of a holy site’s resilience is whether this work gets done. The announcements to the public that Avraham disseminated had aroused great enthusiasm and drew a large number of visitors to the site, but its long-term survival required the enlargement of the tsaddiq’s room and the construction of facilities to accommodate the large numbers of visitors who were arriving for the hillula. Avraham devoted most of his efforts during this period to obtaining the necessary permits from the municipality and the Israel Lands Authority (which owned the land on which the housing project was built) so that the room could be rezoned from residential space to the status of a public institution open to visitors. The bureaucratic hurdles were frustrating and exhausting, but Avraham surmounted them in many instances, thanks to his persistence and determination. The public toilets for men and women that he erected adjacent to the site were perhaps his crowning achievements. It would not be an exaggeration to say that obtaining permits for the toilets was no less essential for Avraham’s success than the spectacular dreams that he dreamed, and were certainly more difficult to achieve. After all, dream visits by tsaddiqim are a familiar and common cultural phenomenon among Moroccan Jewish believers. A person who meditates on the tsaddiqim during the day and turns to them in prayer before going to sleep is not unlikely to be visited by them at night (Ben-Ami 1984: 79-84; Bilu & Abromovitch 1985). But few saints’ devotees are interested in setting out on the long and difficult road to actualize the messages of their dreams and to erect—over the sweeping objections of state, municipal, civil, and religious authorities—a vibrant public shrine. And only a handful of those who do set out on this road are able to bring their project to completion.39 As we will see, Avraham’s flourishing operation was undoubtedly an inspiration for

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the entrepreneur who will be presented in the next chapter, but the latter did not succeed in recreating Avraham’s success. Avraham displayed great dexterity in his efforts to develop the site. At first, he sought to allay the objections of the municipal authorities,40 and enlisted the cooperation of a number of allies, including government officials, wealthy donors, building contractors, and craftsmen. But this facility cannot be separated from the experience of revelation, since the tsaddiq was also involved in these efforts, as his next nocturnal appearance showed. The tsaddiq came to me and said: “Listen, if you have money, you can build. Build without the permits. If they want to take you to court, go to court. If they tell you: “Demolish it,” tell them: “I built, you demolish.” And when that time comes they will see who lives in this place.

In this revelation, the tsaddiq simply encourages Avraham in the face of the hardest problem confronting him at the time—obtaining building permits for the development of the site. In the next revelation, however, the tsaddiq involves himself by other means: A contractor came to me, and I asked him to finish one or two rooms for me. He didn’t want to. He didn’t care. I sought out the tsaddiq and told him: “You live here now, go to the contractor and speak to him.” He appeared to him. For two days he [the contractor] and his wife couldn’t sleep. On Friday he came to me and said, “In God’s name, ask the tsaddiq to leave me alone. He came to me in a dream … he said to me: “Either you finish the place, or I will finish you.” He [the contractor] came and asked for forgiveness.

The contractor’s dream is one of many examples of the aid Avraham received from the tsaddiq in his struggle to establish the site. Note the businesslike tone of Avraham’s request of the saint and the para-contractual relations between them (compare: Ben-Ami 1984: 45-46). Avraham demands that the tsaddiq, now a permanent tenant, defend his home. The saint does his job, threatens the contractor, and obtains his apology (and completion of the construction). In this event, the relations between the tsaddiq and his emissary seem to have been reversed, since Rabbi David u-Moshe is presented here as doing what Avraham tells him to do. Even more importantly,



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this is the first of many examples in which the tsaddiq appears to someone else in a dream that is clearly connected to Avraham’s own. In a certain sense, what occurs here is a dialogue between dreamers, since the tsaddiq is “sent” (in a dream) by Avraham to appear in the contractor’s dream.41 This removes it from the internal plane, the classic subject of modern psychology, and places it on an interpersonal, inter-subjective plane. Many believers from the Canaan housing project and other neighborhoods in Safed, as well as more distant places outside the city, responded to Avraham’s initiative by reporting their own dreams, in which they saw the tsaddiq on the way to his new home in Safed or in which he directed them on their way to the new site. I will not address these dreams here, since the process by which a community of dreamers crystallizes around a site will be illustrated in the next chapter, in relation to the Gate of Paradise in Beit She’an.42 The positive responses, both dreaming and waking, to the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, encouraged Avraham to host other tsaddiqim there as well. Rabbi David u-Moshe, the patron saint, remained the only permanent resident of the site bearing his name. But alongside the central hillula in his honor, Avraham began to celebrate the hillulot of six other tsaddiqim, after each of them appeared to him in a dream and asked him to do so. These hillulot are generally celebrated in a more modest way, as a festive meal to which he invites family, friends, and neighbors. As we have seen, one of these feasts, devoted to Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, in fact preceded the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. The first two hillulot conducted after the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe were those of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai on Lag B’Omer and of Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes four days earlier.43 Even if there was not even a smidgen of defiance in Avraham’s “appropriation” of the hillulot of these two famous tsaddiqim, whose traditional pilgrimages to Meron and Tiberias have for generations attracted huge crowds, there was certainly what smacks of a double standard. Home feasts in honor of Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Meir are common among their devotees. But Avraham, who decried those who celebrated Rabbi David u-Moshe’s hillula in their homes rather than at the shrine he built, was in this case not practicing what he preached. It is hardly surprising, then, that the demand to observe Rabbi Shimon’s hillula in the Canaan housing project came from the tsaddiq himself, in a dream. According to Avraham, Rabbi Shimon told him: “Listen, you know that this place doesn’t belong just to Rabbi David u-Moshe. I also have a share here. And now, be careful.… [my ellipsis–YB] I command that on the eve of my hillula, do not allow anyone to enter this place. Draw the curtain…

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[my ellipsis–YB]. Because we want to sit here.” When the dreamer expresses astonishment—”How can that be? On the eve of the hillula thousands of Jews come to prostrate themselves on your grave; how can it be that you choose to come here?” Rabbi Shimon replies: “Here I know it is a holy place.” Beyond these explicit words of Rabbi Shimon, the dream apparently draws from the tension between the shrines in Meron and the Canaan housing project, resulting from their geographical proximity. The rivalry between the two tsaddiqim is indicated in Rabbi Shimon’s objection that he, too, has a share in Avraham’s shrine, and in Rabbi David u-Moshe’s response (not quoted above), whom Avraham described as “standing close by and laughing” at what he heard. Furthermore, Avraham noted that while, in his dream, Rabbi David u-Moshe is situated in his room and speaks Moroccan Arabic, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai remains outside and speaks Hebrew. This spatial and linguistic opposition highlights the cultural differences between the two traditions, and hints at the superiority of the imported over the native one. The apparently irksome issue of “sibling rivalry”—which of the believers will be privileged to be the tsaddiq’s intimate—which repeatedly appears in Avraham’s dreams, is reversed here and transferred to the saints themselves, who now contend for Avraham’s favor. In the end, however, the tension between the two is dissipated in a surprise move: even though Rabbi Shimon is buried in Meron, the most popular of the saints’ graves in Israel, he prefers to spend his hillula night at the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Rabbi Shimon’s dissatisfaction with what goes on at Meron, which can be inferred between the lines here, becomes explicit in another dream, in which he complains about the betting, drinking, and flirting that take place at the hillula at his tomb. Retrospectively, proximity to Meron has benefited Rabbi David u-Moshe, because many of the devotees who attend the Lag B’Omer hillula stop at the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe on their way there or back. The fifth saint appropriated by the Abode—after Rabbi David u-Moshe, Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, and Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes—was Rabbi David Ben-Baruch, one of the most important Moroccan Jewish saints, buried in Oulad Bra’hil, near Tarudant, in southwestern Morocco (Ben-Ami 1984: 288-296). In this case, too, the tsaddiq appeared to Avraham in a dream and demanded that a feast be held on his hillula date, the third of Tevet. At first, Avraham refuses to accede to the request, so as not to hurt a neighboring family from the village where Rabbi David was buried, who had held a feast in his honor each year even before the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe was established. But Rabbi David Ben-Baruch quickly makes clear that he is insulted and leaves Avraham with no other option. In



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another dream, the tsaddiq binds Avraham’s ten children with a rope and threatens to kill them if his request is not met. Ever since then, Avraham has honored Rabbi David with a slaughtered sheep on the third of Tevet.44 The sixth tsaddiq who shares the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe is Rabbi Daniel Ha-Shomer Ashkenazi, buried south of Marrakech. He is another of the most revered saints of Moroccan Jewry (Ben-Ami 1972; 1984: 338). This time Avraham willingly accedes to the tsaddiq, who appears to him in a dream. The reason is that the appeal endorsed the request of an old friend of his from Ashdod, one of the shrine’s devotees, who has frequently pleaded with Avraham to hold a feast in honor of his most venerated saint. By tradition, the hillula of Rabbi Daniel is held on the first day of the month of Elul. The seventh and final hillula conducted at the site is that of Ahiya HaShiloni, a prophet from the days of the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel, Yir’av‘am (Jeroboam) Ben-Nabat. While Ahiya is mentioned only in a brief biblical passage (I Kings 11:29-39), he holds a special place in the midrashic literature and the Zohar, and is depicted as the heavenly guide of Elijah the Prophet, and of the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Yisrael Ba’al Shem Tov.45 Aḥiya’s hillula too was instituted by a dream. [S]uddenly I see the whole apartment full of people, only old men. Then they sit and there is lots of fruit. I tell them: “Help yourselves.” They said: “You, the master of the house, first. Open a date and make the blessing for it. Afterwards we will recite the blessing.” I made the blessing on the date and they responded.… [my ellipsis–YB]. And they said: “Do you know what this is? A feast, for this is the day that Ahiya Ha-Shiloni passed away.” One elderly man standing there said to me: “If you want, come, I will take you, go speak to him…[my ellipsis–YB].” One got up and said “Don’t go in, you do not have leave to enter this place.” I see one who is entirely white, [like] a king. He said: “Leave him alone, tell him to come in.” I entered, I began to kiss him. He said: “Do you know who I am? I am Ahiya Ha-Shiloni. Now, if you want, you can do as you do to all the others. A blessing will be upon you, you can do that [a feast] for me.”

The nocturnal encounter with Ahiya Ha-Shiloni is one more example of the creative nature of experience in “the field of dreams.” In contrast with the six previous figures that Avraham placed in his holy site, no

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existing pilgrimage tradition has been linked to Ahiya. Holding a feast in his honor was thus a real cultural innovation. Lacking a recognized date, Avraham scheduled it for the fifteenth of Tammuz, the day Ahiya appeared in his dream. From a comparative point of view, this dream shows the long way that Avraham had come since his initial revelation dreams. In those early visions, he had to prove that he was worthy of such a revelation, by walking a difficult path through a desert (in the dream of Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera), or by overcoming obstacles along a hazardous journey far from his home (the dream recounted in his Second Announcement). Here, however, he sits in his apartment, at the head of the table as the master of the house, encircled by tsaddiqim who treat him with respect. Nevertheless, even in this homey dream, his tranquility and belief in his prerogative are threatened when one of the old men seeks to forbid his access to Ahiya HaShiloni. As in the previous dreams, in which doubts about his standing were expressed as difficulty in obtaining access to the tsaddiq in a context of “sibling rivalry,” here too the dream concludes with a reconfirmation of his status. But the frustrating repetition of this entry prohibition (which would seem, in psychological terms, to reflect a troublesome self-doubt about his own worth), even in a dream in which Avraham hosts tsaddiqim in his home as an acknowledged and respected figure, demonstrates how strong a hold his doubts have over him. These seven home hillulot, spread over the year, deepened Avraham’s bond with the saints. In establishing the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, he constituted a sacred space, and a sacred time a well: the hillula of a tsaddiq. He did not, however, rest on the laurels of his initial success. Instead, he worked continually to augment the dimension of sacred time by creating a sacred calendar whose spiritual climaxes, seven hillulot, regulate the rhythm of activity at the shrine. Rabbi David u-Moshe, the patron saint, thus presided over a pantheon of tsaddiqim properly balanced between three Moroccan saints (Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, Rabbi David Ben-Baruch, and Rabbi Daniel Ha-Shomer Ashkenazi) and three local saints (Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes, and Ahiya Ha-Shiloni). With this format of hillulot, the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe has come of age and captured a permanent place on the map of Israel’s holy sites.

A Saint in the Next Room: Rabbi David u-Moshe and the Ben-

Ḥayyim Family In founding the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe in his apartment at number 172 in the Canaan housing project, Avraham imposed his private



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vision on his family, forcing them to adjust to an entirely different way of life. The holy boarder’s effect on the family was principally evident in the “ecological density” dictated by the actualization of the vision. Rabbi David u-Moshe’s revelation did not remain a one-time, exceptional event. It was translated into a permanent presence that brought the tsaddiq into part of the family’s daily routine. As a boarder with his own room—a privilege that none of family’s children enjoyed—who met each evening with the head of the family and guided him in all he did, he had a huge influence on their lives at home and outside it. However, despite Rabbi David u-Moshe’s intimate and constant presence in the apartment, his influence had boundaries. Masouda and her children made a point of saying that the saint appeared only to Avraham. Despite their involvement in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, none of them developed a personal and unmediated relationship with the tsaddiq. Aliza, the eldest daughter, reported a pair of nighttime encounters with Rabbi David u-Moshe, but all her siblings stated explicitly that the tsaddiq had never appeared to them in their dreams. In the words of one of Avraham’s sons, “The tsaddiq goes straight to Dad, he belongs to him. When I reach his age, maybe he will appear to me, too.” The Woman Behind Him Masouda’s insistence that she had no personal connection with the tsaddiq seems surprising at first instance, given her central role at the site. But she carefully distinguished between the spiritual aspect of the saint’s presence, which was entirely under Avraham’s purview, and the material and social chores that derived from it, in which she was intimately involved. This division of labor owed its success to the harmonious relationship between the husband and wife and to Masouda’s personality—optimistic, energetic, warm, generous, endowed with a special sense of humor. These traits enabled her to meet the challenge of the double role her husband’s initiative assigned her: wife and mother in the family, and a hostess attentive to the needs of the site’s visitors. In terms of the family, Masouda was the home’s central pivot. Since, until he retired, Avraham split his time between caring for the orchard and the shrine, it was Masouda who managed the home and the family, from the children’s education to maintaining contact with relations. In the 1980s, during the decade following the revelation, Masouda still had three small children to care for at home, to which were added seven grandchildren, born to her five married children (another son was a college student and another a soldier at the time), all of whom spent many hours under her supervision. In the afternoons and evenings,

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when the voices of visitors faded away, the apartment was filled with the rumpus—loud and sometimes a bit rowdy—of three generations of family members. Masouda orchestrated such gatherings, bounding from kitchen to bedrooms to living room, enticing children and adults to eat the food she had prepared, conducting lively conversations on affairs of the day, sternly reprimanding scuffling grandchildren, trading barbs with her husband and children. Her grandchildren also called her mama, an additional tribute to her status as the home’s great and munificent mother. Long before the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, Masouda, thanks to her warmth towards others, had served as a magnet for neighbors near and far, and some of them became like members of the family. They lauded her ability to give without asking for anything in return, the interest she took in their troubles, her sincerity, and her acerbic but never insulting humor. “If another woman like this is born, the Messiah will come,” one of her neighbors asserted. “She is a saint, helps everyone, even Arabs,” one young man, a chronic drinker, told me. The awkwardness he felt in Avraham’s presence, he averred, dissipated entirely in the face of Masouda’s candor and good humor. Presumably the superlatives that the neighbors used in speaking of her cannot be separated from her central status at the holy site, but in my observations I witnessed her concern for others many times. A partial list of her activities that appears in my notebook for a single week includes cooking meals for worshippers in the neighborhood synagogue who had taken a vow of silence, preparing food for a hospitalized acquaintance, and helping care for a neighbor who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. None of these activities were directly connected to the shrine. Her priorities could be discerned in the fact that, at the beginning of the 1980s, she had no hesitation about abandoning her role at the hillula of Rabbi David u-Moshe, the preparations for which she had coordinated for several weeks, to attend the funeral of an acquaintance in Haifa. In retrospect, Masouda’s characteristic energy and generosity could not have found a better channel than the family healing shrine established by her husband. Just as the saint’s revelation in 1973 was, for Avraham, the climax of a long search for a spiritual guide, it provided for Masouda a space in which she could maximize her social inclinations, which had been on display long before. Furthermore, in her preparations for the hillula, especially the cooking she did for the crowds of devotees, she could count on the assistance of neighbors and acquaintances from the social circle she had established. This circle grew larger as the years went by with many



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women becoming devotees of the shrine, drawn in by its magic and, in particular, by Masouda’s charms. Her style of enlisting such volunteers in the work at the shrine is exemplified in the story I heard from one of them, Sarah, a middle-aged woman from the Galilean town of Shlomi. Sarah first visited the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe in 1977, during an organized tour of Safed and its environs. Avraham was absent, so Masouda greeted the visitors and told them about the tsaddiq’s revelation. Sarah was moved by the story, and being, she confessed, a “born ham,” she began singing hymns of praise to the tsaddiq in Moroccan Arabic, while accompanying herself on a tambourine (compare with Ben-Ami 1984: 99-145). Now it was Masouda’s turn to be captivated. She snatched the tambourine from Sarah’s hands, refusing to return it until she agreed to appear at the impending wedding of Meir, her second son and third child. Sarah consented, “in honor of the tsaddiq Rabbi David u-Moshe,” and even appeared at the family’s home a few days before the wedding to help with the cooking. Following her success as a cook and a singer, she related, “they were so pleased that we became very close. They made me a member of the family.” By her own report, Sarah took on a critical role in preparing the hillula. “Any time they have something, they send for me and I come at once.” Even if there is an element of self-aggrandizement in her depiction, it illustrates the way the site sweeps people in, in particular because of the personal and family-like nature of the network of connections Masouda has woven around herself. Even visitors who do not belong to this network are impressed by her warm and unmediated hospitality. It is hardly surprising, then, that some stories I collected from women visitors to the site attributed the visitation dreams of Rabbi David u-Moshe to Masouda, not to Avraham. Masouda’s bounteousness has roots in her family. Her parents’ generous hospitality was legendary in the village of Imi-n-tanout, in particular thanks to their custom of housing and feeding the Jewish peddlers and craftsmen who poured into the village on market days. The village had three market days a week, so the feverish preparations at home for these guests and for the ebullient commotion of their arrival was a central part of their family life. This hospitality enterprise, in which Masouda took part along with her six sisters, were excellent training for her role in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Her sisters, who lived far from Safed (and in past years, her mother as well) also carried on the family tradition. As long as they were well enough to do so, they came to their sister’s home to help prepare for the hillula.

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Daughter-in-Law and Mother-in-Law With all Masouda’s generosity and bigheartedness, relations between her and Avraham’s mother were never close. Masouda resented her motherin-law for the scant assistance she had provided during the difficult years after their immigration, when Masouda, with small children in her care, had to work outside the house. This antipathy did not diminish with time, and relations between the two remained distant. Avraham, in contrast, maintained close ties with his parents. But from my conversations with him, as well as my observations, it was clear that they had but a marginal connection to the shrine. The role played by his father at the hillulot highlighted how remote he was from the sources of his son’s inspiration. He was one of the hawkers who sold candles at the entrance. Avraham’s mother, for her part, was completely uninvolved in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. But she told me that during the critical period of the tsaddiq’s revelation she was an important source of encouragement and confidence for her son. Her position with regard to his project—claiming a special role in the revelation, but uninvolved in the daily activity at the shrine—was a mirror image of her daughter-in-law’s, who was fully involved in preparations for visitors and celebrants, while making no pretense of having any direct contact with the tsaddiq. While my principal focus in this chapter is Avraham’s nuclear family—his wife and children who share the same roof with the tsaddiq—his mother’s view is worthy of mention because it offers an additional and, to a large extent, unique perspective with respect to the charismatic period of the tsaddiq’s revelation. According to the mother , she was the first person Avraham told about his revelation. (As I noted in the previous chapter, she linked the appearance of Rabbi David u-Moshe to an episode from Avraham’s childhood, in which his late brother was also involved.) She was also the first one to slip a donation into the collection box, situated next to the large family radio, in the hope that Rabbi David u-Moshe would cure the chronic leg pains that severely restricted her mobility. After making the donation, she dreamed that the tsaddiq’s wife appeared to her and instructed her to visit the neighborhood mikveh, the ritual bath. To her surprise, she was able to make her way to the mikveh and to immerse herself, despite her intense pain. When she asked the tsaddiq’s wife to provide her with the key to the mikveh so that she could immerse herself again whenever she felt pain, she replied: “You don’t need the key. You have free access to the place.” When she awoke, she found that her pain had disappeared. Her free access in her dream to the



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curative waters of the mikveh granted her a special status as the female parallel to her son. When he was preoccupied with transferring Rabbi David u-Moshe from his burial place in Morocco to his new home in Israel, her own connection was to the tsaddiq’s wife, who led her to the mikveh not far from Avraham’s home. The counterparts of Rabbi David u-Moshe and his wife were thus Avraham and his mother. The mother’s story confers on her a key role in establishing the site. She claims that she prophesied the date of the cease-fire that ended the Yom Kippur War, and as a result spurred her son to hold the hillula on its regular date. After a dream in which she saw Rabbi David u-Moshe making his way to Avraham’s home,46 she urged him to turn his bedroom into a room for the tsaddiq. After this was done, she demanded of Masouda that she take care to keep the room clean. She reinforced this directive in a way that casts light on an additional link between Avraham and his holy forefathers: “Be careful! This corner is holy. Here is my father’s Torah scroll.47 He read from it for thirty years. Here you will do the ziyyara [pilgrimage].” The fact that the Torah scroll in the tsaddiq’s room belonged to Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, the mother’s father, granted him a presence at the shrine. Rabbi Shlomo’s daughter, who presented herself as a partner of Avraham in his initiative, if not the person behind it, here attributes the site’s holiness to her father’s Torah scroll. This link between the family saint and Rabbi David u-Moshe backs up the presumption that, for Avraham and his mother, the figure of Rabbi David u-Moshe integrates representations of the Timsut family saints, principally Rabbi Shlomo. For many years, a large portrait of Rabbi Shlomo Timsut graced the family’s living room, adjacent to the to the tsaddiq’s room. Avraham’s mother, as I have noted, is the only member of the family who claimed a share in the undertaking as an active partner. This position was consistent with her being the only channel through which the merit of the family’s saints could be passed on to Avraham. The mother’s recounting of the events surrounding the establishment of the site clearly sought to elevate her status—especially given her marginal role in the site, according to other reports—and this probably grew out of her sense of self-importance as the bearer of the family’s sanctity. Her claim of involvement in the enterprise is in contrast to the cold shoulder Avraham’s father gave to his son’s initiative. After Avraham told him of the revelation, his father even tried to dissuade him from doing the saint’s bidding, fearing that he would become the laughingstock of the neighborhood. ***

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In examining the positions of Avraham’s children towards the tsaddiq who came to live in their home, it is first necessary to distinguish between their responses at the time I interviewed them, which generally reflect acceptance and accord with the site, and their initial responses, which were more heterogeneous and which reflected their age at the time of the revelation.48 The younger ones, the three youngest in particular, did not remember life before the tsaddiq appeared. The Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe had always been their home, so they took for granted the saint’s presence in their living space. The older children reported reacting with astonishment and bewilderment when they realized that their father intended to carry out his program. “At first we thought it was a joke,” Aliza, the eldest daughter, admitted. “We couldn’t take it in. It took us a while to get used to the idea.” However, even before Rabbi David u-Moshe’s appearance, tsaddiqim were a part of their view of the world as children. On the Sabbath, after breakfast, they would curl up in their parents’ bed and listen open-mouthed to the stories that Avraham so loved to tell about the saints and their wonders. They did not have close at hand, as Avraham had had in his childhood, an exemplary figure like Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, who could color the stories with his own personality. They did have word, however, of Rabbi Shlomo’s brother, Rabbi Moshe Timsut, who was still alive when they were children. Rabbi Moshe, who spent his days in prayer and fasting, was said to have prophetic powers, which manifested themselves in the events surrounding his death at the advanced age of one hundred. As was common in saints’ legends, his devotees related that he had predicted his day of death precisely, and was thus able to prepare and purify himself in advance (Bilu 2000: 38, 49; Ben-Ami 1984: 28). He was even able to delay the moment of his death so that he could bless each of his many grandchildren. Those who attended his funeral related that, when his body was placed in the ground, a trail of fire appeared in the sky, and in its light the dead man’s shroud shone like pearls. But neither the magic of stories of saints far and near that pervaded the house, nor Avraham’s uncompromising religious faith, was able to prevent the erosion of religious observance in some of the children when they reached adolescence. While Avraham avoided getting into sharp conflicts with his children over this issue, the defections, in particular in nonobservance of the Sabbath, were a source of great anguish to him.49 Rabbi David u-Moshe’s domicile in the house, whether or not it was connected to the children’s non-observance, created an atmosphere that made such



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slippage very difficult. Avraham quickly took advantage of the tsaddiq’s presence to battle his children’s non-observance. He bluntly explained any trouble or difficulty that befell them as the product of the tsaddiq’s anger at their scorn for the Torah’s commandments. Avraham’s method might have been unsophisticated, but because of the immediate presence of the saint in their home it proved effective. Shimon, Avraham’s second child and eldest son, related that his gradual move away from religion halted a few weeks after Rabbi David u-Moshe’s revelation when he came home one Saturday from the municipal swimming pool and a glass door suddenly shattered into pieces right next to him for no reason at all. His father’s unequivocal statement that this was a message from the tsaddiq regarding desecration of the Sabbath fell on credulous ears, given the nebulous guilt that Shimon in any case felt after the event. The son became observant again, to the gratification of his father, who sees Shimon as his heir and successor in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. When Avraham had no disasters or misfortunes to hold up as the tsaddiq’s admonishment against non-observance, he could still issue sharp-edged warnings and threats that, he said, Rabbi David u-Moshe had conveyed to him during their nighttime encounters. One of these warnings was directed at Rafi, Avraham’s son-in-law. In the early years of his marriage to Aliza, the eldest daughter, the couple lived in Kiryat Ata, far from Avraham’s watchful eye. During this period Rafi smoked and watched television on the Sabbath. Avraham, as was his wont, quickly enlisted the tsaddiq in his effort to return Rafi to the straight and narrow. In Aliza’s recounting, he told Rafi: “The tsaddiq has notified me—someone in my family is desecrating the Sabbath. I request that you tell me the truth, is it you? Know that a judgment has already been prepared in heaven, but I do not know who in my family is desecrating the Sabbath.” According to Aliza, the warning implicit in the tsaddiq’s message had its effect on her husband. Whether Rafi immediately changed his ways or not, when I met him at the beginning of the 1980s, after the couple had moved back to the Canaan housing project, close to the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, Rafi was scrupulous in his Sabbath observance. The tsaddiq’s influence over the children was not restricted to keeping them sheltered under the protective wing of the Torah’s precepts. While none of them established a direct connection with the boarder who had come to live in their home, they were regularly reminded of his presence, whether by Avraham’s recounting of his dreams or by the miracle stories related by visitors to the shrine. Shlomo, the only one of the children

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who expressed some reservations about his father’s project while living at home, was more conscious than were his siblings about the extent and power of the tsaddiq’s presence among them. In his words, “You live inside [the home of] the tsaddiq, you wake up at night and hear Dad talking with an invisible being; you hear stories from visitors; you start to get into those things; you begin to get scared.” The lives of the children in the ecological niche of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe changed utterly. They had to adjust their daily routines to the tempo of a pilgrimage site. They lost some of their privacy and their parents’ attention, and at the same time were expected to sacrifice their time and help out during busy periods. On the other side of the equation, they met interesting people from all over Israel (and sometimes from outside Israel) and developed a far-flung network of social contacts. As hosts in the tsaddiq’s house, they took pleasure in the pilgrims’ wonder and veneration, which often was accompanied by gifts and contributions. Along with these ecological changes, the tsaddiq’s influence was apparent in how they structured events in their lives. In some of these cases, the construction of reality came directly from within themselves, and in other cases from their father. The four brief portraits of the grown children that I will now present are meant to show their individual styles of dealing with their father’s initiative. They display the two types of changes: “ecological” and “constructionist” that the holy boarder made in their lives. From Canaan to Kiryat Ata and Back Aliza, the family’s oldest child and the only one born in Morocco, just a few months before their move to Israel, was nineteen years old when the saint appeared in her home. She, too, was compelled “to put an end to the swimming pool and the transistor radio on the Sabbath,” at first under compulsion and later, as she became more involved, by choice. Since she was her parents’ chief helper in caring for her younger brothers and sisters, her relations with her parents are especially strong, by her account. She views her mother as her best friend, “like a close sister” (recall that Masouda is only fifteen years older than Aliza). This intimacy meshes with the fact that Aliza was the only one of the children who reported her own contacts with Rabbi David u-Moshe. Aliza’s first dream is of special significance in light of the fact that the death of her uncle, Avraham’s brother, in a traffic accident was presented as a decisive factor in the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. In her dream, an unfamiliar elderly man warns her of an impending automobile



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accident, which could cost her her life unless she makes a contribution to avert the evil decree. Dismayed by the ominous message, she quickly sought her father’s advice. Avraham immediately identified the messenger as Rabbi David u-Moshe, and instructed her to insert the specified sum in the dream into the collection box in the tsaddiq’s room. A short time later, Aliza and other members of the family were involved in a serious automobile accident, from which they emerged unscathed—a miracle, she maintained. To remove any doubt as to the reason they were saved, Aliza learned from a local fortune teller that “You might have been crippled for life, but a certain old man saved you. He always watches over you, thanks to him you were saved.” Aliza’s belief that the saint saved her from a serious accident, as already noted, sharply contrasted with the sense of powerlessness and helplessness evident in the story of Avraham’s brother’s death in a minor accident (and from Avraham’s dream that preceded the accident). Aliza’s second dream was triggered, she claimed, by a troublesome event. Passing by three of her neighbors, she heard them gossiping about her failure to marry at an earlier age. Their chatter spread salt on her wounds, because Aliza was then in her mid-twenties and two of her younger brothers and one younger sister were already married. That same night she dreamed that: I entered a [burial] cave,50 full of green foliage, lighted candles, and opulent rugs. All the members of the Safed burial society were there. When they saw me, they all began shouting: “What are you doing here? You have no right to enter!” Suddenly the grave opened and an old man came out. This time I saw him clearly. He had a white beard, a beret on his head, like my father’s cap, and a white jalabiyyeh. He was very angry at these people. “Why are you screaming at her? You have no right to scream at her.” He then made me a sign to approach him and gave me his blessing. Afterwards he returned to his grave.

The story is not directly connected to the neighbors’ gossip, which ostensibly was the cause of the dream, but the dream almost certainly gives expression, through the familiar motif of limited access, to the distress Aliza felt in the face of her younger siblings’ marriages while she remained alone. The confrontation at the beginning of her dream thrust Aliza, a young and single woman, into a position clearly inferior to that of the assemblage of older (and

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presumably married) men who served in positions of religious importance. Their attempt to depict her as unworthy of entering the holy place may have expressed, in the special language of a visitation dream, her low self-esteem, resulting from her unmarried status. In keeping with the familiar pattern, the situation reverses itself at the end of the dream. Among all those gathered at the tomb, she is chosen to approach the tsaddiq and receive his blessing. The narrative of this dream seems to have been influenced by Avraham’s initiation dreams, in which the dreamer’s appearance as the special favorite of the tsaddiq is depicted in a manifestly competitive context. Her father’s influence is illustrated concretely in the portrayal of Rabbi David u-Moshe. In this dream, unlike its predecessor, he is clearly identifiable. The tsaddiq and his emissary fused, with the stereotypical markers of the tsaddiq—a white beard and jalabiyyeh—augmented remarkably by the beret that Avraham wears. This is an exceptional combination among the many dreams about Rabbi David u-Moshe collected from visitors to the site, although Avraham appeared in some of them. It perhaps indicates Aliza’s admiration for her father. After her marriage, Aliza moved to her husband’s home in Kiryat Ata, north of Haifa. The separation from her parents was difficult for her, even though she visited frequently, and she pleaded with her husband that they move to Safed. A week before the tsaddiq’s hillula in 1982, they moved into an apartment in the Canaan project, walking distance from the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Over the years, Aliza’s commitment to religious observance grew stronger, and she began to work as an attendant at a mikveh. The Burden of Inheritance Avraham designated Shimon, his second child and eldest son, as his right-hand man in managing the shrine. Shimon, as I have already mentioned, slacked off in his religious observance during adolescence, but resumed orthodox practice after the tsaddiq appeared in his home—most likely as a result of it. Upon completing his mandatory military service, he signed on for a few more years as a communications technician in the standing army (in which his two younger brothers also served). After leaving the military, he pursued the same profession in Bezeq, then Israel’s national telephone company. As the eldest son, with an even temperament and good relations with his parents, Shimon was seen as Avraham’s heir apparent, who would run the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe after its founder’s death. During my visits to the home, it was evident that Shimon was involved in educating his siblings—he was their disciplinarian, a task he carried off better than his soft-



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hearted father. Shimon’s industrious and genial wife, Shoshana, always ready to help, found a place in the hearts of her mother and father-in-law, becoming Masouda’s ally on the family side of the site’s affairs. Shimon and Shoshana evinced the same accord and cooperation that characterized the relations between Avraham and Masouda. The close relationship between Shimon and his parents deepened with the birth of Avi (short for Avraham), Avraham’s first grandson and namesake. After the birth of Avi’s two sisters, Shimon and Shoshana moved into a new apartment in the Canaan project, within earshot of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, thus highlighting their close ties to the shrine and its residents. A few years later they moved again, into a more spacious home in a new neighborhood on the eastern edge of Safed. Despite the closeness between Shimon and his father the son was not privileged to receive a direct revelation from the tsaddiq. Apparently, he lacked his father’s flashes of inspiration, and Avraham’s deep roots in the traditions of saints’ cults. Nevertheless, on a number of occasions, Shimon sensed the tsaddiq’s intervention in his life. One of the most notable examples is reminiscent of the event that lay at the foundation of Rabbi David u-Moshe’s first appearance to Avraham. Shimon was temporarily unemployed and decided, after consulting with Shoshana, to try his luck in another city. When he was unable find housing outside Safed, Shimon realized that the tsaddiq was exerting his influence: Rabbi David u-Moshe was preventing him from moving far from his sacred sanctuary. Avraham, it will be recalled, had been making plans to move out of his home just prior to the tsaddiq’s first appearance, which brought those plans, too, to an end. But while Rabbi David u-Moshe privileged Avraham by appearing in his dreams, Shimon could only deduce the saint’s intervention circumstantially. For the father, Rabbi David u-Moshe was a revealed entity, directly involved in constructing the world around him; for the son, he was enlisted to explain otherwise incomprehensible events.51 Shimon made no explicit display of discomfort over not having received a direct revelation. But the series of events that follows, which he related to me and which includes a dream of his about the grave of a famous tsaddiq near Safed, may contain within it an attempt to cope with such concerns and to prove that he was worthy of the position for which he had been designated. A carful of visitors arrived one day to visit the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, as part of a pilgrimage to saints’ graves in the Galilee. They asked Shimon to guide them to their next stop, the grave of Yonatan Ben-Uziel in Amuqa. While Shimon had often visited the site, just a short drive from his home, he had trouble finding his way this time. The graded dirt road that

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then ran through a forest to the grave “seemed to disappear.” Surprised and frustrated by his failure to bring the visitors to their destination, he returned them to the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe and asked his father to be their guide. Avraham conducted a brief interrogation of the visitors and discovered that one of the women was in her menstrual period. He ordered her to get out of the car, took Shimon’s place, and led the group confidently to Yonatan Ben-Uziel’s grave.52 Even though Shimon’s navigational failure was proven to have been caused by the presence of an unfit passenger, the event highlighted the distressing disparity between his own and his father’s relationship with the saint. The dream Shimon had that night seems like an overt attempt to compensate for this and to bolster his wounded self-confidence. In the dream he finds himself on the way to Yonatan Ben-Uziel’s grave, weighed down by a festive meal as an offering to the tsaddiq. When he reaches the site, it is empty, but it suddenly fills up with hundreds of yeshiva students, who slide down the wooded slopes. Shimon hands out generous portions of the meal to all of them, concluding his display of bounty by giving a passing beggar a generous donation.53 When he told his mother about the dream, Masouda insisted adamantly that they had to enact it immediately. The next day Shimon rented a car and the entire family, bearing enough food for a royal feast, drove, without getting lost, to the grave. To their astonishment, the events depicted in the dream all came true. The clearing by the grave was empty when they got there, but two busloads of yeshiva students soon arrived, and they all received generous portions from the feast. Then an old beggar appeared, and Shimon promptly gave him the same sum of money he had offered in his dream. The way Shimon ended his story may well indicate that he still had doubts about his worthiness, and might even have masked veiled competition with his father over closeness to the tsaddiq. “I asked Dad, ‘look, it’s like I told you, isn’t it? You see, since I wasn’t able to get here [last time] … it’s like compensation.’ And he [Avraham] agreed: ‘It really is a miracle.’” Sharing a feast with the visitors to the tsaddiq’s grave, performed by Shimon in his dream and in reality, may be confirmation of his designated role as the next emissary of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Shimon’s quite understandable doubts about his relationship to the tsaddiq were not shared by Avraham. Certain that his initiative granted his descendants ownership of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe until the end of days, he wrote, in 1983 a will that forbade his children forever to sell the holy site, and named Shimon as his successor in running and keeping it up. Avraham’s decision was still in force, twenty years later, in the early 2000s,



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when I revisited the site, even though another son, Ami, who was unmarried and still lived at home, was more involved than his brothers in the shrine’s day-to-day affairs. Rescue in Lebanon, Holiness in Beit She’an Meir, Avraham’s third child, has lived outside Safed since his marriage, the only one of his siblings to settle elsewhere. He lives close to his wife’s family in Beit She’an, a family “he has gotten used to,” as one of his brothers says sarcastically. Despite the distance, Meir maintains close ties with his parents, visits them frequently, and helps out at hillulot and other holidays. Unlike Shimon and his younger brother, Shlomo, Meir never deviated from the religious observance of his parents, and accepted without challenge Rabbi David u-Moshe’s move into their home. Since then, the tsaddiq has intervened in his life in a variety of ways. One of the most notable touches on his marriage. Meir’s future mother-in-law, a longstanding acolyte of Rabbi David u-Moshe, frequented the shrine in the Canaan project from its earliest days, and quickly joined the inner circle of volunteers who assist in preparing for the saint’s hillula. Meir met her daughter at one of the hillulot, under the tsaddiq’s roof, and the family welcomed his desire to marry her, given the strong ties between the two mothers. The combination of circumstances that led to this marriage is an example of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe’s ecological influence on its residents. However, in the case of Meir, who internalized the tsaddiq’s presence in the home and made it a cornerstone of his identity, such influences extend far beyond the shrine’s “ecological niche.” When he moved away from the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, he applied the interest in tsaddiqim that he had acquired at home to the Gate of Paradise, the holy site established in Beit She’an in 1979, and the subject of the next chapter. The two sites had close personal ties. Without a doubt, the success of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe served as an inspiration and model for Ya’ish Oḥana, the founder of the Beit She’an shrine. Relations between the two sites became even closer due to Meir’s personal mediation. He was actively involved in the new site, which was close to his home, leading the Sabbath prayers in the small synagogue that was established in Ya’ish’s backyard. He helped organize the hillula for Elijah the Prophet, the site’s patron. Apparently, Meir found in the Gate of Paradise a platform for continuing the veneration for tsaddiqim that he had acquired in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Meir’s active service in the first Lebanon War of 1982 serves as a

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concrete example of the construction of reality via the tsaddiq, through Avraham’s mediation. According to Meir, the war ended for him in less than a week, when he fractured his leg while participating in a routine patrol activity. His brief and undramatic description of how he was wounded is utterly different from his father’s account, which attributes a decisive role in protecting Meir to the tsaddiq. According to Avraham, Rabbi David u-Moshe appeared in his dream and commanded him to choose “something good from the garden.” He pointed to a large sheep that Avraham was raising in his yard, and demanded that he vow to sacrifice it for a feast when the war ended. “It will atone for your son and bring the boys home safely.” The family believes that Avraham’s vow saved Meir’s life.54 Here is Masouda’s version of how her son was wounded: “They were six of them in a tank, and the tank hit a mine. One lost his hands, feet, and eyes. The other poor boys were badly wounded, only Meir was saved. As if someone pulled him out by the head and threw him away from the car [sic]. He fell on a boulder and only twisted his heel. That’s all.” Meir was wounded, according to his family, the day after Avraham’s dream. The account of tsaddiq’s physical intervention in the incident (“As if someone pulled him out by the head and threw him away from the car”) is fairly common in saints’ tales, and in the Israeli context is especially prevalent in military contexts, terrorist attacks, and automobile accidents. Meir’s rescue combines two of these categories, and brings us again to the death of Avraham’s brother, who was killed in an automobile accident while in uniform. Avraham’s premonitory dream, which offered an effective way of averting the impending catastrophe (as in Aliza’s first dream), looks like the direct opposite of the dream he had before his brother’s death, which indicated that the imminent death was unpreventable. Choosing “something good from the garden” recalls the beautiful rose that the tsaddiq picked in Avraham’s dream, after which he ended his long mourning for his brother. But even more than the dream, the events surrounding the brother’s death reverberate in Masouda’s version of her son’s injury, given the sharp contrast between the two events. The brother died because of an absurd coincidence of events, without having been exposed to any real danger; none of the other passengers was hurt or was even aware of what had happened. In contrast, Meir found himself in mortal danger and was miraculously saved, while all the other soldiers with him were badly injured. The brother’s death showed itself in Masouda’s account when, in the heat of her story, she replaced the tank the soldiers rode in with the word “car,” and attributed Meir’s injury to the same factors that led to her brother-in-law’s death: hitting a boulder



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after falling-jumping from a moving vehicle. These parallels indicate the huge influence of the brother’s death on the Ben-Ḥayyim family, being as it was a key event in the tsaddiq’s revelation. That trauma was apparently still very much alive in the family memory. It had to be reenacted under the tsaddiq’s protection so that it could be recast and given a happy ending that would mitigate its ominous implications. The Rebel Shlomo, the fourth child, was in his mid-twenties during the period I spent time at the site. To a large extent, he was the black sheep among his older siblings’ largely harmonious acceptance and acquiescence of the saint. Independent, intelligent, and personable, Shlomo, it seemed to me, enjoyed being the family’s enfant terrible and getting into confrontations with his parents and siblings. It is ironic that the son named after the holy grandfather, the family’s own tsaddiq, Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, distanced himself from religious observance in general, and from his father’s enterprise in particular, to a greater extent than any of the family’s other children. In talking to me, Shlomo evinced no doubt as to his father’s sincerity in establishing the site, and he expressed admiration for his parents’ devotion to their children. However, he bristled at the heavy price he had been compelled to pay for the tsaddiq’s presence in his life. So, for example, even though he was an exceptional student, to his parents’ dismay he dropped out of the local high school and enrolled in a vocational military boarding school far from home. Shlomo attributed this move, which took him for many years off the path to academic studies, to the tsaddiq’s appearance in their home, which left him without proper conditions for studying. When I made his acquaintance, a decade later, after he had served in the standing army for several years, Shlomo had enrolled in a pre-academic program to prepare himself for college. He succeeded, and by the 1980s was working as a computer programmer in the Safed municipality. At the time, however, he was resentful about the twisted road he had been compelled to take on his way to a career. His critical attitude, reinforced by the new social environment he was exposed to during his pre-academic studies, made Shlomo the black sheep of the family—both in his attitude towards religion and in his politics. The Ben-Ḥayyim family traditionally supported the right-wing Likud, which was in power under the leadership of Menachem Begin at the time. Shlomo leaned to the left. During his vacations from the pre-academic program, he lived in a tiny one-room apartment two houses away from the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, thus demonstrating his independence from the family. After

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his marriage, he chose to live outside Safed, in nearby Rosh Pina. Shlomo’s critical stance highlights the limitations of the religious and moral system that Avraham imposed on his family when he brought the tsaddiq into his home. Even though the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe looks to believers like a shrine that cures all troubles and illnesses, in Shlomo’s case it exacerbated the differences between him and his parents. Nevertheless, he never thought of severing his relations with his family. The fierce debates he conducted with them sometimes infuriated his parents, but he argued with them from a position of intimacy and concern for their welfare. His grievances about the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe never concealed his immense admiration of his parents’ faith and resolve. Given Shlomo’s refusal to assign himself to the ecological niche his father constructed, it is hardly surprising that he reported no events, neither in dreams nor in waking, in which he felt the tsaddiq’s presence or intervention. Nevertheless, he did not doubt that, for his father, the saint’s revelation was quite real and that it was central to his life. To resolve this dissonance, Shlomo took a classically relativistic position, which sharply distinguished between his own construction of reality and that of his father. But this unilaterally imposed dichotomy did not, of course, obligate Avraham, who indeed ignored it on any number of occasions to imbue key events in Shlomo’s life with new meaning involving the tsaddiq. One dramatic example in which Rabbi David u-Moshe entered Shlomo’s life without his knowledge involved a very concrete and dangerous border crossing. During Shlomo’s military service, before the Lebanon War, he was deployed at times in the security zone in southern Lebanon, which was controlled by the Israel-supported Army of Southern Lebanon. During his time there, he became friendly with a Lebanese villager who urged him to visit his home. Avraham maintained that he was completely unaware of the Lebanese friend before being warned by Rabbi David u-Moshe in a dream that the villager’s hospitality was a trap, and that he intended to poison Shlomo and hide his body. Avraham telephoned his son the first thing the next morning at his base and demanded that he not accept the invitation. According to Avraham, the precise description he provided of the traitorous friend and of his village convinced Shlomo to accede to his father’s request. Shlomo’s rescue by the tsaddiq, according to Avraham’s account, is a common theme in stories of saints’ miracles. The tsaddiq reveals a wellconcealed plot by a relative or friend to murder a Jew or an important person (Bilu 1993: 94; Ben-Ami 1984: 175, 528). But the story also recalls the first chapter in the family mythology, involving Avraham’s ancestor,



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Rabbi Shlomo, the first of the Timsut family’s saints. Recall that this first Rabbi Shlomo was murdered on the orders of a treacherous Arab woman, and his body was interred in the walls of her home. The miraculous events that led to the discovery of his body and of his murderers elevated Rabbi Shlomo to a tsaddiq for the Jewish community in Marrakech, and converted his grave into a pilgrimage site. In this chapter of the family myth, Rabbi Shlomo’s descendant, who bears his name, faced a similar trap, but was saved at the last minute thanks to the intervention of Rabbi David u-Moshe. This tendency to repeat key events in the family saga in order to reconstruct them in the present creates a recurring mythical pattern. But appealing to mythical events in the past is not meant only as a return but also as a repair. When they end badly, as with the murder of Rabbi Shlomo in the distant past, or the fatal automobile accident of Avraham’s brother in the recent past, they are shaped, with the help of the tsaddiq’s cultural idiom, in order to ensure that past traumas will not be repeated. *** Shlomo’s individualism and desire for autonomy burgeoned, in the framework of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, into quarrelsome and sometimes resentful confrontations with his parents and siblings. But this polarization was not common among the children. Most of them, in particular the younger ones who grew up together with the tsaddiq, found balanced and smooth ways to adjust to the sacred boarder. On the whole, Rabbi David u-Moshe’s constant presence in the home seems to have had a positive effect on the family. The tsaddiq united the family around a common goal, suffused with spirituality, that granted them social status as well as material income. I presume that housing the tsaddiq, which meant that the members of the family all had to exert themselves in the service of visitors while giving up a part of their privacy, could not have succeeded if the family had not been cohesive and harmonious from the start. But their cohesiveness and harmony grew stronger under the influence of the saint’s immanence. The pull of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe on the children was expressed in their inclination to establish their own homes close to the site or to move closer to it over the years. In 1983, Aliza and Rafi had already moved back into the Canaan project, after a few years in “exile” in Kiryat Ata. Shimon and Aliza moved within the project from more outlying apartments to ones closer to the shrine. Their old dwelling was bought by a sister-in-law of Miriam, the fifth of the Ben-Ḥayyim children, who moved

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to Safed from Yeruḥam. Miriam herself returned to the Canaan project after a short time in Yeruḥam with her husband. Another daughter, Etti, was married during that period and found an apartment a stone’s throw from the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. The general picture was of an ingathering to the home of their parents, which was also the tsaddiq’s sanctuary. This centripetal movement was especially evident at times of crisis, when the need for closeness and support grew.55 An excellent opportunity to measure the drawing power of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe against distancing and separating forces appeared in February 1981, when rumors began to spread through Safed that the city would soon suffer a massive earthquake. These rumors, which putatively came from an authoritative scientific source, alarmed the inhabitants of this town that had experienced deadly earthquakes in the recent past.56 Many inhabitants decided to spend the fateful weekend when the earthquake would supposedly occur in safe places far from home. While these people were rushing to abandon the city, the members of the Ben-Ḥayyim family gathered in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, including Aliza from Kiryat Ata and Meir from Beit She’an. They spent the fateful night on mattresses in or close to the tsaddiq’s room, placing their trust in Rabbi David u-Moshe and believing that under his protection nothing bad could happen to them. As one might expect, Avraham immediately positioned Rabbi David u-Moshe in the center of these dramatic events. During his nighttime encounters with the saint, he learned that the catastrophe had been decreed because of nonobservance of the Torah’s laws in Safed, and was averted at the last minute after many members of the community repented out of fear of God. At his synagogue, Avraham arranged for special prayers and charitable giving in order to avert the evil decree. That same Friday night, a powerful gust of wind blew through Safed, and Avraham interpreted it as an indication of the catastrophe that might have been. A less evident but important influence that the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe had on the Ben-Ḥayyim family was the income the shrine provided. In addition to being a center of healing and pilgrimage, the site was also a considerable economic resource. Donations were such a standard practice among visitors that few dared come without offering a contribution. There was no explicit demand for donations, nor were any sanctions imposed on those who did not offer money. But the quasi-contractual logic of the believer’s relationship with the tsaddiq required the pilgrim to make an offering in order to receive the saint’s blessing. It is difficult to assess how much money gets slipped into the collection box in the tsaddiq’s room. But



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on hillula days, and during the period of the Lag B’Omer pilgrimage to Meron, when thousands of people pass through, the sums must be substantial. It would be even more difficult to estimate how much money remains in the box after the site’s operating expenses are paid for. Doubtlessly, Avraham is correct when he says that when there are more visitors, and thus more contributions, the costs of maintaining the site and preparing for the hillula also rise. I have already mentioned that Avraham provides every person who attends the hillula with a sumptuous meal. This tradition had required, for example, the purchase of industrial-size refrigerators as well as of a substantial amount of food and drink. As best as I was able to ascertain, no sharp line was drawn between public and private funds. Avraham frequently grumbled about the heavy costs he incurred in running the shrine, and was always looking for ways to generate more income. At the same time, he seemed to be entirely convinced that, as the saint’s servant and spokesman, he was entitled to benefit from the saint’s blessings. If the home and shrine were one and the same, and if the tsaddiq was a member of the family, then it was only natural that the income from the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe and the family’s income go into the same pot. Most visitors to the site were well aware of this overlap, but only a handful expressed any disapproval of it to me. Most matter-offactly accepted the concept that the tsaddiq’s blessing pervades the home that opened its doors to him. The children almost certainly benefited from Rabbi David u-Moshe’s material blessings. This is another “ecological” aspect of the saint’s presence that is impossible to exaggerate in considering the children’s positive relation to the site. Yet it is entirely invisible to visitors. They are inevitably impressed by the contrast between the opulence of the saint’s room and the plainness of the apartment, as well as by Avraham’s lack of pretensions and Masouda’s affability. “The tsaddiq chose well,” they say.

The Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe at the Dawn of the TwentyFirst Century Twenty years after I made my observations of the site, and some 35 years after the tsaddiq’s first appearance to Avraham, the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe remains the most successful of the sites I describe in this book. The statement with which I concluded Avraham’s life story, that his venture had found itself a permanent place among Israel’s holy sites, remains valid in the shrine’s fourth decade. In retrospect, the seeds of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe’s impressive success were planted in the

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combination of circumstances attending the way it was founded—Avraham’s determination and practicality; Masouda’s warmth; the harmony between them; the efficient operation of the site and the close cooperation the two of them established with other members of the family, with neighbors, and with friends; the persona of the tsaddiq they took into their home— one of the most revered and famous of Moroccan saints, yet one without a historical identity and living descendants to vie for his blessing; the Canaan housing project’s convenient location on the route taken by pilgrims who visit the holy gravesites in the Upper Galilee; and in particular its proximity to Safed’s Old City, Meron, and Amuqa. Finally, the opportune timing of the first hillula, at the end of the Yom Kippur War, helped the site break into public consciousness, and the political and socio-religious shake-up that Israel underwent after the trauma of the war produced a public climate more amenable to the expression of ethnic and mystical sentiments. All these factors continue to promote the site’s success today. When I began my field work in the Canaan housing project, at the beginning of the 1980s, Avraham’s enterprise was already approaching its tenth year and seemed to be solidly established. Over that first decade, he had managed to obtain, through hard work, the necessary permits, and was in the process of enlarging the site and installing the facilities required to receive large numbers of visitors. During the past decade, it has gone through a process of institutionalization that have established its status as a holy site, although it has not yet received official recognition from Israel’s National Authority of Religious Services. Safed’s Sephardi chief rabbi, Rabbi Shlomo Eliahu, has made a point of not visiting the site, but his eloquent silence about the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe has not prevented the Safed municipality from providing lighting, a sound system, and cleaning services for the hillula. Some years ago the city budgeted municipal funds to renovate the site and its surroundings—the yard in front of the house was enlarged and paved with colorful tiles; light poles were installed, and the packed dirt path leading to it was paved with asphalt and given an official name: Rabbi David u-Moshe Way.57 Avraham has made almost no changes in his way of life over the years. He can be found each day in his home dressed in everyday clothes and wearing a black beret, practical and efficient, busy with the routine upkeep of the site, organization of the coming hillula, and welcoming visitors. Despite his uncharismatic appearance, his status in the eyes of visitors seems to have increased apace as a result of his long association with the tsaddiq. Given his position as Rabbi David u-Moshe’s “landlord,” pilgrims tend to regard



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him as the saint’s agent; at the hillula they gather around him and request his blessing. In recent years, having passed the age of 70, Avraham has grown a beard. He says that he received explicit instructions to do so from Rabbi David u-Moshe, as well as Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, and Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, in a dream. The change in his appearance has imbued him with a more spiritual mien. Unlike her husband, the previously industrious and vigorous Masouda has had to cease all her activity as keeper of the home and of the shrine—diabetes has nearly blinded her. But her place has been taken by her daughters and daughters-in-law who live in Safed. The crowded family atmosphere in the apartment containing the holy site remains. Of Avraham and Masouda’s ten children, seven live in Safed, among them the oldest daughter and son, Aliza and Shimon, and their families. They can all be found frequently at their parents’ home. Miriam, who is divorced, lives with her four children in an apartment above that of her parents. Ami, the ninth child, the only one who remains single and still lives at home, helps his father run the site. In the 1980s only two of the children, Meir and Shlomo, lived outside Safed; another daughter, Sara, has since moved away, following her husband to Ofakim. Avraham’s children have nearly all remained religiously observant, and some of them have become more religious than they were in the past. Avraham and Masouda have, at this writing, a total of 42 grandchildren, the oldest of whom have already completed their military service. Three of the grandchildren are named after Avraham. The family’s huge growth, and the pressures of the families of the sons- and daughters-in law, make complete family reunions rare events these days. Nevertheless, the children’s inclination to live close to their parents’ home has grown even stronger. The Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe seems to have passed the test of time well. It has not lost its attraction for the family or for its devotees. The large photograph of the saint’s burial sanctuary near Tamzert in the western High Atlas Mountains on display in the saint’s room in Safed is evidence that Avraham no longer fears competition from or comparison with the original site.58 Indeed, there is no reason to have any such concerns today, when only a handful of the Jews who lived in Morocco at the beginning of the 1950s remain there. The site in the Atlas Mountains seems to have adjusted to the new order: there, over the saint’s grave in Tamzert, which is visited by few today, proudly hangs a photograph of Rabbi David u-Moshe’s new home in the Canaan Housing Project.

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Notes The name “David u-Moshe” means “David, son of Moshe.” The “u” (the Hebrew letter vav) means “and” in Hebrew, but in the Berber dialect spoken in the High Atlas Mountains, where the saint is buried, it means “son of.” The names of other tsaddiqim take the same form, for example Rabbi David u-Baruch and Rabbi Yehuda u-Re’uven. See Ben-Ami 1984: 288, note 47. 2 The first site in honor of Rabbi David u-Moshe was established in Ofakim. Others are located in Ashkelon (Ben-Ami 1981), Moshav Aderet, and Gan Yavneh. 3 Ben-Ami (1984: 219) calls this category of tsaddiq “the national saint, revered by all Moroccan Jews, who flock to him from all regions.” 4 There are a number of explanations for the high concentration of saints in such remote places, none of them mutually exclusive. Psychologically, distance may invite a lengthy journey to the saint’s grave, which requires effort and a willingness to withstand difficulties and dangers. These factors, which are an inseparable part of the “pilgrimage spirit,” enhance the experience of the encounter with the holy site, grant it a spiritual dimension, and reinforce the pilgrim’s ties to the saint (Turner 1973). In Morocco, the reverence in which a saint is held is all the greater the farther south one has to travel in the mountainous interior, where high peaks are interspersed with isolated valleys. This may be attributable to the difficult living conditions and lack of political security that were the lot of the Jews there, and to the influence of the Berber population, which was known for its devotion to saints’ cults (Ben-Ami 1984: 222). While the Jewish population in these areas declined in the twentieth century, the sites were preserved and served to link the country’s Jews to their communities of origin. It may also have been a way of asserting a legitimate claim—worded in religious rather than political language—to ownership of these holy areas (Goldberg 1992). Ben-Ami (1984: 222) found that more than a third of the graves of Moroccan Jewish saints are located in the High Atlas Mountains, including the seven most important sites. 5 The pamphlet on Rabbi David u-Moshe that Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim issued in 1988 states that Rabbi David u-Moshe lived in the year 1171 of “their” [the Christian] reckoning, but this date has no historical support. 6 The traditional hillula date, according to Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, was the first day of the Jewish month of Heshvan, the date the hillula is celebrated in his apartment in Safed. But Ben-Ami writes that the hillula was observed on the 1



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first day of the following month, Kislev (Ben-Ami 1984: 647). 7 These include entering and exiting bent at the waist, with the face turned to the marble plaque, hands clasped behind the back. 8 This sense of fraternity, reinforced by the egalitarian distribution of meal portions to the guests, manifests the experience of communitas, the community of equals that typifies pilgrimages. See Chapter 1, p. 27. 9 Compare this to the Muslim baraka, which is inherited only in the male line (Crapanzano 1973: 48). On the subject of rivalry for the saint’s baraka, see Bilu 1988. 10 In Ben-Ami’s comprehensive compilation of Moroccan Jewish saints’ legends it appears only once (1984: 562). 11 On the resolute opposition of Moroccan fathers to their sons’ interest in kabbalah, see Bilu 2000: 63-64. 12 The discovery of the tomb of Benayahu Ben-Yehoyada is attributed by the book Shivhei Ha-Ari (Beḥinat Ha-Dat 389, p. 44) to the sixteenth-century mystic Rabbi Yitzḥak Luria Ashkenazi. The tradition regarding the graves of Abaye and Rabba is mentioned in several sources, among them in Sha’ar Ha-Gilgulim by Rabbi Luria’s pupil, Rabbi Ḥayyim Vital (p. 75) and his Sefer Ha-Hezyonot (p. 170). The tradition regarding the grave of Yonatan Ben-Uziel is even older, appearing in the Evyatar scroll from the eleventh century. For these and other traditions, see Vilnay 1963. 13 In fact, the tomb in Gush Ḥalav was traditionally ascribed to Rabbi Meir Katsin, one of the leaders of the group of 300 rabbis who immigrated to Palestine in 1211 (Ilan 1997: 198). 14 Or Ha-Ḥayyim is the most important work by, and the common designation for, the Moroccan-born kabbalist Rabbi Ḥayyim Ben-’Attar (1696-1746), who late in life moved from Italy to Jerusalem. His tomb on the Mount of Olives attracts many visitors, especially on the day of his hillula, the fifteenth of Tammuz. 15 Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera (1807-1880), called “the divine kabbalist,” wrote important works of mysticism and was the founder of the Abu-Ḥatsera dynasty of saints, the most famed and revered of historical Moroccan Jewish saints. See Ben-Ami 1984: 408-411; Manor 2003. 16 On the element of individualism that characterized Jewish life in Morocco, see Deshen 1983. 17 See Exodus 4:2-4; 7:9-13. The inaccessible mountain and the large book may also be a reference to the story of the bestowing of the Torah. 18 On a snake that guards the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, see Baba Metzia 84b; Kohelet Rabba 11:6; Psiqata de-Rav Kahana, Beshalach, 23. It should be noted that this is the first, and in the case of the Talmud, the only

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mention of a tradition that Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai was buried at Meron. 19 “Not good” in this context means that she is in her menstrual impurity, or that she is immodest in her behavior or in her dress. See Ben-Ami 1984: 87-88. 20 The cult surrounding Rabbi Shimon’s grave is first mentioned in writings from the fifteenth century, and its rise is apparently connected to the great interest in traditions about him evinced by Spanish exiles in the land of Israel. But the tradition linking Rabbi Shimon to Meron is earlier. See Beniyahu 1962; Braslavi 1956; Huss 2002; Ya’ari 1962; Reiner 1988. 21 The association between black and death appeared in a later dream of Avraham’s niece. She was a soldier and suffered a crippling attack of angina pectoris. In her dream she found herself in a hospital, dressed in a black gown. Rabbi David u-Moshe suddenly appeared and took the gown from her, saying that it belonged not to her but to the elderly woman in the next bed. A few days later the elderly woman died. 22 On the ritual to be followed to avert the consequences of a bad dream, see the Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 55b. 23 The declarations’ literary language, on a much higher linguistic register than that of Avraham’s spoken Hebrew, testify to the local rabbi’s contribution. Avraham stressed that in editing Avraham’s words, the rabbi remained faithful to his oral account, and that whenever he deviated from it he suffered from a severe attack of dizziness that prevented him from writing more. 24 Avraham’s passivity is reinforced by his claim that at first he ignored the dream and refused to carry out the tsaddiq’s demands. Only when the dream was repeated did he agree to become the tsaddiq’s emissary. This initial demurral, which we will see with Ya’ish Oḥana as well, echoes the model of the prophet who at first declines to carry out his divine mission, see Ex. 3:11, 4:11-13; Jer. 1:6. The dreamer’s presentation of himself as a passive vessel operated by a power greater than himself is reminiscent of the prophet Ezekiel’s rhetoric (Ez. 8:3, 40:1-3). According to Jewish law, a person asked to lead a prayer service is supposed to refuse initially (Bab. Talmud Berachot 34a). 25 The lack of clarity regarding the nature of the revelation—while awake or in a dream—is characteristic of pre-sleep and post-sleep (hypnagogic and hypnopompic states). Such a liminal state already appears in the biblical account of the patriarch Abraham and the covenant of the cut animals. 26 It should be recalled that Rabbi David u-Moshe’s presumed origin, like that of many non-historic tsaddiqim, was the Land of Israel (Ben-Ami 1984: 317). This provenance reinforces the logic behind the tsaddiqim’s desire to move to Israel. According to Ben-Ami, a mystical tradition among Moroccan Jews states that when all the tsaddiqim have returned to the Holy Land, the messianic



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redemption will occur (Ben-Ami 1984: 43-44). 27 See Chapter 1, note 22 and nearby. 28 Recall that another Avraham—Abraham the patriarch—was visited by three angels (Gen. 18:1). 29 While “Moshe” is in fact the name of the tsaddiq’s father, most devotees understand both “David” and “Moshe” to be the tsaddiq’s names. 30 Compare this with the midrashic claim that Moses abstained from marital relations with his wife when he led the Children of Israel in the desert (Sifri Bamidbar 99). 31 This dream has a midrashic basis. On the verse “My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies” (Song of Songs 6:2), Shir Hashirim Rabba 6:1 states: “to gather lilies to remove the righteous [tsaddiqim] from Israel.” 32 The Hebrew word for “cave,” me’arah, means “cemetery” in the Arabic dialect of Moroccan Jews, as it does in traditional texts about holy sites. Since, in his first Announcement to the Public, Avraham’s dream took him to the tsaddiq’s burial site in the Atlas Mountains, one might assume that he continues to seek his grave in this dream. But the descriptions of the road and the cave indicate the possibility that this is a journey to the Garden of Eden. The elders sitting and studying Torah with Rabbi David u-Moshe recall depictions of the righteous in paradise, and the iron door that burns whoever touches it is reminiscent of the walls of fire around the Garden of Eden and the burning and turning sword at its gate, which ignites everything around it (see Eisenstein 1990: 85). The transformative nature of the road also fits a journey to Eden, as does the fact that in reality the tsaddiq’s transfer is effectuated in a dream, in a symbolic-spiritual way, rather than physically, by uncovering the remains of his body. 33 Recall that, at the same time the tsaddiq entered Avraham’s apartment as a baby, a flesh-and-blood baby, Moshe, was born and named after the tsaddiq. This reinforces the image of the tsaddiq as a child. 34 In retrospect, it may well be that Avraham’s pronounced passivity in the first dream, which dissipated and even reversed itself in the second Announcement to the Public, was highlighted for rhetorical purposes. The guise of a prophet begging to be excused from his task, or of a reluctant prayer leader, may have helped to render Avraham more credible and to counter any suspicions that he was a counterfeit. 35 See I Kings 17:17-24. 36 See Yalqut Shimoni to Genesis, Mossad Harav Kook edition, 142; Zohar I: 168a.

