Yoram Bilu, The Saints' Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers and Holy Men in Israel's Urban Periphery.
Samra, Myer
Yoram Bilu, The Saints' Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers and Holy Men in Israel's Urban Periphery (Translated by Haim Watzman). Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010: iv, 354. ISBN 978-1934843-71-0.
Originally published in Hebrew by Haifa University Press in 2005 under the title Shoshvine ha-kedoshim, the manuscript for this work won the Bahat Prize for the best academic book in Hebrew in 2003. The "impresarios" of the title are in fact a number of Jewish men and women, all of them born in Morocco, who have come to host the spirits of holy men (tsaddiqim) in their homes. All the impresarios had migrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s and were housed in outlying settlements, far from Israel's major cities. All had come from a cultural milieu suffused with a reverence for holy men and a tradition among Moroccan Jews and Muslims alike of visiting the graves of such "saints."
Avraham Ben-Hayyim, living in the Canaan housing estate at the edge of the holy city of Safed, is the first of the impresarios encountered. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, he is visited in dreams by Rabbi David U-Moshe, a popular miracle-worker from Morocco. Since the emigration of Jews from Morocco, the Rabbi's grave is seldom visited by his devotees. He has consequently decided to follow them to Israel, and directs Avraham to set aside a room in his family's crowded apartment for the Rabbi. Avraham publicises this and his home becomes a shrine, visited by thousands of people seeking the Rabbi's blessing. We learn that thirty years after Rabbi David U-Moshe's initial appearance, he continues to attract pilgrims from across Israel to the Ben-Hayyim home. Avraham has a photograph of the Rabbi's grave in the room he has allocated to the Rabbi, and--surely a sign of the success of the venture--there is a photograph of the shrine in the Canaan Housing Project at Rabbi David U-Moshe's grave in Morocco.
The second impresario is Ya'ish Ohana, who in 1979 announced to the world that Elijah the Prophet revealed to him in dreams that the Gate to Paradise lay in the backyard of his modest home in the town of Beit She'an. There is a Talmudic tradition that links Beit She'an, then renowned for the fertility of its land, with Paradise, and soon many people reported dreams supporting Ya'ish's claims. Ya'ish comes to build a small synagogue and a religious school in his yard, which also becomes a centre of pilgrimage and spiritual healing.
This site has not retained its hallowed status as conflict between Ya'ish and other dreamers diminish its popularity over time, and in 1997, the complex was destroyed by fire. However, Rachel Ben-Hamo, a resident of Beit She'an who had been a regular visitor to Ya'ish's Gate of Paradise, assumed the role of a healer, specialising in problems of childlessness, with the assistance of Elijah. In a dream, he intimates to her a rebuke of Ya'ish for not having been careful in ensuring the ritual purity of women who approached the site, by immersing in a mikveh following menstruation.
Whereas the two male impresarios provided a place of worship and communion with their respective saints, the female impresarios we meet have operated as healers, thanks to the powers they have received from their saints. Bilu likens Alu Ezra's life story to Cinderella's. Having lived happily in the bosom of her family as a small child, her situation changed dramatically at eight years of age after her mother died. The father left her with relatives, and then placed her in service with a family where she was harshly treated by the mistress.
When the family participated in the pilgrimage to the grave of Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar, she was told she could not attend the holy site but must remain in their tent to look after the children. A blind old lady from the next tent offers to care for the children and urges Alu to go to the grave site. There, Alu sees a white dove, apparently a manifestation of the saint, and she is the only person to have seen him. Although celebrated by the crowd, her employer scolds her for her disobedience. At the onset of puberty, she is cast out by her mistress.
Many years later, living in Beit She'an in Israel, after her child bearing days were over, Alu again encounters Rabbi Aouriwar, this time in a dream. She had been ill for 3 weeks, and the Rabbi helped her recover her health. Rabbi Aouriwar directs her to set aside a room for him in her humble home, where Alu treats people who come to seek her help with remedies revealed to her by the saint.
Alu recounts how one woman travelled to Morocco to visit her son, and pleaded with him to visit Rabbi Avraham Aouriwar's grave. "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."
The last impresario discussed by Bilu is Esther Suissa. Like the others since settling in Israel, she has lived in a housing project, in the southern Negev township of Yeruham. Esther suffered demonic possession in her early married life, but eventually was able to heal herself, with the support of Shimon Bar-Yohai, a sage from the second century, reputedly a great Cabbalist and the author of the Zohar. With inspiration from Bar-Yohai, Esther treats people who come to her with various anxieties, marital problems and barrenness.
Trained in both anthropology and psychology, Bilu provides a masterly analysis of each of his impresarios, exploring their personal histories, crises they have faced, the social setting in Morocco and the role saints played there, the changing fortunes of their Israeli hometowns, changes in their material conditions and in Israel's political and religious culture.
Bilu notes similarities and differences among his impresarios. While the women function as healers, assisted by their familiar saints, the men have provided a place for people to come to pray and to entreat the tsaddiqim for favour. Avraham Ben-Hayyim and Alu Ezra have transported Moroccan saints to Israel, thereby 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." The other impresarios have adopted historical figures from Israel, known and revered by Jews of all backgrounds. Bilu asserts the processes at work here are not simply the implantation of Moroccan notions of the saints into their new environment but rather developments that have taken place in the Israeli context. While Moroccans are prominent among the devotees of the saints discussed here, and in commemoration of other holy figures throughout Israel, people of different national and ethnic backgrounds have worshipped in the Abode of Rabbi David U-Moshe and at the Gate of Paradise, or consulted the female impresarios to overcome critical concerns.
In a different context, one might consider placing psychiatric labels on some of the behaviours exhibited by the impresarios. Here they have a certain logic, evident in the fact that a significant body of individuals can relate to them and accept their validity. As Bilu observes in the context of the "community of dreamers," who like Ya'ish dreamt of the Gate of Paradise in his yard: ... the dream, which in modern psychology is conceived 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.
This book is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of religious developments within Israel and the processes of adjustment and accommodation to the State experienced by a segment of its population. More broadly, it contributes to our knowledge and understanding of the significance given to dreams, healing practices and cults of saints to human beings everywhere. I thoroughly recommend it.