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On the 72-letter name, see the responsum of Rabbi Hai Gaon on the names of God (Otsar Ha-Gaonim on the Hagigah tractate of the Talmud, B.M. Levin edition: 23). According to this source, the name derives from three verses of the Torah (Ex. 14:19-21), but its letters are not known. 38 Thirty years later, on the first day of the month of Elul 2003, Avraham, then 72 years old, had a similar dream. The Angel of Death notified him that his earthly life had come to an end, but that heaven had awarded him another twenty-two years. This dream echoes a midrashic story about Benjamin the tsaddiq , who was on his deathbed. In consideration of his acts of charity, the heavenly court ripped up his judgment and awarded him another twenty-two years of life (Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 11a). On the psychological level, beyond the self-aggrandizement that this dream represents, it should be noted that Avraham had been preoccupied with his death for many years. 39 The principal reason for the authorities’ reluctance to approve construction and enlargement was that they viewed establishment of a public site in a private home as a transparent change in land usage. City rabbis (who are public officials) and religious councils (the public bodies responsible for the provision of religious services) have condemned the cults practiced at new sites such as Avraham’s for a range of reasons—skepticism about the truth of the dreams and the validity of the messages they conveyed; concern that the sites would turn into places of disregard for religious observance (for example, because of a lack of separation between the sexes); and in some cases, they opposed in principle worship at the shrines of flesh-and-blood tsaddiqim. 40 In particular, Avraham sought a way into the heart of Safed’s mayor at the time, Aharon Nahmias. At the beginning of the 1980s he even asked me, in my capacity as a scholar studying the site, to accompany him to a meeting with the mayor. Avraham had trouble understanding how the mayor, who was himself a scion of a famous Moroccan family that had produced many tsadiqqim (BenAmi 1984: 265), could refuse his requests. My impression was that Nahmias was concerned that the new site would reinforce the negative stereotype of Israel’s Moroccan community as believers in superstitions. When Nahmias, who represented the Labor Party, was replaced by Ze’ev Perl of Likud, the local authorities became more sympathetic to the site. 41 We may presume that Avraham addressed the tsaddiq in a dream, but there is no direct testimony to this in the narrative of the event. As I have noted, Avraham has frequently claimed in recent years that the tsaddiq appears to him while he is awake and not in a dream. 42 On the community of dreamers that emerged around the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, see Bilu 2000a. In many of these dreams, believers who had 37



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intended to visit the saint’s original grave in Morocco were told to visit his new home instead. 43 Rabbi Meir’s hillula is held on the fourteenth of Iyar, Pesach Sheni, and that of Rabbi Shimon on the eighteenth of Iyar. Recall that Avraham named his two oldest sons, the first children of his born in Israel, after these two tsaddiqim. 44 The sheep, which Avraham sees as a sacrificial surrogate for his children, recalls the ram that the patriarch Abraham sacrificed after God obviated his earlier command that Abraham sacrifice his son (Gen. 22: 1-19). 45 On the links between Ahiya Ha-Shiloni and Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai in the midrashic literature and the Zohar, see Liebes 1982, Nagal 1972. Rabbi Ya’aqov Yosef of Polnah, a disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov, testified to the connection between his teacher and Ahiya Ha-Shiloni, whom he depicted as the teacher of Elijah the Prophet. See Altschuler 2002: 24, Atkes 2000: 103 (note 32). The fact that Avraham dreamed about the Ba’al Shem Tov during this same period may indicate that he was aware of the connection between the two figures. 46 Other people also had similar dreams relating to the first revelation. A neighbor woman dreamed that she saw a man with a white beard and jalabiyyeh (a robe-like garment worn in Arab countries) walking among the neighborhood’s homes. When she invited him into her apartment, the man refused and said that he was on his way to Avraham’s. These (dream) views of the revelation from different angles turn it into an inter-subjective and interpersonal one, thus lending it authority validity. 47 The mother’s demand that Avraham’s bedroom be given over to the saint and that Masouda keep it clean can, from a psychodynamic perspective, be seen as a wish to separate the couple and to impede intimacy between them. This wish is complemented by her claim of close relations between her and her son (mediated by her closeness to her father, the tsaddiq Rabbi Shlomo). Recall that in her dream Avraham and she are placed in juxtaposition with Rabbi David u-Moshe and his wife. 48 It should also be kept in mind that these initial reactions were reported by the children in retrospect, when the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe was already an established fact. 49 This may also be the background to the Third Announcement to the Public, which focused on the consequences of not observing the Sabbath. 50 She apparently means a cemetery; the word me’arah, which means “cave” in Hebrew, means “cemetery” in the Moroccan Jewish dialect. 51 On the distinction between participational and explicative modes, see Crapanzano 1973; Bilu 1982.

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On the hazards of “unclean” women visiting holy graves, see Ben-Ami 1984: 88-89, and below, Chapter 5. 53 The dream emphasized not only Shimon’s munificence but also the fact that the food was sufficient for the hundreds of visitors who appeared at the site. The prophet Elisha also miraculously handed out inexhaustible food (II Kings 4:1-7). 54 The dream may refer to a paradigmatic trial faced by another Avraham (Abraham), the father of the Jewish people, who sacrificed a ram instead of his son, whom God had originally demanded as an offering. 55 In Israel’s social and geopolitical context, the “center” in the Canaan housing project is in fact located at the margins (see Turner 1973). I referred in the opening chapter to the significance of the growth of new holy places in Israel’s urban periphery, and will return to this subject in the concluding chapter. 56 The worst of these, in 1837, destroyed entire neighborhoods and killed thousands. 57 The site’s municipal development was carried out at the initiative of Moshe Hania of the National Religious Party, Safed’s mayor from 1993 to 1998. One of the oft-told miracle stories about the saint related by the Ben-Ḥayyim family is how Hania won the municipal election thanks to the tsaddiq’s blessing. 58 At the beginning of the 1980s, when I brought Avraham framed photographs of Rabbi David u-Moshe’s grave in Morocco, he preferred to hang them in his own room, which was off-limits to both the family and visitors. At the time I deduced that he feared drawing attention to the saint’s original tomb. 52



III

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Ya’ish OḤana, Elijah the Prophet, and the Gate of Paradise

The Road to Paradise In 1979, more than five years after Avraham founded the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, another announcement to the public went out to the Moroccan Jewish community in Israel. Its author was Ya’ish Oḥana, foreman of a municipal cleaning crew in Be’it She’an. This development town is located in a well-watered valley along the Jordan River, about an hour’s drive to the south of Safed. In his missive, Ya’ish related that he had discovered the gate to the Garden of Eden in his backyard in the Dalet housing project. In his case, too, the revelation came in a series of dreams, during which an anonymous tsaddiq, who later identified himself as the prophet Elijah, informed Ya’ish of the site’s significance. A tradition that the gate to paradise is located in Beit She’an dates back at least to the Talmud. That work ascribes to Resh Laqish (Rabbi Shimon ben Laqish, a third century sage) a statement regarding the Garden of Eden: “if it is in the Land of Israel, Beit She’an is its gate.”1 This tradition, which apparently grew out of the fertility of the Beit She’an Valley, its plentiful springs, and the abundance of crops it produces, was preserved in written sources for many generations (Vilnay 1976; Ha-Parhi 1969). But the connection between the glorious mythic past and the current shoddily-built development town with its severe economic and social problems, is hardly obvious, to put it lightly. I will return to the connection between the new holy places and Israel’s urban periphery in my final chapter. Here I will focus on the life story of the site’s founder, in order to decipher the personal dynamics that impelled him to attempt to make the utopian, transcendent idea of paradise concrete in the back yard of a home in a nondescript border town. Like the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, the Gate of Paradise was a home-based holy site, despite the heavenly aura its name implies. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Oḥana family lived in a modest garden apartment in a two-family house on a side street of the Dalet housing project, on the town’s west side, not far from the local clinic of the General Health Fund. The apartment was hidden from the street by a thick hedge. A gate stood in the

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middle of the hedge, and the arch above it was emblazoned with a verse from the Psalms, “This is the gate to God, the righteous will pass through it.” The path that led from the entryway to the apartment’s front door branched off to the right into the central section of the yard, where fruit trees—mulberry, olive, pomegranate, peach, and citrus of various types—had been planted. There were also beds of herbs and rose, jasmine, and bougainvillea bushes. The path led to the “gate,” a bare concrete platform, edged in wrought iron in a Star of David pattern. At the center of the slab stood a gate, above which is a sign that stated “respect the sanctity of the site.” A small plastered shack standing next to the fenced-off compound served as the Elijah the Prophet Synagogue. On its other side was a tiny structure where candles were lit and bottles of oil stored. The site was of modest size, and its two central structures were built simply and unprofessionally, but the synagogue’s interior boasted intricate ornamentation and colorful wall coverings. And the garden, with its burgeoning plants and flowers and “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food,”2 was beautiful and serene. Ya’ish conducted a hillula for the site’s patron saint, Elijah the Prophet, each summer at the beginning of the month of Elul. About 150 celebrants then gathered in the garden and shared a festive meal, sitting at well-appointed tables set up under the trees. The celebration’s climax was an auction of candles to be lit to Elijah and to other famous tsaddiqim, both local and Moroccan.3 About a year after the site was revealed, the synagogue was expanded and incorporated the fenced concrete platform, which at first seemed to be the heart of the site. This move could be seen as an attempt to moderate the blatant, perhaps overly-audacious implication that a place of cosmic significance, the center of the universe (axis mundi), had a specific location in an ordinary backyard. In fact, the Gate of Paradise fired the imaginations of many neighbors and visitors and played an important role in their dreams. But the slapdash appearance of the bare platform also disappointed some pilgrims, who even demanded that the site be excavated by archaeologists so as to see what really lay under the slab. The expansion of the synagogue did much to mitigate this skepticism about the nature of the invisible opening. As a synagogue (and later as a beit midrash, house of study) named in honor of Elijah, the site was much less provocative and exceptional. Furthermore, elevating the position of Elijah as the site’s patron saint while deemphasizing the cosmic gate reshaped the site along a model closer to that of Moroccan Jewry’s traditional saints’ cults. ***



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Ya’ish was born at the beginning of the 1940s in Oulad Mansour. This village perched on the northern slopes of the High Atlas Mountains, between the towns of Sidi Rahal and Demnat, about 60 miles east of Marrakech. The inhabitants were Arabs, but there was a large Berber population in its environs. At its largest, shortly before World War II, the local Jewish community comprised several dozen families. After the war, however, the Jewish presence dwindled, mostly because families moved to Casablanca. The community disappeared entirely at the end of the 1950s, at the time of the mass migration to Israel. The Jews of Oulad Mansour differed from other rural Jews in southern Morocco in that most of the families were farmers, although they did not entirely forsake traditional Jewish crafts. The village’s Jews entered into partnerships with Muslims for the purpose of raising livestock and cultivating grain, vegetables, olives, and figs. They also leased land to work themselves, and in a few cases were even able to purchase farmland, which they cultivated with the help of Jewish and Muslim tenant farmers. The Jewish fishermen on the nearby Tasa’out River were among the village’s best. Individual Jews worked as farmers in other Atlas Mountain communities, but Oulad Mansour seems to have been the only place where an entire Jewish community did so. I will not go into what circumstances produced this exceptional phenomenon (see Bilu & Levy 1996), “un accident de l’economie juive,” in Pierre Flammand’s words (Flammand 1959: 84). But the community’s agricultural way of life was clearly a major element in Ya’ish’s childhood memories, and a factor in his establishment of the Gate of Paradise. Like the family of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, founder of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, Ya’ish’s mother came from a venerable family rich in “zekhut avot,” the merits of its ancestors, while his father, who lost his own father at a young age, came from a family poor in both pedigree and in money. In many ways, the father seems to have been the archetypical Oulad Mansour Jew. Thin, sinewy, and powerful, a diligent and determined laborer, he had no aversion to any work that helped him make his living. In the blazing summer months he labored as a hired man in the fields of Jews and Muslims, and in other seasons he traveled among the Berber villages in the area, plying the trades of cobbler, as well as a shoer and saddler of horses. Three months a year, prior to Pesach, he worked in Casablanca, in a bakery owned by a welloff member of his family, where he helped bake matzah. In Israel he also worked as an agricultural laborer until his retirement, first in Keren Kayemet forests, afterwards in the cotton fields of the kibbutzim in the Beit She’an

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Valley, and finally as a gardener for the Beit She’an municipality. When I met him at the beginning of the 1980s, he was already 86 years old, yet I was astonished by how quick his mind and his step were, as I was by his diligence and his positive attitude to life. Despite his age, he continued to work with great zest in his own garden and to tend his fruit trees. Like many members of his community, including his son Ya’ish, he loved to describe nostalgically the happy life he had enjoyed in Oulad Mansour. But unlike the others, he seemed to be unreservedly contented with his lot and with life in Israel. Ya’ish was extremely attached to his parents and visited his father each day. But the simple uneducated father was not a source of spiritual inspiration for the son or his project. Like Avraham’s father, Ya’ish’s father appreciated his son’s initiative and supported him once it began, but he was not in any way involved in the establishment of the site. His passive approach to the Gate of Paradise can be seen in the one dream he had about it, a short time after Ya’ish received his revelation. In the dream, unidentified men (tsaddiqim?) came to him and asked him to build a synagogue in his house. “I couldn’t think of anything to say to them,” he said candidly. “How would I make a synagogue? And in fact it was left at that and I didn’t do anything.” It would seem that the event in the dream indicates that Ya’ish’s father was infected by the excitement surrounding Ya’ish after his epiphany. But his helplessness sharply contrasts with his son’s readiness to obey the instructions he received in his dream, and to build a holy site and synagogue in his yard. Among Ya’ish’s earliest memories were visits to the graves of tsaddiqim in and around Oulad Mansour. The site closest to the Jewish mellaḥ was the ancient Jewish cemetery on a mountain peak above the village, Il-Kuhaniya (Arabic: “The Priests”). According to tradition, it contained the graves of ten priests who had come from the Land of Israel to Morocco in ancient times (Ben-Ami 1984: 440). Next to them lay the grave of a revered local saint, Rabbi Moshe Waqnin (Ben-Ami 1984: 487). But the most popular holy site in the area was the grave of Rabbi David Dra Ha-Levy, one of Moroccan Jewry’s most important saints. It lay to the east of the village, on the main road to Demnat (Ben-Ami 1984: 310-316). The ziyyara, or pilgrimage to Rabbi David’s grave took place close to the Shavu’ot holiday and attracted thousands of participants, among them Ya’ish and his family: “When I was little, I remember that my father would take me to the tsaddiq Rabbi David Dra Ha-Levy near Demnat. We’d stay there a week with the whole family, eating, drinking, and having a good time.”4 Ya’ish was very much involved in the local landscape, with its abundant



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tsaddiq-rich countryside, but he perceived it largely as a background to the activity of his family’s tsaddiqim. Precisely as in the case of Avraham, whose pioneering initiative was a model for Ya’ish, the saints in Ya’ish’s family were all on his mother’s side. Ya’ish was attached in particular to the two most recent of them—his mother’s grandfather, Rabbi David Amar, and his mother’s father, Rabbi Yissakhar Amar, the grandfather he knew in his childhood. Rabbi David had been a charismatic kabbalist, and the locals believed that he had possessed the power to use holy names that only he knew to change the order of the world. “You could have seen him go to a flowing river, say two words, and the river would run dry,” Ya’ish related. Rabbi David’s mastery of mystical secrets allowed him to control the demonic world, and made him a famous healer: “The demons would plead with him, with one word he’d tie them in chains … he’d talk to them, you better believe it, until they kissed his feet” (compare with Bilu 2000: 68, 88-104). In contrast with the mythological halo that surrounded his great grandfather, Ya’ish’s grandfather, Rabbi Issakhar (the son of Rabbi David) was a familiar figure of whom he was very fond. Rabbi Issakhar was venerated by the community because of his learnedness and the merits of his forefathers, even though he did not engage in healing himself (“He knew, but did not want to write [charms],” Ya’ish explained). Ya’ish was about five years old when his grandfather died, but his earliest memories display a figure he loved and longed for: “I know him, I remember him, I’d go to him every day. I’d sit with him each day and talk to him, bring him food.… He didn’t do anything, he was rich, [he had] stores. He’d only study Torah, he had land, cows.” Rabbi Yissakhar Amar and Avraham BenḤayyim’s grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, obviously played very similar roles for their grandsons. In both cases the grandfather was their mother’s father, scion of a dynasty of tsaddiqim, a well-off and well-respected figure, whom each man knew well as a child and with whom he had a special and loving relationship. In my account of Avraham’s journey to Rabbi David u-Moshe, I suggested that the tsaddiq might, for Avraham, represent his revered grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo. In the same way, the prophet Elijah represented, for Ya’ish, the tsaddiqim of the Amar family, especially his grandfather, Rabbi Yissakhar. The tension between, on the one hand, an intimate relationship with a saintly grandfather and the merits that derived from his ancestors, and on the other hand the troubling fact that the family saints all come from one’s mother’s families, led Ya’ish to feel a “distant intimacy” that contributed to his attempt to prove his ancestral claim on the saint through the grandiose site he established.

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Ya’ish spoke a great deal about his childhood in Morocco, and his memories had a notably idyllic cast. He spoke longingly of the community’s religious character and spiritual atmosphere: “Over there, there was no television, nothing, not even a radio with batteries. The Sabbath was Sabbath, a holiday was a holiday. On the Sabbath we sat, ate and drank together, prayed together.” The village boys, Ya’ish among them, spent most of their days engaged in sacred studies in the local synagogue, under the rabbi’s watchful eye. Slackers were beaten. “We didn’t leave the synagogue. From the morning prayers until four in the afternoon we studied Torah,” he said. Ya’ish depicted relations with the village’s Muslims as harmonious and close, completely unlike the animosity between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. In this, Ya’ish was no different from other former residents of Oulad Mansour, who described the relations with their neighbors as quite cordial (if not entirely free of tension). Among the reasons they offered were physical and professional proximity and the agricultural partnerships between Jews and Arabs. They also cited the Jews’ physical strength and courage, the network of personal connections they maintained with Muslim leaders, the local government’s support for the Jews, and the village’s special geopolitical circumstances, which cast the Jews as sought-after mediators between the Arabs and Berbers (Bilu & Levy 1996). Ya’ish also recalled with the nostalgia the close social ties between members of the Jewish community, especially within his family, which lived together, one house touching the other, close to his grandfather, Rabbi Yissakhar Amar. But more than all else, Ya’ish yearned for the abundance of nature and the simple and healthy life of his childhood haunts: “We worked six months a year.… In the winter we’d sit at home, eat, drink, pray, and sleep. Everything was plentiful there. We had beans, pears, grain, sacks full of fruit.” Such idyllic descriptions lead one to ask whether Ya’ish’s project was not meant, among other things, to recreate the lost paradise of his childhood in the back yard of his home in Beit She’an. The fact that Ya’ish himself used the image of paradise to characterize his happy life in Oulad Mansour supports this hypothesis: “Life was very healthy then, not like today, when everything you eat is sprayed with poisons. With us, everything was natural … water came from a spring, just like the Garden of Eden.”5 Below I will show how Ya’ish attempted, consciously and explicitly, to heal a variety of childhood injuries via his holy site. The Oḥana family left Oulad Mansour for Beit She’an in 1954—the same year that Avraham and his family arrived in Safed. The trip involved



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a number of intermediate stops. From their village they and the rest of the community moved the Marrakech, and from there to Casablanca and then to France. Only after a lengthy stay in a transit camp near Marseilles were they able to make their way to Israel. Proud of their distinction as farmers, the Jews of Oulad Mansour, Ya’ish’s father among them, hoped to be sent as a group to a new moshav, a cooperative farming village, “so that we could live in Israel as we lived in Morocco, each sowing for himself.” But they were disappointed—the villagers were scattered throughout Israel.6 The Oḥana family, with five of its six children, found itself in Beit She’an, first in a transit camp and then in an apartment in a two-family house in the Dalet housing project. Living conditions in the transit camp, and then in the half-completed housing project, were harsh, but Ya’ish’s father accepted the tribulations as the price to be paid for staking their claim in the Holy Land, and his forbearance permeated his family. The only thing he refused to accept was the fact that his eldest daughter, who had been married in Morocco, had been separated from the family and sent with her husband to Tiv’on, near Haifa. After a long struggle, he succeeded in moving her to Beit She’an. When I made my visits to the site, only one of Ya’ish’s two brothers and two sisters lived outside Beit She’an. All the rest, who were children or teenagers when they arrived in Israel, continued to live in Beit She’an after their marriage. Furthermore, they all made their homes in the Dalet housing project, close to their parents’ home. Their deep roots in Beit She’an and in the Dalet neighborhood, tracing back to their move to Israel, recall the Ben-Ḥayyim’s strong attachment to Safed and the Canaan housing project. As in the case of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, so the establishment of the Gate of Paradise seems to have been linked to the Oḥana family’s sense of belonging to their place of residence. Yet, even though the family was united, the twelve-year-old Ya’ish’s life changed utterly after the move to Israel. The gravest change, one that causes him agony to this day, was his decision to drop out of school a year after the family arrived in Beit She’an. It is especially painful because, in Oulad Mansour, he had been diligent and conscientious in his studies at the synagogue. “All day, from morning to evening, only in the synagogue, studying Torah.… When we were there we were strong, we know that was the way. You have to walk that path. You have nowhere to run to. The rabbi would not let you slack off.… And we’d get beaten. I got hit not just once, not twenty times, and it was good.” In fact, Ya’ish’s father saw the oldest brother, Shimon, as the most promising student among his sons. When

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I spoke to him, he lamented Shimon’s refusal of an offer to study for the rabbinate in the United States. Whether or not Ya’ish is preening feathers that are not his, his sense of missed opportunity is real and distressing: If we hadn’t come here, I might have been a great rabbi today. I had a head for it, what can I say. The rabbi who taught us was beside himself, he’d say: “I see, the boys, I sit with them for hours and hours, and I don’t manage with them. You are the only one who’s a success.… We had a will to learn.… If there was a day that the rabbi wasn’t there, I taught the boys in the synagogue. That’s the way it was until they registered us to go to Israel.

Ya’ish described the move to Israel as a turning point that expunged his previous identity: “As soon as we arrived in Israel, we forgot the whole world.” He bewailed the permissiveness and lack of a strong framework that he encountered in school in Beit She’an, as well as the general, secular studies that replaced the study of the Torah and its commentators. “Here the teacher doesn’t care. The child loses his bearings and goes on to questionable behavior .… At school here in Be’it She’an we heard nonsense that we never heard overseas, that aren’t connected to religion in any way. That way you forget everything. We learned the same things they [the local Israelis] do and we forgot everything.” He used the word “forget” over and over again in his descriptions of the move to Beit She’an, as if the move to Israel caused Ya’ish culture shock, to the point of amnesia about his past. Perhaps precisely for this reason, Ya’ish, more than any other saint’s impresario I met, strove to recreate a forgotten past in his yard and to heal the wounds caused by the move to Israel. Some of the indications of this attempt at repair will be presented below. After dropping out of school, Ya’ish was free to do as he wished for several years, with no formal framework or guiding hand. He began working at the age of 15, at first in the fields of the neighboring kibbutzim, and afterwards at the archaeological excavation of ancient Beit She’an. Exempt from military service because he was blind in one eye, he participated in the restoration of the Roman amphitheater and gained a reputation as a skilled builder. His industry and good temper endeared him to the archaeologists who oversaw the excavations, and when the work there ended he was invited to join the team that restored Masada, the ancient mountain fortress overlooking the Dead Sea. Ya’ish accepted the offer, despite the difficulty



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of parting from his parents and his family home. Because of his distance from home, he grew slacker in his religious observance—a process that had already begun when he dropped out of school. Once he went so far as to violate the Sabbath—an event he recounted to me with undiminished emotion decades later. One Saturday, when he was left idle in the archaeological camp, he succumbed to the temptation to turn on the record player and listen to music. Punishment was not long in coming. The next day, while he was working on the roof of a structure that stood above one of the site’s ritual baths, on the edge of the cliff face, Ya’ish lost his balance and fell. A footstep separated him from the abyss below. Even so, he fractured his skull and sustained a concussion that required hospitalization. Plagued by guilt, he accepted the injury “joyfully” as a just punishment for his sin, and vowed never to desecrate the Sabbath again. Moreover, despite the good working conditions and the pleas of the archaeologists, he decided to return to his parents’ home in Beit She’an. In dramatic language he related to me his rejection of the temptation to stay (which would have involved violation of the Sabbath) an indication of the magnitude of the shock he had suffered: I said: “I’m done with it, this is the end, better for me to slash my hands and not do anything on the Sabbath, even if they give me a million.” My foreman said: “I’m willing to pay you triple time, if you’ll just work on Saturday.” I told him: “Take yourself a hundred thousand now and go to heaven,7 Tell me to work for you on the Sabbath, I won’t do it.” He said to me: “Why?” I told him, “Because my conscience doesn’t let me.”

Other saints’ impresarios also slackened their ties to religious observance after moving to Israel. Avraham, the oldest of them, who arrived in Israel in his twenties and at the head of a family, did not change his religious lifestyle, but some of his children grew less observant (a phenomenon that largely ended after the saint’s appearance). Another saint impresario from Beit She’an, Alu Ezra, whose story I will tell in the next chapter, also viewed the desecration of the Sabbath as the most severe manifestation of nonobservance. Ya’ish’s “return to religion” (and return home) took place before his epiphany, but as we will see, it was not complete because of a pressing affliction that made it difficult for him to perform his duties in synagogue. Only after the discovery of his holy site did Ya’ish find a solution to this problem, allowing him to return to full religious activity.

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Between the lines of Ya’ish’s story of how difficult it was for him to leave his parents’ home, one can see how badly he missed them during his “exile” at Masada. His return home is reminiscent of the strong centripetal pattern that characterized the Ben-Ḥayyim children, who returned to Safed to live close to their father. This would seem to presage Ya’ish’s extremely strong ties to his own home (which lay close to his father’s home) after the revelation—he was unwilling to leave it, even for short periods. I found similar feelings among the other saint’s impresarios, hardly surprising given that, in one way or another, they had all turned their homes into temples. Ya’ish’s personal story makes one wonder whether the time he spent working on national archaeological sites in Beit She’an and Masada, in contact with the glories of the past, did not shape his discovery.8 As we will see below, the key action in Ya’ish’s initiation dream was an excavation that uncovered the lost beauty of the Garden of Eden.9 When he returned to Beit She’an, Ya’ish went to work at the Kitan textile factory, the town’s major employer at the time. There he met Ḥannah, whom he later married. The couple moved into an apartment adjacent to the home of Ya’ish’s father. A few years later Ya’ish left Kitan and went to work for the Beit She’an municipality, were he supervised a team of street cleaners. Ḥannah also left Kitan after their children were born. At the time of Ya’ish’s revelation, she was working as a nanny for the baby of a local teacher. Despite Ya’ish’s modest salary, which compelled him to moonlight at wedding halls, he was pleased with his working conditions at the municipality. While he went to work at dawn, he finished before noon and was free for the rest of the day. Being the introverted, homebody type, Ya’ish spent most of his time in his yard, tending his garden (he later had to take out part of the garden in order to add a security room to his apartment), and reading from the Book of Psalms. This relaxed combination of gardening and spiritual communion, against the backdrop of his flourishing flowers and trees, can be seen as the new site’s incubation period. The traditional images of the Garden of Eden indeed combine spirituality and scholarship with a flourishing and abundant physical environment. It is hard to ignore the similarity between this period in Ya’ish’s life and the daily routine of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim before Rabbi David u-Moshe revealed himself. Avraham, too, spent many of his work hours in the pistachio orchard in Biria forest. There he recited the Psalms and told tales in praise to the tsaddiqim in the heart of a picaresque valley, surrounded by ancient tombs. The inspiration for the projects of both these men, men of nature, rooted in the land, which they enjoyed tilling and caring for, can be



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seen in the fertile landscape no less than in sacred texts. A direct line of love of nature and simple living within it stretches from Ya’ish’s memories of his idyllic childhood to the beautiful garden he tended around his home, and from there to the holy site he established there (in part at the expense of the garden). It was the gate to a cosmic paradise, a golden place of happy origins and utopian futures. Avraham, whose childhood memories were rooted in the verdant landscapes of his childhood village, worked all his years in Israel in forestation projects and also tended a thriving garden around his house. Of course, Avraham’s holy site is not a garden—on the contrary, its construction came at the expense of the garden, which was uprooted to provide facilities for celebrants and visitors. But his longing for a simple, fulfilling, natural life is evident in his speech, rich in botanical images. It can also be seen in his actions at home and on the site—for example, he heats his home in the winter with wood he chops himself, and he raises sheep in his garden for consumption at the hillula.10 Beyond what Avraham and Ya’ish share in family background and love of nature, Avraham’s project, the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, served, as I have already noted, as an inspiration and model for Ya’ish (and other saints’ impresarios). Ya’ish had a very personal connection to the site in Safed. Married twelve years, and with three daughters, Ya’ish and his wife longed for a son. When they heard that Rabbi David u-Moshe had manifested himself in the Canaan housing project, Ḥannah was quick to visit the saint in his new home. She presented her petition to the tsaddiq and vowed that if a son were born, she would name him after the saint. A year later David was born, Ḥannah and Ya’ish’s only son and their fourth and last child. As with Avraham and other saints’ impresarios, the appearance of Elijah and the establishment of the Gate of Paradise occurred after the family’s fertile period ended. Ya’ish’s belief that his only son was born thanks to the intervention of Rabbi David u-Moshe increased his reverence for the tsaddiq. He, too, visited the new site in Safed and was stirred by what he saw and heard there. The experience found expression in a dream he had that same night: I sat there in the dream before morning, someone came, grabbed me, embraced me, you know, like we were friends. He said to me: “Don’t you recognize me?” I said, “No.” He said: “I am Rabbi David u-Moshe, I want to go home with you.” I told him, “Please, you are welcome.”

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The dream, whose occurrence just before morning granted it all the more importance and validity,11 displayed the usual pattern in which the dreamer does not spontaneously recognize the tsaddiq. But this initial lack of recognition was quickly replaced by a gesture of intimacy from Rabbi David u-Moshe. He grasped Ya’ish, embracing him as if he were an old friend, and asked to be taken to his home. The dreamer responded verbally and with alacrity. Clearly, the dream was a challenge to Avraham’s initiative. Was Ya’ish seeking to “steal” Rabbi David u-Moshe from Avraham, after Avraham had brought him from Morocco to Safed?12 The dream may well have indicated that Ya’ish envied Avraham for having “gotten” Rabbi David u-Moshe first, and that Ya’ish longed to establish a similar site in his home. But the dream’s conclusion—his verbal invitation, not answered—hints, perhaps, that Ya’ish was aware his wish was pointless. This hypothesis is reinforced by what Ya’ish said after recounting his dream: “When I woke up from that dream, here at home, after I came from there [from the Canaan housing project], the next day I dreamed the same thing with Rabbi Ḥoni Ha-Me’agel, just like what Rabbi David u-Moshe did with me.” The dream’s repetition with another tsaddiq indicates that the dream that revealed the Gate of Paradise, which will be recounted below, was not a sudden and unexpected event. Ya’ish’s craving for a symbiotic alliance with a tsaddiq, which seems to have germinated within him for a long while before the revelation, consolidated and progressed in a process of trial and error. Ya’ish tested a number of options, it seems, before reaching Elijah and Paradise. Avraham went through a similar process, in which he transferred his allegiance from his grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo, to Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, and thence to Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, until he finally “homed in” on Rabbi David u-Moshe. Avraham’s search had a manifestly rational character to it: a saint who came from his family but lacked a reputation was followed by two others, one with an established tradition (Rabbi Shimon) and the other having many heirs with a claim to him (Rabbi Ya’aqov). All these were abandoned for a famous saint with no heirs (Rabbi David u-Moshe). Ya’ish, too, imagined gaining a stake in Rabbi David u-Moshe (even though he had already been claimed by Avraham), or in Ḥoni Ha-Ma’agel, the tsaddiq of Ḥatzor Ha-Glilit. Yet he did not seek to actualize these fantasies and in the end chose to establish an ambitious site, but one without competitors and unique to Beit She’an. In both cases, the search was conducted in the field of dreams, which allowed the dreamer to try out various tsaddiqim. This grants the impresarios’ path to the tsaddiq the dimension of a “dream biography” (Bilu 2000a).



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The connection between Ya’ish and Avraham continued after the establishment of the Gate of Paradise—when Meir Ben-Ḥayyim, Avraham’s son and a resident of Beit She’an, became one of the central figures involved in organizing the hillula of the prophet Elijah. He brought his father to some of these celebrations, deepening the personal link between the two sites. Over the course of these same years, Ya’ish suffered from a vexing problem that affected his quality of life and detracted from his ability to fulfill his religious obligations. As an introverted, shy person who felt uncomfortable away from home, Ya’ish incurred intense distress in social situations, especially in synagogue. “But I’d force myself to go to synagogue,” he told me. “The reason I had not to go to synagogue was that I was afraid they would call me up to the Torah. I was so nervous, felt such shivers, I couldn’t … I was afraid that I would go up to the Torah and make a mistake.” This fear of the public that plagued Ya’ish, which took on the proportions of a social phobia, applied to attending prayer services in general. “During the services I was like crazy man. Whenever I pray, Satan stands facing me to mix me up in the prayers. To the point that sometimes I cover my eyes with my tallit [prayer shawl] so that I won’t see anything.” His anxiety eventually grew so intense that he stopped attending synagogue on the Sabbath. But, even then, his anxiety continued to plague him in social situations: “When I go to someone else’s house, the same thing happens, I’m completely embarrassed, can’t move. I tried as hard as I could, nothing helps, I don’t go.” As the anxiety grew even worse, Ya’ish found it difficult to pray and recite the Psalms even at home. Did Ya’ish’s plight play a role in his backyard discovery? Here, too, a comparison with Avraham is helpful. Recall that Avraham suffered from profound depression, following the death of his brother in a traffic accident, during the period that preceded the appearance of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Given the general claim that religious revelations and mystical experiences often grow out of loss and life crises, we should note the different ways the two men coped with their difficulties—ways appropriate to their specific ailments. Avraham’s distress seems to have come in response to a traumatic experience, while Ya’ish’s social phobia was, in his account, a character trait that had always afflicted him (“ever since I was born,” he asserted). Avraham shook off his depression after the appearance of the tsaddiq, who gave him a sense of mission and restored his faith. When the problem was a reaction to a specific situation, a categorical demand from a tsaddiq in a dream was sufficient for the dreamer to end his mourning and begin a new life. With Ya’ish’s problem an entrenched part of his personality—he felt

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“shivers … in all my bones, my whole body felt that way”—even the authority of a tsaddiq could not end it. Ya’ish admitted that even after his epiphany, his personality remained the same. “I tried to shed this nature, I couldn’t, I don’t know why. I’ve always been that way, even now.” The solution in his case, to jump forward a bit, was more a change of environment than a change in behavior. The revelation he received confirmed the legitimacy of staying home, enabling him to avoid foci of social and interpersonal tension. His nervousness in crowded social situations did not disappear, but it was less problematic when other people came to him, into the sacred space that he created in the familiar territory of his home. He also found it easier to participate in public prayer when the synagogue was located under his roof. This distinction between environmental and behavioral change is hardly absolute, because the transformation of the home environment into a sacred one had immediate effects on Ya’ish’s behavior. The revelation brought his anxiety and nervousness to a peak, and he once hinted that they had a sexual foundation: “When this place was reveled, that one [Satan] did not let me move. For a whole week he came to me in all sorts of female forms.” But this internal struggle, externalized as Satan and his temptations, was decided by the ecology of holiness and the rigid schedule it dictated: “Ever since this place opened, may God be blessed, thank God, synagogue, afternoon prayers, morning prayers, evening prayers, everything. People pray here, in this place, on the Sabbath eve, on Sabbath afternoon. They come at one, we read the Torah, Psalms, laws. And after the afternoon prayer they come for the evening prayer. We read a bit more laws until the evening prayer, we pray a lot, read from the Zohar, sit around the table to eat, everything.” In the face of Satan, who seems to be a projection of what traditional Judaism calls the “evil inclination” (against whose temptations Ya’ish often warns), he navigates with a moral compass, externalized in the figure of Elijah and the tsaddiqim: “Thank God, now if I forget to make a blessing, it’s like someone comes and reminds me, ‘make a blessing,’ even if I take water, or bread, ‘make a blessing!’ Once I wasn’t so careful, once if I came home from work tired I wouldn’t recite the evening prayers.” If beforehand, “Satan stands facing me to mix me up in the prayers,” today, “they (the tsaddiqim) come, badger me, ‘Get up and pray,’ just like that! And I get up, jump out of bed, and pray.” I have no information about the mental intra-psychic dynamics behind Ya’ish’s fears, but there is an obvious symmetry between Satan and the tsaddiqim as cultural projections of forbidden urges and strict religious morality (Csordas 1983, 1994; Bilu, Witztum & Van der Hart 1990). It would



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seem that the tension and anxiety personified in Satan, which originally prevented Ya’ish from being called up to the Torah and from enjoying friendly encounters, were displaced to the tsaddiqim as representatives of an externalized superego, which prevented Ya’ish from straying from religious strictures. In discussing Avraham’s plans to move to a new apartment as a catalyst for his epiphany, I noted that a similar pattern could be seen among most of the saints’ impresarios whom I studied. In Ya’ish’s case, this pattern reached a dramatic climax. Despite his strong ties to his father, to his family, and to the town he had lived in from his first day in Israel (except for his period working at Masada), Ya’ish was compelled to accede to his wife’s pleas that they move from Beit She’an to Yavneh, a small town south of Tel-Aviv, where most of her family lived. Ḥannah had long been in conflict with her motherin-law, and when Ya’ish despaired of resolving the quarrel, he began making preparations to leave. During this period, Ya’ish was beleaguered by recurring dreams about the holy site in his back yard, but did his best to ignore them. The arrangements came to completion one Friday at the end of the month of Elul. All that remained to be done before the move the following Sunday to the apartment that awaited him in Yavneh was to obtain the mayor’s signature on a document certifying that Ya’ish was entitled to public housing. The mayor tried his best to dissuade Ya’ish from making the move: “You’re not leaving Beit She’an, you’ve worked for us for a long time, I can’t let you go.” But Ya’ish would not listen: “No, don’t try to convince me, I have to move, I’m leaving and that’s that.” That same evening, after reciting grace at the end of the Sabbath meal, Ya’ish was granted the revelation of the wondrous gate in his yard. It was the climax of a process of revelation that abruptly thwarted the planned move and led to the establishment of the Gate of Paradise. In none of the other cases did the revelation emerge so dramatically from a decision to leave home. The time available to revoke the decision was running out. Only a single weekend separated the couple from their new apartment in Yavneh. The counter-narrative, about his amazing discovery, only hinted at in Ya’ish’s vexing dreams, shot to the surface and produced an unexpected twist in the plot: the rejected home became a sanctuary that could not be abandoned. The powerful drama behind the site’s discovery, like the majesty and sublimity of its identity, correspond to Ya’ish’s distress at having to leave. His difficulty in parting from his brothers and sisters, and especially from his parents, whom he visited daily, could be inferred from the way he presented the Masada episode. He described with great emotion his time

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away from Beit She’an, when he intensely missed the family atmosphere in his parents’ home. His later decision to leave was imposed on him by Ḥannah’s entreaties. The discovery of the Gate of Paradise seems to have given him an incontrovertible reason not to leave. Ḥannah had no choice but to accept the cancellation of the move. Although she cooperated with Ya’ish in setting up the site and preparing the meals for the hillula, her dreams, one of which will be recounted below, reveal something of her ambivalent attitude towards the shrine. Ya’ish, for his part, stated his new tie to his home in categorical language that indicated how comfortable he felt with the reversal: “They told me, ‘you will live here, you have nowhere to go.’… The land wants us here. It doesn’t want us to leave it. What should we do?” Ya’ish’s emotional language testifies to a patriotic sense of belonging to the place, which became explicit when he related his unwillingness to leave town, or even to go to a bomb shelter when katyusha rockets were fired on Beit She’an from Jordan at the end of the 1970s. But first and foremost, the revelation enabled Ya’ish to follow his heart and personality, and to spend most of his day in the protected and holy environment he had established at home: “I can’t leave this place, even on the holidays. Ḥannah’s brother invited us to come to Ashkelon. I told him, ‘I want to come, but I can’t.’ What will people say when I shut down this place? There are people who believe in the place and want to visit, in particular on the holidays, when there is vacation. So who will receive them?” The entire revelatory process was laid out in Ya’ish’s Announcement to the Public, which was mimeographed and distributed in Beit She’an: Announcement to the Public I, Oḥana Ya’ish, who lives in Beit She’an, Dalet Neighborhood, 210/2, have been privileged by the Lord to see wonders. In my first dream a tsaddiq revealed himself to me and told me to dig in the yard behind my house. I started digging and suddenly a gate was disclosed to me. I entered through the gate, and marvelous things were revealed to my eyes. I saw a pool with fresh water and much greenery around it. I kept on going and saw a wonderful garden full of good things, and rabbis walking around the garden, enjoying the brightness of the place. One of the rabbis turned to me and told me that I must take good care of the place because it is holy. He also told me to inform anyone who would like to come to the place that first he must



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cleanse himself. A week went by when I did not think of the dream even though it came back every day on that week, and then in the second week I was again troubled by dreaming that I was in my yard. I was standing between two cypress trees in the yard of my house and I heard a voice calling to me in these words: Listen, listen, listen, three times the voice was heard. I stood there trembling from head to toe, and the voice continued to call out to me, and said that the place where I stood is a holy place and I must maintain its holiness. And again on the third week, which was the beginning of the month of Elul, I set out on Sabbath eve to synagogue to pray. I prayed and returned home, recited the kiddush blessing, and sat down to eat. After the meal I went out of the door of my house, and suddenly a gate was revealed to me in the same place, and I saw light burning in the entrance. I stood and gazed at the place for about five minutes. And again I heard the same voice calling out to me in the same words: Listen, listen, listen, and this time it was real, not a dream, and they told me that this was the Gate of Paradise. And they also required me to build an iron gate and to clean the place, and after I finish to put it in order. They told me to announce in all the synagogues and to the public that all who wish to frequent the place must first cut their fingernails and purify themselves and make repentance. Then my wife had a dream in which I came to her and told her that we have to prepare a festive meal in the name of Elijah the Prophet. And so I performed all that was required of me. O. Ya’ish Beit She’an, Dalet housing project, 210/1

The announcement describes the entire set of experiences, most of them dream revelations, which led Ya’ish to identify the Gate of Paradise in his back yard. The title (“Announcement to the Public”) and ornate opening

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sentence are identical to those of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim’s announcements, and were almost certainly lifted from there. The events described in the announcement took place over three weeks in the month of Elul, during which Ya’ish gradually came to realize the identity of the holy site. The opening dream, which recurred and troubled Ya’ish for a week, was visually the most rich. The dreamer’s naivety—which probably enhanced his credibility—was augmented by his stubborn refusal to engage the nocturnal message he received. Furthermore, he failed to identify the tsaddiq who offered the revelation and identified the site (Bilu & Abramovitch 1985)—even though typological and traditional images of the Garden of Eden pervade the dream (Eisenstein 2000: 84; Ginzberg 1947I: 69-71; Manuel & Manuel 1971). The Announcement hinted at the site’s identity by using expressions like “a wonderful garden” and “I must maintain its holiness.”13 This emphasis on the dreamer’s passivity, which presented him as an instrument that conveyed messages from authoritative beings and voices, reinforced the claim to a revelation from an outside source. Nevertheless, the Announcement included some active descriptions (“I started digging”; “I entered”; “I kept on going”), which underlined the personal and spontaneous nature of the inspiration and which foreshadow the initiative and activity involved in establishing the site—beginning with writing the announcement. After the first dream, Ya’ish did not again go through the Gate of Paradise. In other words, the dream was, for him, a miraculous initiation dream, a one-time event. Instead, he received oral messages that highlighted the site’s holiness, until it was finally identified. These messages, each with a ceremonial opening, echoed classic biblical revelations, beginning with Jacob’s dream (which also centered on a wondrous gate— “the gate of heaven,” Gen. 28:17), through Moses at the burning bush, to Samuel’s initiation dream at Shilo. The link to these two latter events can be seen in the phonetic similarity between the Hebrew word for “listen,” tishma, and God’s address to these prophets by their names, “Moshe, Moshe” (Ex. 3:4) and “Shmuel, Shmuel” (I Sam. 3:10). The link to the episode of the burning bush can also be seen in the similarity of the injunctions: “the place where I stood is a holy place,” the voices told Ya’ish; like the admonition to Moses in Exodus 3:5: “the place where you stand is holy ground.” The revelatory sequence reached its apex at the end of the third week, when the identity of the place was conveyed to Ya’ish directly. The fact that this peak experience took place in waking reality granted it additional authority. Note the timing of the revelation—a Sabbath eve at the end of Elul, the month of penitence that leads to the High Holidays. This, together



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with the activities that preceded the revelation—evening prayer in the synagogue, the Kiddush ritual, and Sabbath meal—converged to produce an apposite backdrop for the revelation. The revelation occurred at an intersection of sacred time, sacred space, and appropriate ritual activity (Eliade 1959). Once the site was identified explicitly as the Gate of Paradise, Ya’ish received commandments, which he devotedly obeyed. He promptly demolished the old shed that stood on the site of the revelation, and installed an ornamental fence around the concrete slab that remained there. Next to the site he built a tiny synagogue (which was later expanded to encompass the holy site, mitigating the conceit of the initial initiative). The vision of the festive meal that concluded the revelatory sequence was not dreamed by Ya’ish but rather by his wife, Ḥannah, yet he was a presence in it. He appeared as the mediator who conveyed to her the identity of the tsaddiq, Elijah, in honor of whom the site’s hillula was to be held. The concluding dream lay at the margins of the revelation, but it was of great importance: it assigned the site its patron saint, and so positioned it within the cultural space of the cult of saints. At the beginning of the chapter I mentioned the ancient tradition that links Beit She’an to Paradise. The close connection between the Garden of Eden and Elijah the Prophet explains why this miraculous figure became the shrine’s patron saint. Aside from being an immortal prophet, the herald of the Messiah, “the messenger of the covenant” (Malachi 3:1), a teacher of mystical secrets, a heavenly messenger, and a savior for those in distress, Elijah appears in various sources as Paradise’s gatekeeper—perhaps because he entered Paradise alive.14 Elijah’s manifestation as the site’s patron saint is thus natural and comprehensible. As the foremost miracle worker in the popular tradition of all Jewish communities (Eisenstein 2000: 24-28; Ginsberg 1972 II: 14; Wiener 1978), Elijah fits well into Moroccan Jewry’s cult of saints.15 Yet the Beit-She’an version of the renewal of Moroccan cults of tsaddiqim in Israel is unique in its originality and ambition: Ya’ish’s dreams validated a local mythic tradition, which made it possible to link the site to a patron saint who himself has an uncontested heavenly provenance in Jewish cosmology. As in the case of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, a community of dreamers sprang up around the Gate of Paradise, imbuing the site with interpersonal, or more precisely inter-subjective validity. I will return to this community below. But the construction of the site as bearing the utmost holiness was not based only on the dreams of its visitors. The growth, from

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nowhere, of a variety of fruit trees in the yard was understood as deriving from the site’s marvelous vitality, and it was not a great distance from this to becoming a healing shrine. In my visits, I noticed that the visitors to the site, some of whom were on their way to or from the nearby medical clinic, often broke off a myrtle branch as a charm or, in particular, took some of the olive oil that Ya’ish kept in his candle-lighting corner and used it as a salve on their aching limbs or malfunctioning organs. This combination of modern and traditional medicine is also indicated in the dreams I will recount below. Ya’ish himself felt the blessing of the site. He claimed that after the site was revealed he “felt no weariness, as if I slept all day. I feel vigorous and healthy in my body … nothing is hard for me.” Ya’ish also attributed his youthful appearance at the age of 40 (at the beginning of the 1980s) to the energy that flowed from the site. This is not all that changed in his life, as is evidenced by the dreams that continued to come to him (as with Avraham before him) after the revelation. Unlike Avraham, Ya’ish issued only a single Announcement to the Public, but the next dream, which occurred several months after the revelation, in the wake of the establishment of the synagogue and institution of regular prayer services, is reminiscent, in its daring and confident atmosphere, of Avraham’s second Announcement (and may well have been influenced by it)— his bold journey to find Rabbi David u-Moshe in Morocco and bring him back to his house in Israel. Ya’ish’s dream also involved a journey: I get up, you know, in a dream, and I go, like I’m digging at the site, with my hands, and then kind of black water comes out. I asked in the dream, “what is this black water?” So this black water goes and goes to the place we pray and comes back all golden. Then I said, “What’s this? Black water that comes back gold? That can’t be true.” Then I go into the gate, and inside there’s another opening, and in that second opening a spring is in the middle and trees and plants on this side and trees and plants on the other side, and there was a bed in this direction and two were sitting on it: King David and Elijah the Prophet. He said to me: “Whoever enters this place does not leave.” I said: “Rabbi, I can’t remain in this place, people are waiting for me, I have to receive them.” Then he said: “Fine, since you said that, go to the gate, and there you will find a diamond, and it is a secret. Press on the diamond and the



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gate will open and you can go out.” Inside it was wonderful, a spring passed by, the Garden of Eden itself. I went out and saw a line of people, from here [his apartment] to the place, standing. I told them: “You should know that whoever goes in to this place does to leave. But whoever enters and wants to leave, put your hand on the diamond next to the gate, and the gate will open.

As in the case of Avraham’s second Announcement to the Public, this dream reflects the atmosphere of awe surrounding the charismatic stage of the revelation, as a result of the site’s initial success and growing fame. Since the object of Avraham’s revelation was a Jewish tsaddiq buried in the Atlas Mountains, his dream took the form of a dangerous quest. The tradition that Ya’ish revived was related to a hidden but proximate site, near his home. It had to be revealed but not brought from afar, so the dream’s movement was vertical, into the ground.16 Nevertheless, here, too, the dreamer’s active stance was stressed. As in his first dream, Ya’ish dug and revealed the wonderful garden. Yet note the differences. In the first dream, he found a tsaddiq who commanded him to excavate, but in this dream the series of opening actions was presented in the first person, as an initiative that required no external impetus: “I get up … I go … I’m digging … with my hands.” The difference between the relative passivity of the first dream’s protagonist and the activity and initiative of the second is less sharp than the difference between Avraham’s first and second Announcements, but it represents a similar psychological process: a transition from a feeling of shock and confusion at the unexpected encounter with the tsaddiq (and from a humble presentation of oneself out of fear of skeptical and dismissive reactions) to a sense of purpose and determination after the establishment of the site (and a more confident and empowered self-presentation, in the wake of the initial positive responses to the initiative). The dream translated the charismatic inspiration of the Gate of Paradise’s discovery into the language of an alchemical process that transmuted black water into gold. The meaning of the transmutation became clear later in the dream, when the Garden of Eden was revealed to the dreamer in its full splendor. The traditional Garden of Eden scenery that appeared in the first dream appeared again here. This time, however, the dreamer’s gaze was more focused on the human figures: instead of “rabbis walking around the garden,” Ya’ish specifically identified King David and Elijah the Prophet sitting on a bed. That he immediately knew who the figures were is not

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typical of visitation dreams, and contrasts with his previous dream. Here, the dreamer was clearly experienced and displayed greater confidence in his contacts with the sacred than he had in his first dream. The presence of King David is not surprising given Jewish traditions that depict him as a permanent resident of Paradise, and as either the designated King Messiah or the Messiah’s forefather (Ginzberg 1947IV: 114-116).17 The threat of being trapped in the cave may reflect the sense of danger that is associated with the discovery of mystical secrets after penetration into a holy place. This motif is familiar from legends about the graves of King David and of the patriarchs’ tomb in the Makhpela Cave in Hebron (Reiner 2008). In the end, however, Ya’ish was granted knowledge of the secret of the gate, and he was able to exit safely. The emphasis on the opening within the entry gate, and the frightening time between them—“Whoever enters this place does not leave”—and the revelation of the hidden diamond at the exit gate,18 grant the visit in Paradise the quality of a three-stage initiation ritual. Again, this is quite similar to Avraham’s visit to the cave of Rabbi David u-Moshe, as recounted in his second Announcement to the Public. There, too, openings are dramatic transition points in the story.19 In both cases, the visit to the holy place in the depths of the earth served as a platform for a life transformation, a symbolic death and rebirth.20 In contrast with his first revelation dream, in which Ya’ish acted without an audience, in the present dream he declared the role he took on in his waking life: the host for visitors at the holy site. Because “people are waiting for me, I have to receive them,” Ya’ish was privileged with the secret of how to leave the garden—a secret he quickly shared with the crowd of visitors outside. Ya’ish’s transformation from an introverted man who avoided social contacts into a public figure who assembled a multitude in his home parallels the transformation of the black water into gold.21 Like Ya’ish, Avraham faced tsaddiqim alone in the events he described in his first Announcement to the Public, while in his second revelation dream, hosts of visitors flocked to the tsaddiq’s grave. This dream transition from the personal to the public arena reflected, in both cases, a path in which a personal initiative manifested itself publicly in a community of believers. In both cases, the dreamer was the person who controls entry to the site, but the competitive dimension so evident in Avraham’s case was only hinted at in Ya’ish’s (although, as we will see, rivalry is not absent from his internal world). Ya’ish modeled his role after that of his site’s patron saint: just as Elijah is the gatekeeper of Eden, so Ya’ish, at the end of the dream, served as the guide who bestows upon his flock the secret of entering and leaving Paradise. The long line at



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the gate, just like the “huge crowd of people standing at the opening of the cave” in Avraham’s dream, most likely reflected both dreamers’ wish that their sites attract large numbers of visitors. Ya’ish’s role as the holy site’s gatekeeper, evident at the end of the dream, did not come out of nowhere. The only immediate memory Ya’ish recalled in association with his revelation dream hinted at a sense of destiny he already possessed. In his boyhood, when his family customarily gathered on Sabbaths in his parents’ house, his brothers and sisters used to joke about which of them deserved a greater share in the next world. Ya’ish, who was never quick-witted, found it hard to trade barbs with the rest of his family at the table. But once he declared: “I’ll be the gatekeeper in the next world.… You know what? If I don’t bring you in through the gate of Paradise, you won’t get in at all.” Assuming that this memory indeed represents an event that took place before his epiphany, it would seem that his fantasy about his role in heaven took root in Ya’ish’s mind at a young age. It may be that under the façade of high spirits and humor, the episode he recounted reflected a more serious sibling rivalry over who had seniority and preference. Perhaps this lay at the root of the theme of restricted entry into a holy place in the dream, and through it the validation of the narrator’s superiority over his competitors. The same subject appeared repeatedly in Avraham’s dreams. As if to validate the claim that the discovery of the opening in the latter dream signified an entire life transition, a symbolic “rebirth,” a later dream of Ya’ish’s expressed this with unsurpassable clarity: I was sitting and I saw people dressed in white. They grabbed me and turned me into a baby. They said to me: “Now it’s like you have been born again. You need patience, and you, with God’s help, will be a king.”22

Wondrous initiation dreams, producing an uplifting sense of being chosen, to the point of feeling born again, are not sufficient for the success of a new holy site. To get from personal inspiration to public success, a site must be accepted both by the community and the authorities. This was an especially acute point with regard to the Gate of Paradise, because of its twofold audacity—that of the site’s identity and that of its patron. As we will see, Ya’ish’s dreams reverberated throughout Beit She’an, and no few of the town’s inhabitants responded with their own dreams about the discovery of the site. Ya’ish, for his part, made every effort to foster the community of dreamers (most of whom were women) that formed around the site. He

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tried to disseminate his Announcement to the Public to as many people as he could, and even collected the dreams of visitors to the site in a special binder. A small coterie of neighbors and friends (including Meir, Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim’s son) formed around the site and worked to further it and grant it legitimacy. First on the Sabbath and then daily, this group began to pray together in the synagogue that Ya’ish built with donations he received. In addition, these supporters worked hard to obtain the endorsement of noted mystics and rabbis. They needed such sanction in order to persuade the municipality, and especially the town’s chief rabbi, Rabbi Eliahu Cohen, that the site deserved official recognition and development funds from the public purse. One of these supporters, who was well-connected in the community of kabalists, was even sent to petition Rabbi Yisrael Abu-Ḥatsera (the Baba Sali) in Netivot and to Rabbi Mordecai Shar‘abi in Jerusalem. He claimed that both of these leading mystics expressed their support for the site, but refused to do so in writing. A well-known rabbi from Bnei Brak, a largely ultra-Orthodox city town near Tel Aviv, visited the site and was impressed by its sacred ambience, and by Ya’ish’s story. He proclaimed that “there is kabbalah at this place.” The greatest of Beit She’an’s kabbalists, Rabbi Makhlouf Lasri dreamed that pure souls could be found at the site. But these reactions and others like them were not sufficient to overcome the municipal chief rabbi’s reservations. A delegation of women who had dreamed of the site, sent to him by Ya’ish, did not alter Rabbi Cohen’s judgment that dreams alone were not sufficient evidence of the revelation’s validity.23 The rabbi later took a more accommodating position, and even visited the site, along with the mayor, on the day of the annual hillula. David Levy, a cabinet minister and resident of Beit She’an, also made a quick appearance, but the non-committal support he expressed had no practical consequences. In the end, the municipality offered assistance in the site’s construction and upkeep, but only on condition that its management be handed over to the municipal religious council. Ya’ish, who feared that his life’s work was about to be taken from him, refused categorically. At the end of the 1980s, the Gate of Paradise functioned largely as a synagogue and a local healing site. It had little success gaining public recognition outside Beit She’an. The hillula of Elijah the Prophet, held on one of the first days of the month of Elul, was the climactic event at the site each year. Yet it was conducted as a festive meal with the participation of about 120 people, nearly all of them locals. Contributions for the upkeep of the site were collected through the auction of candles to be lit for tsaddiqim, first and foremost for Elijah the Prophet. The sums collected were modest,



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in dollar terms in the low four figures. Unlike the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, the Gate of Paradise remained strictly a local site. Beyond the objective reasons—for example the audacity of Ya’ish’s vision and the marginality of Beit She’an—it would seem that shy and simple Ya’ish, despite his strong sense of destiny and his determination, was not blessed with the leadership qualities and sophistication necessary to attract believers and to convince public bodies to support him. “For that, you need politics,” Ḥannah, his wife, noted, “and my husband has no politics.” While he did not manage to achieve the success he had hoped for, Ya’ish was pleased with his project and with the change it made in his life. In particular, he was proud of the Talmud Torah (a religious school for boys) that he founded in the synagogue of Elijah the Prophet. The pupils were children who had not succeeded in other schools, taught by a scholar from the local kolel, an institution where full-time Torah scholars study. Ya’ish, who, recalling himself as a kid left to his own devices in Beit She’an of the 1950s, saw himself in these boys. He was entirely conscious of the fact that in this project he was healing the wounds of his childhood, whose roots lay in the traumatic move from Morocco to Israel.

Dreamers in Paradise Charismatic dreams of the type Ya’ish experienced, during which a dreamer enters a holy precinct and establishes a connection with the transcendental entities and creative forces of his cultural heritage, grant the individual “the certainty of a favorable fate, a reason for selfconfidence, inspiration for his decisions and actions and, therefore, his selfidentification” (Lanternari 1975: 222). But this experience, as impressive and invigorating as it might be for the dreamer, cannot turn the initiative into a sustainable event on the interpersonal and social level if it does not make an impression on and is not adopted by others around him. For the social environment to accept and adopt a revelatory experience, the dreamer must enter into a meaningful and ongoing dialogue with the community. In the case of the Gate of Paradise (and in the case of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe), such a dialogue indeed ensued, and people in the dreamer’s town began to dream of the new site and its holy patron.24 The community of dreamers that consolidated around the Gate of Paradise proved that the dream, which in modern psychology is conceived of as a private, internal, subjective, and elusive experience, can, in certain cultural contexts, encompass interpersonal and inter-subjective spaces and become a manifestly public event (Bilu 1987; 2000). Ya’ish’s revelation

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dream, like that of Avraham, made its way among the community just like other cultural myths, legends, and tales, and nurtured the community’s waking life as it percolated into their dreams. These dreams, which were in turn recounted and retold, became a type of validation that helped put the site on a strong footing as a community institution and cultural resource. This decisive transition from the personal to the collective level was made possible here, as it was in the case of Avraham and others, because the contents of the Announcement to the Public, even if taken in part from Ya’ish’s personal experience, were shaped by a “cultural syntax” in which the template of the holy site and the figure of the tsaddiq are idioms held by the dreamer and the community in common. Beyond the site’s unique local character, which was also based on a Talmudic source and traditional images of the Garden of Eden, the community’s response derived also from its members’ needs to reestablish their ties to tsaddiqim at a concrete place. This need was amplified by the harsh socioeconomic and political circumstances they faced after their immigration to Israel. Ya’ish satisfied this need by serving as a cultural broker who renewed traditions and adjusted them to the contemporary local context. The fact that the dialogue between the entrepreneur and the community was based to a large extent on dreams is consistent with the central role played by dreams in the veneration of saints in Morocco (Ben-Ami 1984: 79-84; Bilu & Abramovitch 1985). I will present the community of dreamers that developed around the Gate of Eden in two parts. First, I will offer a few examples in which the dream discourse helped validate the revelation. Afterwards, I will focus on dreams dreamed by members of the inner circle of the site’s faithful, and will try to show how they have used the place and its patron saint as cultural idioms for articulating and coping with their wishes, conflicts, and problems. The dream discourse began within the Oḥana family. As Ya’ish noted at the end of his Announcement to the Public, his wife Ḥannah had the dream that turned Elijah into the site’s patron saint. The figure that appeared in her dream and demanded that she prepare a festive meal in honor of Elijah was none other than Ya’ish himself. The circle enlarged after the Announcement to the Public was disseminated, when neighbors and acquaintances, principally women living in the Dalet housing project, began having dreams about the site. This external confirmation was supplemented by historical depth, since the site’s special status was hinted at even before the revelation, as Ya’ish learned retroactively. After he established the Gate of Paradise, he learned that the woman who had lived in the apartment



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before him had reported a recurring dream in which she saw a man dressed in white (whom Ya’ish identified as Elijah) standing in her living room within a tall flame, “and he never grew weary.” The dreams that started cropping up in the local community after the revelation were not cut from a single cloth. Some of them were no more than reproductions of Ya’ish’s initiation dream, with the same traditional images of Eden. Such, for example, was the dream of a woman who lived in Beit She’an’s Eliyahu (the Hebrew name for Elijah) neighborhood in Beit She’an. She dreamed that “in the Dalet housing project it opened up like a cave and there was water and people and all kinds of rabbis there, and flowers and celebration and everything.” Sometimes the physical description was supplemented by wonder and astonishment. A young woman dreamed of “a gushing spring of blue, clear water and lots of people around the spring” and added “I was astonished by the spring and its clear waters … I didn’t know that there was such a place in Beit She’an.” In other dreams, the dreamer was transformed from a passive, neutral, or amazed observer into an active participant. In one such case, a neighbor learned, in a dream, from visitors who came to the site dancing, with tambourines, “in two buses, Arabs and Jews,” that they were headed for “the Garden of Eden, which had opened up at the home of Ya’ish Oḥana.” She went in with them and demanded of Ya’ish that he put a sign on his door saying that “[this] place is pure and holy, it is Paradise.” Another woman, who dreamed of “a circle of tsaddiqim” around a Torah scroll, “dancing and having a festive meal,” went out and invited people in: “Come see, it’s like the Makhpela Cave [the tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron], just like Paradise.”25 The latter two dreamers represent another genre of dreaming, in which the main images are of a hillula or festive meal. In a third dream, a woman saw the balcony of Ya’ish’s apartment as “a glass dome, and inside was a lamp lit with candles and people praying there.” A passerby expresses skepticism about the religious activity at the site: “Why should these people be praying here? It’s just a balcony, what does it have?” But the dreamer shushed him: “Quiet! This is a holy place, don’t ever talk [like that] about this place.” From a psychodynamic perspective, it may well be that the doubts are no more than a projection of the dreamer’s own ambivalence about the site’s sanctity, and her silencing of those doubts no more than her way of coping with her own skepticism. In other dreams, the dreamers learned of the site’s existence from its patron saint. In these dreams, Elijah appeared as an enigmatic figure, sometimes as a beggar, in keeping with traditional popular images of this prophet. A neighbor dreamed she met “a man with a beard down to his

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stomach, with a sack on his back and a bottle of water.” When she asked who he was, he said in surprise, “What, you don’t recognize me? I am Ya’ish’s messenger, of the holy site, and I am taking this water to someone who needs to be healed.” This dream, the first to cite the Gate of Paradise’s role as a healing shrine, displays a role reversal—the tsaddiq is presented as Ya’ish’s emissary. In another dream that I found in Ya’ish’s collection of dreams (dated January 22, 1982), the patron saint’s identification of the site is more indirect and complex: “One night I dreamed that I was standing on the roof of my house, and a mulberry tree extended over the roof. For a minute I saw a poor man with a sack on his back, as tall as the building, he reached up to the roof. He extended me his hand so that I would give him charity. I took out a coin, gave it to him, and he went on.” The dreamer understood her dream only when she visited the Gate of Paradise and discovered there the mulberry tree she had seen in her dream, towering above the doorway: “To my astonishment, it turned out that the place I saw in the dream was real, it was the holy site built by Mr. Ya’ish Oḥana.” In other dreams, the site’s sanctity is understood from negative attributes—a danger or prohibition against entering the site because of some action committed by the dreamer or because of his or her unacceptable condition. A visitor who had picked some olives from a tree in the yard was reprimanded by Elijah in his dream: “Why did you take the olives without permission? Go ask forgiveness of the owner of the place and make a festive meal there.” A dealer who sold Ya’ish a decorative lighting system for the synagogue received a similar message, along with an explicit threat: “Listen, refund the money to the owner of the place, and if you don’t give the money back, it will cost you a lot, be careful.” Women who were having their periods and who asked in their dreams to visit the site were blocked at the entrance by a tsaddiq who instructed them to retrace their steps and return only when they were pure. In other dreams, Ya’ish’s revelation was validated by exemplary figures from the Bible or Talmud. This type of dream is the nocturnal parallel of the efforts made by Ya’ish and his friends to obtain the sanction and support of famous kabbalists. A middle-aged woman dreamed that during a family visit to Beersheba she told her sisters-in-law “you know, like it was a joke, that Paradise had opened up for us in Beit She’an.” Suddenly someone interrupted: “Yes, Paradise is there, and we are there.” When the dreamer asked the speaker to identify himself, he said “I am Rabbi Akiva, who is in Tiberias.”26 In an interesting manifestation of a dream within a dream, this dreamer quickly notified Ḥannah, Ya’ish’s wife, what she had been



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told. When she reached the holy site, she raised her eyes to the sky and saw “two angels descending by Ya’ish’s house … all in white.” Her initial skepticism, as expressed in her sarcastic tone of voice when she spoke of the shrine, turned into profound belief after Rabbi Akiva’s confirmation and the appearance of the angels. Rabbi Akiva’s assertion of his presence at the site, despite his tomb’s location in Tiberias—stated in the plural—was consistent with the belief we encountered at the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe that tsaddiqim gather to study together at holy sites. In any case, the appropriate location of tsaddiqim is in paradise. In another dream of this type, the dreamer found himself at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, near two men wearing suits. A passerby, of whom the dreamer inquires about the identity of the pair, replies in astonishment: “What, don’t you know who they are? That’s Moses and Aaron!” The dreamer then addressed them politely: “May I ask you about a certain place?… We have a holy site that needs to be built.” The scene suddenly changed, and the dreamer found himself along with the two holy men at the site in Beit She’an. Moses and Aaron were pleased with what they saw and granted him the needed building permit. The petitioner’s implicit request, which was answered in the dream, referred to the Gate of Paradise’s major problem— the municipal authorities’ opposition to the site’s development. The dream dialogue reached its climax when two or more members of the community of dreamers had similar or connected dreams. After Ya’ish dreamed that tsaddiqim resided in the site he established, the kabbalist Rabbi Makhlouf Lasri revealed that on that very same night he had dreamed of “four pure souls” at the site. The joint dream of Ya’ish and Rabbi Makhlouf was further developed in a dream that a woman visitor to the site reported, in which she saw four tsaddiqim a the site: Elijah, King David, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, and Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes. The second half of this chapter will examine in greater detail the dreams of four inhabitants of Beit She’an: Ḥannah, Ya’ish’s wife; Meir Knafo, a central figure at the site; Zohara, a visitor; and Rachel Ben-Ḥamo, a fixture at the site and the most prolific dreamer of all. I will endeavor to show how these dreams integrated individual psychological motives and common cultural idioms as they simultaneously served as mirrors of each other’s wishes and needs and an arena in which they addressed these wishes and needs (compare: Geertz 1990; Handelman 1990). In this effort, collective symbols of the site and the tsaddiq who resided there become personal symbols shaped by the lifestyles and personal biographies of each of the dreamers. I will discuss Rachel’s dreams at length because of their abundance and the

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fact that they served her as a source of inspiration and granted legitimacy to her gradual disengagement from the Gate of Paradise, as she established herself as a healer under the aegis of Elijah the Prophet. The Deserted Temple Ḥannah was the first participant in the dream discourse—an account of her first dream about the site was included in Ya’ish’s Announcement to the Public. She played a central role in running the site and in organizing the hillula. And, since the Gate of Paradise was manifestly a domestic site, it could hardly have been maintained without her active participation. Her importance was evident principally in the hosting of visitors at times when Ya’ish was at work, and in her work preparing the festive meal in honor of Elijah. Nevertheless, she clearly had almost no role in the establishment of the site. On the contrary, she pressed Ya’ish to move the family from Beit She’an to the center of the country, where her brothers and sisters lived. Since his epiphany stymied (and may have been catalyzed by) this initiative, it is reasonable to presume that she was not entirely comfortable with it. However, Ḥannah quickly adjusted to the new situation, and I never heard her complain about the radical change in her family life caused by the establishment of the Gate of Paradise. She even had the dream that turned Elijah the Prophet into the site’s patron saint. That dream was followed by others. The dream I will present here was the most detailed one I heard from her. Now it was evening, I was asleep. I dreamed, how should I put it, that a rabbi who I did not know came to me. He came and entered by the gate. That is, he didn’t come into my house and he didn’t interest us … he wasn’t interested in us. So I said in the dream, “I’ll take a look to see what he came for, that rabbi.” He went exactly to the place where the synagogue was. Then we still hadn’t erected the synagogue. I see, and he also sees, that a tsaddiq’s grave is there. And that grave was abandoned, without candles, without anything. And that grave was something like the tomb of King David, something like that. Then the rabbi called out three times, this way, in his voice: “High priest, high priest, high priest.” Three times. “So I’m waiting for an answer” [the rabbi said]. He didn’t ask us and went back the way he came, through the gate.



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Even though the rabbi’s visit to the site could be interpreted as an indication of recognition or legitimacy, he ignored the home’s owners (“he didn’t come into my house and he wasn’t interested in us.… He didn’t ask us”). The site, which in the dream became the grave of a tsaddiq, perhaps the tomb of King David (the figure whose presence in Paradise reverberates through the dreams of Ya’ish and others), was described as messy and neglected, meaning that it did not enjoy public recognition. The fact that the rabbi did not receive a response to his threefold call—precisely the opposite of the threefold address to Ya’ish in his revelation dream (“listen, listen, listen”)—could be interpreted as recompense for his hurtful and arrogant behavior. Perhaps this is also the source of Ḥannah’s slip of the tongue—“he didn’t interest us”—which she immediately corrected to “he wasn’t interested in us.” But the lack of response might just as well mean that the rabbi did not receive proof of the site’s authenticity, and that as a result he walked out without granting recognition. The call to the high priest (ha-kohen ha-gadol) associated the site with the Temple in Jerusalem, but also hinted at the identity of the visiting rabbi. Beit She’an’s chief rabbi of the time, Eliyahu Cohen (whose last name testifies to his membership in the priestly caste), had angered the site’s acolytes by refusing to recognize the Gate of Paradise. Ḥannah numbered among the delegation of women sent by her husband and his friends to the rabbi in order to persuade him, through reports of their dreams, of the site’s sanctity. Rabbi Cohen sent them home empty-handed. The rabbi told the women that he would accede to their request only when “that same man who came to Ya’ish [in his dream] comes to me.” Ḥannah’s dream may well have represented Rabbi Cohen’s unsuccessful attempt to establish contact with the site’s patron saint (who, ironically, shared the rabbi’s name). Ḥannah’s dream association of the site with the Temple was probably not coincidental. She turned the site into the tomb of King David, the king who first sought to build a Temple to God. King David’s request was refused and only his son, Solomon, was privileged to do so (II Samuel 4; I Chronicles 14:1-15). In another dream she referred to the site as the Holy of Holies, the Temple’s inner sanctum. Yet, alongside the special sanctity her dreams attributed to the site, they also expressed doubts about the chances of its success. In the dream of the neglected site, its only visitor ignores its owners, and receives no response to his request for divine sanction of the site. In another dream, Ḥannah’s mother berated her for her qualms about the site’s future; in another, “immodest people dancing completely immodest dances” appeared in her backyard while Ya’ish “hid behind a treed, looking

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at them, his eyes flowing with tears.”27 I suspect that the contrast between the sanctity her dreams attributed to the site and her lack of confidence in its future reflect Ḥannah’s ambivalence about Ya’ish’s revelation, which had compelled her to give up her plans to move away from Beit She’an. In contrast with her waking life, in which she was her husband’s faithful helpmeet in running the site, her dreams give away her discomfort and hesitations about the Gate of Paradise. The Development Vision The second dreamer, Meir Knafo, was among the site’s most active devotees during its initial years. He helped organize events and manage the shrine. From his work as a warehouse clerk and his position as gabbai of the neighborhood synagogue (meaning he was responsible for organizing prayer services), Meir had management experience and abilities that Ya’ish lacked. His involvement also expressed itself in a number of dreams. I will present the first and most detailed of these. It was a direct response to Ya’ish’s revelation dream, dreamed immediately after Ya’ish appeared in Meir’s synagogue on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and announced his discovery to the congregation. This intricate dream, which equaled in force the revelation dreams of Ya’ish and Avraham Ben-Hayyyim, reflected the powerful impression that Ya’ish’s story made on Meir, and Meir’s yearning to see it realized. I’m walking by the Kitan junction, where you enter Beit She’an by the old road. A shed stands there, and I see the figure of a man, like a member of a religious kibbutz, with a cloth cap, sitting there, and I am, you know, walking to work just before morning. He asks me: “Hello, Meir, how’s it going” And I answer: “Hello, what are you doing here?” Then he pointed in the direction of this [Ya’ish’s] house, in the direction of the wadi [an intermittent watercourse], and shows me that people are working there with compressors and making a kind of channel. I ask him why, so he says to me: “Look, this creek we have today, it always gets blocked when it rains. This crossing we’re making leads to this house.” Then I ask him what happened, and he says to me, “Look, here it always overflows, makes it hard for cars and other vehicles to get over, and all that. So we want to make a channel here.” He shows me how they are working and everything. And I see this place, as if there are trees, and old-looking people come



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out of there, like Yemenites. And a young man stood there, that way, like I told you, like a kibbutznik with a cloth cap. And I ask him: “Who are these people?” And he says to me: “This is a very old moshav [semi-cooperative farming village], where in the morning each one goes out to his work.” And I see them, one with a basket, one with a bicycle and all that. And I say: “Can I see it?” And he says yes. I went in there, and instead of seeing a moshav or something, I saw this house of his [Ya’ish’s house]. And I see something like a hospital, a clinic, girls with white smocks, all that. And I see a man sitting there, and next to him are three bottles of wine, and myrtle branches are inside them. I ask him: “Tell me, are these myrtles? I want to ask a question.” This is what I asked: “Why doesn’t every planting succeed?” And he answers me: “Look, that’s a secret that I can’t tell you.” And I see the people, as if they are sick, sitting there, like a kind of clinic, and he says to everyone that they should take some sort of araq [anise-flavored liquor]. As if they threw them away, as if they were taking pills or something and now they don’t get the pills, and he gives them this araq to drink. That’s their medicine. And I ask them all: “So, how do you feel?” And they say, “Every pain we have, with what he gives us, it’s good, it goes away.” I go on and I see another man, a third one, and I ask him: “What are you planting here?” And he says, “Look, sir, here at the entrance to Beit She’an we planted a year ago and the inhabitants of Beit She’an ruined what we planted.” So I ask: “No one is guilty of that. You didn’t notify us, not with letters and not to the Ministry of Religion and not to the town council.” Then he says, “You’ll get a letter and you’ll know.” That’s what he said to me.

In contrast with Ya’ish’s dreams, which take place in a contextual vacuum, Meir’s dream involved places and characters from Beit She’an and its environs—the Kitan junction (the location of the factory where Meir worked), a man from a religious kibbutz (of which there are several just south of Beit She’an), an old Yemenite moshav, a clinic, and of course Ya’ish’s home, where the dreamer was headed. The diversion of the creek

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towards the house signaled the identity of the site—Genesis 2:10 states that “a river went out of Eden to water the garden.” The creek supplied the water for the sapling to grow, the sapling symbolizing the shrine. In the prosaic municipal context in which the dreamer lived, the new road, meant to enable easy, unobstructed access by car to the holy site, signified a wish that word of the site spread and that it become more popular. The excavation work itself may have signified laying the foundations and the development of infrastructure for construction on the site, and perhaps also unearthing the opening (in the dream, the “crossing”), the heart of the site. (Meir was in fact a vocal supporter of a proposal to conduct archaeological excavations at the site.28) The figures he met indicated that, for Meir, the way to the Gate of Paradise, which ended in a development town inhabited mostly by North African Jews, began in a religious (Ashkenazi) kibbutz and went through an old Yemenite moshav. This is more than a hint of the expansiveness of Meir’s vision, which addressed the shrine’s social significance (an element completely lacking in Ya’ish’s revelation dreams). Indeed, in his subsequent dreams, the Gate of Paradise took on the character of an all-Israeli shrine, “a kind of Meron,” which drew large crowds that included familiar Israeli figures of the 1980s such as Prime Minister Menachem Begin, President Yitzḥak Navon, and Israel’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef. The identification of the site’s vicinity as a tree-lined moshav may have derived from the appearance of Ya’ish’s street, which was lined by one-story houses surrounded by trees and shrubs. At the same time, it could refer to the traditional pastoral image of the Garden of Eden and its residents (in which case “old” may refer to tsaddiqim). The dream transition from Ya’ish’s home to the adjacent medical clinic probably derives from the functional similarity between the two institutions, which were competing centers of healing, but it also derived from the physical proximity between them in waking reality. Beyond the presentation of the shrine as a place of healing, the conjunction between the two made it possible to display the superiority of the traditional over the modern system: the araq and myrtle replaced the pills as the preferred medicine. The optimism that the dream projected was accompanied by apprehension and uncertainty about the realization of the vision, summed up in the key question, “why doesn’t every planting succeed?” The question’s importance was prefigured in its formal prelude: “‘I want to ask a question.’ This is what I asked,” as it was in the mystery surrounding the reply. The answer came from a third person, who appeared in the dream soon before its end. He said that the sapling—the holy site—had already



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been planted a year before at the entrance to Beit She’an (Ya’ish lived close to the town’s western entrance), but that the inhabitants “ruined it” (were not worthy?). Meir’s attempts to validate the revelation, which in the real world led him to take upon himself to apply to well-known rabbis and to suggest archaeological excavations at the site, are expressed here in his longing for a concrete sign that the sapling had taken root. The references to the town council and the Ministry of Religion as “addressees” in the matter suggest these institutions’ reluctance to recognize the shrine in the absence of corroboration other than the dreams. The promise, at the end of a dream, that a letter would arrive probably referred to the Announcement to the Public that Ya’ish disseminated throughout Beit She’an; indeed, Meir’s dream may well have catalyzed it. From the perspective of the dream as a whole, it looks as if the three figures that guided Meir along his way to the shrine all represent the site’s patron, Elijah the Prophet. In Jewish folklore, Elijah often appears incognito, in the guise of a variety of characters. This can explain his manifestation as a religious kibbutznik in a cloth cap. The fact that the first two figures greeted the dreamer is of great significance in this context, because encounters with Elijah in which he greets those who encounter him on the road are considered to be of greater value than those in which there is no verbal interaction with him.29 In conclusion, clearly Meir’s vision placed Ya’ish’s revelation experience centrally on the plane of community and the collective. It imbued the revelation with meaning deriving from its local context in Beit She’an. The dream displayed the huge importance Meir ascribed to the site as a center of healing and renewal, as well as his intense hope to play a central role in its development and promotion. This aspiration expressed itself explicitly in another dream, one that took place on Shavu’ot, the festival that commemorates the giving of the Torah. In this dream, the site was full of fruit and vegetables—a reference to the bringing of the first fruits of the land to the Temple in Jerusalem on this holiday—and of crowds of pilgrims, including “children … dressed in white and in golden hats, arriving with tambourines and flutes.” Meir remained behind the scenes—“I was sorting some sort of fruit”—but was summoned to join the hymn-singers, after the crowd kept them from beginning to chant the holiday hymns: “No, you can’t begin until Meir is here.” He humbled himself: “You can start,” but the hymn-singers refused: “No, until you come.” In another dream, Meir was stopped by a rabbi who looked like Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef. The rabbi wondered at how well Meir kept up the site,

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despite Meir’s mumbled protests: “Really, I keep it up? All I do is help.” The rabbi demanded that he lead prayer services, and again the dreamer demurred: “There are many prayer leaders, why do I have to” But in the end he could no longer turn down the respected rabbi’s request. These dreams open a window into Meir’s wish to win honor and respect due to his central role at the site. Meir’s close ties to the Gate of Paradise, and his collaboration with Ya’ish, were demonstrated in the dream dialogue that took place between the two after the site was established. In it, questions raised in the dream of one were answered in the dreams of the other. But Meir’s intense involvement in the site and his strong opinions about how it should be developed—which reverberate throughout the dreams presented here— also produced tension and dissension between the two men. In the end, the package came apart. Meir ended his involvement in the site, and in doing so may have accelerated its decline. Sacred and Profane Healing Zohara, a middle-aged woman who lived a short distance from Ya’ish, was an “ordinary” devotee, involved with the site only intermittently. Like many members of the community, her connection to the Gate of Paradise grew out of a belief in the site’s healing powers. This belief was the result of personal experience, as indicated in her dream (which she recounted in Moroccan Arabic). We have a neighbor here who is a real criminal. And he made up his mind to rob me of this bracelet. So I took it off and put on a long sweater to cover my arms. All this happened in reality, not in a dream. I dreamed that I was going to the clinic. You know, the place [Ya’ish’s] is near the clinic. I was sick. I told my husband that I was going the see the doctor. I went, and this boy [the criminal] grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go. All this happened on Friday. I pleaded with him: “Let me go to the doctor. What do you want from me?” But he refused to let me go. And I told him: “People are already going to the synagogue and I haven’t lit [candles] yet, haven’t seen the doctor, nothing. The Sabbath will begin in an hour or two, please let me go.” But he refused to let me go. People around me tried to persuade him,



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but he wouldn’t agree. I took a bucket of water and threw it in his face, I beat him on his face, then he let me go. I entered the clinic furious, shaking with anger. An Arab man stood up and said to me: “My daughter, why do you need the doctor in this noisy place? Come, I will show you God’s doctor, a real doctor, a doctor who is the Great God himself.” I asked him: “Where is this place?” He said to me: “Here, just look under the clinic, you’ll find it.”

Here is a dream about illness and healing. But beyond that it is also a revelation dream, since Zohara claimed that it informed her of the site’s existence. The next day, during a visit to the clinic, she heard for the first time that “a tsaddiq named Elijah” had revealed himself in the house next door. She went to see the site with a friend. If that is the case, the dream was a clear premonition of a real experience. If we remove the dream’s narrative from its local context, what is left is the template of a “typical dream” (Freud 1999: 165-210)—it revolved around the difficulty of carrying out an action because of ongoing incapacity, restriction, or delay. But the dream’s significance lies deep in the local landscape and in the cult of saints’ lexicon of cultural symbols. As with Meir’s dreams, and other dreams that will be presented below, the dream’s storyline was influenced by the physical proximity between the clinic and the Gate of Paradise. This created a convenient background for comparing and contrasting the alternatives. In the end, the healing temple demonstrated its superiority to the dangers and frustrations the dreamer encountered in the modern clinic. Being accosted by a criminal was for Zohara a personal association, connected to her real fear of a delinquent neighbor who frequently molested her. But the fact that it occurred while she was waiting to see a doctor may have symbolized the difficulty of getting in to see the doctor, if not the frustrating and arbitrary character of medical intervention as this woman perceived it. Her mood from the moment she freed herself of the thug’s grasp—“I entered the clinic furious, shaking with anger”—may have reflected the stressful and tense atmosphere of the clinic during its busiest hours. The fact that the obligatory waiting in the clinic prevented Zohara from lighting her Sabbath candles on time may point to the better medical alternative that appears as the story progresses. Not only did the impending beginning of the Sabbath underline the difference between profane and sacred healing, but the lighting of candles, which symbolizes the transition from the profane to the sacred when the Sabbath arrives, is

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the central ritual act performed at the grave of a tsaddiq. In accord with folk-systems of dream exegesis, which use contrast as a major principle of interpretation, the Arab who pointed the dreamer to the holy site was the tsaddiq. This contrast is common in the Moroccan-Jewish lexicon of symbols (Bilu & Abramovitch 1985); indeed, Elijah himself appears in the Talmud as an Arab (see Bab. Talmud Berachot 6b). In another telling of this same dream, Zohara toned down the identification of this figure and said he was “an old man I didn’t know.”30 The Arab’s or old man’s reference to “God’s doctor” certainly referred to Elijah, the site’s patron saint. In her second version of the dream, the old man told Zohara that the visit to the shrine could be accomplished “without waiting in line, without running around” (as opposed to the reference to the “noisy place” in the version above). The superiority of the traditional method of healing was thus again underlined. It should be noted that, according to Zohara, the message, including its promise of healing, came true in all respects. After her visit to the site, her daughter became pregnant for the first time after sixteen years of marriage, and Zohara’s own leg pains disappeared. Whatever There Is In This House, All Is Accepted For two reasons, I will present the dreams of Rachel, the final representative of the Beit She’an community of dreamers, more extensively than I have those of the other dreamers. First, during the period of my visits to Beit She’an, in the early 1980s, Rachel reported dozens of dreams about the Gate of Paradise, more than any other member of the community with the exception of Ya’ish himself. At the same time, her involvement with the site in her waking life grew more and more intense. Without a doubt, Rachel’s dreams and her waking activity at the site reinforced each other. She frequented the site nearly every day, held festive meals there at regular intervals, and advertised the site to her family and acquaintances. Second, Rachel was a prime representative of a familiar process in the development of holy sites and of the changes they undergo. This is the appearance of secondary foci of sanctity that derive their inspiration from the initial revelation, but which gradually detach themselves and become competitors of the original site. Over the years, Rachel turned from a loyal disciple of the Gate of Paradise into an independent healer with powers deriving from Elijah the Prophet. She became a recipient of his blessing and bestowed his blessing on others. Her dreams were undoubtedly an inexhaustible source of inspiration and guidance in her transformation into “Rabbanit Rachel,”



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a charismatic figure who attracted to her apartment people in distress, including many from outside Beit She’an. When I became acquainted with Rachel in 1981, she was about thirty years old, and her life looked normal and harmonious. She had a solid relationship with her husband, with whom, during thirteen years of marriage, she had borne five children. The family’s financial position was strong and they lived in a well kept-up apartment at the edge of the Dalet hosing project. But even a normal life includes problems and distress, and saints can provide invaluable help in addressing them. And, in fact, most of Rachel’s visits to the site had their origin in prosaic life issues. In addition, a connection to tsaddiqim can help a person cope with unresolved traumas and conflicts from the past that still reverberate in the believer’s life in the present. In Rachel’s past there were indeed such unresolved incidents that, in my opinion, contributed to her profound connection to the Gate of Paradise. An examination of a few of her dreams will enable us to understand how she used tsaddiqim and the local holy site to cope with past and present problems. The central place occupied by visitation dreams in Rachel’s life story even before the appearance of the Gate of Paradise made it a kind of “dream biography,” and as such she is much like saints’ impresarios such as Ya’ish and Avraham. In retrospect, this massive construction of her personal story via dreams about tsaddiqim lay the groundwork for her transformation into an autonomous saint’s agent—a process that took place gradually after my encounters with her in the 1980s. Before discussing my hypotheses about Rachel’s motives in establishing her relationships with tsaddiqim, I should reiterate that such motives do not develop in a vacuum. They are interwoven into cognitive structures that can be seen as cultural schemas profoundly internalized from childhood. If tsaddiqim served Rachel as a fitting response to her needs, it is first and foremost because belief in tsaddiqim was inculcated in her from a tender age in Morocco, until it became a cornerstone of the cultural construction of her life experience. “My mother always loved tsaddiqim,” Rachel told me. Her family’s home in Marrakech abutted a yeshiva, and her mother, despite her tenuous health, provided the scholars there with food and drink. Rachel’s early years were modeled by this proximity. “I was the youngest child,” she said—she had a brother and two sisters. “I’d sit and light the glasses [with oil, which served as candles], wash them, they’d always bless me, pray … I made tea for them.” The family became especially close to Rabbi Ya’aqov Sabag, a local scholar who, posthumously, was recognized as a tsaddiq. The family delayed its move to Israel until Rabbi Ya’aqov

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appeared in a dream to Rachel’s mother and gave her permission to leave him (compare: Ben-Ami 1984: 81). Rachel believed that the family’s relatively easy adjustment to their new home in Beit She’an after their immigration in 1963 was attributable to the support they received from tsaddiqim. Unlike other immigrants, who were housed in sheds and shacks, Rachel’s family received “a house that someone left and went to Tel Aviv … with a garden and citrus trees, a grape arbor, apples, everything you can think of.… People were astounded, ‘as if you worked for some tsaddiq, because there’s no way they’d give you a house like this.’” But these good years ended suddenly when Rachel reached the age of fourteen and her mother died. Her father quickly remarried, and at the instigation of his new wife left his home and severed his ties to his children. Rachel and her siblings had trouble adjusting to their mother’s death: “She was so righteous, she loved us so much; we couldn’t forget he, we’d cry like crazy people.” During this crisis, she sought the support of the family tsaddiq, Rabbi Ya’aqov Sabag, and he appeared to her eldest brother in a dream. So he dreamed that this rabbi who was called Ya’aqov came, with a beard. And he [her brother] said to him: “Come in, honored rabbi,” and he [the tsaddiq] said to him: “prepare a table for me.” He went into her room and began to weep, washed his hands, drank, made the blessing over the hallot [the Sabbath loaves]. Then he said, “Listen, I come from a place [she pauses] … I’m a neighbor of your mother’s. I came from a far-off place. Only because of all she was for me, and she came, and she implores that you not cry. You are causing her great sorrow, and she is really in Paradise. You have nothing more to cry about.

This indirect message from their mother comforted the dreamer and his sisters and eased their pain. “After that dream, we began to calm down,” Rachel said. While the dream was not hers, it had come to a person very close to her, her oldest brother, who at that time was a surrogate father. Furthermore, it addressed a problem that was hers no less than his.31 It is difficult to assess how much this nocturnal encounter was a model for her own dreams, but the fact is that Rachel reported that she remembered the dreams she had from the time she was fourteen—in other words, from the time of her mother’s death. Her mother indeed played a role in many of her dreams, sometimes along with tsaddiqim, including Rabbi Ya’aqov Sabag.



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The mother’s location in the Garden of Eden is of great significance given the identity of the shrine that would later be discovered in Beit She’an, the Gate of Paradise. The three years between her mother’s death and her marriage were particularly difficult ones for Rachel. At first she lived in her brother’s house, but her relationship with her sister-in-law was always tense: “She didn’t accept me very well, didn’t cook me the food that my mother did. I’d sit there, crying and crying all the time.” Her brother was exceedingly strict with her and prevented her from meeting with her future husband. She had no choice but to return to her father’s house and to go back to working at the factory where she had worked when she was younger. She attributed the fact that she found a job, after initially being turned down, at a time of rising unemployment at the end of the 1960s to the intervention of her mother, whose grave she frequently visited to weep and plead for help. On the same evening that she returned to her father’s house, sobbing over her misfortune, her mother appeared to her in a dream and scolded her: “Why are you crying? You have no reason to cry. Listen, be calm, I will be with you to the last minute, you won’t lack for anything.” And, indeed, once she married her luck turned, and Rachel was saved from the emotional isolation and economic straits that had plagued her late adolescence.32 The most important area in which Rachel needed the protection of tsaddiqim in the years after her marriage was the birth of her children. Rachel had trouble getting pregnant, suffered from complications during pregnancy, and had great anxieties about giving birth. All this magnified her need for support. It is hardly surprising, then, that visitation dreams came to Rachel before the birth of each of her five children. The connection between her mother and tsaddiqim was demonstrated again in a dream she had during her first pregnancy. While she was suffering from pain and bleeding, her mother appeared to her “and brought ten tsaddiqim, and they came up to my head and gave me ten pounds [the Israeli currency at the time], and she said to them ‘bless her.’ They said, ‘We will bless her and she will come out of this well.’” The blessing of the tsaddiqim and the mother’s encouragement were on the mark—Rachel gave birth to a healthy daughter in the ambulance that was rushing her to the hospital. Given the vital assistance her mother offered, it is hardly surprising that Rachel gave her name to the baby. Each of Rachel’s children is named after a tsaddiq or member of her family who appeared to her in a dream during her pregnancy. I will not recount those dreams, all of which occurred before the establishment of the

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Gate of Paradise. But it is important to note that, in all her dreams, tsaddiqim and members of her family appear as inseparable. On the one hand, she generously applied the title tsaddiq to members of her family, especially her mother. On the other hand, it would also seem that she sees the tsaddiqim as members of her family and as parental surrogates. To illustrate this, all I need do is cite the two names she gave to her third son. When Rachel was three months into this pregnancy, her father died. Even before the mourning period ended, he appeared to her in a dream: “I dreamed that I said to him: ‘Come, I have to arrange a circumcision ceremony, I’ve had a son, come on, get up.’ He said, ‘Let’s go.’ He came and lifted me up, and came to my house and we did the circumcision.” Her father’s appearance served as a fantasy compensation for his death. Rachel demanded that he get up, perhaps expressing a wish to return him to life. At the same time, he lifted her up, perhaps from her mourning. This encounter with her father and his presence at the dream circumcision indicate, most likely, the pain Rachel felt at the fact that he would be absent from the real ceremony. It may also have helped her cope with her loss. She gave her son her father’s name, Rafa’el (Rafi for short), making the baby a replacement for her father. After her father’s dream appearance, Rachel also enjoyed a nocturnal visit from a much-revered rabbi from Marrakech, Rabbi Yehuda Tzarfati. As a result, she gave her son two names, Rafa’el Yehuda, thus demonstrating the parallel she made between the role of parent and that of tsaddiq. I should point out that in most of the visitation dreams she had before the birth of her children, including the youngest, the figures who appeared came to her house. In one dream, the visitor even expressed his interest in taking up residence in her home. The setting of these dreams reflects the personal and intimate connection she felt toward her holy guests, and her close resemblance to saints’ impresarios who boarded a tsaddiq in their home. Rachel’s intimacy with her tsaddiqim, and the inclination to invoke their assistance at times of trouble, can explain her great enthusiasm for the holy site near her house. At the site, she was able to channel her feelings about tsaddiqim. “I was overwhelmed by the place.… I immediately began to believe in that site,” she said. The personal processing she did of Ya’ish’s revelation story can be seen in the following dream, which reflects her initial experience of the Gate of Paradise. I dreamed that I was going up some stairs. Suddenly I saw a doorway. I went in. All at once I saw that Ya’ish’s wife was standing there, she said to me, “Please come in.” I went in.



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Suddenly I saw Ya’ish’s mother across from me, standing in the holy place, and there were all sorts of graves there. She went from grave to grave and kissed them. I said to Ḥannah: “What is your mother doing there?” Then she told me, “My mother, may she be healthy, comes every day to visit the tsaddiqim buried here.”

The dream’s opening described how Rachel discovered the site. The emphasis on the doorway matches the nature of the site, the Gate of Paradise, and allowed the dreamer to underline her smooth entrance and her “natural” feeling of belonging there. Here, as early as her first dream, she displayed familiarity with the wife of the site’s initiator as if she were a member of the family. Note the female nature of this initial dream—the man who founded the site is absent, but his wife and motherin-law are present. Ḥannah’s mother’s dream prostration on the graves of tsaddiqim is of great importance given the three-way dream dialogue between Ya’ish, the kabbalist Rabbi Makhluf Lasri, and another woman who frequented the site, whom I mentioned earlier in this chapter. The dialogue dealt with the “pure souls” of the tsaddiqim buried at the site. Rachel’s dream turned this three-way conversation into a four-way one, and further validated the revelation. After the site’s establishment, Rachel began to visit it regularly, and as a result she established close relationships with Ya’ish and his family. This tightening attachment is reflected in the dreams that followed, and most probably was also reinforced by it. I dreamed that I wanted to eat grapes. So I went to Ya’ish’s house and said: “I’ll certainly find [grapes] at his house. Then, when I came, I saw Ya’ish in a large citrus grove with a green lawn and full of grape trees [sic]. His mother-in-law was climbing up a ladder, picking grapes, and he was there with crates. So I came and I said to him, “Great, I felt like having some grapes,” and he said, “Go on, take as much as you like.”

On the personal level, the dream confirmed her growing friendship with Ya’ish, reflected in his generosity towards her. But beyond this, we see a concrete expression of Rachel’s confidence that the site can provide a response and solution to her problems. As soon as her need arose, she expressed her faith that the site could supply it, and so it could. Oral

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provision of food or drink is a recurring motif in dreams of saints (Bilu & Abramovitch 1985). It is a manifest sign of the realization of a believer’s wish in the future. As we will see further on, in her dreams Rachel frequently received food when she visited the site. The use of this cultural template is also influenced by the special nature of the site as a wondrous garden and from the special significance attached to its fruit. I should note in this connection the similarity between Ya’ish’s garden in the dream and the garden in Rachel’s first home in Beit She’an—the home she had to leave when her mother died (“with a garden and citrus trees, a grape arbor,” she said of the house). Given this similarity, it is tempting to conjecture that, for Rachel, the shrine represented her childhood home during the happy years when her family was whole and united, a kind of lost paradise of childhood that she longed to recreate.33 The repeated appearance of a mother figure in her dreams—Ya’ish’s mother-in-law—corroborates this hypothesis, and grants the giving of the fruit the meaning of the gratification of an oral wish from childhood, focused on her parents. Rachel’s yearning for the maternal nourishment she lost found explicit expression in her criticism of her sisterin-law, with whom she lived after her mother’s death: she “didn’t cook me the food that my mother did.” The site’s family atmosphere is strongly portrayed in the next dream: So I dreamed that I was going there. There there is a large synagogue, full of people. My brother was praying there, everyone was sitting, praying, but Ḥannah [Ya’ish’s wife] got up and brought us juice and cake. Then my sister said to me: “Good for her, she doesn’t bring anyone drinks, only me and you.” Then her little daughter came and watered the place, and then went to pray. I said to her, “She’s something, that girl has faith. She always comes, and first thing she prays.”

Rachel’s brother and sister were present with her; Ya’ish’s family was represented by his wife and youngest daughter. Rachel’s intimate connection with the site is evident not only in the presence of members of the dreamer’s family, but also in the preferred treatment they received— preference that again took the form of oral gratification. Rachel responded to this special treatment by praising Ya’ish’s daughter, who followed in her father’s footsteps. The tightening tie between Rachel and Ya’ish was expressed in a dialogue between the two of them in the next dream:



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Before I made a festive meal at the shrine I dreamed about my boy. I kept putting off [the festive meal], it didn’t work out. Then one day I was sitting, and suddenly I dreamed as if I was going there, to Ya’ish’s house, I only took drinks with me, a bottle of cola and a few cookies.… Then he, Ya’ish, said to me: “Great, it’s good you came, you’ll have a long life, because yesterday I actually dreamed about you.” He said that he had a dream in which he asked: “Where is that woman’s festive meal? Why hasn’t she brought it yet?” Then they said, “No, she hasn’t arrived yet, she’ll come.” He said: “I meant to come right now to tell you.” I went back [home] to get all sorts of things to bring there.

As in her previous dreams, food and drink occupy a prominent place, but this time the dreamer gave rather than received. This role reversal expressed the reciprocity that is the basis of the relationship between a devotee and a tsaddiq. The cultural expectation is that the tsaddiq will help whoever believes in him, visits his sanctuary, and keeps the vows made to the saint. The background to this dream was a vow that Rachel made to bring a festive meal to the Gate of Paradise after her son recovered from an illness (see below). The miraculous correspondence between her keeping of the vow and the message that Ya’ish received, in a dream within a dream, points to the close relationship between the two, as well as to Rachel’s central role at the site. Note that Elijah, the site’s patron, has been nowhere to be seen in the dreams presented thus far. Instead, Rachel populated the Gate of Paradise with the family of the site’s discoverer—Ya’ish himself, his wife, his mother-in-law, and his daughter, in addition to Rachel’s brothers and sisters. This would seem to reflect the family-personal character she sought to assign to the site. It is certainly possible, however, that the local saint was represented in her dreams by the local entrepreneur who “brought” him to Beit She’an. Whatever the case, in later dreams Rachel did encounter Elijah. As in the dream presented above, she dreamed the first of these latter dreams after her failure to follow through with a resolution connected to the site. On the way home after a visit there, Rachel found some money. Since she saw this as a gift from the tsaddiq, she decided to give the money to Ya’ish and to designate it for a festive meal. But she procrastinated.

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I dreamed that I was here on the stairs, that I was about to walk up, this rabbi came, didn’t come into the apartment, just stood [at the bottom of] the stairs. He said to me: “Come down and go up.” I said, “Why?” He said to me: “Just because. Come down and go up.” He placed his hand [on my head] and blessed me. I said to him: “Who are you? Where do you live? Where do you come from?” He said to me: “Don’t you know me? I live in the garden down there.” I said [when I woke up]” “My God, I found the money.… Now I’ll go take it there.”

Like other encounter dreams with the tsaddiq, he did not name himself explicitly. But his domocile left no room for doubt (“I live in the garden down there”). This encounter with the patron of the Gate of Paradise took place outside the site, in the stairwell of Rachel’s apartment building. The fact that the tsaddiq troubled himself to come to see one of his believers, instead of waiting for her to visit him, demonstrated the respect in which he held her, and her importance to him. It also indicated the reason he manifested himself to Rachel—her temporary failure to visit the site. If there was any reprimand here for her delay in carrying out her vow to the tsaddiq, it was hinted in the tsaddiq’s own refusal to enter the dreamer’s home—tit for tat. As we have seen, and will see further below, a frequent motif in Rachel’s dreams was an easy, smooth entrance into the shrine, or the opposite, difficulty and constraint. These were clearly metaphors for, on the one hand, a sense of election and self-aggrandizement, or on the other guilt, inadequacy, and discomfort.34 In this dream, the tsaddiq’s rebuff of her invitation to enter her apartment was sweetened by the intimate blessing he granted her.35 As in the previous dream, after which Rachel forthwith brought the makings of a festive meal to the shrine, this dream motivated a waking action. She donated the money she had found. Another model of the encounter with the tsaddiq is illustrated in the next dream. It is a classic healing dream centered on Rachel’s brother. Rachel frequently used the site as a therapeutic resource. She attributed the recoveries of her children and other family members to her visits to the site, and in particular to the “tsaddiq’s oil.” I dreamed that there was this little room, and there was a man named Elijah there. So he prepared this bag of medicines and said to me: “It’s for him, so he’ll feel better.” He actually



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picked up this bag with all sorts of things in it and gave it to me. When I went [to my brother] that same month, [he] already felt better. [Before that] he had been depressed.

In this dream, “a man named Elijah” represents the prophet Elijah. In fact, in Moroccan Jews’ visitation dreams, a man who bears the tsaddiq’s name often stands in for the tsaddiq himself (Ben-Ami 1984: 84; Bilu & Abramovitch 1985). Another of Rachel’s healing dreams made use of the physical proximity between the local medical clinic and the Gate of Paradise, placing Rachel’s family doctor in Ya’ish’s back yard. The event behind the dream was Rachel’s son’s recovery from a childhood disease after she anointed him with holy oil she brought from the shrine. In waking life, Rachel frequently visited the Gate of Paradise on her way home from the clinic. I was sleeping and I dreamed that Dr. Patrick, as if I went to look for him, and I found him in Ya’ish’s house. I went to get him. He said to me: “Just a minute, I’m just finishing up.” So Ya’ish’s wife, Ḥannah, said to me: “Look, people dreamed that there was an onion here, and we really found an onion.” And I saw that everything was green, like mint. I said, “That’s wonderful, you have peppers here, and onions.” And I said to Dr. Patrick: “Look how wonderful this is, people dreamed and they found it.” He answered: “That’s great.” Then Ḥannah said to me: “Come, I just want to give you some mint.” I said to her: “But people will see me, there are a lot of people here.” She said: “What do you care? I want to give just to you.” (And really when I put the oil on my boy I believed that he would get better—and he really got better.)

An unusual aspect of this dream was that Rachel added a detailed interpretation of it, which I quote here: I got up and I understood. The mint she gave me is the place. Because mint is healing, it’s health. And I understood that Dr. Patrick in his white coat was like an angel there. Because a doctor is an angel, and even wears a white robe. And I showed him, and he said to me “wonderful,” he liked it so much. And the place is green—I want him to have good fortune. Because

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when people dream that something is growing, that is good fortune, that there will be good fortune for the place and for me, too, in all ways. And then I asked him [Ya’ish]: “What about the place?” He said to me: “We have plans.” Then I understood that the dream meant that the site would grow, develop, like the greenery growing there, that it would be something. So it helped him and it helped me. The boy got better, and my brother is better, too. When you have faith, it helps.

Rachel’s exegesis testified to her mastery of the lexicon of cultural symbols in visitation dreams. The symbolic meanings that Rachel attributed to the doctor (an angel), the mint (healing and health) and the greenery (good fortune) all came from this lexicon. It may well be that her personal doctor’s presence at the site was attributable to the fact that the two healing sites, the clinic and the Gate of Paradise, were separated by only a narrow fence. Some dreamers depicted the encounter between modern and traditional medicine as a competition, one that generally ends with the victory of the traditional system (as in the above-cited dreams of Meir and Zohara). Rachel was able to live in peace with both systems, as expressed in her harmonious placement of her doctor in Ya’ish’s garden, and in the pleasure he experienced there.36 Ḥannah, as usual, made an appearance in this dream of Rachel’s. Here she explained to Rachel that the abundant greenery in the garden resulted from the dreams people had. In doing so, she underlined the fact that dreams had been the motivating force in the establishment of the Gate of Paradise. Furthermore, she gave mint only to Rachel, while disregarding the other believers who had flocked to the site. In this she responded to Rachel’s repeated wish to receive special consideration from the site’s owners. The grant of mint, in the context of the visitation dream, represented a promise of healing, which indeed happened in reality. But the green plant had another meaning in this dream, beyond the promise of personal healing. On a more general level it represented the site, emphasizing rapid growth (“that the site would grow, develop, like the greenery growing there”). This double meaning reflects the mutual nourishment of the general and the particular, of the site’s importance as a community institution, as well as a healing resource for the individual in distress. In Rachel’s words: “So it helped him and it helped me.” The healing dreams presented thus far were directed at immediate distress. But the two final dreams of Rachel that I will present here again



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show how Rachel used the Gate of Paradise to cope with wounds from the past, and in particular her loss of her mother at a young age. I dreamed that I went to Ya’ish’s house and there was a gate there. I knock on the door and a tiny old man with a hat came out. I asked him: “Where is Ya’ish?” He said to me: “Ya’ish isn’t here, I’m instead of him, I take care of the house. What do you want? He’s not home.” I said: “I came [pause]”— because I knew that I really, in reality, didn’t feel well, I always had problems with pregnancy—“come on, give me some araq from this place.” Then he asked me: “Tell me, did you immerse yourself?” I knew in the dream that I was supposed to go to immerse myself [in the ritual bath] the next day. I said: ‘Tomorrow I have to go immerse myself.” He said: “No! Then I don’t consent, no one who has not immersed will enter this place.” I said to him: ‘But Ya’ish, whenever I ask him, he says just be clean, you don’t need to immerse yourself.” He said: “No!” That’s what he did to me: “You won’t enter! And Ya’ish ought to know from this day on that no woman who did not immerse herself should enter the place.” I said “Okay.” He didn’t let me in. He stood with me at the entrance . It was all in a dream. He stood there with me like that. He said to me: “Wait here, I’ll go to bring you something.” He brought me a glass of araq and an orange, and I went home. And my mother, I lost her when I was fourteen. I came [home] and my mother said to me: “Where have you been? Where did you vanish, my sweet? I’ve been waiting for you for so long.” I told her: “Mom, we have a place, what can I say, in that house all [prayers] are granted.” I began to explain. She said to me: “My child, take me there, to that place.” I took her to Ya’ish there and I saw her standing, holding a baby, giving him milk.

The dream is divided into two separate but thematically related parts. As in most of her dream visits to the site, here too Rachel arrived as a supplicant, with an actual life problem, related to her pregnancy. She met the gatekeeper of the site, apparently a representation of Elijah, and asked him for a remedy, some araq from the place. The tsaddiq’s refusal

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to let her in because she had not immersed herself may have indicated a sense of guilt concerning her level of religious observance.37 Following her marriage Rachel moved away from religion, but after a while she repented and adopted a more religious lifestyle, to her husband’s chagrin. The emergence of the Gate of Paradise in her neighborhood, and Ya’ish’s explicit demand that she become fully observant, reinforced her existing tendency towards religiosity, and served as a major source of support for her in her contention with her husband. In the end, her husband accepted the religious lifestyle that Rachel instituted in their home. It may be that the episode in the dream had to do with this increased observance. The story also contained a reproach to Ya’ish for not enforcing more strictly the demand that female visitors be ritually pure. The bitter pill of being refused entry was ameliorated by the fact that Rachel became a mediator between the tsaddiq and Ya’ish.38 Her status and close relationship with the tsaddiq is indicated by the araq and orange she receives—another expression of oral nourishment, and an assurance that her difficult pregnancy, the reason for her visit to the site, would end well. (This may reflect the popular belief that a pregnant woman should be given everything she craves—see Bab. Talmud Yoma 72a.) The second part of the dream was brief but striking, because Rachel once again met her late mother. Her mother’s words, “Where did you vanish, my sweet? I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” seem to be manifestly a projection of Rachel’s sense of loss—her mother left her when she was young and needed her most. The dynamic connection between this reunification with her mother and the Gate of Paradise became concrete when the two of them visited the site together. The moving conclusion displayed an explicit oral wish. The baby may have represented the dreamer returning to her mother’s bosom (and milk), thus receiving compensation for her painful loss. Or maybe it was an infant her mother never saw in life—the baby born to Rachel, healthy and whole, after her visit to the site. Either way, it is clear that, for Rachel, the shrine was a kind of protective mother surrogate.39 The dream’s two parts have clear parallels. In both, the dreamer faces parental figures—the tsaddiq, a classic father figure, and her mother. In both, these figures appear as nurturers and nourishers and, in both, the sustenance that the figures grant is directed at the baby’s health, before or after his birth. If we needed any further confirmation that, for Rachel, the saint was a father figure, she supplied it in the following dream:



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I dreamed that my father was here, where they throw out the garbage, next to Ya’ish’s house. I know [in the dream] that there is a very deep grave there, and they begin to fill it up with water. I say to my two uncles: “Come take my father and put him inside.” They say: “Okay.” And I don’t have a father [now]. Then they grab him and put him there, into that grave And I, while they are putting him in, I look here, at Ya’ish’s place. It’s all green, green, roses, flowers; and the sky—such a red sunset. And I say: “Wow, look at that, the Garden of Eden.” And I get the shivers: “Look what a paradise, this place is amazing.…” [She pauses.] I say, “Isn’t it wonderful that my father is buried in the Garden of Eden. Every day that I come, I will visit him, now it’s close for me.”

In this dream, Rachel buried her father next to the Gate of Paradise, so compensating herself for his loss. The initial reference point for the grave’s location, “where they throw out the garbage” (and perhaps also the water that fills it), apparently indicated Rachel’s ambivalent relationship with her father, who after his remarriage distanced himself from his children. But the location also underlined, by contrast, the worth and beauty of the shrine that the dreamer sees before her, like a picture postcard, during the burial. In the end, her father had, in the dream, the good fortune to be buried next to the wonderful landscape of Eden. There he would lie close to the tsaddiqim who, according to Rachel’s first dream, were buried there. For her part, Rachel would be able to visit her father’s grave regularly, since he lay close to her home. Rachel’s nocturnal encounters with her father and mother at the Gate of Paradise, which were without a doubt the emotional climax of her dreams, indicated the breadth of the uses that she made of the site, as well as the profound personal meaning it had for her. These dimensions of use and meaning explained her intimate connection to the site. In her own words, it was a kind of addiction: “Not a week goes by that I don’t go. If a week or two passes and I don’t go, I’m on pins and needles, something’s missing. When I’m there I’m calm and I feel good, and I really come home changed, as if I depend on the place. I always feel safe [there].” Dream and Reality In focusing on Rachel, it must be kept in mind that, while she is an adherent of unequaled involvement and devotion, she was but one

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representative of a community of dreamers that came into being around the Gate of Paradise after Ya’ish’s revelation. How can the enthusiastic response of so many of Beit She’an’s inhabitants to Ya’ish’s Announcement to the Public be explained—an enthusiasm prominently displayed in the dreams they reported? To answer that question, we must look more closely at the character of the dream discourse in Beit She’an and its implications for our understanding of the nature of dreams in general. First, it is hard to believe that the dreams presented in this chapter would have been dreamed in the absence of Ya’ish’s missive. His revelation dreams thus traveled a long path from being a private fantasy to being a public message aimed at enlisting believers. This impressive course tells us that the rhetorical quality and receptive power of a dream-as-reported are no less important than the personal motives and experiences that ostensibly make up the dream’s foundation. The community’s dreams were not, after all, a necessary condition of their attachment to the site—not all visitors dreamed about it. As I will show, neither were they a sufficient condition for ensuring the site’s ongoing existence. But they were reliable testimony to the reverberations set off by Ya’ish’s revelation dreams among his listeners and readers. This interactive dimension underlines the importance of the dream as an intentional message and of the social context in which it was presented. Nevertheless, the perception of the dream as interpersonal must be seen as complementary and not contradictory to the perception of the dream as an internal mental process. The dichotomy of these dreams being, on the one hand, internal experiences, reflections of the unconscious, and on the other hand intended messages, a socially-defined medium of communication, reflects the traditional disciplinary division between the psychological and anthropological study of dreams (Lincoln 1935; Fabian 1966). But the understanding of the dream proposed here explicitly seeks to blur these customary boundaries between the two disciplines. While, for analytic purposes, I do discuss the individual and collective levels separately, in the end my intention is to show how these levels of analysis can interweave to create a complex and multifaceted whole that does not segregate psychology from culture. Naturally, when I have addressed the rich biographical and personal material that the life stories of Ya’ish and Avraham supply, analysis of the internal mental dimension has taken the foreground. But this dimension is full of familiar cultural symbols that the dreamer has processed and beaten on the anvil of the events and tribulations of his life. In the same way, when the focus has been the community, I have stressed the



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interpersonal and inter-subjective dimension, which reflects the revelation dreams’ reverberations and effects on the community. Despite this, the internal voice of the dreamers’ wishes and needs has hardly been absent from this discourse, through which each dreamer obtains his or her own Eden, a landscape of one’s own personal world, and through which each creates “his” or “her” tsaddiq, to match one’s own personality. Double caution is required in any discussion of dreams connected to saints’ cults. On the one hand, we must not remove dreams from the individual psychological plain, while on the other we must not overlook the cultural grammar, based on a common tradition, that structures the dreams. In Morocco, visitation dreams of tsaddiqim were a familiar cultural genre for both Jews (Ben-Ami 1984: 79-84) and Muslims (Kilborne 1981, 1987; Crapanzano 1975). They played a central role in the discovery of hidden saints’ graves and in strengthening the ties between saints and their believers. This cultural pattern continued in Israel, as we saw in the dream biographies of Avraham and Ya’ish. But even among the rank and file of believers, dreams of tsaddiqim are a familiar phenomenon, especially during hillula festivals.40 Beyond this common heritage, the cultural template of the Beit She’an dreams was evident in the physical environment in which their narratives occurred and in the central figure that appeared in them. The site’s distinctive nature was indicated in these dreams by natural objects that frequently figure in traditional descriptions of the Garden of Eden, such as pure water, greenery, flowers, and fruit trees. At other times it was expressed by holy structures such as a synagogue, a tsaddiq’s grave, or a mikveh, or ritual activities such as lighting candles, hymns, prayers, and festive meals. Most of the dreams involved some sort of reciprocal activity with the figure that the dreamer identified as Elijah the Prophet, the site’s patron saint. Elijah identified himself in just a few dreams, so living up to his popular image as a master of disguise and incognito manifestations. In general, the dreamers identified him on the basis of his connection to the shrine (for example, as the site’s guard), in light of his appearance, which matched the stereotypical image of a tsaddiq and rabbi (long beard, white robe), and on the basis of the lexicon of symbols common to participants in saints’ cults. The tsaddiq’s common symbolic disguises are as a doctor, an Arab, an angel, a dove, or as someone else with the name Elijah.41 Recognition of the site’s importance, which explains the reception of Ya’ish’s Announcement to the Public, thus derived from the shrine constituting an intersection between two principal belief systems—one

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regarding the Garden of Eden, whose centrality in Jewish cosmology hardly requires substantiation, and the other being the veneration of saints, which was a central element in the traditional identity of Moroccan Jews. These belief systems are internalized and become cognitive schema in the consciousnesses of many people, although their prominence and motivating power vary from person to person. Among some of the believers, these internalized cultural schema achieve cognitive salience and great motivational force, turning them into systems of idioms for processing wishes, needs, frustrations, and conflicts within their world of personal experience, expressed in dreams. Above, in this chapter, I identified Ya’ish’s desire to return to the lost Eden of his childhood and to a life of tradition and spirituality, as well as his desire to rid himself of his social phobia, as the psychological bases of his revelation dreams. In this section, I have examined the ways in which visitation dreams expressed Ḥannah’s ambivalence about her husband’s project, which forced her to remain in Beit She’an against her will; Meir’s sense of importance, mission, and of his public role; and Rachel’s desire for healing. I discussed at length Rachel’s use of tsaddiqim as a means of coping and compensation in the face of problems that arose during the course of normal life (such as pregnancy, fertility, children’s illnesses, and doubts and disputes with her husband over her own level of observance). She also used them to address problems from her past—becoming an orphan at a young age and her resulting sense of abandonment and inferiority, which still reverberated through her life at the time of her dreams. The Gate of Paradise appeared in her dreams as a warm, nurturing, and nourishing home in which she could find answers to all her problems. She created personal, family-like attachments with Ya’ish and his family, and developed the same kind of relationship with the patron saint. The claim that saints represent benevolent and rewarding parents is repeatedly confirmed in Rachel’s dreams, in light of the associations that tied her father, and especially her mother, to tsaddiqim. The most prominent examples of this link can be found in the dreams in which Rachel placed her parents in the Gate of Paradise, and in so doing compensated herself for their painful absence. That their absence was still an open wound for her was evident in her explicit statements about how much she misses them: “my mother, I lost her when I was fourteen,” in her dream of meeting her mother; “I don’t have a father,” in her dream about him. The final scenes of these dreams—the mother nursing a baby at the shrine, and her father being buried in a wonderful landscape of greenery, roses, and a red sunset—speak for themselves. The oral wish that was



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in the forefront of the dream about her mother, appeared in many other dreams as well, as when Rachel received grapes, mint, juice and cake, araq and an orange, or a festive meal. Her satisfaction was doubled by the special treatment that each reward expressed: “What do you care? I want to give just to you,” Ḥannah told her; in another dream, she was told, “she doesn’t bring anyone drinks, only me and you [Rachel and her sister].” The dreamer thus won surplus compensation for what she missed from her past. This compensation was sometimes also expressed via images of easy, comfortable entry. A difficult entry, in contrast, indicated guilt feelings and dissatisfaction with herself. The central place of tsaddiqim in Rachel’s life was displayed with great force in the few dreams which contained an implied rebuke, because she had delayed arranging a festive meal at the shrine or had neglected to immerse herself before visiting. In these dreams, the tsaddiq appeared as a kind of moral compass, who charged the dreamer with correcting her shortcoming. She quickly obeyed. The behavioral outcomes of these nocturnal encounters demonstrated that, no less than the dream was shaped by reality, the dream shaped reality. This conclusion about the link between dream and reality can be generalized to the entire community of dreamers. Ya’ish, Avraham, and the other saints’ impresarios translated their private dream experiences into a public reality when they established holy sites in their homes. The dream discourse that developed in Beit She’an, Safed, and other places reflects the real world’s influence, whether direct (a visit to the Gate of Paradise, for example) or mediated (reading Ya’ish’s Announcement to the Public or receiving information on what the Announcement said), on the internal worlds of the community’s members and their dreams. However, as we saw in the case of Rachel and other believers, a dream encounter with the holy site and its patron saint in which a disturbing personal problem was expressed, and sometimes resolved, constituted in many cases a turning point that turned faith in tsaddiqim into a personal emotional experience. The result was intense personal involvement and obligation. The behavioral manifestations of this involvement and obligation again demonstrated the power that dreams have to shape, and not just reflect, reality. The growth of a community of dreamers around the Gate of Paradise was evidence that Ya’ish’s initiative, which began with a private experience of revelation, fell on receptive ears in his social environment. But the enthusiastic acceptance of his initiative, reflected in the rich and exhilarating dream discourse (only a tiny portion of which has been presented here) must

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not lead us to forget the lesson we learned from the success of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. A holy site’s true test of survival is not the splendid power of its revelation experiences, nor even their ability to appeal to the hearts of believers and produce further impressive dreams of holiness. Such dreams are like fireworks. They produce initial enthusiasm and draw people to the site, but also quickly go out in the absence of conditions and circumstances that enable the site to carry on in the long run. After the initial inspiration and enthusiasm, the institutionalization of the site’s charisma depends on several practical factors, most of which are of an organizational and bureaucratic nature. The site must receive formal sanction from the rabbinic establishment, or at least neutralize its opposition; it must receive the consent of governmental authorities on the national and local level to a change in land use status so that the necessary infrastructure for receiving visitors can be installed. There must also be effective advertisement of the site that will inform as many households as possible of its existence. In the end, none of these factors really fell into place for the Gate of Paradise. The possible reasons for the site’s decline may well have included, as I have already indicated, the huge (and daunting) arrogance of claiming to have uncovered the mythical axis mundi in a backyard in an unprepossessing town. Furthermore, Ya’ish did not have the organizational and political acumen needed to achieve the sanctions needed for the site’s survival. An accident he suffered at the end of the 1980s—he was hit on the head and shoulder by a falling tree—further loosened his control of the place. Disputes arose among his associates about the way he ran the site, and his personal standing there, and these led to factionalism and the departure of central figures, among them the dreamers Meir and Rachel and the son of Avraham from Safed. These departures were the beginning of the end of the Gate of Paradise.

Paradise Lost If you were to visit the Dalet housing project in Beit She’an today you would have difficulty discerning any signs of holiness in the renovated apartment at 210/1, adjacent to the medical clinic. Both the site, which for twenty years was a healing shrine and the subject of myriad dreams, and its devoted founder have disappeared entirely. In 1997, the Elijah the Prophet synagogue went up in flames. The structure and everything in it, including the holy ark and the Torah scrolls, were destroyed. While the official investigation attributed the fire to a short circuit, Ya’ish was unable to shake off the suspicion that the fire had been set deliberately to destroy his life’s



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work. He sank into depression, which intensified in the days following the catastrophe, when he labored alone to clean off the large quantity of ashes that had accumulated on the cement floor of the wondrous Gate. Enervated and bitter, he stubbornly turned down offers from the municipality and his acquaintances to help him rebuild the site. For him, the fire was an incontrovertible sign that the Gate of Paradise’s days had come to an end. Some of his neighbors and former associates added insult to injury— they claimed that the disaster was a sign from heaven, indicating that the site was not worthy because of some moral failing in Ya’ish’s family. Three years later, Ya’ish and Ḥannah sold their home, packed their belongings, and moved to Yavneh, south of Tel Aviv, close to one of their married daughters. Most of Ḥannah’s family lived there, and the couple’s two other married daughters were by that time living not far away, in the Tel Aviv area. Beyond the fact that the move to Yavneh put an end to any chance of reestablishing the Gate of Paradise, it was also the tragic mirror image of the series of events that led to the establishment of the site twenty-two years previously. Then, too, Ya’ish and Ḥannah planned to move to Yavneh, but they reversed their plans at the last minute when Ya’ish discovered the sacred site in his back yard. This time the moving plans were carried out, without either human or divine intervention. The move to Yaveh did not sit well with Ya’ish. In Beit She’an he was an old-timer. For years he was a municipal employee, first as the foreman of a street cleaning squad, and afterwards as a school janitor. His devotion to his work won him recognition and respect. In Yavneh, in contrast, he had trouble finding employment, because of his age and his bad health. Even worse, the loss of the holy site, to which he had devoted most of his energy, left his life devoid of spiritual content, and of the sense of mission and the social recognition that the Gate of Paradise had brought him. Of course, Ya’ish and Ḥannah—especially Ḥannah—also see the positive side of the move, which allowed them to reunite with and benefit from the support of their daughters and many other members of their family. But Ya’ish, who sought to recreate his childhood paradise just outside the door of his Beit She’an apartment, seems to feel that he was expelled from Eden. He waxes nostalgic about the wonderful days of his holy site, and leafs through the thank-you notes and dream stories he collected from visitors. He still conducts an annual festive meal in honor of Elijah the Prophet, just as he did in Beit She’an, on one of the first days of Elul. But now it’s a much more modest affair, and he holds it at the tomb of Rabban Gamliel, Yavneh’s local saint. Ya’ish spends much of his time reading works of mysticism and popular healing, old and new,

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and sometimes even tries to cull from these books remedies for people he knows. Ya’ish’s fervent interest in “delving into these things and getting results” can, like the festive meal he conducts at Rabban Gamliel’s grave, be seen as the shards of attempts to preserve something of his previous life as the owner of a healing shrine empowered by tsaddiqim. I have no way of knowing for sure to what extent the Gate of Paradise still lives in the consciousness of its devotees in Beit She’an. I learned from casual conversations with some of Ya’ish’s former neighbors that they still ascribe a fuzzy halo of sanctity to the renovated apartment. But the site no longer serves as a place of healing. With its role as a curative shrine gone, the community of dreamers that crystallized around it has also dissolved, and that seems to have expunged the mystical aura that produced such nocturnal encounters with the holy. Nevertheless, the ethereal impression of the Gate of Paradise has not vanished entirely. Just two streets down from Ya’ish’s old home, in a small second-floor apartment in a faded, boilerplate public housing building, a traditional healer inspired originally by Ya’ish’s project receives the sick and the troubled. To understand the nature of this new healing site, we must reacquaint ourselves with a key figure in the Beit She’an community of dreamers, Rachel Ben-Ḥamo. When we last saw Rachel, at the end of the 1980s, she was a member of the Gate of Paradise “family.” She frequently sponsored festive meals at the shrine during the day and visited it in her dreams at night. This intimacy, which often found expression in her dreams, exasperated Ya’ish and his family, who were annoyed by her dominating manner and suspected her of seeking to shunt them aside and gain control of the site. In the end, they told her she was not welcome at the place where, she maintained, all her needs had been answered. We can easily imagine the humiliation and pain she felt, in light of the respect and love she evinced for Ya’ish and his family in her dreams. By the time Rachel was banished from the site, she was in the process of becoming more religiously observant. This period was marked by fervent dream encounters with a number of tsaddiqim, first and foremost the Gate of Paradise’s patron saint, Elijah the Prophet. These nocturnal experiences (which began, as we have seen, even before Ya’ish established his holy site) imbued her with a sense of destiny. She resolved to use her intimacy with tsaddiqim to convey their blessings to the troubled. Little by little, she gained a reputation, one that extended beyond Beit She’an, as a healer specializing in problems of childlessness. In contrast with the shabby external appearance of the housing project building where she lives, the interior of her apartment is clean, neat, and



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well kept up. The walls (even of the stairwell leading up to her apartment) are covered almost entirely by pictures of tsaddiqim. Colorful candles, collection boxes, and sacred books also abound in her home. The pictures and objects stand out all the more against their spectacular backgrounds— they are mounted on shiny velvet cloth decorated with colorful ornaments, and on golden and silvery dedication plaques. Rachel’s husband is responsible for this garish design. Since retiring, he has turned one room in the apartment into a workshop in which he frames and ornaments sacred items. This hobby brings in an income, beyond the magnificence it grants to his wife’s healing work. Many of Rachel’s clients, beyond making a donation in exchange for her blessing, also purchase a picture, candle, or collection box crafted by her husband. Rachel’s reception room is too small for the furniture and sacred objects that fill it. It contains four ornamentally carved Elijah the Prophet chairs (high, broad chairs traditionally used in circumcision ceremonies), pillows embroidered with golden dedication inscriptions, and shelves packed solid with sacred books, pictures of tsaddiqim, ornamental candles, and a candlelighting corner with a shelf full of oil glasses. Among the many tsaddiqim who have candles or oil glasses dedicated to them are Rabbi Ya’aqov Sabag, the saint of Rachel’s childhood; the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs; the twelve tribes; and of course Elijah. The Baba Sali stands out among the Moroccan saints, but the European Hasidic Rabbi Naḥman of Braslav is also represented—Rachel visited his grave in Uman in the Ukraine after hearing of it from a local religious scholar. The wall hangings include many presents sent by grateful clients. Some of these are cloths or parchments inscribed with hymns of thanks to Rachel, most of them praising her assistance in helping them conceive and bear children. Some of them are acrostic poems in which the first letters of each line spell out Rachel’s name. Rachel systematically documents her successes. The room also holds binders filled to bursting with letters of thanks, dream diaries, healing logs, as well as elaborate picture albums of the circumcision ceremonies of children born in the wake of Rachel’s blessings. Many of the albums include photographs of Rachel washing the baby before the ceremony—a special privilege she demands as recompense for her assistance. The treatment that Rachel offers takes advantage of her intimacy with the tsaddiqim who visit her in her dreams. She enlists them to help the people who come to her for help, the great majority of whom are women. The climax of the therapeutic process, documented in color photographs on Rachel’s lavish business card, is the lighting of candles to the tsaddiqim

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and offering praise and appealing to them in prayer. As befits a woman who calls herself Rabbanit Rachel Ben-Ḥamo, she covers her hair, as religious law requires—always with a kerchief whose colors match those of her dress. She also admonishes her clients to become more observant, and even gives them photocopied sheets explaining how to observe the commandments properly. But the preaching and admonishment dissipate during the course of the long session into a generous and friendly conversation, which she steers expertly. Rachel, who speaks quickly and well, clearly enjoys advising those who appeal to her and delights in the praise they rain on her. However, she receives visitors only in the afternoon and evening—she spends each morning caring for one of her four grandchildren. Only the youngest of her five children, a soldier, still lives at home. Rachel’s success in treating infertility makes sense in the context of a complex episode from her past, which in her opinion testifies to the special merit she enjoys in heaven. The event began with abuse of a privilege. Rachel’s five pregnancies were all difficult and miserable. In her anguish, she prayed that her womb be sealed without the use of contraception. Her prayers were answered. Even though she continued to have regular periods, she did not conceive again. Later, when she completed her process of becoming religiously observant, she regretted her rash request and asked for forgiveness. The response came in a dream in which she was commanded by a tsaddiq, probably Elijah, to bless barren women and thus enable them to bear children. These children “will be your children,” she was told. She indeed regards the many children born to her clients as a result of this command (all of whom are documented and photographed in the albums in her treatment room) as a kind of compensation for the sterility she imposed on herself in the latter part of her childbearing years. The issues of menstruation and of the cessation of fertility have been important in the lives of other female saints’ impresarios, and in the timing of their assumption of this role. In this case, a woman who suffered from barrenness (of a particular kind) was chosen to assist barren women. Rachel was entirely conscious of the link that this ostensibly paradoxical situation created between her and the biblical Rachel. She related to me that a famous mystic told her that the root of her soul had originated in Rachel the Matriarch, and that this ancient Rachel frequented her apartment, along with other tsaddiqim. The spot dedicated to Elijah in her treatment room is of special interest, given his role as the patron saint of the Gate of Paradise. Rachel described an intimate and longstanding relationship with him, beginning even before



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the establishment of Ya’ish’s shrine. “Elijah was pained,” she said, that she was banished from the site, because it deprived him of happiness. Some time later he again appeared to her in a dream at a critical moment, when she resolved to sell her apartment and move to a larger home in a different location. Elijah appeared to her in her workroom and informed her: “My daughter, I have come to warn you, do not leave! The home depends on the person’s soul.” As a consequence of this nocturnal visit, Rachel reversed her decision and decided to renovate her apartment instead of sell it. As in the case of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe and the Gate of Paradise, here a tsaddiq foiled, at the last minute, a plan to change homes. This pattern will occur again in the life stories of the women healers who will be presented in the two following chapters. In the present case, Rachel’s willingness to place the tsaddiq’s wishes before her own plans and to remain in her old apartment are all the more striking, given Ya’ish’s inability to sustain the great privilege he had received, and his decision to sell his apartment and leave Beit She’an. Rachel hinted that Elijah now lives in her house, two blocks away from his previous residence, which went up in flames. In fact, she conducts a hillula for Elijah on one of the first days of Elul, just as Ya’ish had done before her. Even if the days of the Gate of Paradise had come to an end, its patron saint did not disappear from the local landscape. He simply moved to a different apartment in the Dalet housing project in Beit She’an.42

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Notes Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 19a. Resh Laqish goes on to state: Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 19a. Resh Laqish goes on to state: “if it is in Arabia, its gate is Beth Garam, and if it is between the rivers, its gate is Dumaskani.” (Translations: BT, Seder Mo’ed, Erubin, Trans. Israel W. Slotki, London, The Soncino Press, 1938) The Talmudic commentator Rashi explains that Beit She’an was given the privilege of being the gate to paradise because “its fruit are the sweetest in all the Land of Israel.” 2 My description of the garden, which evokes the Bible’s description of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2:9, is mine and not Ya’ish’s. But, in a later description he offered of the garden, Ya’ish stated explicitly: “Do you know what that garden was like? Like the Garden of Eden.” 3 At the hillula of Elijah in 1986, which I witnessed, the first three candles sold were for Elijah, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, and Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes, in that order. The candles that followed were for the following saints, in this order: Ḥoni Ha-Me’agel, Rabbi David Dra Ha-Levi, Rabbi Ḥayyim Pinto, Rabbi David Ben-Baruch, Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, Rabbi Yisra’el Abu-Ḥatsera, Rabbi Baruch Sabag, and Rabbi David u-Moshe. The candles were sold for relatively modest sums, ranging from about $7 to about $40. 4 Compare: “Judah and Israel were many, as the sand which by the sea for multitude; they ate, and drank, and were happy.” (I Kings 3:20). 5 The flowing water, plentiful fruit, and wholesome air recall the biblical description of the Garden of Eden, see Eisenstein 1990: 84-85. 6 Many families from Ouland Mansour were placed in farming villages, but the reason seems not to have been their agricultural experience. The largest concentration of families from the community today can be found in Moshav Talmei Yeḥiel, north of Kiryat Malachi (Bilu & Levy 1996: 288). 7 In Moroccan Arabic, the expression “go to heaven” means absolute refusal in the face of all the petitioner’s pleas. 8 It may well be that the restoration of the Masada antiquities had a more complex effect on Ya’ish’s project. In the end, Ya’ish turned his back on the “sacred” secular site, which represents a key story in the Zionist collective memory (seen Ben-Yehuda 1995; Zerubavel 1995) in order to establish a holy site with roots in popular religious tradition. On the connection between archaeology and development towns, see Feige 1998. 9 Nevertheless, Ya’ish was not anxious to put his dream to the test of 1



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reality. He refused to conduct archaeological excavations in his yard. Perhaps he perceived the archaeology that exposed him to the glories of the past as, at the same time, a threat to his religious faith. 10 Many saints’ graves in Morocco and in Israel are located outside urban boundaries; participating in hillulot at such sites involves camping out. So it is hardly surprising that the men and women who have renewed the hillula tradition are people with strong ties to nature. 11 On the truth value of a dream dreamed at a morning hour see the Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 55b: “And Rabbi Yohanan said, three dreams come true, a dream of the morning and a dream dreamed by a friend, and a dream whose meaning comes within the dream.” 12 Recall that a tsaddiq may have more than one shrine. Rabbi David u-Moshe is one example. As I noted early, in addition to Avraham’s popular site, shrines have been dedicated to him in four other locations in Israel. 13 Compare with Gen. 2: 15: “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden to till it and to maintain it.” 14 See II Kings 2:11: “And Elijah went up by a storm of wind to heaven.” Compare with Bab. Talmud Baba Metzia 114b, Derekh Eretz Zuta I, Yalqut Shimoni Bereshit 5, 247 42. 15 Ben-Ami notes that “great Torah learning, especially with Elijah the Prophet, is a hallmark of holiness, and this merit is ascribed to many saints” (Ben-Ami 1984: 23). 16 Recall, however, that the decisive segment of Avraham’s quest involved a descent into a cave, in which he found Rabbi David u-Moshe. Moreover, in discussing Avraham’s journey to the cave, I suggested that it may have been a journey to the Garden of Eden. On this, and on the mythical-symbolic meanings of the encounter with sanctity in the depths of the earth, see Chapter 2, note 32 ff. 17 The connection between Elijah and David, based on Elijah’s traditional role as herald of the Messiah, is a familiar theme in piyyut (Jewish liturgical poetry) and midrash. A well-known puyyut sung on Saturday nights says of Elijah: “May he come to us quickly with the Messiah, son of David.” Midrash Mishlei 19:21 cites Elijah and David as two of the Messiah’s seven names. See also Wiener 1978: 61-67. In the popular legend about King David in the cave, which appears in Bialik’s Va-Yehi Ha-Yom (1965: 27-43), Elijah leads two Torah scholars to the cave where King David sleeps on his bed. 18 The diamond at the gate is reminiscent of the description in the Garden of Eden tractate at the end of Breita De-Shmuel Ha-Qatan: “Two openings of jacinth gates are there in the Garden of Eden (Eisenstein 1990: 84). 19 Avraham went through the first opening despite the guard’s warning that

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whoever did so took his life in his hands. Afterwards he opened an iron gate, despite warnings from the guards that any person who touched the gates would burn up. When he reached the exit gate, the guard told the waiting crowd to go to the tsaddiq’s new abode in Safed. 20 In Avraham’s dream, this motif was expressed in his descent of the staircase in the cave, while moving from light to darkness to light again. Moreover, in his dream, those who entered were warned that they would pay with their lives for entering. Ya’ish’s symbolic death was entrapment in the Garden of Eden; his rebirth was his confident exit. The transition from black to gold water echoes Avraham’s transition from darkness to light. Recall also that Elijah himself experienced a divine revelation in a cave on Mt. Horev (I Kings 19:9). 21 On a more prosaic level, the water’s transformation may indicate a hope that he would benefit materially from the shrine. 22 Recall that Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim also dreamed explicitly about death and rebirth. In his dream he was returned to life by Rabbi David u-Moshe, who was aided by Elijah the Prophet. 23 Rabbi Cohen, a Moroccan Jew involved in the cult of saints, expressed to me his astonishment that Elijah the Prophet would choose to reveal himself to Ya’ish, a simple man with no mastery of sacred texts, rather than, for example, to Rabbi Cohen himself. Rabbi Cohen said this half in jest. But a story he told me to resolve his surprise indicates, perhaps, that he was uncomfortable with the revelation. A family, he related, once went to the Gaon of Vilna (the leading Torah scholar and legal authority of 18th-century Europe) with a difficult question. They were compelled to go home disappointed when the great rabbi was unable to provide an appropriate answer to the problem they posed. The driver of their coach heard of their plight and offered a satisfactory halachic solution. When the Gaon heard of this, he said that the driver had received a gift from him, the Gaon. It was his own scrutiny of the problem, the Gaon declared, that had brought down to earth the divine bounty that enabled the simple coachman to answer the question. 24 During my visits to Beit She’an from 1981 to 1983, I collected, with the help of my research assistant, Motti Asoulin, some 150 dreams dreamed about the site. 25 See Zohar Ḥadash, Midrash Ruth 214: “Rabbi Qasma said [that] the Makhpela Cave is adjacent to the Garden of Eden.” 26 A tradition places Rabbi Akiva’s tomb in Tiberias. See Vilnay 1963: 308. 27 The combination of immodesty and concealment behind a tree is reminiscent of Adam and Eve hiding their nakedness in Eden “among the trees



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of the Garden” (Gen. 3:7-8). 28 His expectation of what such excavations would uncover can be learned from another of his dreams, in which “the place developed into a kind of room like the one you go into at the Western Wall [in Jerusalem], where they excavated, something like that.” 29 This scale of value is reflected in one of the verses of the song of Elijah sung at the end of the Sabbath: “Happy is he who greeted him and was greeted in return” (Rosenburg 1985). 30 Elijah often appears in Talmudic sources as an old man, see Bab. Talmud Berachot 6b; Nedarim 50a; Sanhedrin 113a; Holin 6a. 31 The motif of a tsaddiq appearing as a comforter who aids the dreamer’s recovery after the death of a loved one appeared in Avraham’s dreams as well. Rabbi David u-Moshe instructed him to end his period of mourning for his brother, offering a reason similar to that given to Rachel’s brother. 32 The appearance of a late mother as a source of support and encouragement for an orphaned daughter will appear again in the story of Alu, another saint’s impresario in Beit She’an, in the next chapter. 33 The word “paradise” comes from the same Persian word that in Hebrew became pardes, a grove of trees, usually citrus. 34 The metaphor of easy entry is a motif in many visitation dreams (Bilu 1988), and appears in the dreams of both Avraham and Ya’ish. 35 Laying a hand on a supplicant’s head to give a blessing is reminiscent of Jacob’s blessing of his grandsons, Efrayim and Menashe (Gen. 48: 14-18). This reference may seem forced, but there is another reference to Jacob (Ya’aqov in Hebrew) in her dream. The tsaddiq, at the bottom of the stairs, calling on Rachel to “come down and go up,” invokes the angels who ascended and descended the ladder in Jacob’s dream (Gen. 28:12). These associations may have been connected to Rachel’s experiences of place and of the tsaddiq. Ya’aqov had his dream in a place he called “the abode of God” and the “gate of heaven” (ibid., 17). The direct connection to the Gate of Paradise is obvious. Furthermore, Rachel’s family tsaddiq is Rabbi Ya’aqov Sabag. It seems likely that for Rachel, the figure of Elijah subsumes that of the family tsaddiq from Marrakesh, just as Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim fashioned his Rabbi David u-Moshe in the image of his saintly ancestors. Finally, the biblical Jacob’s beloved wife was Rachel. I learned of Rachel the dreamer’s identification with the biblical Rachel in later visits to the site, at the end of 2001, as I will describe below. 36 Of course, the doctor’s enjoyment of the shrine could be taken as his acknowledgement of the site’s powers, if not of its superiority. 37 Recall the tsaddiq’s refusal to enter her home in the previous dream, in

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the wake of her delay in making her promised contribution to his site. 38 The criticism that Ya’ish did not sufficiently enforce the laws of purity may also indicate subsurface tension and competition between Ya’ish and Rachel, of the type we will see below. 39 Her mother’s presence at the Gate of Paradise in the dream’s closing scene completed a circle in Rachel’s life. Recall that in the dream her brother had after their mother died, the tsaddiq Rabbi Ya’aqov Sabag told him that she was safely abiding in Eden. 40 In a study I conducted at Meron at the beginning of the 1980s with my colleague Henry Abramovitch, at the time of the hillula of Rabbi Shimon BarYoḥai on Lag B’Omer, we learned that in many cases visitors were prodded to attend the hillula by the tsaddiq himself, who appeared to them in a dream. In other cases, the tsaddiq visited them in a dream while they were at the site. So the dream can bring the dreamer to the tsaddiq, just as a visit to the tsaddiq can bring the visitor to his dream. See Bilu & Abramovitch 1985. 41 Elijah appears as an omnipotent healer in the Bible as well, see I Kings 17:17-24. As we will see in the next chapter, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, Alu’s tsaddiq, revealed himself to her first as a dove. 42 Beside Rachel Ben-Ḥamo, two other Beit She’an women of North African origin, Varda Teib and Aliza Aharon, became healers and preachers of rigorous religious observance in the wake of dreams having to do with Elijah. These women, like Rachel, had been members of the local community of dreamers that grew up around Ya’ish’s shrine. But Rachel was the best-known and most popular of the three, as can be seen in the article by Amos Nevo, “Kedosha, Kedosha, Kedosha,” Shivah Yamim supplement, Yediot Aharonot, July 16, 1993.



IV

Early and Late Revelations

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Alu Ezra and Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar

Early and Late Revelations At the end of the 1970s, Alu Ezra, a middle-aged woman who immigrated to Israel from Morocco two decades earlier, dedicated a corner of her living room for Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar—one of the most revered Moroccan Jewish tsaddiqim. Before long, the site, situated in a modest building in Beit She’an’s Tet housing project, became a magnet for supplicants from near and far. These people sought out Alu in the hope that she could heal their ills and solve their problems. Alu gained a reputation as a gifted healer, applying the power of the tsaddiq who lived in her home. Like most housing project buildings in Israel, Alu’s building is a long rectangle composed of a series of entrances. In each one is a stairwell that climbs up to the apartments on each of the building’s four floors. On the façade of her building, over her entrance, hangs a sign stating that “In this building, the tsaddiq Rabbi Avraham Aouriwal [sic], may the memory of the holy tsaddiq be a blessing, revealed himself.” Another sign hangs on the door to her apartment: “Here Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, may the memory of the tsaddiq be a blessing, revealed himself, open to the public Sunday through Thursday from 3 to 7 p.m. Closed on Friday, Saturday, and holidays.”1 The tsaddiq’s corner is covered with colorful ornaments, pictures of tsaddiqim, photographs of the hillula of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar in Morocco, gifts from grateful clients, sacred objects, and flowers. In the center of the saint’s corner stands a collection box, next to a pile of pages describing the wonders performed by the tsaddiq. These pages were photocopied from a book about North African tsaddiqim (Lasri 1978), with the typewritten addition of the address of the tsaddiq’s holy site in Beit She’an and the date of his annual hillula. In the afternoon, Alu’s living room becomes a loud, bustling waiting room. Some of the patients wait their turn, alone or with family members and friends. Others approach the tsaddiq’s corner, recite their problems, and plead for his help. Still others light candles in his honor in a large aluminum container installed on the apartment’s balcony. Alu, a small,

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energetic woman with an expressive face, offers her guests cookies, sweets, tea, and soft drinks, and provides them with remedies concocted from natural ingredients. She claims to have received the formulas, along with a precise diagnosis of the supplicants’ ills, from Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar during nocturnal encounters with the tsaddiq. The warmth and informality she displays in the waiting room change to focused gravity in her treatment room. She conveys her instructions and the treatment regime she prescribes clearly and authoritatively, as befits her claim that all her actions derive from the tsaddiq’s explicit instructions. Her clients believe her unreservedly. Alu told me how she became a healer, empowered by Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, in three interviews I recorded in her home in the mid-1980s (Bilu & Ḥasan-Rokem 1989). Despite her lack of fluency in Hebrew, she turned out to be a master storyteller, expressing herself with vivacity and eloquence. She skillfully wove a dramatic and meaningful life story. I will begin with Alu’s path to the tsaddiq, using extensive quotes from her own account. Afterwards, I will examine the “raw materials” of this narrative with the help of two systems of interpretation. First, I will detect an integrated set of physical, psychological, socio-cultural, as well as geographical and political factors. These, together, shape her story as a narrative structure, endowing with validity and meaning the evolution of her liaison with the tsaddiq over the course of her life. Second, I will consider the possibility that Alu’s life story is based on a deep narrative template common to many cultures. *** Alu was born in 1925 in Casablanca. Her parents migrated to the city from small villages in southern Morocco when they were small children. Casablanca remained Alu’s home until her move to Israel: “I don’t know any other place, just there.” The vicissitudes of Morocco’s Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, following the French conquest, left their mark on the family. While her grandfathers on both sides were well-known and respected rabbis in rural and mountain regions of the country’s south, her parents gradually moved away from religious observance and put all their efforts into improving their economic position in the modern city where they resided. Alu’s father worked as a laborer in a French-owned factory, while her mother devotedly cared for her four children, a boy and three girls. While it was not easy to pay the bills, the future looked promising.2



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But this harmonious and well-functioning family disintegrated when her mother died suddenly at the age of thirty, when Alu was eight. Her inconsolable father, who “didn’t know how to raise children,” moved in with his sister, taking his son with him. Alu and her two sisters were parceled out to other relatives. That was the last time she saw her father, until his death eight years later. In one fell swoop, she lost both her parents and was separated for years from her brother and sisters. Yet this was not the end of her tribulations. The aunt she was deposited with found it difficult to provide for her, and ended up sending her to live with a young couple. In exchange for a roof over her head, Alu was required to care for the couple’s two small children from morning to night. From a well-looked-after, secure child in a strong nuclear family, she turned into an orphan servant in the home of a strange, inhospitable family. Shortly after she was placed with this family, the couple made plans to take part in the hillula of the tsaddiq Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, whose grave lay on a wooded mountain peak named Dad (hence the tsaddiq’s Arabic name, Mu’alin Dad, signifying his ownership of the peak). The grave lay on the land of the village of Oulad Bousiri, not far from the town of Settat. Rabbi Avraham held a place of honor in the pantheon of Moroccan Jewish saints (Ben-Ami 1984: 236-238; Lasri 1978: 167-168). Like most popular saints, his story has no clear anchor in time or place. Rather, it fits the stereotypical model of the ahistorical tsaddiq. According to tradition, Rabbi Avraham was a rabbinic emissary sent to collect donations from Jewish communities in Morocco for the support of Torah scholars in the Holy Land. He died during his journey. His grave lies within a stone structure, and some nearby graves are identified as those of his students and of another tsaddiq, Rabbi Nissim ben Nissim (Ben-Ami 1984: 495). Rabbi Avraham’s hillula, like that of many other ahistorical tsaddiqim, was celebrated on Lag B’Omer, on the model of the “great hillula” (l-hillula al-kebira) that marks the death of the greatest tsaddiq of all, Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai. Settat lay not too far from Casablanca, and as a result the city’s Jews frequently made pilgrimages to Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s grave and attended his hillula. That year, the hillula fell on a Saturday night, so the pilgrims set out on Friday morning in order to arrive before the beginning of the Sabbath that night. Alu described movingly how she trailed after the family on its way to the place where the buses were to leave for Settat, pleading that she not be left behind. “I said to her [the mother], ‘Maybe take me to the tsaddiq? She said, ‘No, I won’t take you, we don’t have room in the bus.’” The vehicle really was packed solid, and Alu was left outside, in tears. Suddenly, just as

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the bus was about to leave, one of the passengers got up and announced to the driver: “My girlfriend wants to get out, she can’t go to the rabbi, because she got her period, it’s forbidden, take that girl instead of her.”3 The driver refused at first, but in the end acceded to the young man’s entreaties. “There’s room for one big girl, now take the small one at half-price.” When the family reached Oulad Bousiri and erected its tent in the celebrants’ camp, Alu expected to be allowed to join them on their visit to the tsaddiq’s grave. But again she was frustrated. All her appeals were rejected by her employers. “I didn’t bring you for the tsaddiq,” the mother said. “I brought you to watch the children.” Alu once more was left behind in tears, and again received assistance from an unexpected corner. A blind old woman in the next tent over suggested: “Bring the children over to me, why are you crying? Go, you’ll see it, too, I’ll watch the children; with God’s and Rabbi Aouriwar’s help the children will sleep until you come back from the hillula.” Before Alu set out, the old woman admonished her to change her dirty underclothes: “There’s pee and everything on them, you shouldn’t go to the rabbi that way, change your underwear and go.” Alu climbed up to the tomb by a circuitous route so as to avoid her employers. When she arrived, she was engulfed in the multitude of celebrants dancing ecstatically around the tomb and showering it with burning candles. Alu made her way among them, stunned by the tumult and frenzy around her. Then a dove came out from next to the grave, and it had water on its wings. I saw it but the other people in the crowd did not, just me. “What a dove! What a dove!” [I cried]. “Where is the dove? Where is the dove?” they wondered. And there was a window there, [arched] like in Morocco, and the dove went out. I told them, “She left, she’s gone.”

On her way back to the tent, Alu had another revelation. Suddenly, what did I see? Mommy! I don’t remember Mommy, Mommy died. She said to me: “Ya binti [my daughter], stand here, don’t walk fast.” I said, “No, no, I’m afraid of the Sabbath, the Sabbath will come in and she [Alu’s mistress] will beat me.” She said to me, “No, here’s your spot” [as if it were close by]. And from there it was like from here [the Tet housing project in Beit She’an] to [the distant]



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Eliyahu neighborhood. She said to me, “Go slow, don’t run, you’ll trip [over the tent pegs] and fall down.” I walked and said, “Mommy died, how can this be?” I looked behind me, didn’t find Mommy.

When Alu reached the tent, she saw with relief that she had arrived before her mistress as well as the beginning of the Sabbath. She told the blind old woman what had happened. “I told her, ‘I saw everything, I saw Mommy and I saw a dove.’ She said to me [excitedly], ‘What’s wrong? What did you see? Tell me exactly.’ I said, ‘I saw a dove and I saw Mommy.’ She said to me: ‘Fine.’ I asked her, ‘What is the dove?’ She said to me, ‘That’s the rabbi, the tsaddiq.’” When her employers returned to the tent, the mother suspected that Alu had violated her instructions and had gone to the tomb. But Alu played innocent. “No, I didn’t go, poor me, I sat here and slept.” She managed to allay her mistress’s suspicions. The family spent the Sabbath in the tent camp next to the tomb, waiting for the resumption of festivities on Saturday night. At the climax of the subsequent celebration, the chief attendant of the holy site, astride a noble Arabian horse, began riding among the tents interrogating the people: “Whoever saw the rabbi [the tsaddiq] yesterday, speak up!”4 The attendant surveyed the tents of the pilgrims, calling those who had seen the saint during the hillula day to come out and identify themselves. There was no response. “No one said ‘I did,’ because it was forbidden to lie about a tsaddiq,” Alu said. She was dozing in the tent at the time, and the attendant would no doubt have passed over her, had the blind woman not intervened on her behalf once again. “She told him, ‘There is one.’ He thought it was a grown-up, and then I suddenly came out, so small. He said [doubtfully], ‘This one?’ She told him, ‘Yes.’ He said to me, ‘Did you see the rabbi?’ I said: ‘What are you talking about? What rabbi? I only saw a dove.’ He said to me, ‘That’s it!’”5 It was Alu’s finest hour. Her voice trembles with emotion when she remembers how she, as the only one among the masses of celebrants who saw the tsaddiq, was chosen to collect the money from the public auction of the first glass of mahia (araq) drunk in his honor.6 What can I say, what did they dress me in? They dressed me in a white dress, made me a crown, dressed me in shoes, and how was the horse dressed? His hooves, too [were adorned].

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And he [the chief attendant] took me on the horse and I sold glasses for the tsaddiq Rabbi Avraham. So many people put money [in my clothes] and I gave him [the attendant’s] a glass and he made a blessing over it.… There are many people there. One says, “A glass for one hundred thousand rials, the second [offers] two hundred [thousand].… One rich man came and took the glass for eight hundred [thousand], [the currency] of back then, no, he offered a million. I give him the glass, and the dove came out again, from the grave. I told him, “Here, here, here is the dove.” He made a blessing on the glass and drank a little. Then he gave the glass back to me. He put a million rials in my clothes. They took the money and gave me a bag [of sweets].

When Alu was taken down from the horse to the firm ground of reality, she had to face her employer’s rage: “Oho, you went to the hillula and had a great time, you left the children!” Then the blind old woman came to her defense a third time, silencing the angry woman. “She’s better than you; you have good fortune [thanks to her], she saw the tsaddiq and everything.” Despite this, the transition back to the bleakness of her everyday life was quick and sharp. “I went home [to the tent], sat with the woman [her mistress] , did the children’s laundry. The next day we already went back from Settat to Casablanca.” Little by little, Alu began to grow accustomed to her new life with her employers. But when the first glimmer of womanhood appeared at the beginning of her teenage years, her matron quickly sent her packing, fearing that she would be a temptation that her husband would have difficulty withstanding. She didn’t want me to be [with them], she was afraid for her husband, so she threw me out. I cried because I was young and I had gotten used to it. I had nowhere to go. It was like her home was my home.

Luckily, she found employment as a housecleaner, first in the home of a French Catholic family, then for a rich Jewish woman who lived alone. In both places, she was treated warmly and generously. Eight years after being cut off from her family, Alu managed to locate her aunt, her father’s sister, and through her she met her future husband, Ḥananiyya. The young



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man was enraptured by this beautiful, long-haired young woman, but feared that she would reject him. He was overjoyed when Alu accepted the match her aunt offered—even if it was not romantic love but rather a realistic assessment of her situation that tipped the balance in his favor. “Suddenly I saw him, I was working for people. It wasn’t important if he had money or he didn’t, I was going to get married. Let’s take him, he was a factory worker, I wouldn’t get left without a wedding. Better to get married, I’d eat a little bread and olives with him and that’s enough for me.” At the age of sixteen, Alu was already married. Seven months later she gave birth to a premature baby who died in infancy. Subsequent pregnancies were successful, and the family quickly grew. In 1957, when they moved to Israel, Alu and Ḥananiyya already had three boys and a girl. Two more girls were born in Israel. The oldest boy was named Shlomo, after Rabbi Shlomo Ben L’Ḥansh, an important Moroccan tsaddiq whose grave lay in Ourika, Ḥananiyya’s home village, on the northern slopes of the Atlas mountains (Ben-Ami 1984: 557-561). The names of the three children that followed encapsulate her family tragedies. She named her second son, David, after her father, who had since died. When the boy fell seriously ill at a young age, she added another name, Avraham, although she says that she did not intend to name him for the tsaddiq who had revealed himself to her when she was a girl. Her third son also received two names. The first was Shimon, after Alu’s only brother, a horserace jockey. At the age of 21, during a race, he fell from his horse, landed on his head, and died. The second name was Yeḥia, after her father’s brother, who never married and asked Alu to provide him with a name so that his memory would not be expunged at his death. Aliza, called Iza for short, the oldest girl, was named after Alu’s mother, who died young. The two youngest daughters born in Israel were named Yafa and Rachel. Alu, Ḥananiyya, and their four children docked in Haifa and were immediately sent to a transit camp in Beit She’an, from which they were moved into a public housing apartment in the town’s Eliyahu neighborhood. Their first years in Israel were extremely difficult. Ḥananiyya worked as a manual laborer at the Tenuva dairy, at Kibbutz Ein Ḥarod, while Alu did her part to support the family as an agricultural laborer in the fields of nearby kibbutzim. She took her children with her to the fields, refusing to leave them with strangers, probably because of the awful way in which she had been abandoned as a girl. “If you knew what I saw, you’d cry.… I took the children and worked with them. I didn’t what to give them [to anyone], manual labor, I worked in agriculture, in the cotton, I was pregnant, the

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first and the second [the pregnancies of her two youngest daughters].” Later, she abandoned seasonal agricultural labor for a steady job in the Kitan textile factory, where she worked for thirty years, first as a simple laborer, then as a shift forewoman. Throughout those years, first in Morocco, then in Israel, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar made no appearance in Alu’s life. “I didn’t see [him] that whole time, nothing of the tsaddiq’s words. His name never crossed my lips. I forgot about him. I didn’t light candles for him. Nothing.” She then moved on to describe the non-religious way of life of those times, which she seems to link to the tsaddiq’s absence: “I was liberated, so liberated, no one was as liberated as me. Décolletage, pants.…and in me—no belief. Anyone who’d say anything to me, [I’d answer] ‘Leave me alone, I do whatever I want.’” But she did not abandon religion entirely. I didn’t leave everything, religion. [I didn’t cook on the Sabbath, and kept the food warm on a] hot plate, didn’t light a fire on the Sabbath. I didn’t smoke cigarettes on the Sabbath. The children too. But when the children came home on leave from the army, I did their laundry by hand on the Sabbath. I said, “What? This isn’t good.” They said, “You have to, we can’t go out in dirty [clothes].” At night I’d shower, do laundry. His [Ḥananiyya’s] father was very religious. In the morning, [Ḥananiyya] would ask, “Did you do laundry?” I’d tell him, “No, it’s the children [taking showers].” I lied for the children.

In 1967, just before the Six Day War broke out, the family moved from the Eliayhu neighborhood to its current apartment in the Tet housing project, on the east side of town. A few years later, around the time of the Yom Kippur War, Alu’s life took a dramatic turn, the beginning of which she recounted with her usual directness: “At the age of forty-eight my period ended.” At the time, she suffered from severe and incapacitating dizzy spells, and it was this plight that suddenly revived forgotten patterns of behavior. I was sick, sick for three weeks. I have a bookcase with drawers. I had two candles. I lit one on Mimouna, and one stayed there [in the drawer]. Two months were left until Rabbi Avraham’s hillula. I was sleeping. Suddenly I took the



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candle and went there [to the balcony where she now lights candles for the tsaddiq] I said, “Ya Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, look at me.” I had never said that [the tsaddiq’s name]. That day I said it. I said to him, “Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, save me from my dizziness. I have dizzy spells. It’s more than I can take, and the house is filthy, and the children have come. Save me from the dizziness.” Then I lit a candle and I went to sleep. I slept an hour or two in the afternoon. Suddenly I saw a young man with a white beard and black hair and he has sidelocks. He said to me, “Do you recognize me?” I said to him, “No, I don’t recognize you, I don’t know who you are.” Again he said to me, “Do you recognize me?” I said to him, “Leave me alone, how could I know you? I’m sick!” He said to me, “Give me your hand this way [she slaps her palm] and make a festive meal for me, and I will tell you who I am, and I will get rid of the dizziness for you.” I said to him, “I don’t have money and I don’t [even] make meals in honor of my mother and my brother. I don’t have money.” He said to me, “I’ll give you money, why are you thinking about money? I’ll give you money and I will help you for the festive meal.” I said to him, “These are my hands, what do I care. If you give the money, I’ll offer my hands [to prepare the meal].” He said to me, “Give me your hand.” He put his hand here [touching her palm] and here [her face]. He said to me, “Get up, I am Avraham Aouriwar, who you saw when you were little; now I have come here.”

It was forty years after her encounter with the tsaddiq in Oulad Bousiri. When she woke up, she had difficulty assimilating her dream. I got up, I couldn’t believe it. Let’s see if the dizziness is still here. I do this way and that way [she bends and changes her position]. There’s no dizziness. For four years I was dizzy, and nothing. From that day until now I have no dizziness. I said, “Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar!” I did the cleaning, the whole house. What did I do? I did [lit] a candle, I did a collection box out of a jelly [jar]. I washed it [the jar]. My daughter came. I told her, “You know how I saw the rabbi when I was little, in Morocco?” She said, “Yes, Mom.” I told her, “Now I don’t

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have dizziness, now I’m healthy.” She asked, “How, Mom?” I said, “I was sleeping and I had a dream.”

Following the revelation, Alu began saving up money in her homemade collection box, with the help of her daughter and husband, for the purpose of conducting a festive meal in honor of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar on his hillula day. Ḥananiyya came from Ein Ḥarod, he worked at Tenuva [dairy

plant] there. I told him what I dreamed, he said: “Take three thousand lirot, put it in the box.” The money grew. And if my husband didn’t give, every month I took my salary from the textile factory and put it in the jar. With the money I made the festive meal. No one helped me, I didn’t tell anyone.

Her renewed connection with Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar thus led, privately, to a family festive meal. Alu’s neighbors and acquaintances were unaware of the tsaddiq’s presence in her apartment (“now I have come here,” he told her). From two [in the afternoon] my doors were closed. Only hello, hello. I didn’t talk to the neighbors, they didn’t know he was here. I didn’t want them to say, you’re making a business [out of it]. I went through three years, [then] I went there [to the corner she dedicated to the tsaddiq], and I said to him, “Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, I want more money to make you something bigger, better.” I went to his place, and I went in there, and from his place I hear, “Go out, you’ve done three years. Now open the doors [to visitors], I want people to kiss me.” I went out afraid, with my face to the tsaddiq.7 Because of the voice. I left a light on, I went and slept. In the morning I didn’t want to go to the textile [to the Kitan factory, where she worked], I wanted to clean and think about the words he said to me, how nice, how good. I never heard that way. I cried, I did the cleaning and I cried. Suddenly a knock on the door. Who could it be? They said to me, “Is Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar here?” I said, “Yes, come in.” I opened the door, I asked, “Where did you come from?” “From Haifa.” “Who gave you the address?” She said to me, “He [the tsaddiq] came to me in a dream and



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gave me the address.” I said to her, “Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar really is here.” Suddenly another one came. “Where are you from?” “From Jerusalem.” “Who gave you the address?” “I was sleeping, he came to me in a dream, I dreamed him, is Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar here?” I said, “Here, come in.” People came, kissed [the sacred objects associated with the saint], visited. I sat for four months without medicine [to give to the visitors], without anything.

After three years in which the saint was a secret presence in her apartment, Alu made her experience public. Rabbi Avraham’s sanction— “open your doors”—now came as a direct communication from her apartment’s sacred corner, rather than in a dream. At the same time, the tsaddiq appeared in the dreams of people in distress and sent them to the shrine established in his honor in Beit She’an. An astonished Alu allowed the petitioners to enter her apartment and plead their cases with the tsaddiq, but she herself was not yet involved in the healing process. The climax of the process through which Alu became a healer working under the aegis of Rabbi Avraham occurred four months after the “opening of the doors.” I sat, wanted to go to work. I dreamed, at night, in my bed, “Don’t go to work. There are two people, two men will come here, and be careful how you talk to them. Watch your words.” I got up, I said to my husband Ḥananiyya, “I want to go to work.” He said to me, “I don’t care if you go or not. It’s your [business].” I got up, put on my clothes, my pants.… I came here, looked for my shoes—every morning I put them on here. I only found one. I looked all over the house, I don’t have any children, don’t have any grandchildren [to hide the shoe], they’re all in their own homes. I couldn’t find the second shoe. I looked at the clock, it was already six. I missed my bus to the factory. I sat down, I said, “I don’t have [a bus], it’s what the rabbi said to me yesterday.” I was afraid, I said, “Let’s stay here and see. What will he do to me?” I washed the dishes and straightened up the apartment. At eight thirty, a quarter to nine, there was a knock on the door, without the doorbell, three times. I said [she is emotional] “Yes, yes, I’ll be right there.” I found two people, [they looked] like rabbis. I told

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them, “Good morning.” They said to me, “Sabaḥ al-ḥir [Good morning].” In Arabic! He said to me in Arabic, “Is Braham bin Braham here?” I said to him, “no, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar is here.” He said to me, “Don’t say Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, say Braham bin Braham.” I said to him, “Say whatever you want, what do I care?” He came here, gave me a candle, said to me, “Don’t give it, not to [the neighbors] above or below, give it to the neighbor across the hall.” That one, she’s also very religious, her husband [was] a rabbi, a real one, poor thing [a widow]. He said to me [in reproach], “You wash the milk dishes and take them to the kitchen? That’s forbidden! Wherever you wash them, they should stay.” He said to me, “Where do you sleep?” I showed him, “Here’s my room, next to Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar.” He said to me, “Who sleeps in this room?” I said, “My children, [who are] in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. When they come, they sleep [here], and if not, no one sleeps [here].” He said to me: “Very good!” We went to the living room, where there is a [closed off] balcony. And I had talked with [the neighbor mentioned above] and said to her, “On Sunday or Wednesday we’ll take the tsaddiq there and we’ll move him over there [to the balcony].” He said to me, “What, you want to change [move] your rabbi?” I said [in embarrassment], “No, I didn’t say that.…” He said to me, “Shhh!… You said that word.” We went into that room. He asked, “Who sleeps in this room?” I said, “I have a daughter who’s not married yet.” He said to me, “You don’t say, that’s great.” We came here [to the living room]. One sat here and the other sat here. Suddenly I said to him in Arabic, “Taḥubu ateii del Moroq? [Do you want Moroccan tea?]. Suddenly he said in Hebrew, “Bevakasha [please].” What? I mean, everything was in Arabic and now “Bevakasha”? [All sorts of] thoughts were running through my head.…”

When Alu returned from the kitchen with the teapot, she was astounded to see that her mysterious visitors had disappeared—and that her front door was locked from the inside. What should I do now? By now I was confused. I went to sleep. I slept. He [the tsaddiq] gave me four secrets. I’m



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forbidden to reveal them until I die. He made me swear, “The words that I tell you [apparently a healing spell], you say.” Suddenly he came to me like a shadow; I hear the words and don’t see him. I hear his voice in Arabic, everything. I don’t have a single word in Hebrew. I was sorry [about the visit], maybe it was Elijah the Prophet, and I didn’t say anything to him.… Suddenly I heard [him] saying to me…: “Don’t be scared, my assistant and I came to see you. Don’t be scared. We’re done.” I got up in the morning, I said, “That’s it, it’s Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar!” Since then I’m sure… Suddenly people came [for treatment]. I gave them their medicines, he [the tsaddiq] gave me the medicines, oil and araq. He gave me a kiss on my mouth, spit into my mouth, and [touched] my hand, and gave me a blessing. All I do is this [touch] and it’s done. You’re not sick. Only someone who has a bad disease, he says to me, “That, he has no medicine.” Takes it back. [He says] “You shouldn’t do your hand, it’s not good [in this case].”

If Alu had any doubts about the identity of the visitors to her apartment (“Maybe it was Elijah the Prophet”), the tsaddiq’s declaration quelled them at once. Her unstated fear that his visit would not be repeated was also relieved by these further manifestations. In light of the revelations, I believe that when the visitors asked her to show them around the apartment, they were acting as prospective tenants looking over the home they were about to move into. Alu’s ties to Rabbi Avraham indeed grew stronger as such visits continued. In one of them, the tsaddiq granted her healing secrets, and in another treatments—oil and araq. In a third, he bestowed on her the power to heal by kissing and spitting into her mouth and touching her hand. Ever since, Alu has used these methods. She anoints her hands with “the tsaddiq’s oil,” then massages her clients’ painful limbs. She takes a mouthful of araq and spits it suddenly into a surprised patient’s face. Once, when I witnessed such a healing ceremony, I was astounded by the emotional force it produced. The sting of the alcohol in a patient’s eyes often leads to an eruption of cathartic weeping. A curative factor no less important in her practice is that Alu recounts faithfully to her clients the way in which the tsaddiq endowed her with her powers. Rabbi Avraham first revealed himself to Alu in a dream and in waking

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life (in the form of his visit) but, as the connection between them became routine, the mode of his revelation shifted from seeing to hearing.8 The tsaddiq did not appear as a human form, but rather “like a shadow,” and he spoke to her in Arabic. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, between 1:30 and 3:00 a.m., Alu speaks with him: He gives me all the words [healing instructions] for people. In his voice, what you should do for this one, what to give to that one, what medicine for this, the people’s medicines. When he speaks, I listen, I don’t understand anything. [Afterwards,] when I’m sleeping, it’s as if [his] voice comes back in my head. What he said to me, it all comes back to me. And I tell people what he said to me, the words. They say [in astonishment], “How do you know?”

When Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar took up residence in Alu’s house, she reverted to religious observance. She now observes the Sabbath strictly, after her years of violating it by washing her soldier children’s uniforms. “I don’t do that, dishes and baking, on the Sabbath. Nothing from three o’clock on Friday. Everything’s shut down. [The tsaddiq] doesn’t receive visitors. I work on Thursday night, until twelve at night, for the Sabbath. On the Sabbath—stop. There’s no cake, I don’t make any.” This sea change was a direct result of the tsaddiq’s influence. “Until he came, and gave me faith, like they say. For a year he sat with me, got into my blood, day and night, day and night, day and night.” She allows herself, a bit here, a bit there, more permissive behavior, like wearing pants, but only on condition that the tsaddiq does not object. “Everyone says to me, ‘How can that be, you have a rabbi at home, and you wear pants? It’s forbidden!’ I say, “What do you care? He didn’t say anything to me, didn’t give me any sign, so I wear [pants].” Alu claims that all her earnings as a healer are earmarked for the public festive meal she conducts each year in her apartment on Lag B’Omer. Each person who gets healthy thanks to him [the tsaddiq] bring him something. I don’t do anything for him. I don’t take anything [from the clients]. Whoever tosses something into the collection box, it all goes for the festive meal. I don’t receive a penny for myself. If they bring me a dress or something like that, that’s a different thing. Money—it’s all in



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the collection box. I work [at Kitan] from 5:30 [in the morning] to 2:00, and from 3:00 to 7:00 I work here [receiving patients at home]. Lots of people dream about him [and come], and I help, why not … I help [with] what the rabbi tells me. I [always] say, without his speaking to me I can’t do anything. I don’t take a penny. I work, my husband works, the children are already married. Whoever wants to can give [money] for the festive meal. If they don’t give, they don’t give! Whoever doesn’t have, doesn’t need to.

Alu takes pride in the large numbers of people who seek her out, some of whom come from outside Beit She’an. There are people who come from far away, from Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem. Especially people who knew him from Morocco. In Tel Ḥanan, [a neighborhood] in Haifa, it’s all [people] from his area, in Morocco. So they hear, and they come here. There’s also a synagogue here [in her apartment] every Saturday night. They read the Zohar. There are people who don’t know and [people] say to them, “Come on, let’s go to Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, we’ll have se’uda shlishit [the third Sabbath meal, eaten on Saturday afternoon before sunset] there and pray [the evening prayer service at the end of the Sabbath] there.”

According to the tsaddiq’s instructions, petitioners receive their remedies (oil and araq) from Alu on their first visit for use at home. But if their problem is not resolved, Alu conducts the second treatment in her home. She massages oil on their bodies, generally on the hands and scalp. For reasons of modesty, she treats other parts of the body by spraying araq from her mouth. The treatment begins with her intonation of the tsaddiq’s name three times. She warns those who take the remedies at home of the potency of the results. “It’s a little strong. Shivers. Because the rabbi wants all [the disease] to get out. He fights the disease … third time stop! A healthy person.” Ḥananiyya, Alu’s husband, had trouble at first getting used to his wife’s intimate alliance with their home’s new tenant, and from her transformation into a healer at his behest. On a few occasions, he attempted to participate in the nocturnal encounters between the two of

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them, but with no success. At night, 2:30 in the morning, I’m standing, and he’s already there. My husband was here and stood, wanted to see me [with the tsaddiq]. He sat down, in ten minutes the rabbi was supposed to talk to me. I asked him, “Ḥananiyya, what’s going on?” He said to me, “No, I’m just sitting, I want to see.” I went to the bathroom, washed my face, hands, took a shower, immersed myself, took a towel. I wanted to go to his place. Ḥananiyya? He stood ten minutes, har, har [the sound of snores]. He fell asleep, didn’t manage. Anyone [else] is forbidden to see. Ḥananiyya’s attempt to observe his wife’s conversation with the

tsaddiq reflects his skepticism and resentment, and perhaps even his envy of the close relationship between Rabbi Abraham and his wife. But then the tsaddiq dealt him a blow, and he began cooperating with Alu. I got back in bed, sat like this. Suddenly Ḥananiyya got up. He said to me, “Forgive me, I stood against you, forgive me.” Why was he afraid? Because he’s already struck him. A heart attack. From Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar. Because he [the tsaddiq] came to me for two years, and [Ḥananiyya’s] mouth couldn’t keep still. He said not nice words to me. Suddenly he [the tsaddiq] said to me himself, “I want to strike him, hard.” I said, “No, if you strike him, who will help me?” Two years ago [he got] a powerful blow, ten more minutes and he would have been gone. I saw [Ḥananiyya’s] death. The doctor said to him, “Ḥananiyya, you have a new name, you were born [again].” He [Ḥananiyya] said to me, “What can I do? He came to me in a dream, I couldn’t believe it.…” I said to him, “Ḥananiyya, believe!” Until he struck him, since then, it’s over, nothing! Now he’s scared. He says, “Whatever you do here, you’re right. I don’t have any say anymore.” Now I give him the medicine. Pills didn’t help him, nothing. And I went to him [the tsaddiq] and he said to me, “Here’s his medicine.” Ḥananiyya did not stop taking the medications his doctors prescribed

him, but he made a point of keeping them in the tsaddiq’s corner, so that



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they could absorb his blessing. Here, too, as in the other cases presented here, the tsaddiq who came to stay in his impresario’s home stymied moving plans. Ḥananiyya, who took the initiative to find a new apartment, described the tsaddiq’s reaction as an unqualified threat. “I bought an apartment in Jerusalem. I want to leave here. The saint came to me in a dream and said, ‘If you leave, your life is over!” I said, “It’s your house. Just save me from death. What do I care? I gave it to him.” Alu added: “He wanted to move, and suddenly [the tsaddiq] struck him, [Ḥananiyya] said to [the tsaddiq], “I left the house [in Jerusalem], I’ll live here, I’m not going anywhere.” Now he [Ḥananiyya] sits, helps me a lot, I can’t say a word [against him]. And he gives me all his respect.” The circle of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s move from Oulad Bousiri to Beit She’an closed when Alu’s son-in-law visited the saint’s grave in Morocco on Lag B’Omer. In Alu’s words, “[Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar] took him all the way there, to Morocco, to his grave, and he brought me pictures from his place.” The photographs are displayed conspicuously in the tsaddiq’s corner, just as photographs of Rabbi David u-Moshe’s grave in the Atlas Mountains hang in his new home in Safed. In both places, the stories of the tsaddiqs’ move to Israel provide enough legitimacy to make the depiction of their original graves in Morocco reinforce rather than undercut the new shrines. *** Alu’s life story flows along a single axis consisting of the series of events that led to her connection with Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar and her emergence as a healer under his sponsorship. The process is clearly, if not explicitly, divided into three periods: the tsaddiq’s first revelation to her when she was a young girl, a dramatic but one-time episode; the dormant years, in which the tsaddiq was not part of her life; and his new manifestation, which produced a close and ongoing relationship, when she reached middle age, following menopause. This division runs parallel to natural transitions in a woman’s life, produced by biological changes. These begin with the virgin, pre-sexual phase of childhood, continue through the period of sexual maturity and fertility of young womanhood and motherhood, and end with the post-fertility of late middle age. The natural dichotomy at the foundation of this division is the existence or absence of the menstrual period. However, the meanings and values attached to

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these three stages represent cultural ideologies and conceptualizations applied to these biological facts. Since the “women draw sacred attention primarily in connection with their reproductive statuses” (Hoch-Smith & Spring 1978: 1), it is hardly surprising that these ideologies are fairly universal among different cultures. In many, the female life cycle is divided into these same three stages. Furthermore, the cultural values assigned to them are uniformly “cleanliness in childhood, pollution in the active life, and purification in old age.” (Christian 1972: 161; see also Hastrup 1978). The cultural dichotomies of purity versus impurity, or cleanliness versus uncleanliness, grow out of the symbolic construction of physical states. I will now examine how these dichotomies shape the contours of Alu’s story and determine the tripartite structure of her narrative. The first revelation took place when Alu was only eight years old, in the stage of prepubertal latency, lauded in many societies as a period of innocence and purity. This valuated attitude toward childhood in the female life cycle derives from the lack of polluting manifestations of sexuality (the menstrual period) and from the integrity of the hymen, a classic symbol of female chastity (Dwyer 1978: 65-73; Hastrup 1978: 55). Pure childhood is thus an appropriate backdrop for revelations and for the establishment of contact with the holy and the divine. The positive status of cleanliness and innocence is accentuated in the story by direct confrontation with its opposite, when the girl Alu takes the place of a menstruating woman in the bus heading for the saint’s hillula. The episode in the bus accords with the severe proscription against menstruating women approaching saints’ graves. The dire consequences of violating this taboo are dramatically and abundantly documented in Jewish Moroccan hagiography (Ben-Ami, 1984: 88-89). The moral superiority of young Alu over mature women is also conveyed by the blind woman’s rebuke of Alu’s employer, a mother in the full flower of her womanhood: “She’s better than you; you have good fortune [thanks to her], she saw the tsaddiq and everything.” Indirectly, the reprimanded woman is a surrogate for all the adult pilgrims, since none of them, except Alu, was privileged to see the saint in the guise of a dove. Childhood innocence is expressed in the lack of awareness that a revelation has taken place. Alu sees the dove without knowing what she has seen. This is further underlined by the fact that her innocence is not rectified by experience. Although the blind woman tells her that she has seen the tsaddiq, the next day, she insists, when confronted by the chief attendant, that she saw only a dove. Her guileless lack of knowledge would



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seem to conform to her sexual innocence (lack of knowledge), characteristic of the clean and pure status of prepubescence. This lack of knowledge is underlined by the fact that the person who provides Alu with her initial knowledge, the blind old woman, cannot see at all. Beyond the status of being clean—dispositional cleanliness—which constitutes the appropriate backdrop for revelation, note the story’s emphasis on situational cleanliness. Examples of this kind of cleanliness appear systematically throughout the text as markers that presage the meaning-laden points in the story. At this stage they frame the encounter with the saint. First, before leaving for the sacred tomb, Alu changes her dirty undergarments at the command of the blind woman. Second, before going back to Casablanca she washes the children’s clothes. This activity constitutes the dividing line between sacred space and time (the tsaddiq’s sanctuary and the hillula) and secular time in the big city. Recall also that Alu’s primary occupation in her employers’ home was cleaning. The silent years, when the tsaddiq’s absence surprised Alu herself (“His name never crossed my mouth. I forgot about him.”), coincide with the unclean period of fertile sexuality—the appearance of the menses, marriage, the loss of virginity, and the birth of children. The negative connotations of female sexuality in many cultures, evident in classical Jewish sources as well (Eilberg-Schwartz & Doniger 1995), were especially severe and hurtful in traditional Morocco (Dwyer 1978: 61-86). Such connotations are alluded to in the text when Alu is expelled from her employers’ home at puberty, when she became a sexual temptation for the man of the house. In this part of the story we again see a connection between impure status—dirtiness as a disposition—and situational impurity, the principal expression of which is symbolic, taking the form of the violation of religious precepts. Alu confesses that her faith weakened during this period, and that in many ways she became “liberated” or non-religious. The single most blatant type of nonobservance was violation of the laws of the Sabbath, albeit under special circumstances, when she laundered her children’s army uniforms. The moral significance attributed to Alu’s behavior thus depended on the context in which it occurred. The same activity that in the former (as well as the ensuing) stage of life represented cleansing and purging here became “dirty” and sacrilegious. The tsaddiq’s sacred revelation, which led to a lasting relationship with him, did not occur until Alu regained the status of “clean,” at the end of her fertile period. Her awareness of the significance of the timing was expressed in the way she chose to open her description of the tsaddiq’s

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second appearance: “At the age of forty-eight my period ended.” After the revelation, Alu crafted a collection box for the tsaddiq, in which she placed her monthly salary. Alu was almost certainly not aware that, in literary Hebrew, the words for “blood” and “money” are identical (Bilu 1978: 458), but might not her monthly donation be seen as an unconscious proxy for her monthly menstrual period? The tsaddiq appeared when Alu’s children—living testimony to her period of sexuality, fertility, and Sabbath violation—left home and began to fend for themselves. In leaving home, they contributed, then, to her once again achieving the status of clean and pure.9 Furthermore, episodes of situational cleanliness and its absence appear again as precursors of the story’s movement towards the resumption of revelation. First, the illness that led to her reestablishment of contact with the tsaddiq prevented her from cleaning her home. Second, after awakening from her revelation dream, she cleaned the entire house. Third, after first hearing the tsaddiq’s voice, she cleaned the house and received her first visitors. Fourth, before the visit by the tsaddiq and his assistant, Alu washed the dishes and put the apartment in order. Given the systematic appearance of episodes of cleaning in the story, the context of mundane housekeeping tasks represent ritual cleansing, a precondition for encounters with the tsaddiq. The sensory way in which Alu experienced the tsaddiq’s presence underwent significant changes over the course of her renewed contact with him. The first encounter took place in a dream, and Alu was unable to identify the figure who appeared there.10 A visual experience, not translated into knowledge, also characterized the tsaddiq’s manifestation as a dove in Alu’s childhood. This similarity creates a sense of continuity between the two revelations. This time, however, the tsaddiq appeared in his own shape, appropriate to the way the world is perceived by an adult. And he identified himself at the end of the dream after touching Alu’s face with his hand. The first adult encounter thus contained within it a promise of intimacy that was absent from the childhood revelation. This trend grew stronger in the encounters that followed. In one of these, the tsaddiq spit into Alu’s mouth, an act she interprets as a kiss. In contrast with the one-time spontaneity of her childhood revelation, the current connection, based on the tsaddiq’s regular appearance two nights a week, is stable and routine. Still, intimacy has been preserved despite institutionalization—even Alu’s husband cannot be included. His attempt to observe a nocturnal encounter with the tsaddiq did not succeed. His failure implies that the tsaddiq has, for all practical purposes, taken his



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place and become Alu’s preferred partner. The institutionalization of her relationship with the tsaddiq brought about a significant change in the manner of his revelation. He now appears “like a shadow,” and Alu can hear his voice, but not see him. Unlike the revelation by sight of her childhood and first adult encounters, which were typified by not knowing, her later adult encounters were based on a verbal connection, during which the tsaddiq reveals mystical secrets to Alu, diagnoses and explains her clients’ problems, and prescribes cures. The change expresses the accumulation of knowledge by an experienced, clean, and pure woman, whose intimate acquaintance with the tsaddiq grows out of a long relationship with him. This intimacy, which excludes even Alu’s husband, expresses the metamorphosis of the tsaddiq’s image. In her childhood, he was a protecting father; in maturity he is a spouse. The symbolic construction of life stages in Alu’s story constitutes a tripartite structure in which the tsaddiq reveals himself to her in childhood, disappears during her young womanhood, and reappears in late womanhood. But this matrix is cultural, not personal. To understand why Alu in particular experienced these encounters with the tsaddiq, we must add the psychological dimension to the explanation provided by the cultural framework and to identify the sources of her motivation to “see” the tsaddiq and to establish an alliance with him. The story before us hardly requires great exegetical effort to identify these sources clearly in the life crises that Alu faced. Her story demonstrates explicitly how she has used the tsaddiq to articulate and cope with difficult losses. Like Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim and other saints’ impresarios in this book—but with greater force—Alu transformed her tsaddiq into a manifestly personal symbol. She shapes the tsaddiq’s collective cultural image of one who offers assistance and healing to his devotees in times of trouble against the backdrop of her harsh childhood experiences. The first revelation at Oulad Bousiri indeed emerged from an acute crisis of loss—her mother died, while her father abandoned her and separated her from her brother and sisters. The consequence was a painful fall from the status of a child who enjoyed the security of a strong family to that of an orphan servant girl in arduous, alienating surroundings. Her encounters with the tsaddiq and her mother in Oulad Bousiri were classic means of compensation. From an intra-cultural point of view, they embody Alu’s purity and her superiority to the other pilgrims. They turn her into a central figure at the hillula, a kind of “queen for a day.” From a psychodynamic point of view, Alu constituted a relationship with parental figures in order

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to compensate herself for the painful absence of her father and mother. Following her first epiphany, Alu suffered further heavy blows. Her father, whom she had not seen since her mother passed away, died when she was sixteen. A short time later she lost her first child, and then her brother, the jockey, who was killed in a horseracing accident. These painful fatalities presumably exacerbated her sense of loss and bereavement. But they took place at a different stage in her life cycle, in which she could compensate for them by raising her own family. Indeed, the names she gave her children indicate that the family she created was a replacement for the family she lost. She named one son after her father and another after her brother, and her first daughter after her mother. Keep in mind also that Alu gave the son named after her father another name, Avraham. While she claims that this name was not given in memory of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar (since she claims to have forgotten the tsaddiq entirely after her initial epiphany), the combination of names is nevertheless consistent with the possibility that she viewed the tsaddiq as a surrogate father. On the cultural level, I attributed the long hiatus between her initial epiphany and her later relationship with the saint to the negative connotations of sexual maturity. In psychological terms, however, this is the period in which she had little need for the tsaddiq, given the many worldly relationships (with her husband, children, and extended family) that lessened the impact of her losses. Her connection to the tsaddiq reemerged at middle age, and was again catalyzed by suffering: a chronic and disabling ailment. In addition, she reached menopause (which perhaps caused her dizzy spells), and her children left home. It may well be that her empty nest exacerbated Alu’s distress, against the background of the trauma of her childhood loss of family. In any case, the tsaddiq’s manifestation filled the vacuum, cured Alu’s illness, and conferred on her the ability to treat the problems of others. The psychological significance of her relationship with the tsaddiq has a manifestly developmental dimension. Rabbi Avraham changes from a protective surrogate father in her childhood into an intimate spouse in her maturity. Ḥananiyya’s initial resistance illuminates this transformation. According to Alu, for the first two years, Ḥananiyya was hostile to her project. He spoke of it scornfully and doubted the validity of her visions. His abortive attempt to observe her nocturnal encounters with the tsaddiq may well provide the key to understanding his defiance. Even though Alu’s healing work brought the family additional income and prestige, it also



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unbalanced intrafamilial relationships. Alu’s status became central and dominant as a result of her alliance with a strong and supportive male figure, with whom she communed at night. The construction of a sanctuary for the tsaddiq made Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar a permanent resident in their home, a member of the family. It is tempting to portray Ḥananiyya from an Oedipal standpoint, as a child trying to spy on his parents’ intimacy, but even without resort to psychoanalysis his reaction obviously displays his sensitivity to Alu’s preference for the tsaddiq as a partner. Ḥananiyya’s antipathy is not unfounded. Phrases that hint at a spousal relationship with the saint suffuse her story. The tsaddiq touches her, kisses her, stands close to her or within her (“For a year he sat with me, got into my blood, day and night, day and night, day and night”). Apparently, Alu feels free to use such expressions of intimacy directly and even bluntly precisely because she has reached the post-sexual stage of purity in which her appetites have supposedly waned, replaced by her spiritual love for the tsaddiq. Alu overcame her husband’s objections after he suffered a major heart attack, which she interpreted as the tsaddiq’s retribution. She went so far as to declare that her intervention had averted the death that would otherwise have been his fate. After this event, Ḥananiyya had the privilege of being visited by the saint in a dream. Rabbi Avraham confirmed Alu’s version of the events, which led Ḥananiyya to abandon his plans to move with Alu to Jerusalem, where he had already bought an apartment. He claimed that the tsaddiq had threatened to kill him if he vacated their home in Beit She’an. I have written that the motif of the frustrated move, common to the stories of all the saints’ impresarios presented in this book, may reflect (as well as contribute to) a positive change in the status of development towns in the eyes of their inhabitants. When tsaddiqim choose to live in these remote towns, the towns become less marginal. In Alu’s case, however, we cannot rule out the possibility that her refusal to leave Beit She’an expressed, on a personal level, her longing for stability and for putting down roots, in reaction to the many moves and transitions she underwent in childhood when her family fell apart. Whatever the case, the migration of Morocco’s famous Jewish saints to Israel and their resettlement in Israel’s urban periphery, where many of their former devotees live, indicates that the Moroccan community has put down patriotic roots in Israel, no less than it testifies to their having turned their backs on their new country’s values and returned to the traditions of their native land.

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In Alu’s case, the transition to Israeli life found verbal expression during Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s visit to her home, along with his assistant. When they entered her apartment, she greeted them in Hebrew, but to her surprise they responded in Arabic. The tsaddiq even insisted on being called Braham bin Braham, in keeping with how the Moroccan Arabs named him, Sidi Brahim. At the end of their encounter, she addressed the guests in Arabic and offered them Moroccan tea. Her nostalgia for the Maghreb was expressed in the drink she offered no less than in the language she used to offer it—but this time they answered her in Hebrew. This transition from the language of the past to the language of the present fits the nature of their visit, the purpose of which was to lay the groundwork for the tsaddiq’s move from Morocco to Israel, specifically to Alu’s apartment. Note also that this step is balanced by a counter-step: Alu’s son-in-law, a resident of Beit She’an, made a pilgrimage to the tsaddiq’s grave in Morocco. Both the tsaddiq and his devotees seem to have acted to bridge the geographical distance between them, in order to allay the pain of separation (Levy 1997). In terms of the level of detail and narrative density, the story of the visit by the tsaddiq and his assistant takes second place only to Alu’s account of the revelation in Oulad Bousiri. She makes it the climax of her new revelation.11 As such, it needs to be analyzed in detail, beyond the alternation between Arabic and Hebrew. The importance of the visit was hinted at in the earlier dream, in which Alu was warned to watch her tongue with her visitors, and in her unsuccessful attempt to avoid the visit. She failed the verbal test when she sought to disavow her intention to move the tsaddiq’s corner to her balcony. Rabbi Avraham’s knowledge of her inner thoughts discomfited her. Nevertheless, the visit succeeded, all in all. He rebuked her for failing to observe the dietary laws with sufficient rigor, and for not giving a candle of the tsaddiq’s to her pious neighbor across the hall. But he also praised her twice. In both cases he commended the sleeping arrangements in the apartment. He was pleased that Alu slept next to his room (and perhaps this was why he refused to move out to the balcony), and that the room set aside for her children who live outside Beit She’an was generally empty, while her unmarried daughter slept in another room. His precise inspection of the apartment is not as strange as it seems, since he was a visitor who planned to make his home there. Overtly, the tsaddiq seemed to be delighted with the apartment’s comfort and modesty, since it housed only Alu and Ḥananiyya (who apparently slept in separate rooms) and their unmarried daughter. In fact, Ḥananiyya



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was not even mentioned in this survey of sleeping arrangements, as if he were not living there at all.12 Finally, the tsaddiq’s firm opposition to moving his place in the apartment was consistent with his refusal to accept Ḥananiyya’s plan to move to Jerusalem. Both cases may be a veiled expression of Alu’s revulsion regarding sharp life transitions of the type that so hurt her in her childhood. In conclusion, my interpretation of Alu’s story combines physical, cultural, and psychological factors. The tsaddiq reveals himself to her, both in childhood and in maturity, when she enjoys a state of cleanliness which is at its source physiological, but the definition and value of which are determined by the symbolic meaning attached to it by culture. Psychologically, the revelation is motivated by personal crises of loss and deficiency that she experienced in childhood. To this can be added the end of menstruation, chronic dizziness, and her children’s leaving home when she reached late middle age. She is compensated for all this by her relationship with Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, a supportive and protective male figure. The tsaddiq grants her the resources she needs to cope successfully with the vicissitudes of life and to become a healer working under his guidance.13 In the story’s background, but inseparable from it, are cultural and geopolitical developments. Modern urban life in Casablanca promised economic advancement, but proved to be hugely vulnerable when Alu’s family collapsed in the absence of the traditional supports of extended family and community. The move to Israel and the difficulty of adjusting to a new country ended in the symbolic move of the tsaddiq from Oulad Bousiri to Beit She’an. All these factors, which combine the physical, psychological, and socio-cultural with the geographic and political, paved Alu’s way to Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar.14

The Folktale As A Life Story: The Cinderella of Beit She’an Alu’s personality and life circumstances, like her language and speaking style, make her story uniquely her own. While all the stories I present in this book are distinctive in this way, they nevertheless share a great deal. The similarities should hardly surprise us given that, beyond their common ethnic and cultural backgrounds, the saints’ impresarios are all totally committed to the holy sites they have established in their apartments. In narrative terms, they have selected and ordered the events of their lives in accordance with the same overarching goal or desired end point—the establishment of an alliance with a tsaddiq who resides in their

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homes. In this way they constructed persuasive life stories, satisfying and meaningful (for them and for others who accept their definition of reality), that focused on their paths to their tsaddiqim, even though their reliability as biography and history is open to doubt. The similarity of the narrative organization of life events by these impresarios is amplified by the similar context in which the material was collected. After all, the explicit reason for my interviews with them was their connection to the tsaddiqim who live in the sites they have established. Whatever the influence of the research context, the narrators indeed shaped the narratives of their lives as quests for their tsaddiqim. Against this common background, Alu’s story stands out in its elegant structure and its fluent delivery. The cultural genre of saints’ legends, richly represented in the oral and written traditions of Moroccan Jewry, permeates and molds all the life stories I present here. But Alu’s carefully structured story displays the imprint of the “myth model” (Obeyesekere 1981, 1990), beyond the specific imprint of saints’ legends. One example of this is Alu’s repeated use of a triad of events or pronouncements—a familiar folktale template (Olrik 1965). Thus, the blind old woman in Oulad Bousiri intervenes three times in Alu’s favor; Alu opens the door of her apartment to petitioners after three silent years; the tsaddiq’s visit to her home begins with three knocks on the door; after his visit, the tsaddiq vanishes for three days before he reveals himself to her again with a thrice-repeated command (not mentioned in the previous account of her dream): “stand there, stand there, stand there.” The treatment Alu offers to her clients is based on the same threefold structure—three treatments over three days, which she embarks on by crying “Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar” three times. Can a specific cultural template be identified in Alu’s story, beyond that of the saint’s story? In my opinion, in her articulation of the experiences that led to the alliance with Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, Alu has produced a narrative very similar to the popular folktale “Cinderella,” whose designation in the typological system of folktales is AT 510A (Aarne and Thompson 1961: 175-178).15 “Cinderella” is one of the most common and popular folktales in the world, as can be learned from the large number of subtypes, variants, and parallels represented in different “tradition areas” of the genre, in many places across the globe (Cox 1893). The tale has been widely annotated and interpreted, and most of these annotations and interpretations have been gathered in a special volume (Dundes, 1983). The obvious similarity between the stories of Cinderella and Alu are evidence, in my opinion, that Alu consciously or unconsciously shaped the narrated



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reality of her life according to the narrative and symbolic model of a story that existed in her cultural tradition. To prove such a link, it is essential, first, to identify such a story type in Moroccan Jewish culture. And in fact the Israeli folklorists Aliza Shenhar and Haya Bar-Itzhak have documented a large number of variants of a particular Moroccan-Jewish subtype of the “Cinderella” tale called SmidaRemida (Shenhar and Bar-Itzhak 1982). The Arabic title alludes, like the name “Cinderella,” to ashes and dirt, so preserving the same connotations as the European versions.16 The Moroccan variants, like those known in Africa, are generally believed to have been engendered by the European versions (Bascom 1972). The Smida-Remida story matches the basic structure of AT 510A, but nevertheless differs in significant details from the two best-known variants, that of the Grimm Brothers (German) and Perrault (French). The Mediterranean version, which Smida-Remida follows, opens with the mother’s murder by her daughter. While this episode has vanished from later literary renderings, the first printed version, from Italy in the seventeenth century, includes it (Mills 1983). Since the matricide, as well as several other motifs unique to the Smida-Remida story, do not appear at all in Alu’s, we may assume that she was influenced by the Moroccan variants that were closest to the “Cinderella” story AT 510A. We have evidence of such versions in Morocco (Legey 1926). It is fair to assume that Perrault’s restrained French adaptation, and perhaps also the crueler Grimm Brothers’ version, were known in Casablanca, whose culture underwent significant French and other European influences. It is hardly unlikely that Alu, who attended a French school before her mother’s death and worked for a French family, was exposed, at one time or another, to these European variants of the story type. I do not contend that Alu’s life story corresponds in every way to the “Cinderella” tale. One of the principal differences between the two derives from the connection between Alu’s story and the cultural context of the Moroccan Jewish cult of saints. A characteristic of the typical saint’s legend is that it is not meant to be simply a story devoid of any contextualization. Rather, it is assumed to tell the story of a real person, who lived and acted in a real place and time. Such is not the case with a folktale. In Alu’s story, the tsaddiq stands in for the prince, and this substitution brings in its wake the use of symbols common in the cultural lexicon of saints’ cults, and specifically in saints’ legends. The dove, for example, which plays an important role in the tale, is one of the accepted forms in which a saint appears to his believers. Similarly, the water dripping from its wings are

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in this same lexicon a sign of the saint’s favor. The shift in genres, from folktale to saint legend, dictates a different relation to reality, since in a folktale wishes are granted outside of reality, whereas a saint’s legend is told within a specific reality system of customs and beliefs (Luthi 1976). This is not the place to address the shift from the legend to the memorate, a first-person story whose pattern and materials are taken from the legend genre accepted in the society in which it is told. It is sufficient to say that the memorate may be seen as a sort of realization of the legend genre. Alu’s life story extends beyond the regular definition of the memorate, crossing as it does the genre system and taking materials not only from legends but also from folktales. The folklorist William Bascom (1972) cogently argued against employing “Cinderella” as a generic term, applicable to any low-status female protagonist who soars from cinders to finery. To categorize a life story, or any other kind of story, as the “Cinderella” type, he argues, requires more than a general similarity. Rather, certain themes and motifs must appear in the story for the assignment to be valid. The themes and motifs that must appear for a story to fit the AT 510 type are (Aarne and Thompson 1961: 175-178): a) a persecuted heroine (for example, treated with disdain by her stepmother, who forces squalor and filth on her; b) the heroine, in her humiliated state, receives magical assistance (from her dead mother or from birds, for example); c) she meets a prince; d) her true identity is proven (for example by the slipper test); e) salt plays an important role (Aarne and Thompson, 1961). The first four motifs are embedded, at various levels of explicitness, in Alu’s narrative. The fifth motif typifies a different subtype of the story, AT 510B, so it is less a defining characteristic of the “Cinderella” story. Alu’s traumatic childhood experiences prior to the tsaddiq’s initial revelation are quite similar to the folktale’s introductory episode. Like Cinderella’s, Alu’s mother dies suddenly, and her father, who retreats into passivity, abandons her to the whims of a hardhearted matron, who employs her as a housemaid and nanny. In both the legend and the life story, the heroine’s vicissitudes are dramatized through the dichotomy of dirtiness and cleanliness. This metaphor, a major organizing principle in Alu’s selfnarrative, is so compelling in the folktale that it assigns the protagonist her name. Cinderella and Alu are also very close in age at the beginning of their stories. One variant of the fairy tale makes this explicit: “When the girl was eight years old, the mother suddenly became very ill...and died” (von Franz 1982: 203). The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim argues that



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folktales in general, the “Cinderella” story in particular, influence children between the ages of six and ten (Bettelheim 1975). The circumstances that lead Alu to the tsaddiq are similar to those that direct Cinderella to her eventual union with the prince. Alu’s request to participate in the hillula is denied, just as Cinderella is forced to stay home while her stepsisters go off to the royal ball with their mother. But with the help of the blind woman, a benevolent mother figure reminiscent of the fairy godmother in Perrault’s version of “Cinderella,” she eventually succeeds in reaching the saint. The dove, as already noted, is a common avatar for a saint in the Moroccan Jewish cult of saints; and magical help from birds is a key motif in many variants of the folktale. It appears several times in the version of the Grimm Brothers—doves, parrots, and other birds help Cinderella pick through a pile of lentils; two doves prevent the stepsisters from taking Cinderella’s place as the prince’s bride, by calling the prince’s attention to the blood oozing from their shoes. They also punish the malicious imposters by pecking out their eyes. Alu’s encounter with the saint-cum-dove, visible only to her, parallels Cinderella’s meeting with the prince, who chooses her from among all the girls at the ball. Alu’s encounter with her deceased mother near the saint’s sanctuary parallels similar encounters between Cinderella and her mother, who appears posthumously in various guises: as a cow, a tree, a bird. According to Bettelheim, all these manifestations may be seen as externalized representations of the fundamental trust that good motherhood bestows on infants during their first years of life. In all her manifestations and representations, the mother succors and supports her orphan child, thus alleviating her misery. In Alu’s story, her mother helps her get back to the tent camp at the very last moment before the beginning of the Sabbath, without Alu being caught by her employer, just as Cinderella is able to slip away from the palace at midnight, just before her magic runs out, without being identified by her stepmother and stepsisters. The manner in which Alu is discovered by the saint’s attendant accords with the way Cinderella is identified. The blind woman calls Alu to the attention of the attendant, who surveys the entire camp, and he discovers that she is the person he is looking for. In the folktale, the prince or his emissary are also guided, sometimes by a benevolent and helpful animal (such as a rooster, in the variant from Marrakech). In Alu’s story, direct interrogation takes the place of the slipper test. After being identified, Alu is mounted on a horse—just as Cinderella is in the Grimm Brothers’ version—and is adorned with fine clothes and jewels, just as the folktale

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heroine is on her way to the ball. Blindness appears both in the life story and the folktale. However, while the blind woman whom Alu meets is a positive, supportive figure, blindness appears in the Grimm Brothers’ story as the just deserts the stepsisters receive from the doves. This mutilation is preceded by selfmutilation: one stepsister cuts off her big toe and the other trims her heel in order to pass the slipper test. For a brief instant, each in her turn becomes the object of the prince’s love and wins a ride on his horse. But the discovery of blood on each one’s foot frustrates her subterfuge. Bettelheim interprets the stepsisters’ self-mutilation as an attempt to enhance their femininity through symbolic self-castration. The prince rejects the bleeding stepsisters—that is, the sexually mature women—in favor of the virginal, sexually innocent Cinderella, just as Alu, the unspoiled girl, takes the place of a menstruating woman on the bus to the hillula. A modern vehicle thus takes the place of the horse, but not for long. Alu, like Cinderella, is also placed on a horse at the climax of the festivities, by the chief attendant. A survey of other subtypes of the universal folktale AT 510 reveals that in the story called “Cat-skin” (AT 510B), the heroine flees from her father, who intends to marry her. A faint suggestion of a similar incest motif appears in Alu’s story, in the episode in which she is sent away from her foster family because her mistress fears that she will be a sexual temptation for her husband. Unlike Cinderella, eight-year-old Alu can bring her short-lived association with the saint to fruition only forty years later. This development can be interpreted, in a structural analysis of the folktale, as an act of completion meant to resolve problems that were left hanging in the previous narrative (Propp 1968). The climax of the resumed association with Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, the visit by the saint and his attendant to Alu’s home, is enabled by the loss of one of her shoes, which forces her to stay at home. Cinderella’s lost shoe is a key point in the legend, the act that makes it possible for the prince to identify his beloved and reunite with her. It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the motifs involved in Alu’s reunification with a beloved figure, which in the folktale occurs in childhood, is put off in her case until the end of her fertile years. The “Cinderella” story revolves a round a single developmental stage (prepubescence); in Alu’s story, this is spread over some fifty years. Assuming that “Cinderella” is indeed the central metaphor according to which Alu shaped her life story, we can, by invoking the hermeneutic cycle, use motifs that appear explicitly in the folktale to cast light on obscure



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episodes in Alu’s life story. In discussing Alu’s life story, we noted that the liaison between Alu and the saint is imbued with intimations of intimacy and even romance. If “Cinderella” indeed served as a “myth model” for Alu’s construction of her story about finding the tsaddiq, then Cinderella’s marriage to the prince at the end of the folktale reinforces the significance of the intimacy between Alu and Rabbi Avraham. Recall that the tsaddiq moves into her home, where he lives in a room adjacent to hers, and speaks to her alone at night. In the folktale, Cinderella moves from her home to the royal palace, while in the life story it is the tsaddiq who moves into Alu’s home. But the final result is similar—unification of a couple—as is its significance. As in the magical transformations characteristic of folktales like “Cinderella,” the small housing project apartment in a development town is transformed into a holy sanctuary and a pilgrimage site associated with a venerated saint. One of the principal foci of psychological anthropology is the processes and mechanisms by which cultural idioms, located on the collective plane and imbued with public meanings, are used for the articulation of personal experiences and feelings, especially in coping with distress. The personal symbol, discussed in the opening chapter and to be addressed further in the concluding chapter, represents this focus in the present book. In most studies that have examined the link between collective and mental representations, the “mythical worlds” (Dow 1987) from which cultural symbols are taken to construct and process charged personal experiences, are located in religious systems of meaning (Crapanzano 1977; Kracke 1982; Obeyesekere 1981, 1990; Spiro 1984; Stromberg 1985; Zempleni 1977). If Alu’s story has any added value, beyond the dramatic power of the events that lead to her union with the tsaddiq, it lies in the fact that her life story enables us to add the folktale—“Cinderella” in this case—to the list of cultural materials that help grant meaning to experiences of distress and to coping with them.

Twenty Years Later When I returned to visit Alu in 2001, she was seventy-six years old and had been a widow for five years. I found her still working as a healer under the guidance of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar. Unsurprisingly, however, “Mama Alu,” as everyone called her, had slowed down the pace of her work because of her age. She received only a few clients a day, in the late morning, only by appointment. Almost all her patients come from outside Beit She’an. (Most of those who seek out the services of Esther from

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Yeruḥam, the subject of the next chapter, now also come from outside her home town.) The shrine to her patron saint that Alu set up in her home still stands in the corner of her living room, but in recent years electric candles have replaced the oil ones, and a sliding door has been installed that sets off the tsaddiq’s sanctuary. Alu’s practice has not changed much over the years. Now, as then, she bases her treatment on the instructions she receives from the tsaddiq two nights a week, “between 1:30 and 2:45,” in which he conveys healing secrets to her for her clients. As she did then, she does not see him, but instead hears the echo of his voice, different from normal speech. She takes care to immerse herself in a mikveh before these nocturnal encounters, and also wraps herself in a tallit, or prayer shawl—a male garment. (Esther, as we will see, also dons this male garment in connection with her healing work.) In addition to the diagnoses and healing formulas that Rabbi Avraham conveys to her, she uses special candles that one of her sons brought her from Morocco, which enable her to reach a prognosis. If the candle she has lit for her client sputters out without “weeping”—that is, without dripping wax—then she will predict that the patient’s emergency operation, complicated pregnancy, or driving test will end with success. Because of her weak lungs, Alu has had to give up one of her trademarks as a healer—the tsaddiq’s araq that she used to hold in her mouth and spray into her stunned clients’ faces. Now she uses an atomizer to spray the araq instead. The kind of catastrophes that Alu suffered during her childhood were repeated in her adult life. Her second son, Avi, was killed in an automobile accident in the mid-1980s, leaving a young wife and daughter. The widow quickly remarried, and prevented Alu from maintaining contact with her granddaughter. Alu fought tirelessly, and even took legal action, to ensure that the girl retain her (and her late son’s) family name, and to obtain visitation rights. But her hope that she would be able to maintain regular contact with her granddaughter came to an end when the widow and her family moved to the United States and disappeared without a trace. The scar left by this separation has not healed with the years. Alu continues to lament the loss of her granddaughter, and in connection with this evokes her tragic parting from her family in Casablanca, after her mother’s death. The fact that her other five children have given her twenty grandchildren and six great-grandchildren does nothing to diminish her sorrow. The loss of her granddaughter is counterbalanced by the regular presence in her home of one of her grandsons, Aviad, the oldest son of



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Alu’s youngest daughter. Aviad, whose name is a modern Israeli version of the tsaddiq’s name, since infancy spent most of his waking hours with his grandparents, while his mother was at work. He sees Alu’s home as his own, and at the age of eight began sleeping over as well. At this writing, Aviad is a sixteen-year-old high school student who has a special relationship with his grandmother. His presence has helped keep Alu from growing lonely after her husband’s death. If the disappearance of her granddaughter reopened Alu’s childhood wounds, her close relationship with this grandson, which grew even stronger when he reached the same age at which she lost her family, has perhaps helped to heal those wounds. The symbolic equivalence between tsaddiqim and living or dead family members, which we have encountered in the life stories of all saints’ impresarios, appears in Alu’s home as well—the home that is the residence of the tsaddiq Rabbi Avraham and of the grandson who bears his name. Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s residence at apartment number 844/6 in the Tet housing project in Beit She’an has gained credence over the years. During periods when tensions between Israel and its neighbors rose, many residents of Beit She’an took comfort in the belief that the tsaddiq was protecting his town and keeping its inhabitants safe. One example came during the Gulf War of 1991, when Iraq launched missiles against Israel. Rabbi Makhlouf Lasri, a famous Beit She’an kabbalist, then dreamed—as did others in his wake—that Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar and other tsaddiqim, among them Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and the Baba Sali, divided the town up into sectors for each of them to protect against the enemy. Similar dreams in Safed had, it may be recalled, credited Rabbi David u-Moshe with protecting that city from Palestinian katyusha rockets. The ultimate expression of Rabbi Avraham’s installation in his new home was conveyed to me by Alu, in the name of an acquaintance of hers who had traveled to Morocco to visit her son in Casablanca. The mother pleaded with her son to present his supplications to Rabbi Avraham at his grave in Oulad Bousiri. But then the tsaddiq appeared to her in a dream and told her in no uncertain terms that he no longer resided in his old location, near Casablanca. He now lived in distant Beit She’an. In the end, the son returned all the way to Israel with his mother and went to Alu’s apartment to receive the tsaddiq’s blessing! So the shrine to Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar that Alu established in her home still exists. Each Lag B’Omer, on the tsaddiq’s hillula day, Alu holds a festive meal in his honor in the large storeroom next to her apartment building. During the rest of the year, a thin stream of supplicants comes

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to her home seeking his aid. Her modest operation cannot compete with the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. But, like Rachel Ben-Ḥamo, also of Beit She’an, and like Esther in Yerhuham—and unlike the male saints’ impresarios—the healing powers she received from the tsaddiq are the focus of her project, not his presence in her home. These powers still attract a clientele, even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and even as Alu’s advanced age compels her to limit their use.



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Notes Before retiring from her day job, Alu received clients after returning from work at the Kitan textile factory. When I visited the site in December 2001, I found that she had changed her opening hours to the morning, from 8 to 12. 2 Jewish life in Casablanca differed utterly from life in the rural communities in southern Morocco, such as Imi-n-tanout and Oulad Mansour, the villages from which Avraham and Ya’ish came. See Levy 1995; Tsur & Hillel 1995; Tsur 2002). 3 Menstruating women were strictly forbidden to visit the tsaddiq’s grave. Saints’ stories are full of descriptions of the horrible things that happen to the celebrants at the site when this prohibition is violated (Ben-Ami 1984:88-89). 4 This description of the chief attendant appears in texts as well. Lasri (1978) describes the tomb’s attendant at Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s hillula in Oulad Bousiri as “a distinguished and wealthy man of high standing. He conducted himself as one of the local Arabs and wore splendid clothes, oriental clothes, of course. He rode through the streets and marketplaces on a noble Arabian steed. As such, and being well-known and esteemed, he managed the costs, income, and upkeep of the holy site. He visited [the site], especially on the days of the hillula, in order to oversee the preservation of order and the performance of customs” (p. 168). 5 This description of an interrogation of witnesses is consistent with the common wisdom that a tsaddiq could reveal himself in symbolic guise to believers at his hillula. A dove was a familiar form in which tsaddiqim manifested themselves (Ben-Ami 1984: 75). Water dripping from the dove’s wings was seen as a clear sign of the tsaddiq’s support (ibid. 97). On the sublime symbolic significance of the dove in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and other religions see The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 2, pp. 225-226. 6 The auction of glasses of araq, colorful candles, pictures of tsaddiqim, and other objects linked to them is an important part of hillula and festive meals in the cult of Mughrabi saints. The money collected is used to cover the upkeep of the site and the costs of the celebration. 7 Many believers observe the custom of leaving a tsaddiq’s tomb by walking backwards, with their face to the grave—a position that expresses submission to and respect for the tsaddiq. 8 On the difference between seeing and hearing as modes of revelation in Jewish mysticism, see Pedaya 2002. 9 The importance of children leaving home in the resumption of ties to a 1

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Alu Ezra and Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar

tsaddiq is evident also in the story of Esther from Yeruḥam, in the next chapter. 10 Demonstrative unconcealed ignorance of the identity of the tsaddiq in visitation dreams—even when they are dreamed during the tsaddiq’s hillula, near his grave—is a motif that recurs in many Moroccan Jewish saint dreams (Bilu & Abramovitch 1985). 11 To the contrasts between the revelations of childhood and middle age that I have already noted, I should add the spatial contrast. In her childhood, Alu overcame obstacles to reach the tsaddiq’s grave. When she reached middle age, the tsaddiq came to her, and moved into her home as a member of the family. 12 The sleeping arrangements resemble those at the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe in Safed, in that the tsaddiq’s room had originally been the room shared by Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim and his wife. Since the tsaddiq’s revelation, the two of them have slept in separate rooms. 13 Alu’s family background, which includes two grandfathers who were famous rabbis, may have also helped her establish her alliance with the tsaddiq. 14 Additional aspects of Alu’s story, relating to her success as a healer in a field dominated by men, will be discussed in the next chapter, which will address the female art of healing. 15 In the Aarne-Thompson typological system, the general story type 510 is divided into two subtypes, 510A (Cinderella) and 510B (The Dress of Gold, Silver, and of Stars), which itself includes two versions. 16 Cendrion in French and Aschenputtel in German.



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Esther Suissa and Rabbi Shimon Bar-YoḤai

From Patient to Healer

Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai holds a special place in the popular tradition of Jewish saints’ cults. This charismatic Tannaitic sage, an ascetic miracleworker of the second century CE, has long been the central mythic figure of the kabbalah. The Zohar, the central text ḥatsera of this tradition, has been attributed to Rabbi Shimon since its appearance in the thirteenth century (Scholem 1954; Liebes 1989). The Zohar’s canonical status, and in particular the rituals of veneration for the book practiced in Maghrebi communities, exalted Rabbi Shimon among Moroccan Jews and magnified his reputation. As I noted in my introduction, many forms of Moroccan saint veneration grew out of the hillula of Rabbi Simon and its associated cult. A venerable tradition, dating back at least to the twelfth century, identifies a site on the slopes of Mt. Meron, in the Upper Galilee, as Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai’s tomb. Since the sixteenth century, an annual pilgrimage to the tomb and hillula has been observed in the spring on Lag B’Omer, between the Pesach and Shavu’ot holidays. It is Israel’s largest regular religious convocation, bringing together tens of thousands of Jews from all over the country, representing all ethnic communities. At the end of the 1970s, Esther Suissa, a woman of about 40 from the town of Yeruḥam in the southern Negev desert, dedicated a room in her small apartment to Rabbi Shimon. She declared herself a healer at the bidding of the celebrated sage. A picture of Rabbi Shimon dominates the room in which she receives her clients, a room plastered with pictures of saints and members of her family and packed with natural medications, prescription slips, and testimonial letters from around the country. As the letters indicate, Esther has set herself up as a healer, though a controversial one, opposed by traditional rabbi-healers, especially in Yeruḥam. Her life story casts light on the way in which a central figure in the pantheon of Jewish saints became the spiritual guide, and boarder, of a simple small-town woman.

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*** Esther was born in 1938 in a small mellaḥ (Jewish quarter) in the region of Skoura in southern Morocco. Her mother was a fairly well-known healer, and Esther takes pride in following in her footsteps, describing her gift as “a hereditary blessing, like zekhut avot.”1 Esther’s mother was known for her expertise in treating barren women, using a fierce massage therapy to reposition descended wombs. She also knew how to treat children’s maladies believed to be caused by the mocca; (awl; see Bilu 1978: 410; Westermarck 1926I, p. 166; II, p. 401), how to thwart the evil eye, and how to use seb (alum; see Westermarck 1926I: 116, 313) for divination. Without detracting from her mother’s expertise, which no doubt enriched Esther’s therapeutic arsenal (she also uses the seb as a diagnostic device), Esther has been careful to draw a clear line between their healing skills. The mother, an able but ordinary healer, was not guided by a patron-saint in her work. Infant mortality was rampant in the peripheral hinterland of southern Morocco, where medical practitioners were barely to be found, and this harsh reality left an indelible mark on the family. Of the eleven children born to her parents, only Esther and two brothers survived, and this fact, accentuated by the death of siblings immediately preceding and following her birth, made her her parents’ favorite. She recalls growing up as an overprotected and somewhat spoiled child in a loving and harmonious family: “I was an only daughter and amazingly close to Mom.… I was the only daughter left to them, precious to them, don’t ask. They’d sleep together with me in the middle [she laughs], they worried about me, maybe if I slept alone in my room something would happen to me.” Unlike most of the male saint impresarios I have studied, she did not mention family tsaddiqim as objects of veneration. However, she had a strong, personal, and intimate connection to the local saints of the Skoura region, Rabbi Masoud Harama, Rabbi Sha’ul Ha-Kohen, and Ait Wazana (Ben-Ami 1984: 476, 486; Bilu 2000b: 35-44).2 Having experienced the deaths of so many of their children, her parents attributed Esther’s survival to the protection and intercession of such saints. Although located far away, near Setat, Alu’s patron saint, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, was viewed by her parents as another of Esther’s protectors. While pregnant with Esther, her mother visited his sanctuary and had a dream there in which she saw herself preparing butter in a jar. She interpreted the dream as a reassuring message from the local tsaddiq regarding the forthcoming birth. The small



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amount of butter, formed out of a large quantity of milk, stood for the child to be born, one survivor out of many siblings. Esther absorbed the notion that she had been spared due to the grace of the saints: “I remained (alive) only because of the blessing of the tsaddiqim,” she asserts. “I grew up with them.” Whenever she fell ill, her father quickly made a vow to one of the local saints, promising him a sheep or a goat if his daughter recovered. Once Esther was well again, the animal would be slaughtered and the meat served as part of a thanksgiving meal at the saint’s tomb. Aside from Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, Rabbi David u-Moshe (Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim’s patron-saint) and other non-local tsaddiqim were also part of Esther’s immediate spiritual environment in Skoura. But, above and beyond all other tsaddiqim, the mystical luminary Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai was the main object of devotion in Esther’s family. In fact, Esther was tied to Rabbi Shimon at the moment of her birth. Her parents, fearing for her life after the loss of so many children, followed a custom regarding children at risk and “sold” her to the saint (Ben-Ami 1984: 51), to obligate him to protect “his” child.3 As the “possession” of Rabbi Shimon, Esther became particularly fond of the songs in praise of the tsaddiq that her grandfather and father used to sing after kiddush (the ritual on Friday night sanctifying the coming Sabbath): “The songs of Rabbi Shimon [were] like honey in my throat,” she says. “I can’t leave the voice of Rabbi Shimon bar-Yoḥai, his name.” In reviewing her life, Esther considers this sweet childhood passion for the songs as foreshadowing her intense involvement with the tsaddiq in Israel. Esther depicts her childhood years in Skoura as the best time in her life. Her parents were always available—her father worked at home as a carpenter. They lived modestly, even frugally, as did most of their Jewish neighbors, but her father always had sufficient work. The air of intense piety and spirituality that pervaded the small community was adequate compensation for their simple life. But this happy period did not last long. At the end of World War II, internal migration by Jews from rural border areas to the large urban centers redoubled, and the traditional communities in the south quickly declined. When Esther was eleven years old, her family left Skoura for Casablanca, hoping to move on soon thereafter to the recently established State of Israel. But for Esther this period stretched on for more than twelve years, in which the placidity of her life was entirely upset. At the age of sixteen, she married Yosef, a 26-year old servant in the home of a Jewish doctor. His father had arrived in Casablanca from Tazenakht in the south. Less than a year later their oldest daughter was

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born. During her pregnancy, Esther began to suffer from periodic attacks of aslai, or demonic possession (Bilu 1980),4 which persisted for three years and severely hampered her ability to function as a wife and mother. From time to time she would fall prey to the wrath of the jnun (demons) who would throw her to the ground and knock her temporarily unconscious; then, taking command of her body, they would thrust it into fits of wild and erratic behavior. Esther maintains that the illness started near the ḥamam (public bath), a place haunted by demons, where she inadvertently injured her demonic double and was subsequently attacked by her.5 The jinniya (female demon) revealed herself to Esther in a dream, informing her that in order to get well she had to find a cure for the demon’s injury as well. Later on, during an attack, the demon even suggested, speaking from Esther’s mouth, that the latter should sacrifice a white fowl near the ḥamam to release them both from their plights. Esther followed these instructions and so appeased the jinniya, who left her for good. The respite proved short-lived, however, as other severe tribulations soon followed. For more than two decades, she was plagued by a succession of incapacitating symptoms that made her life miserable. She termed these chronic ailments “weakness,” “paralysis,” and “imagination” and although the medical nature of her problems remained obscure, her vivid reports of agony and pain seem to be the symptoms of severe depression with strong somatic manifestations. In retrospect, she deems the evil eye, cast at her because of her beauty, as a major cause of her malady (Bilu 1978: 196-204; Westermarck 1926I: 603). Esther blames her abrupt transition from good health to multiple ailments on the drastic changes she underwent at age seventeen. The normal adjustment difficulties faced by any young bride when she moves in with her husband’s parents were exacerbated in her case by a domineering and malevolent mother-in-law. Yosef was a gentle and considerate husband who did his best to take good care of Esther and the children during her dark period. But he was too deferential to his mother to confront her about her despotic behavior. To make things worse, Esther’s parents, to whom she was so closely attached, and who were her sole comfort during the first harsh months after marriage, soon left for Israel. This was a terrible blow to her: “My mother-in-law gave me a lot of trouble, but I didn’t make a big fuss about it because I had joy in my heart; my parents lived close by.… Joy makes up for troubles, for everything. When they left, they took all of me with them, body and soul. My heart, everything, went with them. I was crying all day long. So it was not such a big surprise that I got sick.”



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Esther’s possession began at an age typical for the onset of this illness in the life cycles of many women around the world. It may well be a product of the hardships young wives and mothers encounter in unfamiliar patrilocal settings when these turn out to be demanding and hostile (see Bourguignon 1973, 1979; Goodman 1998; Lewis 1986, 1989).6 In 1962, when Yosef finally decided to immigrate to Israel, Esther was already a mother of three girls and one boy. Two more boys were born in Yeruḥam, the small desert town in southern Israel where the family was settled. Esther’s health deteriorated further after the move. Still far from her parents, who had found themselves a home in Shlomi, a small town in the Galilee, she spent many hours a day in bed, anxious, morose, and overweight. She was so dysfunctional that her oldest daughter assumed most housekeeping duties. That daughter recalls: “During all these years, I had to take care of my mother. I was the mother here, I ran the house.” The doctors Esther frequently consulted could not mitigate her suffering. From time to time she would leave her husband and children to make the long trip to Shlomi, where she found solace with her parents. In 1964, Esther gave birth to her fifth child, Meir. The growth of the family made it even harder for her to cope, and she reached her lowest point since moving to Israel. In despair, she resolved to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, her patron-saint since childhood, to pray for his help. Her account of what happened conveys the emotional turmoil that seized her there: The moment I entered [the shrine of] the tsaddiq, I threw the baby at him. He was 40 days old. I said [to Rabbi Shimon]: “There’s no one to take care of this baby, you will take care of him!” I entered on Wednesday, and from that time I didn’t give [Rabbi Shimon] any peace. I wept the whole time, entreating him to save me from doctors and hospitals and my children from becoming orphans. On Friday morning, by nine o’clock, he was already speaking with me. His soul said to me: “Pray for whoever you want.…”

The dramatic act of “abandoning” the baby to the saint, an indication of Esther’s desperation, might well have had its origin in the fact that she herself, as a newborn, was “sold” to Rabbi Shimon to save her life. Note the personal style she used to describe her attempts to attract the attention of the saint, whom she termed her last resort. Eventually she

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Esther Suissa and Rabbi Shimon Bar-YoḤai

succeeded, although the saint’s epiphany on that particular Friday was so brief that Esther was unable to convey all her problems adequately. Fearing that she had missed her sole opportunity for a dialogue with the tsaddiq, she sank into an abyss of depression: “I had a black Friday at Meron. It was a horrible day, even people with hearts of iron could not keep from crying.” But on Saturday she was ecstatic again: “He put me in paradise. What is paradise? I saw him twice. I felt that my body was in paradise. Since then I have been with him.” The revelation at Meron was the prelude to innumerable encounters between Esther and Rabbi Shimon, during which their relationship solidified. Notably, the visual mode of “seeing” the saint in a dream or in a vision, so prevalent among the male saint impresarios, was almost absent from Esther’s experience. Rabbi Shimon revealed himself to her through words rather than images, but the voice that conveyed the words was often located within her. There were encounters in which Esther could hear him with her ears, but usually she heard him in her mind, as if he implanted his ideas and needs in her thoughts. The saint was always present near her: “He is constantly with me, he does not come and go, his soul is tied to my brain.” Indeed, Esther believes that Rabbi Shimon’s soul hovers above her head, guiding her in all she does. Sometimes he takes such strong control of her that she does not even understand the words he makes her say. Yet: “I rely on him for everything,” she concludes, “without him I am nothing, zero.” The impression of a deferential and humble devotee genuflecting before an omnipotent saint turns out to be only part of the picture, given Esther’s self-aggrandizing explanation as to why she was blessed with Rabbi Shimon’s presence: I am the soul, the reincarnation (gilgul), what I have, nobody has.… Rabbi Shimon himself said to me: “You are my mother, my mother.” I am his mother, I gave birth to him in a former body that has since decayed and gone. Reincarnation, a soul of his mother.… Even my children have difficulties accepting it. Like Moses who existed only once, and nobody will be like him forever, that is how I am.… When he revealed to me who I was I asked him: “If I am your mother, why must I come back to the world and suffer so much” He replied: “If you do not suffer, the Messiah will not come.”



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Esther’s claim that she is the reincarnation of Rabbi Shimon’s mother elevates her tie to him to the most intimate of all human relationships (“He was with me for a month and a half. … he called me Mommy,” she added in the interview). But this is not just mother and child. Her complex and emotionally-charged relationship with the saint is based also on other less explicit, but no less intimate, family ties. As we have seen, Esther displays absolute dependence on Rabbi Shimon, despite her soul’s lofty status. She portrays herself as a helpless girl. Given her “sale” to Rabbi Shimon as a child, it would not be out of line to propose that in her inner world the image of the tsaddiq is that of a benevolent and protective father. This family metaphor, explicit to various degrees in all the saint impresarios’ narratives about themselves, is quite comprehensible to “ordinary” adherents as well. The transition from viewing the saint as a father to explicitly viewing him as her son occurred immediately after Esther gave birth to her fifth child. It is possible that as a long-time (though dysfunctional) mother, Esther was ready to “adopt” the saint and absorb him into the family.7 Since her sixth and last child was born only two years after the revelation, she did not conform to the common pattern—saints appeared to all the other saint impresarios only after they had finished having children, at middle age. Esther, in contrast, was in her late twenties when Rabbi Shimon first revealed himself to her. The exceptional timing may be due to the extremity of her condition, a chronic and incapacitating illness that had plagued Esther since her marriage. With no other way to cope with her prolonged crisis, it is hardly surprising that she established a relationship with a tsaddiq at a younger age than other saint impresarios. However, in accord with the general temporal pattern of revelation, Esther made her first attempt to publicly announce herself as the saint’s agent only at midlife. Until she turned forty, her deepening bond with Rabbi Shimon remained a relatively private affair. Moreover, I discuss below two episodes that took place in Rabbi Shimon’s shrine during this initial period in which the fact that Esther was of childbearing age was problematic. The first involved her baby defiling the site’s holiness, the second her own menstruation, which in Jewish religious law is regarded as a cause of impurity. Esther’s accounts of these events betray the inherent tension of establishing an intimate bond with the sacred at an improper (premenopausal) age, even though Esther took pains to make it clear that she was entitled to free access to the saint despite the impropriety involved. Esther perceived herself grandiosely as the soul of Rabbi Shimon’s mother, with the same spiritual status as Moses, and as a harbinger of the

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Messiah. Such a pedigree sharply contrasted with her physical and mental inability to function as a mother to her own children. She was incapacitated to the point that her daughters were for all intents and purposes mothers to her. Her exalted image of herself may have emerged, in part, as defensive overcompensation for her feelings of inadequacy and guilt as a mother. That this ideation is defensive and conflict-ridden is reflected in the overtones of childish helplessness dissonantly embedded in her self-aggrandizing accounts of her relationship with the saint. Aside from the opposite images of saint-as-father and saint-as-son (evident also in Avraham’s web of associations with Rabbi David u-Moshe), Esther might have held a third mental representation of the tsaddiq, more covert but no less intimate. She named her sixth child, born two years after the first visitation of Rabbi Shimon, after the tsaddiq’s son, Rabbi Elazar. It should be recalled that when she cried out for the saint’s help, Esther threatened to abandon her fifth child, Meir, in the sanctuary. The setting of this dramatic act was the central hall of the sacred complex in Meron where father and son, Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Elazar, are believed to rest side by side. Perhaps this ritual gesture of compelling the saint to take care of her baby and to become his patron grew out of a fantasy of the saint as her spouse, and thus the child’s father. Indeed, Esther’s depiction of the close relations she maintained with Rabbi Shimon was so intimate that one of her daughters told her jokingly in my presence: “In a little while your clients will say that he [the tsaddiq] is your husband.” Moreover, Esther maintained that, during her last pregnancy, she was regularly frequented by Rabbi Shimon. “He came to me all the time and said: ‘Elazar, Elazar, Elazar.’ I was supposed to give birth to a girl, but he wanted it to be a son. He said time and again: ‘Elazar.’ This is his son.” Esther’s manifest claim that Elazar is Rabbi Shimon’s son makes the inference that she entertained the fantasy of the saint as spouse quite probable. Note that with both Alu and Esther, this image of the tsaddiq as a husband, appropriate for women alone, was added at a relatively advanced age to the image of the saint as parent. (cf. Bynum 1987). In fact, Alu’s discourse about the saint included expressions of intimacy so blatant that her husband was jealous of his wife’s new, near-exclusive relationship and was at first quite hostile to her undertaking. Esther’s husband was also quite critical of his wife’s initiative in its first phase, before it proved lucrative. Although the revelation at Meron was a turning point in Esther’s life, the road to recovery was lengthy and arduous. Rabbi Shimon allotted her twelve years to get well, corresponding to the twelve harsh years he spent hiding



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in a cave, in fear of the Romans (after he emerged, God sent him back for another year).8 This parallelism, indicative of Esther’s strong identification with her patron-saint, provided a rationale for the disappointing persistence of her ailments despite her link with the tsaddiq. On a more prosaic level, the saint’s sobering pronouncement appears to be consistent with the severity of the clinical problems that continued to haunt her in the 1960s. The selfstyled “paralysis” persisted and contorted her face. Indeed, in pictures from that time her face appears swollen, twisted and frozen. Obese and depressed, for long periods of time her activity was limited to sleeping and eating. “I don’t know what I had in my head then—a scorpion or a snake,” she said of her condition at that time. As a precondition for recovery, Esther had to put herself totally and unconditionally in the hands of the saint (cf. Green 1989). “From the time my oldest was born, and she is 27 years old now [this conversation took place in 1982], I was sick. But I’ve been with him for twelve years now, without medicines and without shots, without anything. “He said to me: ‘It’s either me or the doctor.’ He gave me like this [ she demonstrated a handshake] and made me swear that no one would touch me and that I wouldn’t go to the doctor. He would take care of me, he would do everything for me. And that’s really what happened.” The handshake and the tsaddiq’s refusal to allow anyone else to touch her once again evoked a strong sense of intimacy. By and large, Esther resisted discussing the techniques she putatively received from Rabbi Shimon to combat her maladies. She did divulge, however, one physical exercise, designed to alleviate the “paralysis,” of intermittently stiffening and relaxing her facial muscles. While it is hard to assess its efficacy, at the time of the interviews, approximately twenty years after the first revelation, the facial numbness and distortion that had plagued her were barely perceptible. The return to good health throughout these dozen years was gradual and marked by ebbs and flows. “On some days I was sick in bed and on other days he gave me the power; and I felt that he provided me with crutches. When he gave me his support, I could finish a week’s work in one day.” From comments like this it might be inferred that the major factor underlying Esther’s improvement was the sense of hope and direction that, following the revelation of the saint, replaced her malaise and demoralization. Inspired and energized by the saint’s close presence, Esther gradually came out of her depression and started coping more actively with daily duties. With a radical diet she returned to normal weight and improved her mood and self-confidence. In reviewing her tormented life, it is apparent that she

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treasured the agony and pain that were her lot for so many years. In her view, her suffering, along with her noble soul, won her the privilege of becoming a successful healer, empowered by the blessing of Rabbi Shimon.9 As in the case of Alu, the transition from illness at the time of the revelation to healing was gradual and slow. One reason for the lengthy trajectory was the obvious need for self-cure before she could cure others.10 During this interim period Esther sought to fortify and institutionalize her alliance with Rabbi Shimon. The spatial dimension of the saint’s presence played an important role in these attempts, given the potential tension between the clearly demarcated geographical location of Rabbi Shimon and his intimate personal association with Esther, who lived far from the shrine in Meron. At first Esther continued to seek the saint’s blessing in his sanctuary. Problems of impurity, so central in Alu’s story, were also prominent in Esther’s first visits to Meron. Three years after the first revelation, she came to the saint’s sanctuary with the baby Elazar, whom she dressed in a new garment she made especially for the occasion. With no regard for the sacred location, the baby urinated on his festive clothes. The saint’s response was abrupt: “Go, stay home, make my hillula in your house.” Esther took pains to emphasize that Rabbi Shimon’s was not enraged or insulted but was rather solicitous of her: “He did not want to bother me.” This anticipated the transfer of Esther’s center of gravity from the national shrine in northern Israel to her domestic shrine in southern Yeruḥam. The emerging centripetal orientation that focused on her house and living quarters, situating the sacred in the midst of the profane, is a dominant theme in the stories of all other saint impresarios. The problem of female impurity overshadowed another of Esther’s visits to Meron. This time her menstrual period began while she was there. As evident from Alu’s story, the presence of menstruating (hence polluting) women in the holy precincts of the saint is absolutely forbidden. However, Esther maintained that she had no compunctions about remaining in the holy precinct even at that inauspicious time—an audacious act indicative of her special alliance with the saint. Like Alu, she dramatized her zekhut by contrasting the fact that she came out unscathed from this incident, while other women who entered the sanctuary while menstruating fell ill. Yet even she, who claims to be the reincarnation of Rabbi Shimon’s mother, did not dare cross completely the cultural boundaries between the pure and the profane. She did not go home, but she did restrict herself to the sanctuary’s upper level, away from the saint’s tomb. During the 1970s, Esther gradually emancipated herself from Meron. Her



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visits to the sanctuary became infrequent. They ceased altogether following an unequivocal message from Rabbi Shimon: “This is it, enough, I don’t want you here anymore. Stay home, you have your own Meron there, don’t come!” The timing of this message indicates that the impetus to create “her own Meron” at home might have been influenced by the emergence of Rabbi David u-Moshe’s Abode in Safed in 1973. Recall that Rabbi David u-Moshe was a venerated tsaddiq among Esther’s family in Morocco. Like Ya’ish in Beit She’an, she was exhilarated by his reappearance in Israel, visited his new shrine, and became acquainted with Avraham and his family.11 Later, when she became a healer, she posted a note at the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, inviting visitors to take advantage of her services. Rabbi David u-Moshe joined Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai in empowering her, even though his role was secondary to the tsaddiq from Meron. As against the close and permanent presence of Rabbi Shimon in her house, Rabbi David u-Moshe’s contacts with Esther were limited to sporadic dreams. In the late 1970s Esther took further steps to establish an autonomous shrine for Rabbi Shimon in her apartment. She decorated the room allotted to the tsaddiq with colorful linens which she audaciously removed from the tombs of Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Elazar in Meron. To justify this apparently reckless act, she maintains that she merely followed Rabbi Shimon’s instructions. She uses the linens, imbued with the saint’s blessing, as curative devices no less than as decoration. She has her patients wrap them around their waists to absorb their healing energies.12 In envisioning her project, Esther clearly embraced the shrines in Safed and Meron as models to emulate: Rabbi Shimon told me to assign a room for him, like in the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. He told me: “put the linens (on the walls). People should come.” I foresee the time when supplicants will bring here sheep (to feast on). Just as in Meron, if a (male) child is conceived after a visit to the saint, his hair will be cut here for the first time,13 near the place for lighting the candles in glasses.

In the second half of the 1970s, while she was making plans to establish the healing shrine in her house, Esther had also to cope with the rapidly deteriorating health of her parents. After her father’s death, she brought her severely incapacitated mother to live with her in Yeruḥam. Looking after the frail old woman was a trying task which drained the energies of the family.

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Eventually, Esther’s children rebelled and demanded that their grandmother be placed in a geriatric institution. Esther, still grappling with her painful memories of her long years of separation from her parents, sought her saint’s assistance to keep her mother at home. Rabbi Shimon (through Esther) admonished the children to submit to their mother’s will. He notified them that their grandmother’s days were numbered in any case. Indeed, she passed away a month later, exactly on the day predicted by the saint. Following her mother’s death in 1978, Esther made her first serious attempt to establish herself as a healer. She was forty years old then, gradually recovering from her ailments, and ready to divert the energy she had put into caring for her mother to healing others. Possibly, the death of her parents motivated her to establish an even stronger and more intimate bond with the parental figure of the tsaddiq, as compensation for her loss. Support for this conjecture comes from the new mode of communication with the saint that emerged at the time of the mother’s death. The boundaries separating saint and devotee vanished temporarily; periodically, Esther became possessed by (and thus “unified” with) Rabbi Shimon. In front of her astonished family and clients, the tsaddiq would speak from her mouth, using Esther’s normal voice, yet with masculine and usually plural personal pronouns. In fact, this mediumistic activity was the core of Esther’s performance as a healer at that time. In line with idioms used by the possessed in many cultural settings, she described herself as a “vehicle” driven by the tsaddiq, through which divinatory and therapeutic information could be delivered to the needy (Boddy 1989; Bourguignon 1976; Lewis 1989). This possession episode can be seen as the embodiment of the metaphors of both saint-as-spouse and saint-as-son. Being possessed by Rabbi Shimon may have been tantamount to being penetrated by him, and to containing him like an embryo in her body. But whatever the meaning of Esther’s possession by Rabbi Shimon, it is clear that she already had the predisposition or capacity to become inhabited by a spirit. Recall that her long series of illnesses had begun, when she was seventeen, with bouts of demonic possession. Viewed in context, however, these two clusters of possession episodes appear markedly different. The change in the possessing agent, from a female demon to a venerable tsaddiq, marked a process of “domestication” (cf. Bourguignon 1979; Crapanzano 1981; Gussler 1976; Lewis 1986), a move from suffering to healing whereby a “symptom” had become a “symbol” (Obeyesekere 1981, 1990; Zempleni 1978). Involuntary bursts of bizarre behavior, at first stigmatized as sick and deranged, became transformed into deliberately sought, meaningful acts of



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ecstatic fusion with a holy ally, who could be used to help others. As a healer presumptively empowered by Rabbi Shimon, Esther’s dramatic possession episodes appeared particularly appropriate for her. The earlier private, voiceless dialogues with the tsaddiq were transformed now into public, vocal monologues which made his presence palpable to those around her. In actuality, however, the possession episodes turned out to be an impediment rather than an asset. First, the experience proved traumatic for many patients. Some of them, scared to the point of distraction, quit the therapeutic session and “went back home as pale as the walls around,” according to Esther’s now-bemused reflection. Even more detrimental was the negative response of Esther’s children. Reluctant from the outset to accept the presence of the saint in the house, they resisted with particular vehemence the odd possession episodes in which this presence was most uncannily manifested. In their efforts to stop their mother from healing, they even threatened to destroy the abode of Rabbi Shimon. Esther fought back, seeking to inculcate fear and submission in her recalcitrant children. One of Rabbi Shimon’s first monologues through Esther’s mouth, transcribed at the scene by her daughter-in-law, retains the flavor of these desperate attempts. It starts as follows: I am Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai [hovering] above the head of Esther. We steer her like people steer a car. We don’t ask her [permission], we activate her as we wish. The children of Esther cause her a lot of trouble because they don’t want her to engage in healing. Her daughter was supposed to die and we prayed for her, as on Yom Kippur [the Day of Atonement], and the decree was annulled. Avraham the soldier, Esther Suissa’s son, we forgive him, because he sees only his mother and not what is above her head.… If we do not move her [Esther], she is like a board and doesn’t move.

The rapid shift to plural pronouns, though not indicative of a multiple possession (see Boddy 1994: 407), appears to accentuate the fact that Esther enjoys the support of a host of saints, in addition to the patronage of Rabbi Shimon. The children, however, were impressed neither by this plural voice nor by the unsubtle warning in the message, and Esther had to forsake her mediumistic performances altogether. Thus, her first attempt to become a healer empowered by Rabbi Shimon proved abortive. Six dormant years passed before Esther resumed her healing activities.

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During these years she attended a special adult educational program and acquired elementary reading and writing skills. This move to literacy, of which she was very proud, was later reflected in her therapeutic methods. At age forty-six, the time seemed ripe for her to resume her role as a healer. Her youngest son, Elazar, was in the army; the other children, who sabotaged her earlier foray, no longer lived at home. She was not spared confrontations with them when they visited, but this time she was determined not to let them block her way. She made a big effort to publicize herself by courting the media. She also pressed grateful patients to provide testimonial letters depicting their cures. These, together with printed prescriptions for remedies for a large assortment of problems, were put on display in the tsaddiq’s room. The effort paid off. Esther established herself as a skillful healer with a reputation that transcended her hometown. Today most of her clients come from the urban settlements of southern Israel—mostly from Beersheba, Dimona, Netivot, and Ofakim— but a tiny stream of supplicants also flows from other, more remote parts of the country. Familiarity, though, breeds contempt. The people of Yeruḥam, who long knew Esther as a tormented, barely functional woman, have been underrepresented in her clientele. In terms of life cycle and life circumstances, the professional trajectories of Esther and Alu have much in common. Both of them became saintempowered healers in their mid-forties, after their children had left home. In Alu’s self-narrative, however, the exit of the children was less accentuated than her renewed purity following menopause. Esther did not make any explicit association between healing and menopause, although such an association cannot be ruled out. In any event, it should be recalled that she had made a previous, unsuccessful attempt to become a healer when she was forty and that the saint had revealed himself to her long before that. Yet, as the incident of having her period in Meron illustrates, she too had to deal with this physiological marker of female impurity and to neutralize it. Her work as a healer was accompanied by an aggrandizement of the saint’s abode in her home. Rabbi Shimon signaled his presence in “his” room by insisting that Esther leave the house as little as possible. In line with the pattern encountered in other domestic shrines in Israel, Esther claimed that the tsaddiq, in a dramatic dream apparition, thwarted a well-advanced plan of hers to move to a bigger apartment elsewhere. Esther internalized the prohibition against leaving. Although she never abandoned the idea that Rabbi Shimon was “above her head” wherever she went, the opposite notion that he was also “grounded” in his room in her apartment gradually became



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dominant and made her reluctant to disengage herself from his protective presence. She reported feeling restless and discomposed whenever she had to leave the house. The same homebound pattern prevails in the postrevelation lives of all other saint impresarios as well. When Esther resumed her healing activities, the saint’s presence was no longer manifested directly through dramatic episodes of possession as before. Instead, he was covert and his message was mediated. Rather than vocalizing, through Esther’s mouth, diagnostic and therapeutic information, he covertly communicated it to Esther (who, like Alu with her saint, can either hear his voice or absorb it in her mind) or projected it onto one of three objects—seb (alum), oil, and egg. Esther claims that the saint conferred on her the art of interpreting these objects. Note, however, that at least one of these materials, the seb, was part of her mother’s healing arsenal as well.

Written in Egg Yolk: The Healing Art of Female Saints’ Impresarios All the female saints’ agents I met, Esther and Alu included, view themselves first and foremost as healers by grace of saints. This distinguishes them from most of the men in the group, who refrained from active engagement in healing, even though the sites they established are classic healing shrines. This detailed account of Esther’s work, with the help of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai (and other saints), opens a window to the women’s craft of healing within the cult of the saints. So as to offer a more comprehensive discussion of women’s participation in the cult, I will broaden this case study to include Alu, whom we have already met, and Rachel, a prominent figure in the community of dreamers that gathered around the Gate of Paradise. Rachel in recent years has become a healer empowered by Elijah the Prophet. Broadening my scope will enable me to compare women’s healing practices with those of rabbi-healers. One of my purposes will be to understand these women’s success in territory ostensibly dominated by male healers. In my concluding chapter I will return to the life stories of Esther, Alu, and Rachel in order to examine whether there are other characteristics that converge into a unique female path to sanctity. Esther uses the room she dedicated to Rabbi Shimon as the arena for her therapeutic activities. A dense array of pictures adorns its walls. It includes a folk-portrait of Rabbi Shimon, the only visible indication of his presence; pictures of other tsaddiqim, mostly of the Abu-Ḥatsera and the Pinto families; and pictures of Esther’s family members, including her parents, herself (with her husband on their wedding day), and some of her

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grandchildren. Boxes and bags of healing materials fill the room. A rack of shelves holds a peculiar display of jars, each containing a twisted form of a white crystalline substance reminiscent of solidified lava [see illustration]. The presentation illustrates Esther’s use of melted seb (alum) for divination. A hand-written label on each jar briefly indicates the meaning of the encased shape and its significance for the problem of one of Esther’s clients. She says that she prepared this exhibition, which adds a uniquely impressive decor to the room, for people like me, who come to inquire about her work. During our meetings she even asked me to help her write some of the labels. On the wall underneath the lower shelf of the display hangs a jerrybuilt box overflowing with instructions for treating maladies, for preparing medicinal formulas, and letters from grateful ex-patients. One of these photocopied sets of instructions spells out the ailments that Rabbi Shimon has sanctioned Esther to treat. The long list includes “nervousness, paralysis, single men and women who cannot get married, weak sperm, marital discord, problems of livelihood, sorcery, an adulterous husband, irregular period, children’s maladies.” The note ends with the assertion that “I can cure all diseases but three: multiple sclerosis, angina pectoris, and a third disease that is not to be named” (the implication is that this is cancer). Judging from my observations of healing sessions and from the perusal of some seventy letters of acknowledgment written by grateful patients, Esther indeed addresses a wide range of life problems that clearly transcend strictly defined medical and psychological complaints. The major concerns that bring supplicants to Esther are romantic difficulties (e.g. unrequited love, inability to find a spouse), marital problems, childlessness, psychological ailments defined as “tension,” “mental crisis,” “depression,” somatic or psychosomatic maladies (e.g. heart palpitations and “paralysis”), children’s problems (e.g. hyperactivity, excessive crying, lack of appetite), economic difficulties, and general “bad luck.” Over eighty percent of Esther’s clients are women. Women in Israel, as in many other social settings, are generally overrepresented among the pilgrims and the supplicants in saint sanctuaries as well as among the consumers of folk-medicine (Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle 1997; Bilu 1979a; Mernissi 1977; Stark and Bainbridge 1985). As a folk-healer empowered by a saint who resides in her house, Esther appears to integrate both domains. The age range of the clients is wide, though girls in their late teens and young women in their twenties and thirties appear to be overrepresented. Ethnically, the overwhelming majority of them are of North-African and Middle Eastern extraction. Ashkenazim are extremely rare.



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The therapeutic session that takes place in the room of the tsaddiq is lengthy, exceeding one hour in most cases. It has a definite structure, proceeding according to a predetermined design. At the same time it is informal, as Esther, warm and talkative, chats freely with her patients, serves them tea and refreshments, and explains everything she does in vivid language.14 The therapeutic procedure starts with the ritual of lighting glasses of oil in honor of the tsaddiqim. Twenty-six such glasses, filled with oil and equipped with floating wicks, stand on a special tray in the kitchen, and Esther instructs the patient to light each of them while praying for the intercession of the saints. Rabbi Shimon, Esther’s patron saint, and Rabbi David u-Moshe, her other cardinal ally, are accorded bigger glasses then the rest, to signify their privileged position in the house. As if to underscore the intimate links between parental figures and saints, Esther’s parents are also represented among the glasses. The remaining 22 personages include popular saints from Morocco, among them two of Esther’s childhood tsaddiqim from Skoura, luminary figures from Biblical and Talmudic eras (e.g. Elijah the Prophet, Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes, Yonatan Ben Uziel), and contemporary tsaddiqim of North African background (Baba Sali and Rabbi Ḥayyim Ḥouri). The other female figure in the list, besides Esther’s mother, is Rachel the Matriarch, the national-religious emblem of motherhood. After the lighting, Esther wraps the patient with one of the tsaddiq’s cloths she expropriated from the shrine at Meron. She utters a blessing for the complete cure of the draped patient. Lighting the candles, wrapping the cloth, and the blessing constitute the preamble to the therapeutic procedure. Brief and ritually unelaborated, the fabric’s importance lies in establishing the setting for treatment by focusing on Rabbi Shimon and the other tsaddiqim as the prime movers behind Esther’s healing powers. The diagnostic procedure begins when Esther selects a piece of seb and passes it over the body of the patient, touching gently the scalp, the forehead, the chest, the hands, the legs, and all the fingers. While doing this she instructs the patient to utter a prayer for the success of the seb divination: “In the name of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and Rabbi David u-Moshe, may all the troubles of (the patient’s name), daughter of (her mother’s name) come out in this stone.” The patient is instructed to spit twice at the seb,15 which is then put in a censer filled with burning coals on the balcony. There the seb melts slowly, assuming a succession of rapidly alternating shapes. Later, taken out of the fire it will be crystallized into a multi-dendrite formation which Esther will decipher.

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While the seb is burning, Esther moves into the principal part of the session. She fills a bowl with water while holding it over the patient’s head, and pours a small amount of oil into the water. She puts the bowl on the table, examines the oil patterns in the water and deciphers them. Esther maintains that the traces in the water convey valuable information about the patient’s problems, transmitted by Rabbi Shimon and the other tsaddiqim. I will discuss specific “readings” of the oil, as well as of the other diagnostic materials, in the following section. The examination of the oil appears somewhat cursory in comparison with the thorough inspection of the egg-yolk that follows. Esther passes an egg over the body of the patient, just as she did with the seb. Then she breaks the egg, carefully separating the yolk from the white, and adds the white to the oil and water in the bowl. Lightly holding the yolk in her palm, so that it does not disintegrate prematurely, she carefully scans its shiny surface, looking again for clues to the patient’s condition, provided by the tsaddiq. From time to time she moves the yolk gently from one hand to the other, assessing its viscosity. When the yolk is about to disintegrate, she adds it to the bowl. The smooth and glittering surface of the yolk provides Esther with a particularly rich array of diagnostic signs, shifting rapidly with changes in position and luminosity. If the yolk disintegrates too rapidly, before most of the signs can be deciphered, Esther uses a second egg to supplement the diagnostic process. On rare occasions she repeats the examination three or even four times; in such cases the repeated rapid disintegration of the yolks is itself a clear premonitory indication. In contrast, yolks that do not decompose for ten to fifteen minutes are deemed a favorable omen, standing for good health and success. Esther employs the materials at her disposal for healing as well as diagnosis. This is primarily true of the mixture in the bowl, composed of water, oil and egg, to which the patient is instructed to add several herbs (provided by Esther) and small, precisely defined amounts of wine, arak, and honey. The long list of ingredients reads like a recipe, and this impression is enhanced when the patient is required to taste a bit of the mixture. The principal treatment, however, is performed at the patient’s home, where she is required to rub portions of the mixture on various parts of her body, with special emphasis on ailing organs, for seven consecutive nights. In order to make her immediate surroundings more receptive to treatment, Esther also advises patients to apply the therapeutic concoction to the lintels in their homes and to pour some of it in the four corners of each room. Esther assures her patients that the residue of the healing substance can be kept



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in the freezer for future use. By the time the egg diagnostics are completed, the seb, melted on the burning coals, is ready for reading. Once removed from the fire, it cools down rapidly. Deciphering the seb does not take much time, since it usually generates only one to three identifiable shapes. But these shapes play a cardinal role in uncovering the etiology of the patient’s problem. Following her divination of the seb, Esther crushes it into a powder which she mixes with water. The liquid is to be spread over the body for seven consecutive mornings, in precisely the same way as with the other, nightly application of the mixture of water, egg, and oil. To complement the healing effects of the two concoctions, now bottled for home use, Esther provides the patient with an amulet (Hebrew: qame‘a) for prophylactic purposes. She prepares the amulet in front of the patient by packing a mixture of herbs, known to thwart the evil eye and demons, in a small piece of green cloth. She stitches the ends of the cloth together, creating a small pouch which the patient is instructed to carry on her body, in a pocket or attached to an undergarment. The green color of the amulet stands for growth and prosperity. The thread used for sewing up the amulet is charged with blessing. To obtain a stock of these special threads, Esther visited four popular shrines—those of Rachel the Matriarch (Sered 1989), Yonatan Ben-Uziel, Rabbi Ḥayyim Ben-Atar (Bilu, Witztum, and Van der Hart 1990), and Rabbi Ḥayyim Ḥouri (Weingrod 1990), where she performed a ritual of “measuring” the tombs. She circumambulated each gravestone with the thread, cutting the excess to make the length identical with the perimeter of the tomb. The threads may be used as amulets in their own right (Bilu 1978: 405-411). In addition to the amulets, Esther provides single and barren women with pieces of the threads and instructs them to tie them around their waists like a belt, under their clothes.16 Providing the patient with an amulet usually brings the therapeutic session to an end, but the procedures described here by no means exhausts Esther’s rich arsenal of curative devices. Beyond the standard course of treatment presented above, Esther commands a rich array of healing prescriptions, too diversified to discuss here, specifically designed to deal with the dire consequences of various s’ḥur (Arabic: black magic) afflictions. Photocopies of all of the prescriptions are also available to assist the patients in applying the detailed and often complex instructions at home. All the written materials in the tsaddiq’s room were composed by Esther. They were transcribed, typed and photocopied with the help of family, neighbors, and clients.

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An examination of various versions of the photocopied instructions Esther has prepared casts light on other aspects of her role as a healer, her self-image, and the social and cultural contexts in which her healing is anchored. The scope of the problems addressed by the sheets and their systematic treatment of them shows Esther to be an adept healer. The tone is assertive, underlining her competence and the respect to which she is entitled. The instructions begin by placing the treatment in the proper hagiolatric context: a boundless faith in the tsaddiqim is a prerequisite for therapeutic efficacy. They mandate uttering the names of Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi David u-Moshe at the outset of all treatments, and urge patients to enlighten their neighbors about the two saints’ healing powers. Patients are to update Esther on their progress, by mail or by telephone. They must inform her first about a pregnancy that she has helped produce. If a complete recovery is not effected within the first seven days of treatment, the patients are to return for a second session, no later than ten days after the first visit. The instructions anticipate many questions that patients are likely to have. Where should the medication be stored at home? What to do with it when the symptoms are over? Can it be used during the menstrual period? (Given Esther’s audacity in remaining at Rabbi Shimon’s sanctuary in Meron during her period, it is not surprising that the answer is affirmative.) Prospective complications are dealt with authoritatively and reassuringly. A rapid exacerbation in the patient’s condition, the instructions state, should not be a cause for alarm. It may well be an indication of the saint’s favorable intercession. He shakes the illness out of the patient’s body, thereby causing its “externalization” and thus a temporary aggravation of the symptoms. The instructions also clearly indicate Esther’s sensitivity to competition from other folk-healers, as well as her effort to establish a modus vivendi with modern medical practitioners. Patients are warned not to wear any amulet provided by another healer during treatment, and are advised never to wear any such charm they may have if the therapy administered by Esther was successful. Any patient who suffers from “illnesses of the nerves” (psychiatric disorders) must continue to pursue standard psychological and medical treatment while simultaneously enjoying “the treatment of the tsaddiqim.” Psychiatric medication (sedatives) is specifically approved. Esther’s high self-esteem is revealed in the self-assured insistence on payment included in the instruction sheets. Patients are straightforwardly directed to contribute to the collection box for the tsaddiqim that Esther keeps at home, and to deposit a donation in Esther’s bank account in Yeruḥam as well. Like many other traditional healers, Esther refrains from



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specifying the precise sum patients are to give her. But when she feels she has not been paid enough, she has no compunctions about saying so directly and demanding more. In any case, this donation is not meant to supplant the payment patients have to make at the end of the therapeutic session. Moreover, she was the only saint agent to admit openly that, aside from relatively small sums of money she allots for Rabbi Shimon’s se’udah in the local synagogue and as a contribution to a yeshiva bearing his name in Meron, “the saint allows me to have everything for myself.” Needless to say, this rule applies to the gifts, mostly home utensils and ornaments, that grateful patients lavish upon Esther. Notwithstanding the rich arsenal of healing devices that Esther commands, her expertise and renown lie in the realm of diagnostics. The main substance of the therapeutic session in Rabbi Shimon’s room is Esther’s successive readings of the oil, egg, and seb. Her elaborate system for interpreting these materials deserves closer examination. Before scrutinizing the plethora of indications provided by the diagnostic materials, Esther employs them to detect the patient’s physical symptoms. When she pours the oil into the bowl over the patient’s head and waves the seb and the egg over the patient’s body, she claims to sense pain in exactly the same locations in her own body. Esther believes that this gift of empathetic pain was granted her by Rabbi Shimon because of her own past ordeals. The suffering that befell her made her attuned to the suffering of others in a very concrete, corporeal sense (e.g. Green 1989; Kendall 1989; Sered 1994: 216; Singer and Garcia 1989). This is in line with the female mode of healing in other cultural settings (e.g. McClain 1989; Sered 1994: 216; Singer and Garcia 1989). She describes her body as “human radar,” or a “magnet which attracts and absorbs the pain of the patient.” When she scans the diagnostic signs, however, the pain fades away, as intuition and empathy are replaced by cognitive-interpretive skills. From “human radar” she becomes, in her own words, “a decipherer of X-rays.” Over the years, Esther has learned to identify thousands of meaningful signs in the three diagnostic materials, primarily in the egg-yolk. In keeping with her inclination to cast her healing methods in a professional, systematic way to impress her clientele, she includes in the photocopied instructions several charts of diagnostic signs, organized by the substance used or the themes involved. Rather than itemizing these at length, I will restrict myself to her organizing principles, and offer a few illustrations of each one. Esther’s interpretations comprise a comprehensive and flexible semiotic system in which the relations between signifier and signified are

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metaphorical. The system’s universe of content is constructed along two principal dimensions, etiological and prognostic. The first dimension, which deals with various aspects of the problems involved (e.g. causes, triggers, context), is by definition negative, while the second one is concerned with the prospects for cure, and is mostly positive. A few examples illustrate the etiological-malevolent axis of diagnosis (when not otherwise specified, the diagnostic tool is the egg-yolk). A “black point” attributes the patient’s problems to sorcery; a “hole” in the oil alludes to a demonic source of illness (since demons normally reside underground; Bilu 1979b; cf. Crapanzano 1973, 1980; Westermarck 1926I); and an “eye” (in all three substances) alludes to the “evil eye” as the agent of affliction. A dim or broken “star” indicates a general deficit of “luck in life.” A “sink” may refer to the kitchen as the place where the illness began, while a “pool” is a clue that the onset of the problem has to do with water.17 A “male sexual organ” (in the seb) and a “cigarette” both indicate sins as the cause of an ailment, but the association is religious rather than Freudian. The first sign indicates licentiousness on the part of a male patient while the second one refers to the religious transgression of smoking on the Sabbath. Most of the deciphered signs belong to the second, prognostic axis. They are usually positive, anticipating the beneficial effects of the therapeutic interventions. Thus, a “key” means that the problem will be “opened” and resolved.18 A “helicopter” predicts heavenly assistance (coming from above); and a “dove’s beak” indicates that the illness will “fly away.” Small variations in the signifier can bring about entirely different interpretations, and this sensitivity to detail multiplies the interpretive capacity. To illustrate, a “thread” may refer to the effectiveness of the cure, which “mends” the “torn” body; but a longer “thread” is likely to represent the umbilical cord of the baby soon to be conceived; and “a thread in the mouth of a dog,” identified in the egg-yolk of a young woman deserted by her husband, means that “the husband will return home soon, like a dog walked home with a leash.” Taken together, the etiological and the prognostic dimensions represent a dynamic process of harmony disrupted and harmony restored, in which the tsaddiq is the equilibrating power. The distinctive feature of Esther’s semiotic system is not her astute reading of the diagnostic signs, rendering them relevant to the patient’s problems, but in their linkage, through an intricate web of associations, to the saints. Rabbi Shimon and the other tsaddiqim are the protagonists of the narratives which Esther



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constructs out of the multiplicity of forms and shapes she perceives in her diagnostic materials. In this respect, the examples presented above are truncated, since they do not include the most encouraging aspect of the diagnostic process from the patients’ point of view, namely, the conviction that the saints, mobilized by Esther, are committed to assisting them. Thus, going back to previous examples, the “key” that “opens” and resolves the problem is held by a tsaddiq, and so is the thread which he uses to “mend” the illness. Since the saints are not directly perceived in the egg or the seb, but are rather narratively embedded in Esther’s interpretations, the scope of their interventions is limitless. The following examples may convey the flavor of these saint-oriented interpretations. A lion, a dove, even a snake are animal guises through which the saint may reveal himself in the yolk or the seb (Bilu and Abramovitch 1985). A saw (in the oil) means that “the saint will saw apart all her problems,” and a sickle suggests that he will cut them down. A hand and heart indicate that “the saints extend their hands to her and love her a lot.” A sword and a missile both represent weapons used by the saint to fight for the patient, and the figure of two points connected by a line convey that the patient is strongly attached to two tsaddiqim. Needless to say, these two protective saints are Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi David u-Moshe. Because of their salience in Esther’s life, she interprets all twin or two-sided shapes as representing these two saints. The same interpretation applies of course to the symbol “2” that may appear in the egg-yolk, but is not unique to it, as most other digits represent the respective number of saints interceding on behalf of the patient. The only exceptions among the one-digit numbers are “1” (an etiological sign: “Something happened to the patient at one o’clock in the afternoon or at night”); “7” (“seven heavens and seven lands,” or “seven days”); and “9” (“Ninety percent that God and the saints will help the patient”). Esther’s reading of number “4” reveals the sense of greatness she harbors within her: “It symbolizes God, two saints (Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi David u-Moshe), and my (Esther’s) own zekhut [merit or privilege].” The boundless nature of the saints’ involvement is demonstrated in the creative way Esther copes with embarrassing cases in which no definite shapes appear in the diagnostic material. This “diagnostician’s nightmare” is almost impossible with the rich matrix of the egg-yolk, but may occur occasionally with the seb. Esther designates these obscure specimens a “mess” or “confusion” and interprets them as a good omen: “the saint will confound the disease, will make a mess out of it.” The flexibility and creative vagueness of Esther’s interpretive style is

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reflected in the casual and lenient approach she espouses towards the glossaries she herself had promulgated. Rather than indiscriminately relying on fixed associations between signifier and signified, she accommodates her reading to the patient’s problems and personal background. This context-dependency may yield diverse readings of the same sign with different patients, as the following examples illustrate. When glittering dots appeared in the oil of a female patient who was desperate to get married, Esther discarded the standard interpretation, which equates dots with saints, for the idiosyncratic but relevant “white dots on a bridal veil.” In the same vein, she deciphered a circle that appeared in the egg-yolk of the same patient as a wedding ring, while in another case it was described as “a dome on a saint’s sanctuary,” and in yet another, of a male patient self-labeled as a victim of sorcery, as an iron ball chained to his foot and weighting him down with his problems. When two young female clients complained about a neighbor who supposedly tried to bewitch them, Esther without compunction deserted the conventional interpretation of the digit “1,” which is normally temporal—the time of the day or the night in which the problem started—and suggested instead that the suspect was “number one in witchcraft, a super-witch.” Blood in the egg-yolk is always a bad omen; but in a case of a woman suffering from mental problems, Esther associated it with a slaughterhouse, a typical setting for the onset of demonic illnesses,19 while in another case, of a woman whom Esther had previously scolded for religious negligence, it stood for having sex with her husband during the forbidden menstrual period.20 Esther arrives at the diagnostic outcome by deciphering many discrete signs, collected from three disparate sources. While she does not make special attempts to weld all the emerging pieces of information into one unified plot, her rich narrative style, metaphoric language, and expressive discourse render the interpretations fluent and coherent. She skillfully controls the interaction with the patients, knowing how to dramatize the message by raising her voice, repeating key points, and using emotional gesticulation; how to involve the patient by making him or her respond to her interpretations; and how to assert an authoritative style while maintaining a warm and informal atmosphere throughout the session. Since most of her clients are not strictly observant, Esther always includes in the diagnostic discourse admonitions against religious negligence. Along with the interaction with the patient, Esther conducts an ongoing dialogue with the saint. Here, too, her language is unrestrained and informal. She is not embarrassed to lodge a complaint against Rabbi Shimon when the



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diagnostic picture is not clear (e.g. “Why are you making all these problems for your supplicant?”), or to address him in a commanding voice (“I insist that you find this client a good husband”). But the dominant tone is one of intimacy more than insolence or defiance. In order to illustrate the unique variety of Esther’s therapeutic discourse, I offer an account of a session she held with a young man from Eilat. He came to see Esther along with his wife after repeated failures at business. As one might expect, the couple suspected that his problems were the result of sorcery. Note the rich speech, characterized by self-exaltation and personal sincerity displayed by Esther even at this relatively early stage of wrapping her patient in the tsaddiq’s cloths. I want to explain about these things I took from the tsaddiq’s grave fourteen years ago, one from Rabbi Shimon’s grave and one from the grave of Rabbi Elazar his son.… So I say straight out that I am not afraid of the tsaddiqim. Why? [Because] I feel them in my body and in my soul and they guide me. No one can take things from the [grave of the] saint. No one! His legs won’t bear him, he won’t leave his place. But I permitted myself because he [Rabbi Shimon] steers me. I took them because fourteen years ago he sent me out to heal and told me to take the things from his grave so that I could make his room like they did in the Canaan [neighborhood], for Rabbi David u-Moshe. That’s the only reason he told me take them. We’ll begin with this, and people will begin to arrange the room, and we’ll start working. My children were against it then. They didn’t want me to work. So [the cloths] stayed with me, I didn’t want to upset my children [by hanging the cloths on the walls], but what [do I do with them?], I bless people with them. A childless person who comes, I pass it over his loins, and with God’s help everything will work out.

Esther shares with her client the things she sees in the oil and the egg yolk, while taking care to stress that the saints are responsible for what she sees: It’s not a sign of the oil and not a sign of the water [in the bowl], it is signs from the saints. These spots, in the shadow you see them as white spots, in the sun you see them glittering

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like a diamond. A sign of the saints. So here, too, Amnon [a pseudonym], with God’s help you have help, because the oil is in two layers, [and] the second layer is like a saw [with a jagged edge], not a clean curve, so the saints will cut through your troubles.

She is excited by what she sees, and intersperses her diagnosis with cries of surprise, which lend greater force to the severity of the problem. The thing that happened to you [the witchcraft], happened to you at night. There is a membrane [on the yolk], a membrane symbolizes night.…What a cover, ya-allah! [Wow! Then, to the client:] Take a look, it’s all covered [with the membrane], they’ve covered up your livelihood, covered up everything for you. Wonderful, I don’t know how to get out of it. They did it for you, honey, they did something really big for you.

But her astonishment and ostensible helplessness in the face of the severity of the problem are replaced by cries of wonder at the signs that indicate that the saints will help: I have a feeling that the yolk will hold [a positive sign], seven times, the number seven is good, there aren’t many people who get seven. Seven symbolizes the heavens and the seven lands. It’s special, not everyone gets it … three dots, God and two saints. You have a connection with two saints, and all their merits … this is a slingshot, like the ones little children have, it symbolizes that with God’s help the saint will hit on the thing that happened to you.

The richness of the semiotic system which informs Esther’s interpretations is not exhausted by the multiformity of the signs. Aside from shape and form, other physical dimensions involved in molding the final diagnostic outcome render it more complex. Color may add valuable information when it deviates from the monochromatic background of the material inspected (anything not yellow in the egg-yolk, or not white in the seb). The negative meanings of blood in the yolk have already been discussed. Similarly, black dots in the yolk and black or brown veins in the seb are indicative of sorcery. Foul odors, emanating occasionally from



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the egg or the seb, are also indicative of sorcery. Abrupt changes in the temperature of the water in the bowl are of prognostic significance. If the water suddenly gets colder, for example, “the problems of the patient will cool down and disappear.” The perceived weight of the egg-yolk in Esther’s palm and its viscosity are also important indicators. Unusual heaviness and rapid disintegration of the yolk both allude to prospective exacerbation of the symptoms or even death. In other words, Esther employs a multisensory semiotic system. Sight is the central modality for scrutinizing the diagnostic materials, but smell, touch, and even taste are also involved. Taste concerns the patient alone, as she is instructed to taste a bit from the mixtures made from the diagnostic materials at the end of the session. Note that the patient is fully involved in the process and entitled to experience and share it with the healer, since none of the diagnostic signs is inaccessible to him or her. The forms and colors in the egg and the seb, though not their meanings, should be no less visible to the client than to Esther, and the former is supposed to sense the stench of the seb and the sudden coolness of the water in the bowl just as Esther does. The incorporation of the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory senses into the diagnostic process makes it more physical and concrete. But the crux of the diagnosis, based on the careful visual examination and decipherment of the diagnostic signs, is more cerebral than corporeal. The physical-corporeal aspect is more evident in the treatment which, as I have stated, is based on rubbing the body with the divinatory-turnedhealing materials. Both diagnostically and therapeutically, Esther’s methods, as well as those of Alu and other female healers, differ markedly from the system employed by male rabbi-healers. Male healers rely heavily on sacred texts which, in the traditional religious framework, are virtually inaccessible to women. This phenomenon is, of course, not unique to Judaism. The exclusion of women from public ritual arenas in any number of religions has made the dichotomy of “sacred healing” versus “secular healing” almost coterminous with male and female modes of healing, respectively (Kleinman 1980). Kabbalists and mystics who engage in healing often lack rabbinic ordination. Most of them, however—at least Moroccan immigrants of the same age cohort as the women depicted here—were trained as religious functionaries—sho’hatim (ritual slaughterers), mo’halim (circumcisers), religious scribes, and teachers of the Torah. Hence, they assume the healing role as an integral part of their religious duties. They generally discern the causes of the problem in one of the goral (fate) books in their possession, and

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the healing formula, in the form of sacred names of one sort or another, from handwritten books of cures. Therapy is based on the two-tier impingement of written texts and sacred and secret words of power (cf. McCguire 1983), derived from mystical books of healing,21 on the patient’s body. The texts are charms, usually written down by the healer during therapy, in which God’s enigmatic appellations, names of angels, and Scriptural verses designating deliverance and cure are incorporated. The two-tier deployment of these written charms is based on the separation between active and prophylactic cure. In both cases, the gist of the intervention lies in the embodiment of sacred words. But for active cure these written words must be transformed into fumes or liquid (by burning them or erasing them in water) so that the healing substance can permeate the ailing body (through fumigation or drinking and smearing, respectively). To protect the patient from future predicaments, the healer will write for her a special charm called a kame’a (amulet), which she is supposed to wear constantly in a closed pouch worn under her clothes (see Bilu 1985). In both cases, the use of medicinal herbs often augment the text, but they are clearly secondary to it. In fact, the act of writing is so central to Jewish religious healing that the word ketiva (“writing”) is often used as a generic term for treatment. Rather than employ divinatory texts, female diagnosticians “read” the signs inscribed on an assortment of objects, including oil, egg-yolk and seb, and also coffee sediments, melted tin, and cards. The typical treatment administered by women is based on the same metonymic rationale that guides the therapy of rabbi-healers, namely, bringing the healing substance into contact with the suffering body. The remedy, however, is not a sacred text copied from a mystical book, but rather a collection of natural objects which, like the oil and the egg employed by Esther, derive in part from the immediate environment of female healers. Because, in the routine of food preparation, most of these materials do not remain “raw,” but rather undergo processing and transformation, the pertinence of Ortner’s (1974, 1996) classic nature vs. culture opposition to the female mode of healing appears somewhat tenuous (see McClain 1989). On the other hand, there is no doubt that Esther’s curing methods are informed by women’s domestic ecology (Rosaldo 1974). The female voice is preeminent in a treatment in which candles are lighted in the kitchen, linens are wrapped over the ailing body like garments, egg and oil are used for divination and then transformed into a salve, lists of healing materials are read like recipes, and leftovers are kept in the freezer. Even the amulet Esther prepares for her patients



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is specifically “female.” Rather than the written text of a mystical formula it contains a herbal mixture; and the ritual activity of astutely writing the sacred words of the charm, reserved to men, is replaced by the mundane (turned sacred) female activity of sewing and stitching the green cloth that encases the mixture. While Esther and Alu, in the treatments they offer, comply with the general idiom of female therapy, the fact that they work under the aegis of venerated tsaddiqim places them in the domain of sacred healing. In this domain, they pose a challenge to male healers. In fact, Esther had a bitter confrontation with a famous rabbi-healer in Yeruḥam. She claims to have defeated him in various divinatory contests and to have won over many of his former patients. Differentiating herself from this rabbi-healer, Esther maintains that “I do not open a book, nor do I hold a pen in my hand … even today I can’t read much.” She does not deny her male rival’s competence in “writing” (ketiva), but castigates him on moral grounds for misusing this male-specific gift: “He uses ketiva for sorcery and for summoning demons.” Alu leveled similar accusations against a rival rabbi-healer in her hometown, Beit-She’an. Known all over Israel for the high quality (and high price) of the amulets he writes, this prestigious healer could not find a remedy for the pus and swelling in his gums which prevented him from using his dentures. He had to come to Alu for help. After consulting her patron-saint, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, Alu found out that the source of the problem lay with the rabbi-healer’s avarice. Using his magical book to conjure up the demons and compel them to help him in healing (Bilu 2000b; Westermarck 1926I: 359-360), the greedy rabbi continued to work after sunset, declining the demons’ wish not to be summoned at night. They retaliated. The cure Alu prepared for him—a mixture of honey, cumin and rue in a new white cloth, for soothing his swollen gums—proved effective as long as he was willing to discontinue his nightly exploitation of his demonic accomplices. But ultimately his failure to restrain himself, indicative of his moral frailty, stranded him without a cure. Like Esther, Alu accentuates her moral ascendancy over her male rival, whose weakness and imperfections were embodied in his incurable toothless, “castrated” mouth, an outcome of his avaricious excesses in the impure world of the demons. And like Esther, she too considers books the major difference in their working styles: “He works with un livre, a book... he speaks only from the book. If he has no book he cannot speak. Not like me. I work without a book, I have never studied anything, only from the

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saint is what I have.” In the cases of Alu and Esther, then, the shortcomings of the feminine mode of healing become a virtue when the saint enters the scene (Sered 1994:251). The link to him, immediate, intimate, and grounded in female-specific metaphors, compensates for the exclusion of women from the world of erudition and allows for effective flexibility in treatment (Boyer et al 1985; Kendall 1989; Singer and Marcia 1989; Zempleni 1977). The polysemic, transformative nature of religious symbols comes to the fore when female healers use their gendered experiences to associate the males’ book of healing with the impure world of demons, while at the same time imbuing honey, cumin, and rue, edible ingredients from the female domestic domain (see Bynum 1987; Sered 1992), with a spiritual (tsaddiqinformed) aura. The “wonders” that Rabbi Shimon began performing for Esther in the egg-yolk and the seb since 1987 indicate that, with the help of a male luminary, she could even expand the traditional boundaries of the role of the female healer to challenge male monopolization of curing via writing. After three years of practice during which the saint had conveyed his messages “in pictures,” Esther learned to identify in the diagnostic substances “all the letters of the Torah, from alef to tav .” Esther deciphers these letters, the gift of the saint, either by transforming them into numerical values or by looking at significant words of which they are the first or the last letters. In the first type of interpretation the values almost always stand for the number of tsaddiqim summoned by Esther to protect the client. Thus, the letter bet (the second letter, the numeric value of which is two) represents the celebrated pair, Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi David u-Moshe. The letter lamed (numeric value 30) indicates that a host of thirty saints watches over the client. In the second type the appearance of the letter ḥet is taken as a sign for longevity, since in Hebrew the word “life” (ḥayyim) begins with ḥet, while the letter pe predicts the disappearance of the client’s problem since it comes at the end of the word for “end” (sof, in Hebrew). The same interpretation is given also to tav, because this letter is the last in the alphabet. Following the miraculous apparition of the letters in the egg and the seb, Esther thus started to read these diagnostic materials in the most literal sense. However, this has been only a rudimentary reading, as the letters do not combine into words or phrases. The fact that Esther has made her first steps in reading only recently is reflected most palpably (and movingly) in her tendency to identify letters in the egg-yolk in a distorted, mirror-image form. Her writing ability is even more limited than her reading skills. But precisely because of this elementary level of literacy, Esther’s venture into



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the male world of writing is provocative and bold. The transition from pictorial to alphabetical code has implications that go beyond the enrichment of the semiotic system that informs her diagnostic work. Under the patronage of Rabbi Shimon, Esther has encroached on the male-exclusive territory of sacred texts and mystical words of power while still innocently remaining within the bounds set for female healers. In this vein, Esther accentuates the gap between herself and her male counterparts by insisting that “I don’t work with a pen, I don’t write anything. I don’t have to write. Just pass the egg-yolk (between the hands), and the answer is written by itself. This is my zekhut.” In the written instructions for her patients she openly equates her work with the writing of male healers: “The egg-yolk replaces the pen and the paper which a rabbi or a pious sage uses when he writes for you. The yolk is the medication of Rabbi Shimon BarYoḥai and Rabbi David u-Moshe, and also of the pious woman, Esther.” Her avid appetite for collecting letters from grateful patients and her insistence on circulating photocopied instructions and healing prescriptions (written down for her by family members, neighbors, and patients) constitute another kind of evidence of her attraction to the world of the written word. It might be argued that this predilection betrays a recognition of and acquiescence to the superior efficacy of male symbols. Still, her attempt to stake a claim in this male territory is intriguingly innovative. At the time of Esther’s first, failed, attempt at healing, the tsaddiq announced through her, in the plural form, during one of her possession episodes, that “we have taken our mother to books that no one has ever touched.” When I asked her to explain this ambiguous sentence, she claimed that the saint had shown her his books during her first stay at Meron. Yet this grandiose claim remained an empty one, since she never used this knowledge in her work. Now, after the appearance of letters in her substances, Esther no longer needed the lost books: “I can see an entire Torah in the egg yolk and all else I do. What God has created I can see. There is no end.”22 The files of letters that Esther has systematically collected from her patients, a unique phenomenon in the local scene of folk-healing, document how the “sacred alphabet” surfaced in the diagnostic materials. By and large, her collection of the letters reflects Esther’s intense desire to gain the reputation she deserves as a reincarnation of Rabbi Shimon’s mother, and as the possessor of unequaled healing powers granted her by her “son.” Designed to attract new clients, the letters offer direct proof of her success as a healer. Esther actively solicits such letters and usually participates in their composition. They contain valuable information worthy

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of investigation, including data on patients’ backgrounds and problems and her rhetorical style. Here, however, I will limit myself to two letters that preceded the “alphabetical turn,” and a selection of the reports that documents the appearance of the letters during 1986. The first letter was written by a young soldier who was one of Esther’s first patients when she resumed her activities in 1984. Among other things, it reflects the wide scope of life problems Esther treats. With the help of God Aug. 23, 1984 I am a soldier. I was of heavy speech [a stutterer]. I heard about Esther of Yeruḥam and went to her. She opened the egg and the oil and I saw astounding things there. Several times I saw two tsaddiqim. A figure of a person was portrayed and on his back two tsaddiqim. The interpretation is as follows: I am this person, and the saints are on my back. Esther told me that the saints were with me. But what amazes me is that although she was passing the egg from one hand to the other all the time, I could still see the figures of the two tsaddiqim. One week ago I had to stand trial in a military court. Based on the evidence against me, I was supposed to get four or five months in prison. My mother came to Esther and took some medicine for me, and I don’t know how the judge released me. I felt that the judges were lenient and the prosecutor was flexible. I would like to thank Esther for all she has done for me. I was under arrest for one and a half months, and the judge made do with that amount of time I spent in prison and released me. One must come to Esther with absolute faith, and also believe in the tsaddiqim Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and Rabbi David u-Moshe. Esther took out the seb which took the form of a missile. And Esther told me that this was a sign that the saints would help me to finish my military service in peace and tranquility. Thanks to Esther and the tsaddiqim Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and Rabbi David u-Moshe I am happy now, while in prison it was very bad.



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[Patient’s name, telephone number, and hometown are specified]

The writer needed the two saints’ full support, strongly stressed in this letter, to get released from a military prison. He perceived the court’s unexpected leniency as the outcome of Esther’s intervention. The problem presented in this letter was atypical but not unique. I found a few other letters in which grateful clients acknowledged Esther’s role in assisting them with cumbersome legal problems. Note that the stuttering which was the reason for the soldier’s visit to Esther is not discussed in the letter at all. This omission probably alludes to failure in treatment. Needless to say, the letters which are designed to glorify Esther’s therapeutic achievements are altogether mute regarding failures. The second letter, written more than a year after the first one, represents a typical client. Oct. 10, 1985 Today I visited the rabbanit [a honorific usually reserved for a rabbi’s wife] Esther. The rabbanit lit twenty-three oil lamps and I received her blessing. The rabbanit works mainly with the help of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and Rabbi David u-Moshe. The following things were told to me orally and without any magic: that I suffer from nerves and sleeplessness; and that I establish many ties with men but none of them serious, and this is true. I received blessings with linens from the tombs of the saints on my head. Then the lady took a bowl of water and put oil into it, above my head. She put down the bowl and together we saw circles in the oil. One circle indicated a wedding ring. Three circles represented three tsaddiqim. Also, the oil was floating in two layers, a sign for the help of two tsaddiqim. The oil generated a divided ellipse, a sign for a certain problem which I alone cannot overcome, sometimes going up and sometimes going down. Then the rabbanit opened an egg, and as she put the yolk in her hand, at once she felt its heaviness, a sign for the heaviness I feel in my body. Also, the egg white in the water

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with the oil became thick and almost boiling, a sign that I am not relaxed. A vague shape of a star came out in the yolk. It was covered with a thin veneer, as if my luck was covered and made obscure. A fine thread came out of the thin layer, a sign that the problem can be cured. The digit three was generated from the thread, a sign that God and two tsaddiqim will help me. In addition, dark stains were formed in the yolk, a sign that sorcery was made underground (against me). Indeed, this was true, with my own eyes I saw how “acquaintances” [in sarcasm] of mine poured bewitched water near my gate. A curly thread, like a spring, came out too, a sign that my luck was delayed. Then the digit zero came out, a sign that the problems were nullified and vanished.

This detailed letter highlights Esther’s skills as a diagnostician. The client, a woman in her twenties, came to find out why she could not find a husband, despite many short-lived romantic ties with men. Based on the perusal of the letters and my conversations with clients, this appears the most common problem addressed to Esther. Note that the first pieces of information are delivered to the patient before the diagnostic materials are put into operation. In the patient’s words, this information was conveyed “...orally and without any magic,” that is, as a direct message from the saint, sensed by Esther without the mediation of the divinatory tools. The diagnostic information oscillates between negatives, centering on the sorcery which has inhibited the client from getting married, and positives, the promised help of the saints. The sorcery account is “validated” by the client, who claims to have observed the evildoers in action. In fact, since sorcery is an automatic explanation for all romantic problems, most clients in this category would address folk-healers like Esther with strong preconceived suspicions regarding the identity of the perpetrator. While sorcery problems are not easy to overcome, the message of the letter is optimistic, particularly in terms of the positive signs that open and conclude the diagnostic array. The first diagnostic sign—a wedding ring—is positive, indicating the attainment of the goal for which the client is seeking Esther’s help; and so is the last one—the digit zero—carrying the promise that the problems will ultimately vanish. The alphabet’s appearance in the diagnostic media occurred gradually in



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1986. In addition to shapes in the egg yolk, Esther began to identify, here and there, a few letters. I here present a selection of these first literacy readings: I was at Esther Suissa’s and she opened oil and egg for me, in this way amazing things were revealed to me. A figure entirely enveloped in the train of a white wedding dress appeared, and a long rope opened into the letter ḥet, which symbolizes a good life.… The ḥet did not disappear until the final dissolution of the egg. [Dec. 12, 1986] From one egg it emerged that they bewitched me; the letter shin appeared on the egg, which is a name of God [Shaddai]… ḥet—a good life [ḥayyim] … yud appears so that I’ll have children [yeladim].… The letter tav appeared in the yolk, a sign of the tav of the Torah and perhaps also my name [Tamar] … the yolk held for thirty minutes. About twelve letters appeared for me. [June 1, 1986] He wrote a pe sofit on the yolk for us. Esther said that this symbolizes an end: the girl will recover. And that is really what happened. The girl is healthy thanks to Esther and all the saints and with God’s help and the help of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai. [Nov. 11, 1986] The letter vav, which means her problem hangs on the saints’ hook [the literal meaning of vav]; tav—he will help me from alef to tav [A to Z]; resh—rosh hodesh [the first day of the Hebrew month], a good sign. [undated]

In these first examples, identification of the letters is hesitant and they do not encompass the entire alphabet. The shift from images to letters is evident in the first excerpt, in a concrete transformative process, in which “a long rope opened into the letter ḥet, which symbolizes a good life.”23 The identification, in the last selection, of the letter vav as a physical vav—a hook—on which a problem hangs may derive from a convergence of word (the double letter vav that comprises the word vav) and form (the letter vav resembles a hook). The innovation in the transition was also evident in the infectious enthusiasm I observed in Esther during my observations whenever she identified a letter of the alphabet. She declared this happened

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by special grace of the saint, and was not routine. A letter dated June 1987 dictated by Esther and signed in a formal manner by “the two witnesses” (who used their full names and added their telephone numbers) states explicitly that the letters appeared only in the second egg, after “I [Esther] prayed a great deal that he [Rabbi Shimon] produce letters for her and I took it upon myself that she [one of the clients] observe the Sabbath. After that he [Rabbi Shimon] wrote all the letters for her.” A sense of novelty can be felt in the excited postscript: “I wish to note that never in five years have I seen such a thing.” An outside observer cannot but be impressed by Esther’s achievements as a healer, given the tribulations and ailments that confined her for so many years, and given her location in remote Yeruḥam. However, Esther sees her relative fame and good fortune as still a far cry from the stature and remuneration she believes she deserves, given her exalted pedigree, her calling, and her healing powers. She is painfully aware of the disparity between her considerable but still limited success as a healer and her keen ambition to join that select group of Israeli rabbi-healers who enjoy a perennial flow of patients from all over the country. Beyond the objective impediments of her personal history and her geographical remoteness, certain aspects of her work and personality seem to make Esther a controversial healer. First and foremost, her grandiose claim about the provenance of her soul, and the privileged access to the greatest luminary of Jewish mysticism and the healing powers that she claims as a result, make her suspect to many. In addition, her arrogance and frank impatience with clients who do not accord her the high respect and compensation she sees as her due may well detract from her popularity. Nevertheless, Esther has earned a reputation as a capable healer and a pious devotee of Rabbi Shimon. Esther’s career appears all the more impressive in light of her transformation from a life crippled by suffering and chronic sickness to one dedicated to alleviating the suffering and sickness of others. While such a life trajectory is common to the autobiographical narratives of many healers, women in particular, in many quite different cultures (Eliade 1964: Landy :Sered 1994; McClain 1989), Esther’s ascent from the abyss of incapacity and helplessness is particularly dramatic. Her life story depicts in detail the stages in the arduous ascent that could begin only after she established a close liaison with Rabbi Shimon. An intimate alliance with a patron-saint triggered drastic changes in the lives of all the Israeli saint impresarios I studied. But Esther seems to have gone further than any of them in exploring and exploiting the metaphoric potential contained in the cultural idiom of



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the tsaddiq. Given Esther’s blatant self-aggrandizement, it is not far-fetched to assume that the fulfillment of her own narcissistic needs underlies her motivation to heal. Indeed, the idea that she is the reincarnation of the soul of Rabbi Shimon’s mother is idiosyncratic and grandiose to the extent that it might be viewed, out of religious context, as a sheer delusion of grandeur. Esther demonstrates how blurred can be the line between bizarre manifestations of distress and culturally acceptable use of religious symbols. Yet, before imposing psychiatric criteria on her story, it should be noted that her grandiose ideas imbued her relationship with the saint with unparalleled affective intensity. This intensity has enabled her to persevere as an esteemed healer after long years of suffering and incapacitation. Esther’s ascent from suffering to healing was marked by three interrelated transitions. The first one involved the “domestication” and control of her maladies through the assistance of Rabbi Shimon. The apex of this process was the transformation of the uncontrolled episodes of demonic possession which had tormented her as a young wife and mother into willfully sought, inspiring trance states in which she was possessed by a venerated saint. The second transition, centering on the nature of her relationship with the saint, involved a move from embodied fusion with Rabbi Shimon to a more differentiated and mediated affinity to him. The corporeal fusion with the saint, manifested in possession episodes in which he inhabited Esther’s body, was gradually replaced by more differentiated modes of attachment. First, Esther heard the saint’s voice speaking to her. Then she began to sense it in her mind, the presence of the saint thus assuming a less tangible and concrete form. While these modes of communication have not totally disappeared, the introduction of the diagnostic materials as the channel through which the saint conveys to her his messages has made the interaction with him more distant and mediated. The third transition was one of the practice of healing. It involved a shift from female domesticity to male sagacity and spirituality. I have noted that most of Esther’s diagnostic substances are natural and organic, and her healing recipes are concocted from foodstuffs like oil, eggs, arak, honey, and a variety of herbs, all from the domain of the kitchen. All of these substances have no inherent religious significance. Their religious dimension was added, still within the traditional bounds of the female role, by Esther’s attribution of her divinatory activities to the tsaddiqim. But the essence of the third transition has been a move from deciphering images to reading letters of the alphabet. This indicates a small but not insignificant

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move beyond female curing traditions. It enables Esther to penetrate the exclusively male domain of sacred scripture (“the letters of the Torah”), at least in a rudimentary form, without engaging in ketiva, the gist of male folkhealing as practiced by rabbi-healers.

Esther and Rabbi Shimon: A Return Visit When I interviewed Esther and observed her healing work in the 1980s, it was difficult to offer a conjecture as to how her sortie into male religious arenas would play out. I could not predict whether the letters in the egg yolk would eventually combine into words and sentences (as Esther’s ability to read improved), and whether she would dare encroach on other territories of male religiosity, appropriating activities and rituals from which women have been traditionally excluded. The latter possibility, more blatant and therefore more dangerous, seemed to be presaged by an obscure episode in which Esther prayed for the recovery of a seriously ill patient, after wrapping herself in a tallit (prayer shawl)—a religious garment reserved for men. Her account of this antinomian act reiterated the explanation she gave for the no less unorthodox act of remaining in the holy precinct at Mt. Meron during her menstrual period: “The saint granted me his permission.” In retrospect, the answer to the question of whether she would encroach on male prerogatives seems to be no: the letters have not become words and sentences. Esther has not escalated her challenge to the male monopoly over the written word. She is inordinately proud of the rudimentary reading and writing proficiency she attained at an advanced age, and she continues to participate conscientiously in the adult education program where she learned these skills. Her reading ability has improved to the point where she can penetrate the world of literacy: she can read at length from the prayer book, the book of Psalms (reciting Psalms is a traditionally female form of devotion) and the Song of Songs. But in her capacity as a healer she only identifies letters in her egg yolk (including, on occasion, a letter or two in the Latin alphabet). I also discovered on my return visit that Esther had turned her donning of the tallit into a regular part of her treatment of sterility. I do not have an answer to the question of whether, in arrogating to herself a male prerogative (which is not explicitly forbidden to women) when she blesses childless women, she seeks to state symbolically that she is assuming the male role in a process intended to end in pregnancy. It should be recalled that Alu also customarily wraps herself in a tallit after ritual immersion, during her nighttime encounters with Rabbi Aouriwar. I surmise that Esther



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and Alu, as older and “clean” women (who no longer menstruate), seek to express their proximity to the world of holiness via this ritual act generally reserved for men. I know of no other attempts by Esther, beyond this ritual gesture, to invade male religious territory. After some twenty years of professional activity, Esther’s alliance with Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai has given her a recognized place on the map of Israeli folk medicine, but she nevertheless remains on its margins. Clients, mostly women, from all over the country continue to seek her aid, but their numbers have declined. Esther attributes this decline to her own health problems, in particular the difficulty she has walking because of the deterioration of the cartilage in her knees. This, she says, has curbed her previous passion for advertising herself via testimonial letters and in other ways. She claims that she has drastically limited the number of clients she accepts and allows only a few to visit her home each week. Esther is proud of her six children, five of whom are married. Three live in Yeruḥam, and she has numerous of grandchildren (she refuses to say exactly how many out of fear of the evil eye). My return visits place Esther, like Alu, in the middle, between Avraham and Ya’ish. Their modest successes as healers are far from achieving for them the same level of popularity enjoyed by the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, but unlike the Gate of Paradise, their healing sites are still active. Healing via the powers of a saint, uncharacteristic of the men portrayed here, grants them a greater measure of flexibility than that possessed by the men, who must maintain a holy site with all the complex activity that requires. People in distress turn to Esther and Alu because of their proficiency in healing, not because of the holy sites they have established to their patron saints. It can hardly be doubted that were Esther to make public her belief that Rabbi Shimon resides in her house, and urge his faithful to come visit him there rather than at Meron, she would risk condemnation and denunciation. The saint’s presence is evident only as part of the assistance he gives her in her healing work. He is not a constant presence that seeks to eclipse the ancient and well-established tradition at Meron. In the final analysis, the successes of Esther, Alu, Rachel and their fellow women healers are modest. But after many years it looks as if they have managed to stake out their own territories, “rooms of their own”—healing rooms belonging to their saints—in a healing domain controlled by men, thanks to the protective and empowering covenant they have established with their patron saints.

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NOTES Mother-daughter succession in religious healing is dominant in femaledominated religions (Boddy 1989, Lambeck 1993, Sered 1994). 2 According to Ben-Ami (1984: 265), the Arama family provided Skoura with no less than five tsaddiqim, of whom Rabbi Masoud was the most famous. All of them were buried in the local cemetery. Rabbi Sha’oul Ha-Kohen is probably related to Rabbi Moshe Ha-Kohen, also mentioned by Ben-Ami (1984: 487) as a local tsaddiq. The tsaddiqim of Ait (family) Wazana are buried in Ait Budial, north of Skoura (Bilu 2000b: 39). 3 In Morocco, “selling” the child to the saint was constituted as a ritual of a conditional vow called ar (Westermarck 1926I: 188, 518ff). 4 Demons (jnun) played a central role in Moroccan culture for both Muslims (Crapanzano 1973, 1975; 1981; Westermarck 1926I) and Jews (see Ben-Ami 1969; Bilu 1979b). Aslai (a Berber term), called in Hebrew “Evil Spirit Illness,” was the Moroccan Jewish variant of demonic possession illness (Bilu 1980). 5 The Jews in Morocco believed that each human being is accompanied throughout life by a demonic double, who resides underground. Demonic attack was universally taken as a retaliation, a response to an injurious act committed by a human. Since demons are often invisible, a human might inadvertently inflict harm upon them. Such incidents are more liable to occur in places associated with water and dirt, where demons are said to reside (Bilu, 1979b). 6 The near-universal female predisposition for spirit possession has been accounted for in terms of women’s social deprivation (Lewis 1986, 1989) which makes the possession episode a means for gaining material, emotional, and social rewards that are otherwise unobtainable. This explanation, particularly when applied to positive, ceremonial possession, has been criticized from divergent theoretical perspectives (e.g. Boddy 1989; Kapferer 1991; Lambek 1993). From a feminist viewpoint, women’s predilection for possession may be related to their greater ability to loosen their ego-boundaries and share their body with another being, and also to the possession idiom as a gendered, embodied metaphor rooted in women’s physical experiences of heterosexual intercourse and pregnancy (Bilu 1985; Sered 1994: 190). Note that the onset of Esther’s possession coincided with her first pregnancy. 7 On the centrality of motherhood in female religious experiences see Sered 1994: Ch. 3. 8 See Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 33b. It is in this cave, which a Jewish 1



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folk-tradition identifies as being in the village of Peqyyin, that Rabbi Shimon is believed to have written the Zohar. A symbolic parallel may be drawn between Rabbi Shimon’s years in the cave and Esther’s dark years of depression. Both are liminal periods full of suffering which lead to revelation and exalted spirituality. 9 The link between suffering and healing is a recurrent theme in the life trajectories of female healers in many cultural settings (Koss-Chioino 1992, Sered 1994). 10 On illness and recovery as major post signs on the road to becoming a traditional healer, see Eliade 1964; Kendall 1999; Walsh 1994; Zempleni 1977. 11 As the first and most successful among the “new shrines,” the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe became a source of inspiration for saint impresarios other than Esther. Ya’ish’s only son, born after three daughters, was conceived after Ya’ish visited the shrine in Safed. He was given one of the saint’s names, David. The opening paragraph of Ya’ish’s public declaration of his initiation dreams, which also bore the title “Announcement to the Public,” is identical to that of Avraham’s first leaflet. 12 The blessing of the saints in pilgrimages is believed to be facilitated through contagious magic (Frazer 1951) or metonymic association with the tsaddiqim. Thus, water, oil, and scarves left on the tomb of the tsaddiq are said to absorb his blessing (Tambiah 1970). 13 Esther refers here to the halaka, the ritual haircut of three-year-old boys conducted by many mystically-oriented Jews at Meron (Bilu 2003). 14 For a summary of studies discussing the social-informal nature of healing rituals conducted by women, see Sered 1994: 117. 15 By spitting at the seb, the patient “transfers” her problem to the mineral. The metonymic notion of “illness transference” is prevalent in Morocco (Bilu 1978: 169; Westermarck 1926I: 605-607). 16 Note the absence of threads from the tombs of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and his son, Rabbi Elazar. (Rabbi David u-Moshe could not be represented here since his burial site in Morocco is out of reach for Esther.) One simple explanation is the limited accessibility of the tombs in Meron, encircled as they are by a latticework which makes their “measurement” difficult to achieve. It is also possible that Esther seeks to diversify the sources from which she derives her healing powers. All four figures are among the 26 saints to whom glasses are lighted at the outset of the therapeutic session. The tombs of Rachel and Yonatan Ben-Uziel enjoy enormous popularity as shrines visited by supplicants seeking a spouse, and by the childless. 17 Etiologically both a sink and a pool imply a demonic attack, since demons

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are believed to reside in water (see Bilu 2000b: 66). 18 This sign is pertinent in tkaf, a particular class of s’ḥur (sorcery)-based problems, including inability to marry, barrenness, and impotence (Bilu 1978: 156-7). The key is the remedy because often these problems are believed to be caused by magical “binding” and “locking.” 19 Demons are reputedly attracted to blood and meat (Bilu 1979b; Westermarck 1926I: 104, 277). In Maghrebi ethnopsychiatry, demonic attack is a prevalent etiology of mental disorders (Bilu 1978: 110-155; Crapanzano 1973). 20 The creative vagueness and the flexible context-dependency of the diagnostic system makes Esther, from a skeptic’s point of view, an excellent “cold reader” (see Hyman 1977). The term applies to diagnosticians who are able to impress their clients with conclusions exclusively derived from the latter’s appearance, conduct and responses during the session, irrespective of the output of the diagnostic materials and techniques. 21 Books of healing which rabbi-healers use are printed or hand-written texts based on Jewish mystical folk-traditions (kabbala ma’asit, see Matras 1997). 22 It is difficult to know whether Esther’s para-mystical language is a cliché or rather a reflection of kabalistic associations that refer, for example, to the creation of the universe from the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Esther here again presents her twelve-year period of self-healing under the guidance of Rabbi Shimon as an initiation period, parallel to the first twelve years that Rabbi Shimon and his son spent in the cave. The Hebrew word for cave, me’ara, is similar to the Moroccan Arabic word which means cemetery. It may also be that Esther’s initiation, like the dream initiations of Avraham and Ya’ish, is based on the transformative experience of a symbolic death and rebirth. Furthermore, it may well be that her vague claim that the tsaddiq showed her his books refers to the Zohar, which according to popular tradition he wrote in his cave. 23 The move between forms and letters may be bidirectional. The Hebrew words for “wedding” and “rope,” which are at the center of the diagnosis, both begin with the letter ḥet.



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The Cult of Saints from a Comparative Perspective: Symbol, Narrative, Gender, and Identity

Crosscutting Stories: The Saints’ Impresarios from a Comparative Perspective Our protagonists journeyed to their patron saints on individual paths, with a route laid out by his or her life circumstances and experiences. But despite these differences, all four stories share a common structure. The common form is most salient in Alu’s case, but the other stories follow much the same pattern. I will analyze the narratives from the perspective of psychological anthropology, a discipline that seeks to integrate collective and individual levels of analysis. My purpose will be to show how, at a specific historical moment, within an “external space” of possibilities and constraints defined by political forces and social transformations, these impresarios creatively used components of their “internal spaces”—physical, mental, and internalized cultural factors—to give their lives purpose and meaning within the boundaries of the “potential space” (Winnicott 1971) between them and their tsaddiqim. I identify the deep imprints of this set of vectors in the four life stories that they told me. All the impresarios, men and women, based their stories, at different levels of clarity, on a “natural” tripartite division between childhood, adulthood, and midlife. What made this ostensibly trivial division consequential was the rich set of associations and meanings attached to these stages. Psychological wishes, cultural assumptions, religious concepts, moral orientations, sociopolitical events, and geographical arenas all overlay these stages, reproducing and deepening the threefold division. I present here each of the three stages along with the set of meanings attached to it. Childhood in Morocco: In the Company of Tsaddiqim The transitions between childhood, adulthood, and middle age are precipitated by physical changes that, in part, have their roots in the rise

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and decline of sexuality (Van Gennep 1960). Human sexuality progresses in similar ways through the life cycles of men and women, but in the case of women transitions between its stages are more sharply bounded by the appearance and then disappearance of menstruation. In men, transitions are more gradual. As a result of this difference, the attribution of moral innocence and purity to the absence or repression of sexuality is more evident in the case of women (Christian 1972; Hastrup 1978; Hoch-Smith & Spring 1978). The connection between purity and the absence of sexuality is especially notable in images of childhood, where the concept of “the holy purity of the very young” is widespread regarding both sexes in many cultures (Trexler 1974: 225). The innocence and purity of pre-sexual childhood stands in the foreground of Alu’s story. Her tsaddiq, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, revealed himself to her in the guise of a dove when she was only eight years old. This early revelation occurred after her mother died and her father abandoned her, when Alu went to work as a servant for a heartless family. Alu’s moral superiority over adult (and sexually mature) women was made explicit when she took the place of a menstruating woman on the bus to the tsaddiq’s hillula, and lay in the background of her conflict with her mistress. Alu’s stubborn refusal to identify the dove with the tsaddiq is appropriate to the naïve innocence of a small girl, another manifestation of the purity of childhood. In Alu’s story, images of pure status are reinforced by the act of cleaning, which creates situational purity (changing underclothes before visiting the tsaddiq’s grave; laundering the family’s clothing before leaving the holy grave compound). These expressions of innocence and purity that reappear frequently in her narrative, both as qualities and as states, buttress the image of childhood as a fitting stage during which to approach the sacred. The male saints’ impresarios who appear in this book also look back in appreciation on their childhoods, but in their stories the religious-spiritual dimension takes the place of the moral dimension of innocence and purity. They stress their observance of their religion’s precepts and the spirituality that characterized Jewish life in the communities where they were born. In particular, they recall the religious education (offered to boys only) they received in their synagogues, under the strict eye of the local rabbi. Both Avraham and Ya’ish fondly and nostalgically portray their years of study in the synagogue—the only period in their lives in which they received a systematic education—even though the rabbi did not spare them the rod. Ya’ish’s story in particular abounds in wistful depictions of Oulad Mansour’s



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Jewish community, in which lush natural surroundings and physical health, together with spiritual intensity and a strict regime of sacred studies, produced an ideal childhood world. The saints’ impresarios’ life stories do more than depict childhood as a conducive cultural platform for approaching the holy. Their accounts of childhood also contain the psychological seeds of the future relationship with the tsaddiq. Again, Alu provides the clearest link between the cultural and psychological dimensions. The fact that she is the only one of the four to have met her patron saint in childhood derives, most likely, from the harsh trauma she experienced at the age of eight. We can easily presume that the early appearance of the tsaddiq, a protective and supporting parental figure, was for her compensation for the many losses she suffered as a girl. None of the other impresarios had such a harsh childhood. But even in their nostalgic accounts of the past one can find serious childhood scars. There is great variation in the severity and timing of the losses and suffering behind these scars, but all of them evidence, in my opinion, some of the residues that prepared the ground for the later appearance of their tsaddiqim. Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim depicted the death of his beloved grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, when Avraham was thirteen, as the lowest point (and end) of his boyhood. The death of a grandfather may at first glance seem to be a “normal,” unremarkable ordeal of life, quite unlike the series of traumatic losses Alu suffered. But in Avraham’s case, several other factors intensified his distress. First, he grew up in his grandfather’s house and was extremely close to the old patriarch, who was revered as a tsaddiq by the Jews in the village. Second, the circumstances of his grandfather’s death were especially painful—he died a long way from his home and family, in the coastal city of Essaouira, where he was buried. The family myth attributed that city’s Jews’ “theft” of the tsaddiq to their desire to benefit from his blessings after his death. Third, the grandfather died just before Avraham’s bar mitzvah, an important moment in his life, after which he abandoned his studies in the synagogue. With this act, he turned his back on the life path of scholarship and spirituality that his grandfather had trod, and became instead an itinerant cobbler like his father. Ya’ish’s happy childhood in Oulad Mansour was cut short suddenly by his emigration to Israel. The move, and the absorption difficulties that followed, were painful events that impelled him to abandon the studies he had been so good at as a child. He described the move into the Beit She’an transit camp as an upheaval that erased his previous identity. After dropping

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out of the local high school, he was left to his own devices for an entire year, until he began to work for a living in the fields of the neighboring kibbutzim. To this day he laments his desertion of a life of learning and spirituality. Like Avraham and Ya’ish, Esther also painted her childhood in Skoura in southern Morocco in ideal colors, but the deaths of nine of her eleven siblings in early childhood cast a pall over her life. As the only daughter to survive, she was her parents’ favorite. They indulged her, but were also anxious about her safety and thus very protective. (One way they sheltered her was by “selling” her in infancy to Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and other saints.) She describes the move to Casablanca at the age of eleven and her separation from her parents after her marriage at the age of sixteen as difficult experiences, the traumatic climax of which was the possession illness that struck her after her marriage and which was the beginning of long years of physical and mental suffering. All four impresarios were introduced to tsaddiqim from earliest childhood, and their memories of that period are full of visits to the graves of saints in their immediate surroundings. Both Avraham and Ya’ish highlighted their personal ties to tsaddiqim in their own families, especially to a revered grandfather—their mothers’ fathers—whom they knew in life and loved intensely. I have suggested that these ties may have been important motivating factors in the two men’s future initiatives, because of their sense of their illustrious ancestry. But no less than this, perhaps, they perceived a need to prove themselves worthy of this family merit (given their relative distance from the families’ holiness, which lay on their mothers’ side). The women barely mentioned ties to family tsaddiqim (although Alu mentioned her pious grandfathers), but they made up for this with the intimate relationship they established with other tsaddiqim. In Alu’s case, a visit to Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s grave leads to the tsaddiq’s revelation to her—the climactic event of her childhood, if not her entire life. Esther, from birth, found herself surrounded by an entourage of tsaddiqim, headed by Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai. They had been summoned by her parents to protect her and save her from the bitter fate suffered by most of her siblings. The close company of tsaddiqim, living and dead, and members of their families or outsiders, in the childhoods of our saints’ impresarios imbued the tsaddiq with personal and subjective added value and with high cognitive salience in their lives. I examine below the ways in which these childhood tsaddiqim were interwoven into the multi-layered image of the patron saint as a personal symbol in the impresarios’ adult lives.



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Young Adulthood: The Silent Years The transition from childhood to young adulthood is marked by physiological changes linked in part to the appearance of sexuality. In the case of women, many traditional cultures imbue these transformations with moral meanings that portray adult sexuality with ambivalence. These putatively negative aspects of female sexuality are tied to various manifestations of “uncleanliness,” such as the appearance of the menses, the loss of virginity, and the birth of children. Both classic Jewish sources (Eilberg-Schwarz & Doniger 1995) and popular culture in Morocco (Dwyer 1978: 61-86) associate these with negative stereotypical traits. Women are thus said to be foolish, sexually impetuous, fickle, and unreliable. Alu paid a heavy price for her sexual maturation when her employer dismissed her out of fear that her husband would be unable to suppress his primal urges in the face of the charms of a young woman. By the age of sixteen, Alu was already married, and shortly thereafter she bore her eldest son. Once she became a mature and fertile woman, she entirely lost her connection to the tsaddiq who appeared to her in her childhood.1 In addition to the lack of cleanliness imposed on her by her monthly period, during these years she also lost her simple faith and ceased to be punctilious in her observance of religious precepts. This ostensibly justified the cultural assumption about the moral inferiority of adult women. Esther was plagued by illness during her young adulthood, including serious attacks of demonic possession that appeared a short time after her marriage, during her first pregnancy. Even without the sexual implications of possession syndromes in different cultures,2 the explicit demonic presence imbues it with clearly negative values, since an entity from the impure world has penetrated and taken over a human body. For the male impresarios, the principal negative aspect of the transition from childhood to young adulthood was the abandonment of religious studies and their replacement by a secular life centered on work and family. Immigration to Israel—an external geopolitical event that became part of the impresarios’ life cycles—accelerated their disassociation from the spirituality-infused lives of their childhood. Immigration tore the younger impresarios, like Ya’ish, from their books, and swept all of them, old and young, into an wearying economic reality in which they had to make their livings as low-paid laborers. When Avraham and Ya’ish established their holy sites, and for many years thereafter, they were at the bottom of Israel’s occupational ladder—Avraham as a forestry worker, Ya’ish as foreman of a municipal street cleaning crew. Alu worked in a textile factory until her

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retirement. In addition to the struggle to feed and clothe their families, immigration quickened the secularization process that had already begun in Jewish communities in Morocco. If the impresarios idealize their childhoods in some measure, it is because of the sharp contrast between their expectation of a full Jewish life in the Holy Land and the secular reality they encountered in Israel. Although our protagonists differed greatly in the extent of their secularization, none of them escaped it entirely. Even Avraham, who remained religiously observant his entire life, had to grapple with his older children’s rebellion against the Torah’s commandments. Ya’ish and Alu offer explicit descriptions of their gradual drift away from religion—the climax in both cases being desecration of the Sabbath. An active adult life centered on family can serve as a shield against the scars of the past and the frustrations of the present. This was clearly the case for Alu, whose own family compensated her for the loss of the family she had been born into. The fact that her children bear the names of her parents and siblings underscores the compensatory significance of her new domesticity. For Avraham and Ya’ish, adulthood was also a time of activity during which they channeled their energies into commonplace pursuits, in particular making a livelihood for their growing families. In Esther’s case, in contrast, the family cell she established was unable to protect her from mental distress and ongoing functional crises. Her life of chronic illness offered her less of the material satisfactions of family life than the constraints and costs that such life imposes. In any case, all four families, whatever their differences of function and adjustment, were characterized during this time of life by narrow spiritual horizons and a focus on material goals. In summary, the impresarios’ young adulthood were characterized by sexual fertility, active lives, and the investment of resources in raising and maintaining their children. Their families offered, for most of them (less so for Esther), concrete returns, and made up for the laxity of religious observance they slid into following immigration. The cumulative effect of these factors worked in general to reduce the impresarios’ connections with the world of tsaddiqim, although there is considerable variance among them on this score. Alu’s young adulthood is the most extreme of the four cases, since the tsaddiq who privileged her with a revelation during her childhood—an experience that none of the other impresarios enjoyed—vanished from her life entirely. Avraham’s and Ya’ish’s contacts with tsaddiqim declined in this period as well. Their patron saints were still far from their lives’ horizons, while the graves of their childhood tsaddiqim remained distant and inaccessible after their move to Israel. Their family tsaddiqim did not



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vanish from their minds, but in Israel they appeared less and less often in their dreams. Recall that Avraham’s grandfather, the tsaddiq Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, appeared in his dream a short while after Avraham’s arrival in Israel, and handed him over to the care of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai. This replacement of a family saint from Morocco with a local patron saint points to the difficulty of retaining old loyalties in a new country. While this and other dream encounters are evidence that Avraham’s ties to tsaddiqim had not disappeared, they, and his visits to saints’ tombs in the Galilee in connection with his work, could not constitute full compensation for the childhood saints he had lost. In any case, these events pale in comparison with the visitation dreams that flooded his nights in the years after the revelation of Rabbi David u-Moshe. Esther is, to a certain extent, an exceptional case. Unlike the three other impresarios, who received their revelations only at midlife, after their fertile periods and childrearing was behind them, she was privileged to be given hers by Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai at the end of her twenties, and then gave birth to her sixth and last child some two years later. Apparently, her long and difficult suffering, which severely impinged on her ability to function as a wife and mother, was the reason her revelation came earlier. But this deviation in timing was moderated significantly by the fact that Esther did not publicly announce her relationship with the tsaddiq or begin to heal in his name until she was in her forties, like the other saints’ impresarios. Recall also that, because of her younger age, she, a self-styled incarnation of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai’s mother, was compelled to cope with manifestations of uncleanliness of the type that are characteristic of young women and mothers—such as her monthly period and her lack of control over her baby’s bodily functions—during her visits to Meron. Midlife: A Return to Spirituality Avraham, Ya’ish, and Alu were in their forties, after the birth of their youngest child in each case, when they had their revelations. Esther, who was younger when she first heard the voice of Rabbi Shimon at Meron, went public with her relationship to the tsaddiq and became a healer in his name only at midlife, after a dozen years of silence in which she recovered from her own illnesses. The resumption of a relationship with a tsaddiq in late adulthood also seems connected to changes in fertility and sexuality. The cessation of menstruation allows middle-aged women in many traditional cultures to cast off the impurity that had been attributed to them, and to make their way into ritual roles, especially in the area of religious healing

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(Boyer, Hoch-Smith & Spring 1977; Gutmann 1977; DeVos & Boyer 1985). Alu, who became a healer under the inspiration of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, belongs to this group of women. She explicitly linked the cessation of her period to the tsaddiq’s second appearance. But the importance of the presence or absence of menstruation as markers of ritual purity or impurity in women’s path to holiness can also be learned from the negative cases I have presented. We can see Esther’s presence at the hillula at Meron during her period—by her own account—as an exceptional event, testifying to the special privilege granted to her by her mystical intimacy with Rabbi Shimon. Moreover, her pride at her special status conceals the fact that even she was prevented from approaching the tsaddiq’s grave during her period. Rachel from Beit She’an turned into a healer, channeling the powers of Elijah the Prophet and other tsaddiqim, even though her period continued to appear regularly. But the fact that her womb had closed after the birth of her fifth child—before she became a healer—makes it possible to see her as a kind of “ritual denial” of the importance of this marker of impurity in the second half of her life. The lack of a distinguishing physiological marker like the menstrual period makes the midlife stage less distinct for the two men of the group. But their stories contain clear intimations of the connection between the saint’s appearance and changes in sexuality and the siring of children. First, both Avraham and Ya’ish experienced their first revelations at the end of their fertile and childrearing periods. True, Avraham’s tenth and last child was born a few months after Rabbi David u-Moshe’s first appearance to him, but this simply casts the connection into sharper focus. Conception occurred a few months before the revelation, and the resulting child was named Moshe, after the saint. Rabbi David u-Moshe thus became a kind of spiritual child who joined the family after its natural increase had come to an end, during the final pregnancy that produced the son named after the tsaddiq. The connection between the tsaddiq’s appearance and the cessation of childbearing (and perhaps also the inception of sexual quiescence) was indicated by the fact that the room dedicated to the tsaddiq had been the couple’s bedroom, and from this point on they slept in separate rooms. For all four figures, the tsaddiq’s appearance and the establishment of the holy site seem to have marked their transition from their fertile periods into a stage of spiritual seeking, more appropriate for late middle age.3 The tsaddiq’s manifestation and his intimate presence in the home increased the impresarios’ religious commitment, both the women’s and the men’s. In the cases of Avraham and Esther, the process of commitment



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was less pronounced than in the case of Ya’ish and Alu. Avraham, perhaps the most stable of the impresarios in his religious lifestyle, served as an officer of his neighborhood synagogue for years before his epiphany. This synagogue was the scene of a dispute over a festive meal to be held for Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera—ending in Avraham’s decision to hold the celebration in his home, and pay for it himself. The relocation from the synagogue to a private residence could be seen as a dress rehearsal for the establishment of the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe. The world of the synagogue also played a prominent role in Ya’ish’s life prior to his revelation, but he was compelled to avoid the synagogue because of his fear of the public. His revelation about the Gate of Paradise allowed him to express his religious devotion without inhibitions and anxiety. The intervention of tsaddiqim, which compelled him to return to strict observance, may be seen as a counterweight to the compulsive character of his mental distress, which had distanced him from the world of prayer before his revelation. Alu also shed secular clothing and behaviors and resumed a religious lifestyle when Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar took up residence in her home. To these religious and moral aspects should be added a modest improvement that the impresarios enjoyed in their standard of living over the years, which also made these later years better suited to the appearance of the tsaddiq. The family’s income in all four cases was quite low, deriving as it did from manual labor at the bottom of the vocational scale. But the seniority they gained in their work places, and especially the end of their family’s growth and the exit of some of the older children from the home, allowed them to divert some of the energy previously devoted to making a living to spiritual matters. In the cases of Avraham and Alu, the oldest of the impresarios, this process of increasing mental availability and spiritual horizons was catalyzed by their retirement. To this cultural-religious construction of late middle age as a spiritual stage of life, and to the improved economic position that made it easier to seek out spirituality, I add the psychological dimension—adult life crises that produced the motivation for revelation. With a bit of interpretive effort, I can point to the associative links between the scars of childhood and the plights the impresarios faced in their adult lives. In Alu’s case, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s second coming was catalyzed by severe dizzy spells that impinged on her day-to-day activities, and by her children leaving home. It is not impossible that her empty nest reawakened her childhood trauma of abandonment. Her distress may have led her to evoke a cultural defense mechanism in the form of the same tsaddiq who had helped her

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cope with her childhood loss. In the case of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, the catalyst for the appearance of Rabbi David u-Moshe was the tragic death of a brother to whom he was especially close. The fact that Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, the brothers’ grandfather, appeared to Avraham in a dream before the accident in which his brother was killed, may indicate that, in his internal life, Avraham linked the deaths of these two beloved figures. He sank into depression from which he emerged only with the inspiring appearance of Rabbi David u-Moshe in one of his dreams. Ya’ish’s revelation dreams were activated by the psychological stress brought on by the anxiety attacks that kept him from taking part in services at his local synagogue. Again, there seems to be a thread connecting this current problem with a crisis from his childhood—his abandonment of religious studies in the wake of his family’s move to Israel. Both cases involve avoidant behavior, and both distanced him from his synagogue.4 By discovering the Gate of Paradise and founding a synagogue on the site, Ya’ish established an unstressed domestic environment in which he could pray tranquilly. Here we see a direct and immediate connection between the relief of distress and the reinforcement of a religious orientation in midlife. In the case of Esther, whose life was paved with illness and suffering, the attacks of demonic possession that she suffered right after her marriage lead directly to the disorders that embittered her life and made her dysfunctional until Rabbi Shimon revealed himself to her at Meron. All these new sites were founded in the 1970s and 1980s, twenty to thirty years after the great wave of migration from Morocco to Israel. This adds an important dimension to the significance of the timing of the revelations in the impresarios’ life cycles. Historical vicissitudes—collective political, cultural, social, and geographical changes—were interwoven in all these cases with individual transformations in the form of physical and psychocultural changes. The lives of all four protagonists proceeded along similar paths in time and space. All immigrated to Israel in their young adulthood or (in the case of Ya’ish) pre-adolescent years, over the course of the eight years between 1954 and 1962. All were sent by the Israeli absorption authorities to one of the development towns that had been founded hastily on Israel’s periphery to absorb the masses of immigrants who arrived in those years.5 As veteran inhabitants of these new towns, they were compelled to cope with the economic and social difficulties that had plagued such marginal communities since their establishment. These problems caused a high rate of population turnover, which itself exacerbated the tribulations. Nevertheless, none of the impresarios left their Israeli hometowns during



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the difficult years after their immigration. Like many others who stayed put, whether by their own choice or out of lack of any other, they gradually developed a sense of “localism” that grew gradually as they put down roots in the local landscape and community. In their life stories, they portray their initial years in transit camps and housing projects as pioneering periods, agonizing but heroic, which strengthened their ties to their places of residence. Their feelings about their places became more profound as their family roots intertwined with those of their communities. The extended families of Avraham and Ya’ish—which included their parents and most of their siblings and their families—remained united after immigration, and created, from their early years in Israel, three generations of continuity in their new communities in Safed’s Canaan and Beit She’an’s Dalet housing projects. Alu’s parents died in Morocco, and Esther’s parents lived far away in Shlomi, but they also created, in their hometowns, over the years, a multigenerational family that included children and grandchildren. The precipitating factor in the saints’ revelations in all four cases—as it also was in the case of Rachel, Ya’ish’s “successor” in Beit She’an—was a decision by the future impresario to leave his or her home for a larger one, in most cases in Israel’s urbanized central region. This decision would seem, ostensibly, to stand in conflict with the protagonists’ strong ties to their homes and communities. Apparently, it reflects a complex emotional reality of ambivalent feelings about their places of residence. Even our four protagonists, veteran inhabitants of their towns with deep family roots there, considered, in a moment of weakness, moving to more attractive and less out-of-the-way locations. In the end, however, a tsaddiq stymied their plans, and their fundamentally positive attachment to their homes was purged of all ambivalence and became a lasting bond. The circumstances surrounding the decline of the Gate of Paradise after nearly two decades of activity were an obverse of this process. The site’s fate was sealed irrevocably when Ya’ish carried out his decision to move to Yavneh, after more than forty-five years in Beit She’an’s Dalet housing project. Recall that, at the end of the summer of 1979, only a single weekend separated the Oḥana family from their new home in Yavneh. But then, on Friday night, Ya’ish received a revelation from Elijah, which led him to discover the wondrous gate in his back yard and to cancel the move that had been planned for the coming Sunday. It should be noted that the complex web of family that surrounded Ya’ish at the time of his revelation and in the period that followed frayed as the years passed—his parents passed away, he feuded with his brothers, and all his daughters moved to the center of the country. His children’s abandonment

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of Beit She’an contrasted with the centripetal force that made the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe a magnet for the entire Ben-Ḥayyim family, drawing most of the children to live close to their parents. The regularity with which a tsaddiq’s appearance frustrated the impresarios’ plans to leave their homes requires some examination. First, it might simply be a narrative genre characteristic of Moroccan stories about communication with tsaddiqim.6 An examination reveals that this specific motif was fairly rare in Jewish saints’ legends in Morocco, but the idea that the graves of tsaddiqim symbolized a connection to territory was quite common.7 In large areas of southern Morocco that the Jews abandoned even before their move to Israel, the graves of tsaddiqim remained Jewish property and people made pilgrimages to them on hillula days. This fact may have sharpened collective sensitivity to the symbolic meanings of distance from the tsaddiqim (Goldberg 1983; Levy 1994). The explanation I offer for this motif in Israel is not detached from its Moroccan origins. Leaving home and remaining at home while bringing a stranger to live there look like contrary processes. This structural contrast may have reappeared in these stories because it was an appropriate idiom for expressing and perhaps mitigating those painful experiences that are part of Moroccan Jewry’s collective experience in Israel. It is a kind of symbolic reparation for abandoning the saints of their past when they left their homes in Morocco and entered their new homes in Israel. Avraham’s guilt feelings about having “left” and “abandoned” Rabbi David u-Moshe, hinted at in his first Announcement to the Public (“why have all those who departed from Morocco left me and abandoned me?”), resemble Alu’s about how Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar vanished from her life (“His name never crossed my lips. I forgot about him”). These feelings may well have resonated with many Moroccan Jews in Israel, who had been cut off from their tsaddiqim as a result of their move. Beyond expressing these feelings, the establishment of the new sites was, in a sense, a corrective experience, a way of atoning for their sin of abandonment. Since the impresarios did not, in the end, leave their homes, despite their difficulties, they merited having the tsaddiqim move in with them and become part of their families.8 This symbolic compensation could, perhaps, have allayed the ambivalence the impresarios, and the believers who gathered around them, felt regarding the marginal, ramshackle towns in which they lived. The tsaddiq’s appearance gave their old homes an aura of sanctity and converted them into desirable locations that could not be abandoned. This dramatic reversal may reflect the positive change in the value of the development towns for some of their



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inhabitants, or at least an attempt to create such a change through the traditional symbol of the tsaddiq. According to this view, the revelations can be read as bearing a message of amazing audacity: that the Canaan housing project is not a drab, run-of-the-mill housing project on the edge of the holy city of Safed, the mother lode of kabbalah. If Rabbi David u-Moshe, one of Moroccan Jewry’s most important tsaddiqim, chose it as his dwelling, Canaan too is a holy precinct. And Beit She’an is not a hardscrabble, out-of-the-way town if the Gate to Paradise is located there. As we noted in the latter case, this symbolic transformation, modeled like a modern version of a saints’ legend or—as in the case of Alu’s Cinderella story—an innocent fairy tale, brings no guarantee of success. More important, even successful sites do not, via a single dream, cure their towns’ economic and social ills. Some observers might even see the holy sites as a false façade that simply papers over the towns’ serious problems. Nevertheless, and without disparaging the real hardships of those who live in such places, it would not be out of line to argue, in my opinion, that the appearance of tsaddiqim in Israel’s urban periphery reflects the strengthening of a local sensibility among many veteran residents. Such people, like the protagonists of this book, at first felt themselves to be the passive victims of arbitrary population dispersal policies. But over the years they developed, despite their difficulties and disappointments and perhaps even because of them, strong ties to their homes, their communities, and their local landscapes. Undoubtedly, the midlives of the impresarios, the time at which they publicly declared the revelations they had experienced, coincided with significant changes in the communal life of Moroccan Jews in Israel, two to three decades after their arrival. The establishment of these new shrines, which on the individual level I have interpreted as a solution to a personal life crisis, became on the public level a symbol of communal awakening and ethnic pride that expressed integration into the Israeli experience no less than it did ethnic distinction. In this sense, the tsaddiqim’s immigration to Israel in the wake of their believers—as in the cases of Rabbi David u-Moshe and Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar—close a circle that began with the migration of Morocco’s Jews to Israel. This was a deep fault line in the lives of many of them, in particular of this book’s protagonists. The common geo-historical experiences of immigration to Israel and the social, economic, cultural and political problems that it produced were, to some extent, repaired by the metahistorical immigration of Moroccan tsaddiqim (or the discovery of local tsaddiqim, as in the cases of Ya’ish and Esther) that took place a quarter of

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a century later in their new country’s sacred geography. As I noted in my introduction, different meanings can be assigned to the appearance of holy sites in Israel’s urban periphery, specifically to the naturalization of famous Moroccan tsaddiqim in the local landscape. I return to these meanings at the end of this chapter.

Personal Symbols and Mythic Narratives In a conceptual framework derived from a single developmental theory of life cycles, it is difficult to document completely the significant factors involved in the tripartite structure that forms the foundation of the saints’ impresarios’ life stories. For example, factors relating to the metamorphosis of sexuality and the distinct cultural meanings ascribed to successive life stages are appropriate for the “normative crisis” model to be found, among other places, in the theories of Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson (Erikson 1950; Levinson 1978). Other factors, such as the channeling of boys (but not girls) into religious studies in Morocco, or the impresarios’ investment of the greater part of their resources into supporting their families in their young adulthood, better fit conceptualizations that emphasize the estimated normative timing of events assessed against the expected “sociological clock,” as in the theories of Bernice Neugarten or David Gutmann (Gutmann 1975; Neugarten 1964). Beyond these factors and others like them, the impresarios’ life cycles display another aspect that could be called situational or contextual. This relates to sociopolitical changes and major historical events that have influenced the life paths of my protagonists and others of their generation. The migration from Morocco to Israel was such an event. It utterly changed the lives of the impresarios and their contemporaries, sharpening the tripartite division underlying their narratives. The contrast in their life stories between the innocence and studiousness of childhood and the secularity that resulted from the need to support a family was sharpened by immigration. The move abruptly cut Moroccan Jewry off from the now inaccessible landscapes of childhood, at the same time painting those landscapes in nostalgic and ideal colors. The transition to spirituality at midlife was intended, in part, to repair the damage caused, directly or indirectly, by immigration.9 Does my tripartite scheme, integrating physical, mental, cultural, social, and historical explanatory factors, exhaust all the meanings inherent in the mission assumed by the saints’ impresarios, and the life transformation it involved? Caution is called for; a deterministic formulation can turn these elements into causal links that lead inevitably to an alliance with a tsaddiq.



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Such a statement would detract from the impresarios’ active coping skills and creative imaginations, which allowed them to enlarge their window of opportunities and carry out their grand initiatives beyond the constraints and possibilities I have enumerated.10 The impresarios’ creative powers, expressed in the narrative construction of their encounters with the tsaddiqim, is what distinguishes them from other believers.11 Recall that the factors at the basis of the tripartite division of their life stories, including their close ties to their childhood tsaddiqim and the existence of saints in their families, are characteristic of not a few Jews from southern Morocco. Furthermore, none of the impresarios seems to me to possess exceptional personal charm, or to be a person capable of whipping up crowds by an imposing appearance and rousing rhetoric. Yet each of them knew, out of his or her experiences and difficulties, how to mold the cultural symbol of a tsaddiq, and to turn him into a manifestly personal symbol integrated into an inspiring, transcendent life narrative. In the opening chapter, I proposed the personal symbol and life story as central explanatory concepts in my psychological-anthropological analysis of the renewal of saints’ cults. I used these concepts in individual discussions of each of the four protagonists, but it would be best to restate them explicitly in each of the cases. I reiterate that the nature of the tsaddiqim as personal symbols is summed up in their being both mental and collective, personal and public, internal and external representations. This twofold nature allows the impresarios to strum collective chords as they use the tsaddiq to grant meaning to their personal experiences. Before discussing each protagonist in turn in this context, I should state that the fact that the tsaddiqim reside in their homes as members of their families is the most concrete evidence of the saints as personal symbols in their lives. The Tsaddiq as a Personal Symbol Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim chose Rabbi David u-Moshe through a long process of trial and error that took place largely in the world of his dreams. When I discussed Avraham’s path to his tsaddiq, I noted the logic behind choosing a popular tsaddiq missed by many of his devotees, yet who also lacked any historical identification, and therefore had no descendants with a claim on him. In the present context I should add that the fewer special identifying characteristics the saint has, the easier it is for a believer to shape him according to his needs and wishes—that is, to turn him into a personal symbol. Avraham’s version of Rabbi David u-Moshe is indeed a multifaceted figure, modeled to a great extent after Avraham’s family saints, specifically

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after his revered grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Timsut. In discussing the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, I noted that in founding the site, Avraham unconsciously compensated himself for the vacuum left by his grandfather’s death and burial in the distant city of Essaouira thirty years previously. The tsaddiq’s revelation and the establishment of his shrine were perfect acts of repair for the original loss. In place of the family saint who was “stolen” and buried faraway, a previously unknown figure was brought home to become a member of the family. The impressive portrait of Rabbi Shlomo Timsut that had for years hung in a position of honor on the central wall in the Ben-Ḥayyim apartment, next to Rabbi David u-Moshe’s room, reinforces the feeling that Rabbi Shlomo’s image has merged into the multi-layered image of the patron saint, along with other tsaddiqim who appeared in Avraham’s dreams and whose hillulot he celebrates. The frequency with which, in his dreams, Avraham competes with other believers for the tsaddiq’s favors, seems to be an echo of the sibling rivalry of his childhood. Furthermore, it points to another aspect of his use of the tsaddiq as a personal symbol. He utilizes the tsaddiq to display that he has inherited his family’s special merit (zekhut avot), which comes from his family’s secondary side (his mother’s). If this interpretation is correct, it reinforces the tacit presence of Rabbi Shlomo Timsut and other saints in the multifold image of Rabbi David u-Moshe. The physical presence of Rabbi Shlomo Timsut and Rabbi David u-Moshe was also woven into the family fabric through two of Avraham’s sons, Shlomo and Moshe, who bear their names. This parallel reinforces the image of the tsaddiq as a son, whose appearance seals the family cycle of fertility and opens a new stage of spiritual life. Perceiving the tsaddiq as a child, on top of the obvious image of the tsaddiq as an omnipotent father, creates intimacy from two directions, doubling the significance of the tsaddiq as a personal symbol. The force of the intimate tie to the tsaddiq derives from its concrete anchor in the impresarios’ daily lives. It centers in the room in which the tsaddiq lives as a member of the family, and in the member of the family who bears the tsaddiq’s name and thus declares the latter’s presence in the home. The personal symbol at the foundation of Ya’ish’s initiative is not just his tsaddiq, Elijah. First and foremost, it is epitomized in the sacred space of Paradise. The close association between Paradise and Elijah in Jewish sources presumably led to the prophet’s role as the site’s patron saint. Paradise, or the Garden of Eden, is a central symbol in Jewish tradition, and the location of the entryway to Paradise in Beit She’an is based on a wellknown tradition. But Ya’ish imbues this key symbol with a manifestly personal



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cast. Given his idealized memories of the Moroccan village of his boyhood, I have suggested that one of his project’s purposes was to recreate that lost Eden of his childhood. Corroboration comes from Ya’ish’s evocation of the Garden of Eden in his depictions of both his happy life in Oulad Mansour and the ecology of spiritual life in the tranquil garden in his adult home’s back yard. Another association comes from one of Ya’ish’s memories from his teenage years. Bantering with his brothers over the Sabbath evening meal in his parents’ house, he declared that he would be the gatekeeper in the next world and decide whether or not his brothers could gain entry into Paradise. It is hard to determine the extent to which this jest testifies to a sense of destiny that Ya’ish may have already had at the time, but it is consistent with his role as Eden’s gatekeeper, both in his dreams and in waking life, and with the shrine in his backyard. Ya’ish himself saw the religious school for wayward boys that he founded there as an attempt to repair his own harsh experience of adolescent disconnection from his boyhood world of religious learning and spirituality. The chain of associations could be stretched further to suggest that he perceived his move away from Beit She’an, which demolished his life’s dream, as expulsion from Eden. Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s role as a personal symbol in Alu’s life hardly needs elaboration. That for her the tsaddiq is a strong and benevolent father figure is obvious, given the catastrophe of her girlhood when the protective world of her family collapsed with her mother’s death and her father’s abandonment of her. As a girl, she was privileged to see the tsaddiq, and as a result received honor and gifts, and the vision compensated her for the many losses she had so recently sustained. The fact that her mother appeared to her immediately subsequent to the tsaddiq’s manifestation to her as a dove on his hillula day underlines his role as a father figure. Rabbi Avraham’s later appearance took a different form because Alu was then a mature woman rather than a young girl. The innocent, detached gaze of girlhood, which Alu herself did not comprehend (“I only saw a dove”), was replaced by personal verbal encounters, sometimes including a physical component such as touching and spitting/kissing. The exclusive intimacy of Alu’s nocturnal relations with the tsaddiq—from which her jealous husband is completely excluded—further substantiates the conjecture that in her fantasy life, the tsaddiq has become her spouse, the prince to her Cinderella. Yet Alu also views the tsaddiq as a son. After losing her son Avi in an automobile accident—a son who bore the tsaddiq’s name, even if he had not been named after him—Alu “adopted” a grandson, Aviad, who had been named after the tsaddiq, even though he did not bear the tsaddiq’s

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exact name. The grandson became a surrogate for her own son. This triangle of images—the tsaddiq as father, son, and husband— appears most explicitly in Esther’s story. Her intimate relationship with Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai began a short time after her birth, when she was “sold” to the tsaddiq. He was to protect her from the fate of her siblings, who died in childhood. In her earliest memories, the tsaddiq is a concrete presence in her life, and even in her body—songs about Rabbi Shimon were like honey in her throat, and she “can’t part from the voice of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, from his name.” Her huge dependence on the tsaddiq after his revelation indeed positioned her as a helpless infant in relation to him. In Esther’s case, even more than with the other impresarios, the tsaddiq’s image was one of a benevolent and omnipotent father who slowly, over a dozen years, drew her out of her illness. Yet, at the same time, given her grandiose claim that she was a reincarnation of Rabbi Shimon’s mother, he assumed the strongest of ties to her—that of her son. This process of establishing her personal relationship with the tsaddiq culminated with the completion of the triangle, when the tsaddiq took on the role of her spouse. As in Alu’s case, Esther’s relations with Rabbi Shimon were based on close and exclusive verbal contact that, for her daughters, evoked associations of the tsaddiq as a husband. The prominence of this intimate image in Esther’s fantasy life can be seen in the fact that she gave her youngest son the name of Rabbi Shimon’s son, Elazar, and in the tsaddiq’s role in the choice of that name. It may well be that the brief interval in which the tsaddiq spoke through Esther’s mouth derived from the same reservoir of meanings, since this involved a male figure’s penetration of a woman’s body. In Esther’s story, we see sudden shifts between the three images of the tsaddiq, whereas in Alu’s case the image changed in line with the timing of the revelation in her life story—from a protective father in her girlhood to an intimate spouse in late middle age. Does this difference between the two women intimate a disparity in their ability to integrate their fantasy lives into their social reality? I will return to this question after discussing the tsaddiq’s status as a member of the family. I prefaced my discussion of the tsaddiq as a personal symbol with a claim that the fact that the tsaddiq resided in the family home is the most concrete evidence of his immediate presence in the lives of the impresarios, and of the personal subjective meaning it radiates. This meaning can be examined in greater detail if we look at the tsaddiq’s position in the family’s intergenerational structure, relative to parents and grandparents on the one hand and to children and grandchildren on the other. When I discussed the



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Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe and the Gate of Paradise, I noted the relatively marginal position of Avraham’s and Ya’ish’s fathers in their initiatives. Even though they lived close by and were on good terms with their sons, they were not participants in the charismatic process of revelation. Masoud Oḥana stated explicitly that, unlike his son, who received his inspiration in a dream, he turned down the dream request he received from tsaddiqim who asked him to found a synagogue in his home. Yitzḥak Ben-Ḥayyim could be seen at Rabbi David u-Moshe’s hillula among the peddlers hawking their wares to the celebrants. The women impresarios had no connection with their fathers when they had their adult revelations. Alu had lost her father at a young age, while Esther’s parents lived far away in northern Israel. In the cases of Avraham and Ya’ish, the absence of their fathers is all the more palpable given the central role their maternal grandfathers played as sources of spiritual inspiration (and as a tacit component of the tsaddiq as a personal symbol). From the believers’ point of view, this contrast derives directly from the fact that the family’s sacred lineage, its zekhut avot, stemmed in both cases from the mothers’ side. Both mothers’ fathers were renowned tsaddiqim. A skeptic would argue that intergenerational distance blurs the grandfathers’ images and made it possible to lionize them, while intimacy with fathers exposes flaws that counteracts idealization and adulation. When people seek figures to revere, human nature “prefers remote and malleable past to a recent one, perhaps too painful or too well known (Lowenthal 1975: 31). But this explanation of the intergenerational gap will remain incomplete, in my opinion, if we do not again take into account the effect of sociopolitical developments on family and personal processes. Given the transformations experienced by traditional Jewish society in Morocco during the first half of the twentieth century, grandfathers were depicted in their grandsons’ stories as mythical figures, the last representatives of small, united, and stable communities in rural southern Morocco. The traditional past, idealized by the lenses of Avraham’s and Ya’ish’s memories, died with their grandfathers. Their fathers, in contrast, were dragged, to their disadvantage, through the crises and upheavals of a society in the throes of transition, first in Morocco, then in Israel. These changes, at the climax of which the fathers became poor immigrants, impinged on their ability to cope with life and thus ground down their standing. Turn from parent to children. I have noted that the tsaddiq’s taking up residence in the family home, which marks the end of the fertile stage of the impresarios’ lives, is made immanent and personified in the family fabric

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by one of the family’s sons. This continuity was explicit with Avraham and Esther. Avraham’s youngest son, born a few months after the revelation by Rabbi David u-Moshe, was named Moshe, while Esther’s youngest son, born two years after her revelation, was named Elazar, like the son of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai. Ya’ish’s youngest son was David, named after Rabbi David u-Moshe, who was one of the tsaddiqim who appeared in his dreams, before he established his alliance with Elijah. Alu insisted that she had not named her son Avi after a patron saint, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar,12 but the grandson she raised in her home as a son was named Aviad, a modern version of the name Avraham. The fact that other saints’ impresarios also had grandsons named after “their” tsaddiqim also points to the possibility that the memory of the revelation would continue to live in the family for generations to come—even if this family myth is no guarantee of the continued existence of the holy site as a “lieu de memoire” (Nora 1989). When I discussed the significance of personal symbols, I noted that there is disagreement over the question of the extent to which the use of familiar cultural resources to express personal distress and conflicts actually releases the user from suffering and mental problems. Does “the work of culture” sublimate the experience of distress so that instead of crystallizing into symptoms, it turns into behaviors the meaning of which is recognized and even valued? Or should it only be seen as a special form of defense mechanism, a thin cultural veneer that covers a problematic mental state, mildly modifying the intensity of the distress, but not fundamentally changing its meanings? Both sides of the debate believe in the power of culture to reshape the expression of mental distress. But while the former claims that this reshaping entirely neutralizes its problematic character by changing symptom into symbol, the latter suspects that this cultural molding only gives the symptom another, more acceptable appearance. I will discuss this argument in light of a comparative examination of the four saints’ impresarios, within their cultural context. Evaluating the behavior and experiences of the impresarios outside this context—for example, by sweeping use of the psychiatric terminology of delusions and hallucinations to describe the impresarios’ direct encounters with the tsaddiqim and hearing their voices while awake—utterly denies the fact that these experiences are part of a broad cultural meaning system, and that they resonate with many other believers. Without going into the criteria for distinguishing mystical visions from psychotic episodes (Greenberg & Witztum 2001; Prince 1992), it behooves observers to refrain from translating the very experience of revelation into psychiatric language,



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and in general from exclusively conceptualizing religious experiences in medical or psychological terms. Once this language is set aside, we cannot but marvel at the way the impresarios worked to make their visions a reality. Nevertheless, it is best to avoid generalizations that indiscriminately grant mental immunity to given patterns of behavior simply because they are based on familiar cultural idioms. The connection between mental suffering and culture, as seen through the prism of personal symbols, can be examined in light of two complementary questions. First, do the impresarios’ stories include traumatic experiences that engendered psychological difficulties? Second, how do they use the cultural resources at their disposal relative to the conventions and expectations that prevail in the community of believers? The answer to the first question is affirmative, of course, but should be qualified. Even if explicit depictions of psychological wounds and distress appear in their life stories, labeling them as fundamental or accessory reasons for the revelations is an interpretive act, by the researcher and by the narrators. The presumption in either case is that the tsaddiq’s appearance is a means of coping with such injury and pain. Beyond this, the impresarios display obvious differences in the force of these events and in their manner of coping. Furthermore, they differ in the nature of the use they made of the cultural idiom of the tsaddiq as a personal symbol. I will compare these differences by juxtaposing Alu and Esther, then Avraham and Ya’ish. Objectively, Alu’s childhood experiences were the harshest of the four. In an instant, she lost her mother and father, was cut off from her brothers and sisters, and ended up as a servant for a hostile family. But her method of coping with these crises—even without reference to the revelation she experienced in childhood—indicates that she had considerable psychological resilience. Even after her employer sent her packing, Alu did not collapse. She found domestic work with a wealthy family, and later married and started a family. Alu also withstood the difficulties of immigration to Israel, devotedly raised her children, and helped support the family by working hard outside her home, first as a farm laborer, later at the local textile factory. I have construed her childhood revelation, coming a few months after her great losses, as deriving from a desperate need for protection and support. But beyond interpretation, the story of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s manifestation in Oulad Bousiri suited the experiences of a small girl, and his incarnation as a dove fit the cultural vocabulary of how a tsaddiq might appear to his devotees at a hillula. If the revelation indeed reflected Alu’s longing for compensation for her losses, the narrative construction of the

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wish well matches the lexicon of cultural symbols of the Moroccan cult of saints. To put it another way, her needs underwent a significant process of objectification—an accommodation to shared cultural idioms (Kleinman 1988; Obeyesekere 1990). This objectification is somewhat diminished by the incident of Alu’s late mother’s appearance to her when she returned from the grave, but even this unusual event is not culturally impossible, given the turmoil of the senses characteristic of a hillula celebration. Furthermore, it was a one-time episode experienced by an eight-year-old girl just a few months after her mother died. It would therefore be hasty to dismiss it as a severe psychological pathology without due consideration of the cultural context in which it took place, and of the manner of its narrative construction. In the final analysis, throughout her life Alu actively coped with her problems and demonstrated adequate reality testing. Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s second revelation to Alu took place in the context of a physical ailment—frequent and disabling dizzy spells—and was apparently catalyzed when her children moved out of her home. At first, the tsaddiq revealed himself in a dream, afterwards while she was awake, “like a shadow,” when Alu began to hear his voice. Recall that Alu claimed that the tsaddiq’s speech, which she heard only at night, was not translated into specific instructions until she went to sleep afterwards. This again moves the experience outside the bounds of clinical judgment, even if we examine it apart from the cultural context of saints’ cults. The climactic experience of the second revelation—the visit by the tsaddiq and his assistant in her apartment—was an extended face-toface encounter, rich in verbal exchange, in what was ostensibly a state of full wakefulness. In keeping with my decision not to analyze the core meaning of the revelations experienced by the saints’ impresarios from a skeptical perspective, I prefer to leave this incident without comment. This may seem odd given the plethora of exegesis that I have offered on the impresarios’ life stories. Yet in cases such as this, it is better, in my view, to act with restraint than to translate the event into psychiatric or psychological language lacking in context. This is true even if, formally, the event can be viewed as a hallucination, and even if the translation involves strained rationalization of a type that, for example, attributes the event to a special state of consciousness deriving from a biochemical imbalance connected to a physical ailment (such as Alu’s dizzy spells). Nevertheless, even if the exceptional events in the stories of Alu and the other impresarios leave skeptics and believers with unbridgeable gaps, we should avoid the indiscriminate inference that might be drawn from them by radical



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cultural relativists, who may claim that we have no basis for appraising the impresarios’ adaptive power or their reality judgment. Even if we set off a handful of Alu’s experiences in research parentheses—by accepting for the purposes of study their status as “supernatural” or “mystical”—we are still left with considerable information about her day-to-day functioning and her ways of coping with difficulties and crises. Likewise, we can evaluate the extent to which her uses of the tsaddiq as a personal patron, and the experiences she reports of her encounters with him, fit the lexicon of cultural symbols of saints’ cults and are accepted by the community of believers. Alu coped tenaciously and bravely with the horrible traumas of her childhood and displayed no evident symptoms of mental distress in her adult life. In contrast, Esther suffered for many years from a series of illnesses and symptoms of a manifestly psychological nature, which severely impinged on her ability to function as a wife and mother. Even though Esther’s childhood wounds would seem, objectively, to be less severe than Alu’s, her suffering was harsher and more overt. Her symptoms appear to be those of a chronic mental disorder (which I identify, in retrospect, as severe depression). Given this pathology—which Esther was the first to acknowledge—her gradual recovery during her thirties, and the transformation she underwent from patient to healer, are all the more impressive. Esther’s life story exemplifies how the cultural tool kit, whose central instrument is the tsaddiq, can be used to extricate oneself from a persistent state of misery and dysfunction. This biographical (or narrative) model, which ascribes healing powers to a person who cured herself successfully, is typical of the initiation of traditional healers, shamans, and modern therapists. Nevertheless, we can hardly ignore the fact that Esther uses the personal symbol of the tsaddiq in a unique and controversial way. Not only has she taken as her own Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, the greatest tsaddiq in popular mystical tradition; not only has she placed this tsaddiq, whose tomb at Meron in the Galilee attracts myriads of believers, in her home in southern Israel; but she has even declared herself as a reincarnation of Rabbi Shimon’s mother. This concept shades into something idiosyncratic that may look odd even in the cultural context of Moroccan Jewish saints’ cults. When I discussed Esther’s alliance with Rabbi Shimon, I posed the question of whether her boldness did not grow out of a defense mechanism of overcompensation for the guilt feelings and low self-esteem produced by her years of functional disability. The sense that her feeling of superiority was defensive is reinforced by the sharp contrasts in her presentation of her relationship to the tsaddiq, ranging from dependent, helpless childishness

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to uncritical self-aggrandizement. Without going into the question of whether Esther chose to be a healer and glorified herself because of unresolved narcissistic needs, it would seem that her unique way of using her tsaddiq as a personal symbol contains more residues of past crises than does Alu’s. Like Alu, Esther accommodates her personal longings into the accepted cultural idioms of the saints’ cults. But in doing so she “bends” the symbol of the tsaddiq to her own needs, while granting it a subjective meaning growing out of her internal world, which is much more extreme and difficult to assimilate. Like Alu, and in contrast with Esther, Avraham shaped his connection to his patron saint in an objective way that better fit cultural conventions than did Ya’ish, the discoverer of the Gate of Paradise. First, the problems that seem to have produced their visions were different in each case. I pointed to two significant losses in Avraham’s life story: the death of his revered grandfather, who was buried in a distant city when Avraham was thirteen years old; and the death of his brother in a traffic accident a few months before Rabbi David u-Moshe’s revelation. I presented the first loss as a cornerstone in the construction of the motivational foundation for the revelation, and the second loss as the immediate catalyst. According to those close to him, Avraham sank into deep depression, far beyond the bounds of standard mourning, after his brother’s death. This severe crisis reflected real distress of clinical proportions. But it should be noted that it was a short-lived reaction to a specific loss and that it vanished after the tsaddiq’s appearance. I presented the process by which Avraham established his covenant with Rabbi David u-Moshe as a rational and pragmatic search that in the end led him to the best figure for carrying out his vision—a popular, well-known tsaddiq missed by many of his devotees, yet without heirs with a claim to his name. Recall that, during his search, Avraham was not tempted to choose alternatives that might have been more emotionally and subjectively satisfying, such as his beloved but relatively unknown grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Timsut, or the divine mystic Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai (Esther’s choice). Instead, he focused on a tsaddiq whom he himself barely knew. As with Alu, this process can be seen as “objectification,” deferring short-term emotional satisfaction by putting off personal yearnings—for example, the choice of a family saint—and diverting them to an accepted channel in the cult of saints and to the optimal choice in that framework. This process of objectification testifies to Avraham’s ability to analyze his circumstances, make judgments, and adapt.



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The central crisis in Ya’ish’s young life was his move to Israel, which cut him off from the harmonious life of spirituality and study he had enjoyed in Morocco. But beyond that, he suffered as an adult, because of his introverted, shy nature, from an acute fear of public spaces—a fear that prior to his revelation approached the dimensions of a social phobia. The establishment of the Gate of Paradise healed the trauma of immigration by returning Ya’ish to a path of spirituality. In addition, it enabled him to again fulfill his religious and social obligations in the safe and familiar environment of his home, even if it did not change his character in any fundamental way. In this he differed from Avraham, whose depression was a passing episode that occurred in response to an external event, and disappeared once the tsaddiq intervened. Ya’ish, in contrast, remained introverted and withdrawn even after his revelation, even if the new ecology he constructed around himself allowed him to overcome his fears and engage in social encounters, prayer services, and Torah readings. His difficulties and lack of confidence in running the Gate of Paradise, which grew in part out of his timidity, led to the shrine’s ultimate failure and disappearance The cultural materials Ya’ish used to design the holy site in his backyard were also more problematic than those Avraham used. Ya’ish’s choice of a personal symbol, like all such choices, was based on a public tradition and a common lexicon of symbols, and as such it resonated with the local community. But the site’s failure to break into public consciousness and gain a name for itself beyond Beit She’an was apparently caused by the immense audacity of the claim it made. This arrogance deterred some believers, especially those in positions of religious authority. Neither was identifying Elijah the Prophet as the site’s patron saint easy for many to take, notwithstanding its internal logic given that Elijah was in legend closely associated with Eden. The problem was that there was already an established tradition that celebrated Elijah’s hillula at a cave bearing his name on the west side of Mt. Carmel, far from Beit She’an. The discovery of the wondrous opening to Paradise in his backyard was, for Ya’ish, a direct and effective response to his loss of his childhood Eden. But, apparently, in his creative attempt to heal his childhood trauma, his personal longings imposed themselves with too great a force on the common cultural idioms from which his personal symbol grew and consolidated. They shaped it in a subjective format that prevented the new initiative from being accepted smoothly and broadly. To reiterate: the two key symbols that Ya’ish chose, the Garden of Eden and the prophet Elijah, were not problematic because they were the product of a personal fantasy. On the contrary, the difficulty lay with their transcendent

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status in Jewish cosmology. It could have been expected that locating them in the backyard of a modest home in Beit She’an’s Dalet housing project, in fulfillment of a private fantasy, would be controversial. To sum up, in the delicate balance between personal longings and cultural conventions that characterize the personal symbol, Avraham and Alu displayed their talent for objectifying symbols—that is, adjusting their personal needs and wishes to commonly-held traditions. Ya’ish and Esther, in contrast, shaped their patron saints and holy sites with greater attention to their individual needs, thus imbuing them with a more subjective hue. Avraham and Alu made bold use of the cultural resources available to them, but the results were less controversial, and were even logical outgrowths of these resources. They chose to move tsaddiqim from Morocco to Israel, thus filling a vacuum created when Morocco’s Jews left the country of their birth. In this they performed an important service for believers who had been cut off from their saints. Ya’ish and Esther, for their part, brought into their homes exemplary local figures, long associated with well-known, popular, and accessible sites, thus challenging established traditions. All four impresarios were audacious, but Ya’ish and Esther’s initiatives were grandiose and, in Esther’s case, included explicit and unmitigated selfaggrandizement. To return to the plights that lay at the basis for the revelations, recall that the life crises of Avraham and Alu involved responses, limited in time, to difficult losses; in the cases of Ya’ish and Esther, the crises expressed themselves in crippling symptoms that lasted for many years. Ya’ish and Esther were able, in the end, to shake free of their chronic maladies in ways that we can marvel at given the great distance the two of them, Esther in particular, crossed from an initial state of suffering and disability. Nevertheless, they obviously differ from Avraham and Alu in the level of their neutralization and sublimation of their initial distress. Ya’ish admitted that his anguish in social situations did not vanish after the revelation he received. The tsaddiq’s appearance in his life simply enabled him to avoid most of the threatening sources of tension outside his home. Esther struggled for years to emerge from her profound depression. She began her healing work by entering into trance-states of possession, in which Rabbi Shimon spoke through her mouth. Such states look like the “domestication” of the attacks of demonic possession she suffered from in her girlhood. The taming of this disturbance, turning it into a positive form of possession, demonstrates the healing power she acquired in her encounters with Rabbi Shimon. But the common background of disassociation at the basis of both



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states testifies that, at the beginning of her professional path, Esther was unable to rid herself entirely of the problems of her past. These displays of possession looked so strange and frightening to her family and clients that she was compelled to abandon them. It took six more years for her to develop a relationship to the tsaddiq that was more mediated and objective. The sharp swings between unbounded self-aggrandizement and complete dependence and helplessness also showed how difficult it was for her to shake free entirely from her past suffering. The differences between the refinement and objectification of personal symbols adopted by this book’s protagonists cannot blur the fact that all four of them underwent passionate experiences of holiness that utterly changed their lives and gave them an added spiritual dimension. Their unshakeable belief in their destinies and the sense of identity and self-confidence that they acquired from their encounters with their patron saints enabled them to overcome the problems and symptoms that had previously plagued them, and to carry out visions of establishing shrines to the saints who were their allies. Furthermore, the fact that, by definition, personal symbols paint cultural traditions and idioms in the subjective colors of personal needs and desires, blurs the distinction between objectification and subjectification of key cultural symbols. This is especially the case in situations of social crisis, when the familiar system of cultural meanings loses force and its hold on the community. In such cases, a unique and exceptional personal symbol, shaped in a creative and innovative way within the subjective experiences of an individual, can sweep after it many believers and become a force for social change (Littlewood 1984). Cultural symbols contribute to shaping the internal worlds of members of a society, but at the same time they can also change under the influence of that same personal world. Finally, a caveat: all the distinctions and categorizations I have proposed are based on the reports of the impresarios themselves, as they examined their own lives and related their fervent personal experiences. I have no way of verifying them, but neither is it easy for the impresarios to recall them, and it is even harder to interpret and understand them. The experiences have no doubt undergone massive narrative processing and construction, making it difficult to use them to measure levels of adjustment to reality and to cultural traditions (which themselves are dynamic) in any objective way. One example suffices to illustrate this. Avraham’s inspiration comes from his dreams. Dreams are experienced uniquely by their dreamers, but the phenomenon is familiar to all of us, and we have no reason to doubt that Avraham indeed had dreams of the sort he recounted to me. But in recent

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years he has begun to claim that his relationship with Rabbi David u-Moshe has grown so close that he has begun to encounter him on a daily basis while fully awake. How are we to take this claim, which in a vulgar translation, devoid of context, into psychiatric terms would be referred to as a mental aberration? Any essentialist explanation, whether clinical or religious, can be countered with the argument that all we have here is the rhetoric of selfpresentation, reflecting Avraham’s growing self-confidence in the face of his vision’s success. As with Alu, I prefer to leave such claims unexamined, and to view them as a mystical halo that surrounds a person who brings a tsaddiq into his home and thus makes sanctity an integral part of his life. The true test of mental stability for Avraham and the other impresarios is his ability to make cogent judgments about reality, to function and to adapt to day-to-day life. In all these, in my view, Avraham gets high marks. Encounters with Tsaddiqim as Mytho-Poetic Narratives In the experiential world of his believers, the tsaddiq always sets in motion a narrative process of some sort. For all this book’s protagonists, the tsaddiq’s power as a personal symbol was amplified by his key role in the narrative construction of central experiences in their lives, whether through visitation dreams or other special experiences. The impresarios’ encounters with their tsaddiqim, in dreams or in waking states, are impressive evidence of the mytho-poetic function—the creative human ability to weave quasimythical narratives in imaginary symbolic spaces, generally accomplished in extraordinary states of consciousness.13 For the men, the mytho-poetic quality was principally evident in their visitation dreams, whose narratives were motivated by the tsaddiq.14 The mythic-narrative construction of Avraham’s revelation dreams is evident in the sublimity that pervades the two Announcements to the Public that he disseminated. It is also clear in the dramatic contrast between them. From an intertextual point of view, the pair of announcements can be seen as two acts in a drama of destiny. They portray how a passive dreamer, in the first act pushed against his will to serve as the agent of an active, dynamic saint, turns into an adroit, fearless protagonist in the second act. At the end he brings the saint—who has been reduced to a silent old man—into his home after a hazardous journey. The announcements to the public and other dream stories are significant turning points in the story of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim’s road to Rabbi David U-Moshe. The stirring nocturnal experiences are the building blocks of a dream biography of mythic quality, imbuing his life with direction and a sense of purpose. But the mytho-poetic



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aspect of Avraham’s biography is not limited to the field of dreams. It is also manifest in his tendency to use key stories in his rich family saga as a narrative reservoir for constructing current events and experiences. Saints’ legends from his family’s past reverberate in the events of the present. So, for example, Rabbi David U-Moshe’s magical migration from the high western Atlas Mountains to the Canaan housing project recreates the family myth about Rabbi Ya’aqov Timsut’s mystical underground migration from Marrakech to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Tragic stories from the distant or recent past are repackaged and reconfigured as a counter-narrative. For example, the legend of the first Rabbi Shlomo’s murder by the qa‘id’s wife is “repaired” by the story of how Avraham’s son Shlomo was saved from a plot to murder him in Lebanon, and the anecdote of how Avraham’s brother, killed in a car accident, turns into the story of how another son, Meir, emerged unscathed from an attack on his tank in Lebanon. Ya’ish’s life story leads to the Garden of Eden, the paradigmatic mythic site in Jewish tradition. It includes a series of exciting visitation dreams, during which he, like Avraham, meets a series of tsaddiqim before he is privileged to discover the miraculous opening in his backyard and the tsaddiq who guards it. Ya’ish limited himself to one Announcement to the Public; but his narrative sequence of revelation dreams displays a rhetorical development similar to Avraham’s—Ya’ish moves from astonishment, wonderment, and even hesitation in the face of the revelation’s power, to determination and belief in his destiny, which lead him into the depths of the earth in a bold initiation quest. His second quest dream to Paradise, full of dangers, which ends well with the help of King David and Elijah the Prophet and equips him to become the gatekeeper of Eden, is the mythical climax of his dream biography, the transformative moment in which black water turns into gold. This dream biography is validated by the other emotional narratives attached to the Gate of Paradise, from the community of dreamers that grew up around the site. A similar community also emerged around the Abode of Rabbi David U-Moshe. The women impresarios did not have as many dreams as the men. Dream visits from tsaddiqim are a secondary narrative device for Alu, and are almost entirely absent from Esther’s story. In Alu’s case, the mytho-poetic function is attached to a different narrative template, one that reshapes saints’ legends—the most widespread narrative genre in the believers’ discourse—on the model of the folktale “Cinderella.” When Alu cast her tale of suffering and rescue in the folktale’s shape, she imbued the story of her life with grandeur and spirituality. As in the other cases, the power of the mytho-poetic function to act on and change reality is manifest here. Like

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the magical transformations in fairy tales, through which a pumpkin turns into a carriage or a frog into a prince, a tiny housing project apartment in a neglected development town becomes the abode of a venerated saint. Esther’s narrative construction of the events of her life, like Alu’s, is based on a double template, in which the tsaddiq who saved her as a child returns to rescue her from her troubles as an adult. Esther suffered for many years from ailments that rendered her dysfunctional on the most basic level as a mother and housewife. The drama of how Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai saved her conforms, in its general outlines, to familiar miracle stories about tsaddiqim, in which the saint appears as a doctor who can cure any malady. The narrative power of Esther’s story derives from a combination of factors: the identity of the patron saint as the central figure in the Jewish cult of saints; Esther’s identification with Rabbi Shimon’s mother; the healing intervention of the tsaddiq in her unbearable suffering;15 and finally, her dramatic swings between low and high points, in which the entities that cause her suffering and heal her both occupy her body and speak through her mouth. The demonic possession in her youth that was supplanted by her spiritual possession by Rabbi Shimon as an adult is a concrete manifestation of her transformation from sufferer to healer. Mythical residues in the impresarios’ consciousnesses are indicated by their identification with exemplary figures from Jewish cosmology. In Esther’s case, the identification is explicit—her relationship with Rabbi Shimon BarYoḥai is based, in part, on her stated belief that she is a reincarnation of his mother. Other impresarios are motivated by a profound identification with the biblical figure whose name they bear. Rachel from Beit She’an became a healer specializing in infertility after her own womb turned barren. Her choice to use this dialectical story to explain her work was almost certainly inspired by the figure of Rachel the Matriarch who, Rachel believed, was the root of her soul. While she formulates this connection with caution, and refrains from presenting herself to her clients as a reincarnation of the biblical Rachel, her claim is ultimately not different from Esther’s. While Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim does not explicitly voice an identification with the biblical Abraham, whose name he bears, a number of events in his life resemble those in the life of the founder of the Jewish people. For example, the indistinct transition from a waking state to a dream described in his first Announcement to the Public resembles a similar transition undergone by Abraham at the time of the “covenant between the pieces” (Genesis 15); the visit by three tsaddiqim depicted in the same document resembles the visit Abraham received from the three angels, and there is an intimation of the



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binding of Isaac in the dream that prepared the ground for the festive meal he instituted for Rabbi David Ben-Baruch. His revelation dream about Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, set in a parched desert, contains some elements that hint at Avraham’s identification with the biblical Moses. Avraham and Masouda’s decision to sleep in separate rooms after Avraham’s revelation would seem to echo the midrashic claim that Moses ceased conjugal relations with his wife after the revelation at Sinai. Likewise, Ya’ish’s story of his discovery of the Gate of Paradise follows the pattern of the story of Moses’ revelation at the burning bush. In contrast with Esther and Rachel, the two men’s identification with these Jewish forefathers, while audacious, remains unstated, and may not even be conscious.16 Note that despite the fact that each of the protagonists has a single distinct patron saint, these same saints often appear to the others, thus thickening and complicating the mytho-poetic narratives that each impresario fashions. Rabbi David u-Moshe, Avraham’s patron, appeared in Ya’ish’s dreams as well. Yai’sh believes that this tsaddiq helped him sire a son, whom Ya’ish named after the saint. Rabbi David u-Moshe also plays a central role, second only to Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai’s, in the healing shrine that Esther established in Yeruḥam. Rabbi Shimon, Esther’s patron saint, and Elijah the Prophet, the star of the Gate of Paradise, are frequent guests in Avraham’s dreams, while Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, Alu’s patron, was one of Esther’s childhood tsaddiqim. This crisscrossing underscores the common cultural origin of the four tsaddiqim who are the movers of the impresarios’ life narratives. In sum, through a mythic-narrative construction of their life stories, these low-income men and women, lacking in formal education, were able to overcome the physical distance between the graves of tsaddiqim in Morocco, or in other places in Israel, and their own homes. They recreated the symbolic spaces of the cult of saints by taking them from the fields of their imaginations and dreams and making them part of the local sacred geography, at least at this historical moment. I will discuss below its duration, which has already passed for the Gate of Paradise.

Gender and Sanctity: The Female Way to the Tsaddiq Can we discern a distinctly female voice in the life stories of Esther, Alu, Rachel, and other female saints’ impresarios whose stories are not presented in this book? The previous analyses indicate that the answer is affirmative. In this concluding chapter I would like to bring together the central motifs that characterize these women’s way to their tsaddiqim and

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which distinguish them from the men in the group. First, in childhood the women had a profound relationship with tsaddiqim who were not members of their families. All the impresarios, men and women, were raised from earliest childhood in a mystical-religious atmosphere, and tsaddiqim were immanent in their worlds. But the notable childhood tsaddiqim of the men were members of their families (“holy forefathers”), who had been recognized by their local communities as exemplars and miracle workers. I have stressed the importance of these family tsaddiqim, and their “distanced closeness” in shaping Avraham’s and Ya’ish’s sense of mission. For the women, family tsaddiqim played a much less significant role, perhaps because as women they had difficulty validating their claim on family lineage, which by tradition passes from father to son. What is the significance of this gender difference? The primary male connection to family tsaddiqim would seem at first glance to be founded on a deep and intimate relationship with familiar tsaddiqim from their immediate surroundings. But, in the end, the patron saint that Avraham, Ya’ish, and others like them chose was not their family saint, but rather a stranger—sometimes even one they had not known previously. Notably, Alu and Esther reestablished ties to tsaddiqim who saved them in their girlhoods, while Avraham and Ya’ish moved from one patron to another until they found “their” saints. Their ties to their saints fit the universal paradigm of male activity moving from the inside to the outside, as they switch their loyalties from close and familiar figures to distant and foreign ones. For their part, Alu and Esther, who focus on fostering an intimate relationship with figures familiar to them from childhood, conform to the type of activity associated with female domesticity (Bakan 1966; Josselson 1987; Rosaldo 1974). This change in the patron saint’s identity is responsible for the fundamental difference in the patterns of the revelation experiences. While, for the men, revelation comes as a quasi-prophetic spontaneous inspiration that produced an initial response of disregard and reluctance in the face of the unexpected appearance of an unfamiliar tsaddiq, the women engage in quasi-ritual actions aimed at summoning the tsaddiq and motivating him to intervene in their suffering. True, Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s name comes to Alu’s lips spontaneously, after many years in which she does not think of him. But once she remembers him, she hastens to light a candle in his honor in her kitchen and seeks his help. Esther entreats Rabbi Shimon at Meron during his hillula and leaves her baby at the saint’s tomb as a dramatic and desperate ritual gesture of asking for his protection. Second, life problems played a more significant role in the women’s



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paths to their tsaddiqim. It may be that the women’s attraction to the function of healer derives to a great extent from their larger exposure to life crises and illnesses. This pattern is consistent with the connection between suffering and disease on the one hand and women’s religiosity on the other. The same link appears even more prominently in religions dominated by women, which are replete with healing rituals (Sered 1994: 89-118). Women all over the world tend to suffer more than men from acute and chronic illnesses.17 Among the hypotheses proposed to explain this greater vulnerability are role pressures, early marriage, prohibitions against abortions and birth control, malnourishment, palpable gains resulting from defining certain kinds of problems in medical terms, and an oppressive and frustrating workload. These problems are often translated into physical and medical symptoms, because in patriarchal societies women have few channels for expressing their distress. This unfortunate picture matches, to varying extents, the experiences of the female impresarios that I met. Esther’s life unfolded in a series of chronic illnesses that left her unable to function or enjoy life. Alu’s medical problems, preceding her revelation, were relatively mild and not chronic, but it would be hard to exaggerate the severity of the disaster she suffered as a child when her mother died and her family fell apart. As difficult as it is to quantify the suffering in the stories of my protagonists, it would seem that the women bore deeper scars of the past, whether caused by illness or loss. This burden of suffering borne by the women is evident also in the distinct manners of revelation I noted above. Life problems were certainly a catalyst for the revelations experienced by Avraham and Ya’ish. But they portray the appearance of the tsaddiqim in their initiation dreams as spontaneous and surprising, rather than as a direct response to an appeal of theirs. In the case of the women, however, the appearance of the tsaddiqim was explicitly a response to a plea for help in the face of suffering they could not bear. Esther, in bitter despair, took the extreme step of handing her baby over to the tsaddiq. Alu, whose menopausal symptoms were immeasurably milder than Esther’s ailments, nevertheless explicitly pled with the tsaddiq whose name she had just remembered: “Ya Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, look at me.… [S]ave me from my dizziness.” Moreover, the women’s paths to holiness, specifically to the profession of healer, were largely channeled by concepts of physical purity and impurity. Alu, Esther, and others like them became saints’ impresarios and healers at menopause, in a process completed after the end of their period of fertility and childrearing. This timing also characterizes most male saints’

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impresarios, including Avraham and Ya’ish, but it notably contrasts with the young age at which rabbi-healers of Moroccan origin begin to ply their craft. In southern Morocco, the place of origin of most of the saints’ impresarios I got to know, a man could become a ritual slaughterer, circumciser, or teacher of children, and in doing so gain the honorific “rabbi,” before his twentieth birthday. Since these religious roles, which did not require official rabbinical ordination, were commonly launching pads for engaging in religious healing, male healers began their careers at a relatively tender age (Bilu 2000: 62-63). We learned from the life stories of the women that the relatively advanced age at which they began to engage in healing was due in part to the cultural construction of physiological changes in the female life cycle, in particular religious conceptions of female purity and impurity. Again, with the women, Alu in particular, the initial link to the tsaddiq grew organically in girlhood, out of a cultural conception that attributes innocence and purity to young children. This cherished innocence of the girls, deriving from bodily purity, was in the case of the boys tied to religiosity and spirituality mediated by a strict regime of religious studies (to which the girls were not exposed). The women did not explicitly attribute the absence of the tsaddiqim during their adolescent and adult years to menstruation and sexual maturity. Nevertheless, the fact is that Alu was dismissed by a mistress who feared that her pubertal servant would become a sexual enticement to her husband. And Esther’s attacks of demonic possession, a malady that comes out of the impure world of evil sprits, began in her adolescence, a short time after her marriage, during her first pregnancy. The stories display a number of links between the cessation of the menses and revelation. For Alu, the end of her monthly period at the age of forty-eight was clearly a trigger for the appearance of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar. Esther, for her part, stressed the fact that no evil befell her even though she chose to remain at Meron during her period (although she refrained from approaching Rabbi Shimon’s grave too closely) as evidence of Rabbi Shimon’s favor towards her. Rachel, the dreamer from Beit She’an who became a healer under the inspiration of Elijah, assigned an important role to menstruation on her road to holiness. At this writing she is fiftytwo and claims that she still enjoys a regular period. But recall that after the birth of her fifth child and a series of difficult pregnancies, she prayed that her womb close. While she regrets this rash request, she sees its acceptance (she has had no pregnancies since then despite her continued menstruation) as an indication of heaven’s favor. In any case, she began



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engaging in healing only many years after the birth of her last child. On a more practical but no less important level, at middle age these women began to enjoy some relief from the cumbersome load of their responsibilities as homemakers, especially in the area of childrearing. As a result, they now had time to engage in spiritual activity. Alu presented her soldier-children as obstacles to leading a full religious life—she had to launder their uniforms on the Sabbath when they came home for weekend visits. Esther, for her part, had to put off her healing practice for several years because of her children’s vociferous objections. Both women became healers only after their children left home. The connection between the presence of the tsaddiq and two other factors, the cessation of the menstrual cycle (or the neutralization of its effect) and the children’s exit from the home when they become adults, was directly expressed in the way in which Alu chose to explain the decline of the Gate of Paradise, a competing holy site in Beit She’an: “There [at Ya’ish’s home] there are [immodestly-dressed] girls. The tsaddiq doesn’t want girls who have periods in his house. The house has to be empty. The girls [should] come only for the festive meal. That’s why the tsaddiq didn’t stay.”18 A comparative examination of the connection with the tsaddiq shows that the relationship between the female impresarios and their tsaddiqim looks “denser” and more personal than those of their male counterparts, largely because of the richer fabric of female metaphors and images at their foundation. Against the background of the extensive use religious systems make of metaphorical representations of family relationships, from “our Father, our King” to the “Holy Mother” and the “Son of God” (Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle 1997; Spiro 1984), it is hardly surprising that both the men and the women that I interviewed expressed their closeness to their patron saint in terms of family relationships. The women, however, were able to express their emotional tie to the tsaddiq in a more intimate fashion, using a set of associations that positioned them implicitly as the tsaddiq’s wife— as intimated both by Alu and Esther—or as his mother, as Esther stated explicitly. I do not mean to detract from the power of the relationships that Avraham, Ya’ish, and other male impresarios established with the tsaddiqim who resided in their homes. But when it comes to the possibilities for using family idioms, it looks as if women enjoy much broader horizons of expression and richer webs of associations than men do.19 Given the women’s intimacy with their patron saints, it is surprising to see how little Alu and Esther, compared with Avraham and Ya’ish, used dreams as a channel of communication with their tsaddiqim. This difference does not represent a general pattern, since women who participate in saints’

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cults usually dream about tsaddiqim, both at home and at hillula sites (Bilu & Abramovitch 1985). Recall also that Rachel from Beit She’an cast her path to becoming a healer inspired by tsaddiqim in the form of a dream biography no less detailed than the ones told by Avraham and Ya’ish. Nevertheless, a comparison of dream encounters with other channels of communication used by Alu and Esther is instructive. It illustrates the possibilities for and constraints on the expression of a woman’s voice on the road to holiness. Alu meets with Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar two nights a week. He appears to her “like a shadow” and conveys to her healing secrets. She cannot see him; she can only hear his voice. Afterwards, when she goes to bed, the tsaddiq’s voice reverberates in her head, and only then can she decipher his meaning. Esther hosted Rabbi Shimon not only in her home but also within her body, when the tsaddiq began to talk through her mouth. But in the face of the hostile reactions to these possession episodes, his manifest presence gave way to the conveyance of healing instructions into her ears or directly into her mind. Esther’s possession episodes look like an unmediated fusion with the tsaddiq, the epitome of the dissolution of boundaries between saint and believer. In discussing Esther’s illness, I noted that women experience possession more often than men. This gender distinction crosses cultures, and is explained by the greater openness of the boundaries of women’s bodies—as seen, for example, in female sexuality and pregnancy. The same openness is characteristic of the female ego, which is more predisposed to long-term intimate relationships without hard “male” boundaries between the self and the other. In a dream, in contrast, the dreamer’s level of involvement is high enough to blur the borders between imagination and reality, but boundaries between the dreamer and the other figures in the dream are preserved. These differences are consistent with the findings of an intercultural survey, which shows that men are more inclined to enter into trance states in which the dreamer’s ego boundaries are preserved— states that are closer to dreaming. Women, on the contrary, tend to enter into trances that lead to the breakdown of ego boundaries and fusion with other entities—states of possession (Bourguignon 1979; de Heusch 1971).20 Esther’s possession episodes ended and, like Alu, she based her relationship with Rabbi Shimon on encounters in which a separation was maintained between the two parties. This model is much closer to the men’s channels of communication, except that the women generally heard their tsaddiq’s voice, while the men usually saw him in a dream. Note, however,



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that the two women’s encounters with their tsaddiqim did not involve absolute separation between them and their saints. Alu only understands Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s messages to her when she hears them a second time within her mind; Esther frequently hears Rabbi Shimon inside her head, as if he planted his ideas and desires within her thoughts. Such experiences are commonly seen in the reports of male mystics and kabbalists, who seek adherence and even mystical unity (unio mystica) with God or with other spiritual entities (Idel 1989; Pedia 2002), but in this context they again point to more fluid ego boundaries among the women, which enable them to fuse with their tsaddiqim to a greater extent than the male impresarios can. Finally, it should be noted that the women impresarios presented in this book engage in more direct and explicit healing activity than do their male counterparts. This specific development of a symbolic covenant with the tsaddiq, consistent with the women’s emphasis on physical suffering as leading to religious involvement and healing rituals as part of their religious cult and roles, is most explicitly illustrated in my description of Esther’s healing work. Even if we have a possible answer to the question of why female impresarios engage in healing, we must nevertheless explain why the men in the group barely engage in it at all. The most logical answer may come out of the comparison we made between women healers like Esther and rabbihealers of Moroccan origin. As noted, the traditional healers who parallel the impresarios in age and ethnic origin are “holy vessels” of various sorts who derive their interventions from textual traditions of practical mysticism, and who use holy names and esoteric formulae as their healing practice. The male impresarios, simple in their background and modest in their means, did not receive a broad religious education, and certainly were not trained to fill formal religious positions. They lack the skills needed by those who heal in the tradition of male literacy, in which the heart of the healing procedure is “writing.”21 It might be even claimed that, in bringing their saints into their homes and turning their living quarters into a sanctuary the heart of which is the kitchen no less than the saint’s room, the men have adopted a “female” mode of action.22 Indeed, it looks as if the Jewish cult of saints, whose affinity with religions dominated by women I have already noted, constitutes a women-friendly religious tradition in this regard (Falk 1985: xvii). In the framework of this tradition, under the protective wing of the patron saint, women can also rope off a ritual niche of their own. In sum, channels of communication with a tsaddiq develop along manifestly gender lines. The male impresarios are, above all, builders. They

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see their main role as the establishment of a home for the tsaddiq that will attract as many visitors as possible, and which will be the center of extensive ritual activity the climax of which is the tsaddiq’s hillula. True, the cult site they work to maintain is manifestly a healing shrine, but they themselves do not, for the most part, engage in healing activities directly, except insofar as they convey the tsaddiq’s blessing. Instead, they create the infrastructure that allows troubled visitors to benefit from the tsaddiq’s healing powers. The female impresarios, using the healing resources the tsaddiq has bestowed upon them, are primarily healers and see their principal role as treating people in distress. While they, too, have dedicated a specific place in their homes to the tsaddiq—generally, the room in which they conduct their treatments—and while they also celebrate their tsaddiqim’s hillulot, these aspects of sacred place and time are secondary to the ongoing therapeutic work they conduct under the aegis of their patron saints.

Migrating Traditions: The Historic Timing and “Shelf Life” of the New Shrines Three of the four sites described in this book—all of them founded during the 1970s or 1980s—survived into the new millennium. The most audacious of the four, the Gate of Paradise, vanished entirely from the map of Israel’s holy sites, but its patron saint, Elijah the Prophet, found himself a new home two blocks away. Yet this picture of continuity could well change in the years to come. Given the historical oscillations in the fates of holy sites in the Land of Israel and other places, continuity over two or three decades is hardly a guarantee that the sites will continue to function in the future. The holy sites I have portrayed are especially vulnerable because of their personal nature, being as they are sites established by individual initiative in private homes. These weak points are especially notable regarding those founded by women. Their sites lack public infrastructure and official recognition, so their chances for survival depend, for better or worse, on the women’s success in persuading potential clients from near and far that they have real healing powers. The Abode of Rabbi David U-Moshe has undergone a process of partial institutionalization, and Safed’s municipal leaders now see it as a holy site that the town and its institutions should help maintain and develop. But even in this case, its popularity depends to a great extent on Avraham’s efforts to ensure that veteran and new believers in Rabbi David U-Moshe continue to make pilgrimages to his home, especially for the tsaddiq’s hillula. The chances that the new sites will fall into oblivion once the current generation of impresarios passes on is especially high in the case of



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the women. Their reputations are based on their personal healing powers, not on the presence of the tsaddiqim in their homes. To the best of my knowledge, none of them have taken any steps at all to choose and train a successor. Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim is the only one of the impresarios to have attempted to ensure that his shrine will continue to function after his death. In his will he has named his eldest son, Shimon, his heir. In the same document he enjoins his descendents to maintain the Abode of Rabbi David U-Moshe and forbids them to sell the house in perpetuity. Thus, of the four sites portrayed here, it looks, at this historical moment, most likely to have the longest life. The current picture of relative stability thus appears less certain beyond the current generation. This should hardly be surprising. In retrospect, all four initiatives constituted, by their very nature, challenges to existing traditions and attempts to transfer tsaddiqim to new locations. Rabbi David u-Moshe and Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar were transferred from Morocco to Israel. Elijah the Prophet and Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai also had established sites of pilgrimage of their own when Ya’ish and Esther moved them into their homes. Traditions, it seems, are indeed fluid. Migrating saints and pilgrimage sites are not unheard of in saints’ cults in Israel or around the world. In the cases of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai and Rabbi David u-Moshe, these shifts are not limited to Esther’s and Avraham’s shrines. Esther’s bold claim that Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai lives in her house in Yeruḥam has historical precedents in Morocco, where two towns, Sefrou, near Fez, and Tidili, in the southern part of the country, had traditions according to which Rabbi Shimon was present among them (Ben-Ami 1984: 43). Sites dedicated to Rabbi David u-Moshe are also to be found in Israel in Ashkelon, Ofakim, Moshav Aderet, and Gan Yavneh. Today, the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe in the Canaan housing project in Safed is the most popular of these sites, but it is certainly possible that one of the other ones will eventually overshadow it. In any case, it is hardly exceptional for the same saint to be located concurrently in a number of sites. Instances of the appropriation of saints and the migration of traditions can also be found in Moroccan Islam (Crapanzano 1973; Marcus 1985), and particularly in Christianity. In the pre-modern Christian world, the cult of saints expanded, especially during periods of weak central government and insecurity, and turned into a mania of marketing and robbery of relics and their movement all over Europe. This created a flexible, even protean sacred geography that spread throughout Christendom via new traditions about migrating relics (which often multiplied by being copied or broken into more than one piece). Beyond the miracles attributed to the relics, their potency

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lay in the power of the stories attached to them rather than in their historical authenticity. This narrative tradition provided a constitutive framework for the collective memory of the community that came into possession of the holy relic. It gave its inhabitants a sense of belonging, an identity, even a feeling of moral superiority, given that the saint had “chosen” them (Brown 1981; Geary 1978; Kleinberg 2008; Sox 1985). The migration of saints’ relics throughout Christian Europe during the first millennium and at the beginning of the second bears many similarities to the migration of saints to new sites in Israel at the turn of the third. The similarities grow even stronger given the Medieval perception that the relics were living entities (Geary 1978: 151157).23 Furthermore, the Christian world hardly lacks holy sites established as a result of revelations from supernatural entities, in visions and dreams. Such sites, the best-known of which were founded after the appearance of Mary, continue to come into being to this day (Carroll 1986; Turner & Turner 1978; Zimdars-Swartz 1991). However, a detailed comparison between these and the Israeli cases is beyond the scope of this discussion. The fluidity of sacred geography throughout Christian Europe is hardly surprising, given the fact that the founding myth of Christianity shifted the center of the earth (the axis mundi), the point from which it was created, from the Temple Mount of Jewish tradition to Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion. Many myths associated with the site of the Temple made the same shift (Limor 1998). But the displacement transfer of traditions within a limited or broad geographical space are abundant in the cult of tsaddiqim in the Land of Israel as well. In fact, it had happened at the cult’s most popular site. A person who attends the hillula of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai at Meron today will find it hard to believe that, in the twelfth century, and apparently even earlier, the cult was centered not around the tombs of the great mystic and his son, but rather around the cave of Hillel and Shammai, which today lies on the margins of the holy compound and attracts few visitors (Reiner 1988: 295-305). With an eye to the future, one might ask speculatively whether the recent surge in popularity of the tomb of Rachel, wife of Rabbi Akiva, in Tiberias has not created a northern version of the tomb of the Matriarch Rachel at the edge of Bethlehem, where the Jewish hold has become more tenuous, due to the tomb’s proximity to Palestinian territory. A similar process of the movement of southern traditions north to the Galilee took place after the destruction of the Temple (Gonen 1999).24 A comparable shift of traditions emerged surprisingly in this study with the reappearance of Elijah the Prophet, the patron saint of the Gate of Paradise, nearby in Rachel’s home. This finding can be used to qualify and refine the previous claim that a new site’s chances



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of survival are not high. Even if the sites portrayed here do not survive their founders, it may well be that the seeds they have produced will germinate at new sites that sprout up in unexpected places and circumstances. In any case, it is reasonable to assume that new sites that may appear after the passing of the generation of Moroccan immigrants to Israel will be quite different from those presented in this work. All four of this book’s protagonists belong to that generation, and to the optimal age cohort within it—they were all old enough when they left Morocco to have absorbed the saints of their childhood in mind and body as personal symbols that became basic givens in defining the reality in which they lived. And they were all young enough to have actively confronted the difficulties of absorption into Israeli society and to have acclimatized into the local landscape the traditions they brought with them from the Maghreb. This generational placement means that they shared life circumstances, experiences, memories, problems, and aspirations with many other Moroccan immigrants, thus explaining the warm reception of their projects given by many in that community. But the historical circumstances that shaped the lives of the impresarios and their generation are changing rapidly. There is no reason to believe that in the future we will witness a new wave of migration of tsaddiqim from Morocco to Israel, because the descendants of today’s immigrants from Morocco are losing the intimate ties to the saints left behind in Morocco. There is a better chance of seeing more initiatives based on local traditions, like those of Ya’ish and Esther, but even these will presumably lose the Maghrebi tang that characterized the hillula at the Gate of Paradise and the healing potions of the healer from Yeruḥam. Another factor connected to the timing of the appearance of the saints’ impresarios is the fact that, during the period the new sites were founded, Israelis were not allowed to enter Morocco to visit the saints’ graves. While most Israelis of Moroccan background cannot afford frequent pilgrimage tours to the tombs of tsaddiqim in the old country, the urge to transfer these tsaddiqim to Israel might have subsided after their tombs became accessible in the mid 1980s. It may be that changes in Israel’s general religious climate, and in the politics of holy sites in particular, will also diminish the chances that new sites of this type will appear in the future. Anyone who wanders the Galilee these days can hardly avoid noticing the building boom around the graves of tsaddiqim. In many places, magnificent bright-domed buildings have been constructed around modest gravesites, complete with well-marked, paved access roads. The impresarios at such sites are not individuals. They

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are haredi (ultra-Orthodox) non-profit associations like the Committee for the Preservation of Ancient Graves or Atra Kadisha, as well as local religious councils (public bodies, funded by the government, responsible for religious services) and government agencies like the National Authority of Religious Services’ Center for the Development of Holy Sites. The construction projects, meant to enhance the drawing power of these shrines, testifies to the rise of popular traditions of saints’ graves and of the mystical practices observed at such sites. But it also reflects the religious establishment’s growing hold over the graves of tsaddiqim and its efforts to discipline and refine the cults practiced there. A notable example is that dividers—usually solid, highs wall—separating men and women have appeared at all such sites, from the grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai in the north to the tomb of the Baba Sali in the south. The dividers are a damper on the ecstatic, infectious celebration that previously characterized the sites.25 This institutionalization and oversight, imposed on the holy sites by religious bodies on the national and municipal level, as well as the political uses to which the cults of living and dead saints have been put by religious political parties (the most important of which is Shas, an ultra-Orthodox Mizraḥi party that had not yet been founded when the impresarios first emerged) is liable to reduce the chances that new sites will appear spontaneously, from the grassroots, as those portrayed in this book did.

The Cult of Saints as an Israeli and Local Phenomenon At the beginning of this chapter, I noted that the lives of my four protagonists followed similar paths in time and space, subject to the historical changes that took place in the mid-twentieth century: the establishment of the state of Israel, Moroccan independence, the mass migration of Jews from Morocco to Israel, and the dispersion of the immigrants into the new country’s peripheral regions. Even though the impresarios brought cultural traditions of the cult of saints with them from Morocco—and in the case of Avraham and Alu, even patron saints themselves—the revelations that led to the founding of the new sites took place in the local landscape, after the impresarios had lived in it for two decades or more. As I noted in my introduction, the expansion of saints’ cults in Israel in recent decades is consistent with the fact that these cultural phenomena also reached their height in Morocco in the mid-twentieth century, against the background of accelerated social change. But the historical timing of the phenomena has not prevented disagreement about its meaning for Israeli society. According to Erik Cohen, an Israeli sociologist, the return of the saints



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can be seen as part of a general trend towards religious, nationalist, and particularistic values that emerged from “the disenchantment of wide strata in Israeli society—not all Orientals—with the basic premises of pioneeringsocialist Zionism” (Cohen 1983: 122). In his view, the revival of saints’ cults can be seen as a regression to an archaic symbolic order, tantamount to the “symbolic diasporization” of Israel. This step backwards derives, in his view, from the frustration that many North African Jews experienced after they failed to gain full acceptance into the new society. In contrast, it can be argued that, in reviving the cult of saints in Israel, immigrants from North Africa have made a statement that they belong to their new homeland. “Paradoxically,” argues the anthropologist Alex Weingrod, “the message being sent [by the hillulot] … is an expression of the participants’ enhanced social integration rather than a statement of schism or deep division” (Weingrod 1990: 85). While these two positions seem to be contradictory, they can in fact be reconciled and even integrated. The revival of the cult of saints is a dynamic process that reflects the growing sense of home felt by ethnic North Africans in Israel; but at the same time it rejects the old model of being Israeli and contributes to its deconstruction. The cult of saints is participating in reshaping Israeli identity in directions that take it far from the Zionist ethos of Israel’s early years, and brings it closer to a more pluralistic social reality. The fact that the veneration of tsaddiqim is a recognized and accepted form of religiosity—even if many have reservations about it and disagreements with it—makes it possible to adhere to a rhetoric of amalgamation and unity (as opposed to ethnic separatism) in the struggle to define Israeli identity.26 Running through this entire book is the claim that development towns and other locations on Israel’s urban periphery have served as central arenas for the renewal of the cult of saints. The fact that Jews from North Africa, Moroccan Jews in particular, are overrepresented in these places cannot fully explain the geographical distribution of the cults, given the lack of new holy sites in North African neighborhoods in Israel’s large cities. I have linked the appearance of holy sites in and around development towns to the changes these places underwent since their establishment. There has been a gradual development of a sense of localism—an ongoing and unselfconscious process, stretching over years and crossing generations, by which these people have developed affinities for their place of residence.27 Given the social and economic difficulties that development towns have faced from the time they were established, it is hardly surprising that these ties to place were acquired through suffering and with great ambivalence. This negative

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element of ambivalence is expressed among this book’s protagonists by their plans, before the appearance of their tsaddiqim, to move to different neighborhoods or cities, closer to the center. Their revelations, and the subsequent sanctification of their homes, stymied these plans and strongly tied the impresarios to their homes. At this writing, two to three decades after the establishment of the sites, three of the four impresarios continue to live in the same apartments they originally intended to leave. The fourth, Ya’ish, left Beit She’an after a fire that destroyed the Gate of Paradise. The circumstances of his move illustrate the obstacles faced by an individual impresario who lacks public backing and economic resources, and highlight the successes of the other three. Based on the stories presented in this book, I have depicted the revelation experience as a psycho-cultural mechanism, related to the natural attachment to one’s home, community, and local landscape. It enhances the status of unremarkable neighborhoods in out-of-the-way towns. But these manifestations of belongingness and localism have also broadened to take in other routes of renewing saints’ cults, as discussed in Chapter 1. So, for example, after the death of Rabbi Yisrael Abu-Ḥatsera (the Baba Sali), rumors spread through Netivot that a burial plot in the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem had been set aside for the tsaddiq, but that he preferred to be buried in his own town. The template is the same as the one in which the impresarios’ moves were thwarted by the tsaddiq’s revelation. The patriotic tie to the town and the home in the context of the cult of saints is especially visible in times of war and crisis. During these periods, believers in different parts of the country had dreams in which the tsaddiqim appeared as soldiers on guard, with loaded weapons, prepared to protect their towns (Ben-Ami 1977; Bilu & Abramovitch 1985). In Ḥatzor Ha-Glilit, people believed that Ḥoni Ha-Me’agel saved them from Syrian shelling during the Six Day War, leading them to crown him the town’s patron saint during the Yom Kippur War six years later. The patriotic tinge to the sanctification of Ḥoni Ha-Me’agel was made explicit and amplified when his hillula date was set for Israel Independence Day. In the 1970s and 1980s, an emergence of sanctity, or hierophany, to use Eliade’s term (Eliade 1954), occurred on Israel’s urban periphery. The inhabitants of mundane towns with bad reputations were searching for an ideological justification for their existence so as to consolidate a local identity. They thus constructed a local myth through a neo-traditional and extra-Zionist (but not anti-Zionist) symbolic system, by creating or annexing holy sites. From a historical perspective, the sanctification of



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the development towns can be seen through the traditional idiom of the tsaddiq as a mechanism parallel to that of pioneering Zionism, which provided the ideological foundation for previous types of settlements, such as the kibbutz and moshav.28 In keeping with this view, those who snidely referred to Netivot as the “Israeli Varanasi (Benares)” because of the surge in the town’s tsaddiqim, miracle workers, and holy tombs, were simply taking note of a process in which holy towns were added to the map of the country’s peripheral regions (within the Green Line). The metahistorical depth that this process has endowed development towns derived, in cases in which a tsaddiq was moved from Morocco to Israel, from the appropriation of a myth from a distant space (one that was once close and familiar) and its relocation in the local space. In other cases, however, this depth was achieved or amplified by the revival of ancient myths from the local geographic space which were then attached to the modern town. The best example of this is the Gate of Paradise, which a Talmudic tradition located in Beit She’an, and which Ya’ish situated in his backyard in the Dalet housing project of the old-new city. But local myths lay at the foundation of all cases in which a specific local community annexed tsaddiqim buried in their environs and turned them into their patron saint (as in the case of Ḥoni Ha-Me’agel in Ḥatzor and Rabban Gamliel in Yavneh). Even in the case of Rabbi Yisrael Abu-Ḥatsera’s memorialization in Netivot, his supernatural aura was enhanced by a mythic tie to the local space—local kabbalists maintained that a mystical link had been established between the tsaddiq and Abraham the Patriarch, who had pitched his tent at nearby Gerar 4,000 years before Netivot was established.29 The added value that mythic depth granted Netivot was best summed up by one of its residents, who stated with unconcealed pride that, in the past, the town had been “off the map,” but that now, thanks to the presence of the Baba Sali, it was “on the map” and even “above the map” (Bilu & Ben-Ari 1997). The Israeli character of the cult of saints can also be seen in the overt and covert links between it and Israel’s civil religion—the state cults, political myths, and scripts of collective memory created by the Zionist national movement. Recall that, from its earliest days, the Zionist movement expressed and intensified its characteristic fervor through the use of a reservoir of symbols borrowed from Jewish tradition. Thus aliya (literally “ascent”) in the form of immigration to the Land of Israel replaced aliya le-regel (pilgrimage to the Temple), and aliya al ha-qarq‘a (establishing a new settlement) replaced aliya le-Torah (going up to read from the Torah scroll during prayer services). This conceptualization granted Zionism

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eschatological meaning and volume. Investigators of Israel’s civil religion have shown that the foundations of this religion are anchored in the pioneering ideology and rituals of the period of the pre-state collectivist society (Yishuv)—the mystification of the landscape and of farming the land, the recasting of traditional holidays in nationalist forms, the literature of mourning and of commemoration of the movement’s martyrs, and in memorials and tombs of exemplary figures that have become cult and pilgrimage sites (Almog 2000; Liebman & Don-Yeḥia 1983; Sivan 1991). In the 1950s, the founding myth of the new nation-state was connected to the cult of independence and of fallen heroes. A cult of memorialization developed around this, with a huge variety of spatial representations. The sanctification of the national space encompasses thousands of uniform military gravestones, located in military cemeteries and military sections of civilian cemeteries. Furthermore, wars were mythologized in a new heroic topography that included many hundreds of memorials of all types and styles—official and private, monumental and modest, inclusive and unit-specific. Some were abstract representations of the warrior spirit and others were concrete relics of warfare, iconic remains of mythologized battles (Azaryahu 1995). After the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel took control of locations central to the Jewish people’s mythical memory, in Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Nablus, the penetration of traditional Jewish content into the Israeli civil religion accelerated, weakening the hold of Zionist myths from the recent and more distant past, such as those of Masada, Bar-Kochba, and Tel Hai (Ben-Yehuda 1995; Zerubavel 1995). This process intensified after the Yom Kippur War and the political upheaval that followed it. From the end of the 1960s onward, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City became Israel’s most important and popular cult site, both in popular and civil religion (Storper-Perez & Goldberg 1994). On the far side of the Green Line, in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights, Gush Emunim and other settlement groups worked to sanctify these areas in a process that integrated the distant and recent past, by the mythical construction of new memorial sites. These ranged from places dedicated to the Hebron riots of 1929 and the Yamit Yeshiva in Neve Deqalim (a memorial to the Israeli town of Yamit in Sinai, evacuated when that territory was returned to Egypt), to “memorial settlements” dedicated to settlers who had been murdered, such as Rechelim (El-Or & Aran 1995; Feige 2003). This same period saw the rise, within Israel proper, of the popular cults of saint veneration surveyed in this work. Against the background of the renewed accessibility of traditional



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memorial sites and the flowering of popular traditions of saints’ graves, it is hardly surprising that channels of national and religious memorialization and sanctification have become interwoven with each other. It is not at all unlikely, for example, that the surging popularity of folk traditions of saint veneration have influenced the rituals conducted in recent years at the graves of and memorials to “political saints” such as former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin (Bilu & Levy 1993) and Yitzḥak Rabin (Vinitzki-Seroussi 2002) and, quite differently, Baruch Goldstein, a settler who committed a mass murder in Hebron. Aliza Shenar has written about a fascinating link between the civilnational and popular-religious channels. She shows how the area around the graves of early Zionist pioneers Yehoshua and Olga Ḥenkin, on the slopes of Mt. Gilboa, have become pilgrimage sites identified as “Nebi Shua” or, in another version, of King Saul, for the residents of the local farming villages, who immigrated to Israel from Kurdistan (Shenhar-Alro’i 1994). This “adoption,” expressing the need for ties to a local saint in keeping with the patterns of the past, explicitly combines the popular cult and the Zionist ethos. But in examining the immigrant traditions that produced the mistaken identification, we must not overlook the quasi-religious title, “redeemer of the [Jezreel] Valley,” attached to Ḥenkin in Zionist historiography. The cult of saints is linked, as we have seen, to the subjects of defense and security, which are part of the existential issues faced by the Israeli nation-state. This national aspect of the holy sites is nothing new. A list of holy sites prepared by the political leader and scholar Yitzḥak Ben-Zvi during the period of the British Mandate was intended to serve as proof of the antiquity of Jewish settlement in various parts of the Land of Israel, thus as a bargaining card in the fight for the Jewish right to settle in Palestine. Sh. Z. Kahana, the first director general of the ministry of religion, founded in 1950 an Association for Holy Sites in the Land of Israel. He summed up his efforts to identify and rebuild the grave sites of tsaddiqim in northern Israel as “the Judaization of the Galilee,” long before that phrase became a slogan with political ramifications. The battles fought by the Jews and Palestinians over the Temple Mount and holy sites in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—in particular, over the Makhpelah Cave in Hebron, Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, the prophet Samuel’s tomb outside Jerusalem, and the tomb of Joseph in Nablus—demonstrate how difficult it is to separate today’s politics, religious traditions both great and small, and national or nationalist myths. But these connections are not restricted to these disputed territories. Civilian sites like the Ashdod port and national sites such as the battlefield where the Egyptian Army was temporarily held off by Israeli

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fighters at Kibbutz Yad Mordecai appear on the itineraries for pilgrimagequa-excursions to the Baba Sali’s tomb as advertised in leaflets put out by religious organizations. Such programs smoothly interweave both threads of spatial sanctification in the believer’s world of experience. For its part, the public and governmental establishment in Israel abets this connection, implicitly in some ways and blatantly in others. The former is exemplified, for example, by the fact that the Ministry of Defense’s publishing arm has issued, in addition to albums on Israeli military memorials, an especially elaborate one on the country’s holy sites (Michelson, Solomon & Miller 1996). The latter can be seen in the Keren Kayemet’s integration of holy graves from the popular tradition in its planning and development. So, for example, this body, responsible for much of Israel’s public green space, has landscaped the area next to the Baba Sali’s tomb as a park in the form of a ḥamsa, the hand-shaped talisman popular among Mizraḥi Jews. And it has laid out a “path of the tsaddiqim” that leads through breathtaking Galilean woodlands to the grave of Yonatan Ben-Uziel at Amuqa, and installed a picnic area next to the site. In the final analysis, the state is the most important agent of commemoration in the religious sphere, just as it is in the national-civilian sphere. It maintains, through the National Authority of Religious Services’ Center for the Development of Holy Sites, the country’s officially recognized sites—among them new sites, such as the tomb of the Baba Sali. Through sophisticated planning and public relations, officials of this office and of the Ministry of Tourism promote and seek to increase participation in local pilgrimages. Their large-scale plans are based on an estimate that the country’s 120 principal holy sites receive between six and seven million visits a year (Ilan 1996).30 Even if the number is overstated, governmentbacked religious tourism is planned as a huge enterprise that will integrate comprehensive architectural design, service facilities, commercial facilities, and audio-visual information booths with computers . Most new sites do not have much of a chance of being included in this ambitious enterprise. Even if the Gate of Paradise had not shut down, it would be difficult to imagine any public body promoting it as a park in the vicinity of the huge national park that encompasses the excavations of ancient Beit She’an. And even if we overlook the anti-establishment nature of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai’s manifestation in his “mother’s” home in Yeruḥam, there is no reason to suppose that the room that Esther has dedicated to the tsaddiq, or the corner that Alu has devoted to Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar—modest sites that serve largely as a setting for their



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healing activities—will ever receive any sort of official status. Only the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe would seem to have a chance to be accorded such recognition. But it is not at all certain that this would be welcomed by Avraham and his family, if its price is handing control of the site over to a government or public body. Nevertheless, the initiatives of our four protagonists have made their modest imprint on Israel’s sacred geography in the decades leading up to the turn of the millennium. From a bird’s-eye view, these domestic temples have become part of a multihued mosaic of memorial sites in the local landscape. Traditional and popular holy sites in Israel’s center and periphery, military memorials, national museums, monuments to Zionist pioneers, Holocaust and terror victims, and the graves of Israel’s founding fathers and mothers have now, at this particular historical moment, been joined by the shrines established by our four saints’ impresarios. Four modest housing project apartments in outlying Israeli towns have been touched by the sacred.

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Notes Alu’s inability to maintain contact with her tsaddiq fits the internal logic of her story. As a married woman and the mother of children, she was like her employer and the other adult celebrants who were unable to see the tsaddiq at Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar’s hillula. 2 Possession syndromes have symbolic aspects connected to female sexuality, involving as they do penetration by an alien entity which maintains a presence within the woman’s body (as in pregnancy). Compare: Bilu 1984. 3 The psychologist Karl Jung devoted much thought to the spirituality of middle age as an expression of proper development (Jung 1939). The popular wisdom in Morocco was that men progress throughout their lives, and especially at middle age, toward greater sanctity and spirituality (Dwyer 1978). 4 Recall that, in rural Moroccan Jewish communities, children received their religious education in the village synagogue. 5 Safed, one of the Land of Israel’s four holy cities and the home of Avraham Ben-Ḥayyim, was not, of course, a new city. But the new neighborhoods built around Safed’s historic center, especially the Canaan and Darom housing projects, were no different than the housing projects that comprised Israel’s development towns. 6 A narrative genre is not necessarily just a discursive convention. Even if there was a repeating narrative formula of the frustration of plans to leave homes in saints’ legends, it could well grow out of an actual social reality. In any case, believers may choose it because of its a priori suitability for their personal experiences—or they may use it to shape such experiences. 7 In the Jewish context, there are a small number of stories in which the tsaddiq bade his devotees who were planning to move to Israel to remain by his side (Ben-Ami 1984: 332, 599). But the stories in which the tsaddiq urged his followers to move to Israel, promising them that he would quickly follow them, are much more common. On a case in which a Muslim saint prevented devotees of his who had settled in Meknes from returning to Marrakech, his city of birth, see Crapanzano 1975: 151. On saints’ graves as markers of territorial attachment, see Meeker 1979; Marcus 1985. 8 The idea that a tsaddiq rewards his faithful and thwarts any attempt by him or her to move from his place appears in medieval traditions from the Land of Israel. The “Letter from Rabbi Menachem son of Rabbi Peretz the Hebronite” from the thirteenth century (Ha-Ma‘amar III, Jerusalem: 1920, pp. 45-46), tells 1



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of a widow among the faithful of the Tomb of the Patriarchs (the Makhpela Cave) in Hebron who was preparing to leave Hebron because of her poverty. The patriarch Abraham appeared to her in a dream and told her, “Do not move from here and do not leave your place here.” He referred her to a Muslim official who agreed to provide for all her needs after he was told to do so by Abraham. 9 In other words, my protagonists have been subject to similar influences, as members of a single generational cohort. See Mannheim 1972. 10 On the level of the “politics of representation,” the emphasis on the impresarios’ creativity and activity seeks to get away from the dichotomy of defining the Mizraḥi as the “problem” either because of his “traditionalism” or because of his passivity (Ḥever, Shenhav, and Motzafi-Haller 2002: 294). 11 On the connection between initiative, creativity, and virtuosity, see Herzfeld 1985. 12 This may have, however, been a rhetorical device to underscore how the tsaddiq was absent from her life during her period of childbearing. 13 For an anthropological discussion of the mytho-poetical function, see Price-Williams 1987, 1999. The concept was proposed by Meyers (Ellenberger 1970: 314). On the similar concept of “autonomous imagination,” see Stephens 1989, 1997; Stephens & Suryani 2000. 14 For a comparison of myth and dream, see Urban 1996; Kracke 1987. 15 Esther’s life of agony before her cure is reminiscent of the “dark night of the soul,” the period of suffering that virtuoso religious mystics must endure before being redeemed by God’s grace (Obeyesekere 1981, 1990). 16 It is difficult to determine whether the parallels to Abraham and Moses represent a profound process of identification by the men, or simply the use of conventions of biblical language. 17 This is the case even though men suffer from more serious illness and die of disease more frequently than women do. See Sered 1994: 105. 18 This interview was conducted during my return visit to Alu’s house at the beginning of December 2001. 19 It seems likely that the intimate fabric of associations with the tsaddiq is connected also to the fact that only the women claimed a tie to the soul of a figure from the past. Recall that Esther viewed herself as the root of the soul of Rabbi Shimon’s mother, while Rachel made a similar claim regarding the matriarch Rachel. 20 A trance without possession, like a dream, is generally a private event, based on seeing and hearing. While it is a special state of consciousness, cognitive functions and the sense of the ego’s distinctness are preserved, and the experience remains in memory. The potent perceptual impressions,

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characteristic of the experience of encountering an entity with a special (“supernatural”) ontological status are displayed on a screen in the mind but do not necessarily break loose and become acted out dramatically. A possession trance is generally a public display, in which the sense of identity and basic ego functions vanish for a limited time. The passionate behavior of a person controlled by an alien entity within her is not recorded in consciousness and often ends with complete or partial amnesia. 21 The case of Yosef Waqnin of Beersheba, who adopted Rabbi Ya’aqov Wazana as his patron saint and channeled his power as a healer (Bilu 2000) ostensibly does not fit in with the claim that only female impresarios engage in healing. However, even though Rabbi Yosef’s practice centers on an ancient book of remedies that, he claims, once belonged to Rabbi Ya’aqov, he does not write out remedies from the book. Rather, he uses the book as a magical instrument, which can help relieve symptoms just by touch. 22 In parallel, the women have adopted several male forms of action. Both Esther and Alu wrap themselves in prayer shawls, and the appearance of letters in Esther’s diagnostic potions resembles the magical writing of male healers. 23 It was common for Moroccan Jewish communities to fight over the right to bury a tsaddiq that more than one community claimed as its own (Bilu 2000b:51; Ben-Ami 1984: 389-391). Accounts of such a conflict over Rabbi Elazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai, appear in the Talmud and Midrash. According to these texts, Rabbi Elazar was originally buried in Gush Ḥalav (or in another version, in Akbaria). Rabbi Shimon appeared to the inhabitants of Meron in a dream and urged them to steal Rabbi Elazar’s bones and inter them in their village, next to him. See Kohelet Rabba 11:6; Bab. Talmud Tractate Baba Metzi‘a 74b. In the current context of saints’ cults in Israel, a similar story is the smuggling of the bones of four saints from the Pinto family out of Morocco to Israel, where they were reburied in Kiryat Malachi. Similar stories of the theft of saints’ relics were prevalent in Europe. 24 On the shifting of traditions to the Galilee—for example, the location of Miriam’s well in Lake Kinneret—see Reiner 1996. 25 No such divider exists at the Abode of Rabbi David u-Moshe, but there, too, a trend towards institutionalization of the popular cult can be discerned. For example, men and women now have separate entrances to the tsaddiq’s room. 26 A rhetoric of Jewish unity characterizes the ideological platform of Shas (Peled 2001). 27 Saints thrive in the periphery, far from urban centers, in other cultures as well. The phenomenon may be tied to distance from foci of religious authority that are generally not eager to adopt the belief in saints (Weingrod 1991: 155).



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Tamar Katriel has compared the kibbutz museums that commemorate the early days of Zionist collective settlements to development towns’ holy sites. The founders of the museums, like the saints’ impresarios, have sought to highlight their stories in the struggle between the commemoration narratives of different groups, following the fissures that have opened up in the metanarrative of Zionist collective memory. See Katriel 1997, 1999. 29 Tel Gerar, the mound containing the remains of the ancient city, is also the site of the tomb of Abu Hureira, a companion of the Prophet Mohammad, and a figure revered by the Bedouin in the Negev. See Bar-Tzvi, Abu-Rabi‘a, and Kresel: 58-60. 30 Many pilgrims visit more than one grave during each trip. According to a survey conducted in 1998, 28 percent of Israel’s Jewish inhabitants visited a tsaddiq’s grave during the previous year, see Haus 1999. 28

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Weber, Max, 1968. On Charisma and Institution Building, edited and Introduction by S.N. Eisenstadt. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1980 Weingrod, Alex, 1991. The Saints are Marching on: A Comparison between North Africa and Israel. In Issachar Ben-Ami (ed.), Studies in the Culture of North African Jews. Jerusalem: The Community of North African Jews. pp. 149-156. [Hebrew] --- 1966. Reluctant Pioneers: Village Development in Israel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. --- 1985. Studies in Israeli Ethnicity: After the Ingathering. New York: Gordon and Breach. --- 1990. The Saint of Beersheba. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Westermarck, Edward. 1926. Ritual and Belief in Morocco. London: Macmillan. Wiener, Aharon. 1978. The Prophet Elijah in the Development of Judaism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Winnicott, Donald W., 1971. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books. Ya’ari, Avraham, 1962. The Origins of the Hillula in Meron. Tarbitz 31: 72-79. [Hebrew] Yarom, Nitza. 1992. Body, Blood and Sexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Saint Francis’ Stigmata and their Historical Context. New York: Peter Lang. Zarfati, Leora, 2000. The Cult of the Saints in Israel at the End of the Millennium: Religiosity, Mysticism, and Modernity. MA Thesis. Tel-Aviv University. [Hebrew] Zempleni, Andreas. 1977. From Symptom to Sacrifice: The Story of Khadi Fall. In Case Studies in Spirit Possession. New York: Willey. pp. 87-170. Zenner, Walter P. 1965. Saints and Piecemeal Supernaturalism among the Jerusalem Sephardim. Anthropological Quarterly 38 (4): 201-217. Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Recovered Roots: The Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zimdars-Swartz, Sandra L. 1991. Encountering Mary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zimmels, Hirsch J. 1975. Ashkenazim and Sephardim. London: Marla. pp. 87-170.

345

Index Abaye and Rabba Abraham the Patriarch Abu-Ḥatsera, Rabbi Baruch Abu-Ḥatsera, Rabbi Ya’aqov Abu-Ḥatsera, Rabbi Yisrael Aḥiya Ha-Shiloni Akiva, Rabbi Aliya (see Immigration) Amulet Amuqa Angel “Announcement to the Public”

Aouriwar, Rabbi Avraham

Archaeological Excavations Ashkenazi Atlas Mountains Auction (in Hillula) Baraka Beit She’an

69, 72, 121 122-123, 125-126, 300, 315, 321 46, 48-49 46, 71-73, 80, 82-83, 89, 91, 95-96, 98, 119, 121, 138, 188, 279, 301 21, 45-46, 49, 58, 150, 314-315 97-98, 125 42, 46, 154-155, 190, 310 61, 247-248, 256-257 7, 42, 48, 109, 118, 318 2, 79, 123-124, 155, 173-174, 179, 191, 256, 300 59, 78-79, 81, 84, 86, 90-91, 123, 125, 127, 142-143, 146-148, 150, 152, 156, 161, 178-179, 181, 269, 282, 299-300 6, 11, 50, 192-196, 200-209, 214-218, 222-223, 225, 227, 230-231, 257, 266, 272, 274, 278-279, 282-283, 287, 290-292, 301-304, 306-307, 309, 318, 320 160-161, 189 9, 23, 30-31, 33, 35, 37-39, 41, 43-44, 49, 53, 57, 97-98, 121, 160, 244 1, 18, 22, 59, 61, 81, 89, 119-120, 123, 129, 147, 199, 209, 299 25, 82, 128, 150, 197, 227 20, 121 5-7, 50, 83, 95, 111, 116, 127, 129-130, 132-136, 138-139, 141-143, 145, 149-151, 153-159, 161, 164-167, 170171, 178-184, 187-188, 190-193, 196, 199, 203, 207, 209, 215-217,

346

Index



Ben-Ami, Issachar

Benayahu Ben-Yehoyada Ben-Baruch, Rabbi David Ben-Ḥamo, Rachel Ben-Ḥayyim, Avraham

Ben-Ḥayyim, Meir Ben-Ḥayyim, Masouda Ben-Ḥayyim, Aliza Ben-Ḥayyim, Shimon Bettleheim, Bruno Bilu, Yoram

Biriya Bled el-Makhzen Bled es-Siba Blindness

223, 225-226, 239, 257, 273, 278, 281-283, 286-287, 295-296, 300, 304-306, 314-315, 318 iv, 20-23, 25-27, 35, 42, 45-46, 50, 5556, 59-60, 63-66, 72, 82, 85, 9394, 96-97, 101, 104, 114, 120-124, 126, 130, 152, 166, 173, 179, 189, 195, 199, 210, 227, 230-231, 268, 309, 314, 320, 322 68, 121 23, 50, 96, 98, 188, 301 51, 155, 184, 186, 192, 226 viii, 1-2, 11, 50, 55, 59, 78-79, 86, 90, 120, 129, 131, 136, 144, 150, 158, 190-191, 213, 228, 231, 273, 280, 285, 298, 300, 309, 320 139 3, 62, 67-69, 73, 75-76, 83, 85, 99-103, 106, 109-110, 112, 117-119, 125, 301 67, 76, 99, 104-108, 112, 115-116, 119 105, 108-111, 115, 119 220-222 1, 4, 6, 8, 25, 42-43, 47, 50, 55-56, 71, 93, 104, 114, 121, 124-125, 129, 131-132, 138, 140, 144, 151-152, 164, 170, 173, 188, 191-192, 194, 212, 228, 230, 232, 244, 247, 250251, 256-257, 268-270, 304, 306, 314-315, 317, 320, 322 3, 68-69, 72 18, 56 18, 56 222

Canaan Housing Project

59, 74, 79, 85-86, 88, 95-96, 98, 105, 118-119, 126, 133, 137-138, 283, 299, 309

Car Accidents

299

347

Casablanca Cave Burial Cave Elijah’s Cave Makhpela Cave (Cave of the Patriarchs) Cemetery Charisma Cinderella Civil Religion Communitas Cultural Relativism Schema David u-Moshe, Rabbi

Demons Depression Desecration of the Sabbath Deshen, Shlomo Development Town

Dhimmi Dove (as Tsaddiq)

129, 133, 194-195, 198, 211, 217, 219, 224-225, 227, 231, 274 45, 69, 72, 107 42 52, 148, 153, 190, 317, 321 46-49, 51, 58, 64-66, 72, 78, 123, 125, 130, 268, 270, 314 20-21, 39, 41-42, 47-49, 78, 93, 102, 118, 131, 147, 151, 165, 182, 229, 289 218-223, 228, 283, 287, 299 10, 38, 40, 315-316 24, 56, 82, 121 293 14, 53, 165, 180 1-7, 10-11, 22, 50, 55, 59-68, 70-79, 81-92, 94-120, 122-127, 129, 131, 133, 136139, 145-146, 148, 151, 155, 182, 187-191, 209, 225-226, 228, 231, 236, 239, 245, 248, 251, 253, 258261, 267, 269, 277-280, 282-283, 285-286, 289-290, 294, 298-299, 301, 308-309, 319, 322 2, 39, 131, 232, 247, 250, 257-258, 268-270 76, 84-85, 139, 183, 232, 234, 237, 244, 269, 280, 293-296 105, 135, 276 17-19, 35-37, 39, 56-57, 121 32-33, 45-46, 56, 60, 67, 78, 127, 160, 188, 215, 223, 280, 282, 300, 313, 315, 320, 323 17-18, 20, 29 179, 192, 196-198, 210, 212, 219, 221222, 227, 250-251, 272, 287, 291

348

Index

Dra Ha-Levi, Rabbi David Dream Biography Community (or community of dreamers)

23, 130, 188

Elazar, Rabbi (Son of Rabbi Shimon) Elijah the Prophet

43, 48, 236, 239, 253, 269, 322 5, 42, 50, 80, 82, 91, 97, 111, 125, 128, 143, 145-147, 150-151, 156, 161, 164, 179, 182-185, 189, 190, 205, 243, 245, 278, 295, 299, 301, 308-310 24, 59, 83, 86-87, 89-91, 94, 108, 110, 122, 154, 195, 221 51, 66, 77, 273, 286

Emissary Essaouira Ethnic, Identity Problem Ezra, Alu Festive Meal

Gamliel, Rabban Garden of Eden (see Paradise) Gate of Paradise

138, 165, 298-299, 306 5, 95, 124, 145, 149, 151-152, 155, 164, 178, 181, 184, 192, 243, 299

10, 36-37, 39, 52, 57 29 viii, 5, 50, 135, 193 71, 92, 95, 110, 128, 143, 145, 150, 152154, 156, 164, 171-172, 179, 181, 183-184, 201-202, 206-207, 225, 227, 279, 301, 305 45, 183-184, 315

Geertz, Clifford General Health Fund Goldberg, Harvey

5-6, 50, 55, 83, 95, 111, 127-130, 133, 137-139, 141-147, 149-152, 154158, 160, 162-178, 180-184, 186187, 191-192, 243, 267, 279-281, 289, 294-295, 299, 301, 305, 308, 310-311, 314-315, 318 12, 19, 155 127 iv, 17-22, 27, 35, 39, 56-58, 120, 282, 316

Hagiography Haglili, Yoseph Ha-Shomer Ashkenazi, Rabbi Daniel Ḥatzor Ha-Glilit

4, 210 44, 58 23, 97-98 45, 314

349

Healing Female Healing



Male Healing

Hillula



Prophet Elijah’s Hillula



Rabbi David u-Moshe’s Hillula Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yoḥai’s Hillua

Holy Place Ḥoni Hame’agel (the Circle-Maker) Ḥouri, Rabbi Ḥayyim

Ifergan, Rabbi Shalom Ifergan, Rabbi Ya’aqov Imi-n-tanout Immigration

Ingathering of Exiles Initiation Integration of Exiles Jerusalem

20, 100, 116, 146, 150, 154, 160-164, 182, 203, 277, 293, 311, 319 15, 172-174, 180, 185, 205, 213, 224, 226, 228, 230, 238-249, 255-259, 264-265, 267-269, 296, 300-301, 303-308, 322 42, 46, 85, 131, 151, 183-184, 206, 214, 270 1, 3-4, 25-26, 28, 34, 36-37, 39-41, 45, 47, 49-50, 56, 60-62, 79-81, 83, 88, 93, 120-121, 125, 137, 142, 153, 156, 179, 189, 193, 196-198, 200, 202, 210211, 213, 221-222, 225, 227-228, 272, 287, 291-292, 306, 314, 320 5, 128, 139, 145, 150, 187-188, 295 59, 71, 82, 85, 89-91, 95-98, 100-101, 103, 108, 111, 118-119, 282, 289, 308 24, 42-44, 46, 58, 63, 96, 117, 119, 192, 195, 229, 238, 278, 302, 310-311 3, 5, 8, 52, 96, 108, 126-127, 143-144, 148-149, 153, 169 45, 58, 138, 188, 314-315 49, 245, 247 48-49 48-49, 58 63-67, 77, 101, 227 10, 29, 31-32, 35, 38-39, 68, 74, 90, 92, 102, 152, 166, 275-276, 281, 283284, 291, 295, 315 28, 30, 116 78, 89, 108, 136, 144, 148-149, 153, 269270, 293, 299, 303 30, 35-39, 283, 313, 318 1, 5, 51-52, 59, 65, 121, 150, 155, 157, 161, 191, 203-204, 207, 209, 215, 217, 299, 314, 316-317, 320

350

Index

Joseph’s tomb

52, 317

Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism)

6, 19, 21-22, 73, 121, 150, 227, 229, 264, 283 47, 68, 129, 318 52, 91, 146-148, 155-157, 189, 299 13, 310

Keren Kayemet (Israel’s National Fund) King David Kleinberg, Aviad Labor Party Lasri, Rabbi Makhluf Lebanon War (1982) Levy, Andre Life Story

Likud Luria, Rabbi Yitzḥak (“ARI”) Marrakesh Masada Meir Ba’al Ha-Nes, Rabbi Mellaḥ Menstrual Period Meron

Midlife Mimouna Mizraḥi Moroccan Jews History in Israel Relationship with Muslims Religiosity

34, 124 150, 155, 163, 193, 195, 225, 227 111, 114 iv, 21-22, 49, 56, 129, 132, 188, 216, 227, 282, 317 6, 15, 23, 59, 117, 127, 165, 194, 209, 217, 219-220, 222-223, 229, 264, 285, 288, 293-294, 299 33-34, 37, 113, 124 42, 121 191 134, 136, 141, 188, 316 7, 42, 46, 70, 95-96, 98, 155, 188, 245 18, 23, 130, 230 110, 209-210, 212, 238, 248, 252, 266, 278 7, 42-44, 58, 63, 70, 73, 95-96, 117118, 122, 160, 192, 229, 234, 236, 238-239, 242, 245, 248-249, 259, 266-267, 269, 277-278, 280, 293, 302, 304, 310, 322 235, 271, 277-278, 280, 284 36, 39, 200 9-10, 29-31, 33-41, 43-45, 49, 53, 5758, 70, 312, 318, 321 17 1, 32, 39, 41, 53, 81, 85, 282-283 20, 32, 56 20, 40, 45, 49, 53, 57, 61, 122-123, 180

351

Saint Worship Renewal Stereotypes Voting Patterns Moses Myth Model Mytho-Poetic Function

17, 19, 25, 28, 34, 41, 63, 120, 173, 229, 313 34, 52, 57 34 72, 123, 144, 155, 234-235, 301, 321 218, 223 298-299

Naḥman of Braslav, Rabbi

52, 185 46-49, 51, 58, 150, 242, 314-315

Objectification Ohana, Ya’ish Ohana, Hannah

292, 294, 297 viii, 5, 50, 111, 122, 127, 153-154 5, 136-137, 141-142, 145, 151-152, 154158, 169-170, 173-174, 180-181, 183 25, 61, 82, 86-87, 128, 146, 165, 172-173, 185, 205, 207, 224, 243, 245-247, 249-254, 256, 260-263, 265, 269 129-130, 132-133, 227, 272-273, 287

Netivot

Oil

Oulad Mansour Paradise

Personal Symbol Physician (Doctor) Pilgrimage

Pinto, Family of Post-Modernism Potential Space Prophet

5, 123, 127, 132, 137-138, 145, 148, 153155, 157, 166, 170, 177, 183, 191, 234, 286-287, 295, 299 13-15, 17, 53, 155, 213, 223, 274, 285-291, 293-298, 311 74, 162-164, 173-174, 179, 191, 208, 231, 233, 237, 300 3, 14, 20, 24-25, 27, 41-46, 48, 58-60, 64, 73, 82, 92, 95, 98, 103, 106, 109, 115-117, 120-121, 130, 195, 216, 223, 229, 233, 269, 282, 308-309, 311, 315-318 23, 49, 51, 188, 243, 322 9, 48, 53, 55 271 5, 20, 42, 50, 52, 66, 69, 80, 82, 91, 97, 104, 111, 122-123, 125-128, 131, 139, 143-147, 150-151, 153, 156, 161, 164, 173, 179, 182-185, 189-190, 205,

352

Index

Protectorate Psychological Anthropology

243, 245, 278, 286, 295, 299, 301302, 308-310, 317, 323 18, 21-22, 24, 27, 29, 31 11, 55-56, 223, 271

Qa’id (Governor) Quest Myth

64, 77, 299 88

Rabbi David u-Moshe’s Abode Rachel the Matriarch Rachel’s (the Matriarch) Tomb Rachel’s (Rabbi Akiva’s wife) Tomb Rebirth Reiner, Elchanan Religious Penitence Revelation

239 186, 245, 247, 300 52, 317 46, 310 89-92, 148-149, 190, 270 iv, 42, 122, 148, 310, 322 144 6-9, 11-12, 15, 63-65, 70, 73, 76-78, 8285, 90, 93-94, 98-105, 109, 113-114, 122, 125, 127, 130, 136, 138-154, 157-158, 160-161, 163-164, 168-169, 178-182, 190, 196, 202, 205-206, 209-213, 216-217, 220, 227-228, 234-238, 243, 269, 272, 274, 276281, 283, 286, 288-292, 294-296, 298-299, 301-304, 310, 312, 314 102, 135, 175

Ritual Bath Sacred Geography Safed

Saints (Tsaddiqim) as Family Members Saints’ Impresarios (Saints’ Agents)

48, 54, 284, 301, 309-310, 319 1-3, 5, 7, 42, 45, 48, 50, 59-60, 62-64, 6768, 70, 77-79, 81, 85-86, 88-90, 95, 101, 107-109, 111, 113-114, 116, 118120, 124, 126-127, 132-133, 136-138, 181-182, 190, 209, 225, 228, 239, 269, 281, 283, 308-309, 320 69, 78, 103, 131, 277, 285-286, 294, 302 5, 7, 10-13, 15-16, 24, 59, 69-70, 74, 78, 134-138, 141, 165, 168, 181, 186, 191, 209, 213, 215, 217-218, 225, 226, 230, 234-235, 238, 243,

353

Saints’ Legends

Saint Worship (Cult) as Female Religion in Israel



in Morocco

Samuel’s Tomb Seb Secularization Settat Shokeid, Moshe Shimon Bar-Yohai, Rabbi (RaSHbY)

Shas (Party) Sibling Rivalry Six Day War (1967) Skoura Sorcery (Witchcraft) Spirit Possession Suissa, Esther Synagogue

264, 269, 271-293, 296-305, 807309, 311-312, 314, 319, 321-323 14, 16, 42, 45, 65, 68, 72-73, 101, 104, 121, 148, 152, 189, 218-220, 282283, 295, 299, 320 13, 26-28, 41, 285, 301 6, 25, 50, 56, 243, 274, 294, 300, 306-307 iii-iv, 7, 22, 33-35, 37-42, 46, 48-53, 55, 58, 69-70, 73, 81, 83, 86, 92, 109, 120, 122, 124, 128, 145, 163, 179, 229, 308-310, 312, 314-317, 322 iii, 2, 7, 17, 19-21, 24, 39, 41, 46, 64, 145, 179, 190, 219, 221, 227, 292293, 313 317 230, 243-247, 249-251, 254-256, 258, 260, 269 27-28, 35, 38, 276 195, 198 iv, 18-19, 36, 39, 42, 56-57 6-7, 22, 24, 42, 44, 46, 50, 56, 63, 70, 73, 83, 95-96, 98, 119, 121-122, 125, 138, 155, 188, 192, 195, 225, 229-233, 239, 241, 243, 245, 259261, 264, 267, 269, 274, 277, 288, 290, 293-294, 300-301, 309-310, 312, 318, 322 33-34, 37-38, 312, 322 72, 96, 98, 149, 286 45, 200, 314, 316 230-231, 245, 268, 274 244, 250, 252-255, 257, 262, 270 268 iv, 6, 44, 50, 229, 241, 263 1, 22, 26, 34-35, 43, 47, 59, 61, 66, 70-72, 83, 100, 111, 116, 128, 130, 132-135, 139-140, 143, 145-146, 150-151, 154, 156, 158, 162, 170,

354

Index

179, 182, 207, 249, 272-273, 279280, 289, 320

Timsut, Rabbi Ya’aqov Tsur, Yaron

33, 37, 296 17, 45, 60, 136, 156-157, 161, 163, 310, 315-317, 319 5, 7, 42, 46, 69-70, 92, 95, 154-155, 190, 310 64, 115 73, 78, 83, 103-104, 113, 131, 273, 277, 280, 286, 294 65, 299 28-29, 32, 57, 277

Wazana, Rabbi Ya’aqov Weingrod, Alex Work of Culture

50, 55, 230, 268, 322 31, 35, 40, 47, 49, 57, 247, 313, 322 13, 290

Yavneh Yeruḥam

44-46, 120, 141, 183, 281, 309, 315 6, 50, 116, 224, 228-229, 233, 238239, 242, 248, 257, 260, 264, 267, 301, 309, 311, 318 246, 249-256, 258-259, 261-263, 266 40, 45, 59, 85, 103, 118, 200, 314, 316 7, 42, 48, 68, 109-110, 121, 247, 269, 318

Tami (Party) Temple Tiberias Timsut, Rabbi Shlomo (the First) Timsut, Rabbi Shlomo (the Second)

Yolk (as Diagnostic Material) Yom Kippur War (1973) Yonatan Ben-Uziel Zekhut Avot (familial merit) Zionism Ziyyara Zohar (Book of Splendor)

20, 64, 129, 230, 286, 289 30, 35, 40, 85, 313, 315 24, 44-45, 103, 130 22, 42, 56, 60, 97, 123, 125, 140, 207, 229, 269-270

355

356

Index