Lag B'omer Hiloula

by Ruth Knafo Setton

Hiloula: (Aramaic): Festivity, especially a wedding celebration. Later the term was also used for the anniversary of the death of famous rabbis and scholars because such occasions were often celebrated by popular pilgrimages and rejoicings. ...The death of a saintly man is a kind of "mystical marriage" with God. (Encyclopedia Judaica)

On a spring night in Morocco, under a full gold moon, the tombstones are petrified animals poised to strike. Lanterns lead the way to the white-domed shrine, or koubba, of the saintly rabbi known for his miracles. People run in and out of large tents erected around the koubba and the Jewish cemetery a few yards away. I smell the michoui, fragrant grilled lamb marinated in olive oil, mint and cumin, cooking on open charcoal fires. At the gates, old rabbis sit at tables and collect money for the poor. Sellers of oil lamps and crippled beggars squat on their heels. Old women bear amulets, hamsas and messages from the future: the marketing of hopes and dreams.

Around the koubba, men sway and chant from the Zohar. Over a hundred pilgrims dance and sing around an enormous fire built on charcoal rocks, or kneel to throw in handfuls of candles, entire cardboard boxes of candles at a time, and watch them erupt in flames. Jewish and Arab women huddle near the flames, praying, then kissing their candles and throwing them in with both hands. Every few minutes the women interrupt their prayers to trill the fierce, penetrating "you-you" sound, fingertips vibrating against their tongues.

I tell myself to be an anthropologist. To stand back and witness these people, descendants of the Hebrew wanderers. Faces glowing red and burnt-orange, arms raised to heaven, voices crying through the night. The heat of the fire, the sultry night, and full moon. Pilgrims crouch on rocks, squat near the fire, sway in prayer, dance in ecstasy. A dance of death--next to tombstones, invoking a dead man's prayers to an elusive God. The flames of the huge fire lick at my soul, the songs and mystical chants insinuate their way through me until I hear them from within, as though they have bypassed my ears and entered through the flesh. I find my own rock and cling to it with my toes, and stare into the fire. Beneath the cries and prayers, my teeth chatter.

I remind myself to remain an observer, but I'm shivering--every part of me: legs, arms, even lips. Maybe no time has passed: we are still in the desert, waiting for Moses to return and tell us what God wants from us. The Golden Calf? Or moral behavior?

* * *

In hiloula, the saint is an intermediary, one who obliterates the borders that separate us from each other, and from God. Hiloula is an extension of the powerful belief that a holy person, while never losing his or her humanity, is the matchmaker in a wedding between God and humans. His spirit returns, and he listens to our prayers and carries them back to God. Since the time of the great Kabbalist, Isaac Luria, in the sixteenth century, Jews have gone on Lag b'Omer to the traditional graves of Simeon bar Yohai and his son, Rabbi Eleazar, in Meron, in the Galilee, where they would "eat, drink, and be merry." Even Luria himself "brought his small son there together with his whole family and they cut his hair there, according to the well-known custom and they spent a day of feasting and celebration." (Rabbi Hayyim Vital)

In my novel, The Road to Fez, I created the fictional Rabbi Abraham ben Avram, a composite of real-life Moroccan saints:

"He was known for performing many miracles. A mystic who talked to animals and turned himself invisible, he flew like a bird when he had to prevent a disaster. Once he even stopped time, just to save a little boy. He looked at you and knew in a moment if you told the truth or not. He touched you, and you were cured of whatever ailed you. At dawn he talked to God. At night he sang in his courtyard, and everyone came to listen. They gathered outside, under the fig tree, and he sang to them of God and miracles and hope. You listened and you cried. When the music stopped, you still heard his oud, his voice vibrating through the sky."

And what first drew me to the nineteenth century Moroccan-Jewish martyr-saint, Suleika, whose story forms the heart of The Road to Fez, was that when I went to the Jewish cemetery of Fez, I saw Muslim and Jewish women weeping and praying at her tomb, lighting candles, and offering her couscous and lucky hamsas. In saint hierarchy, she is too minor (too female) to have her own hiloula; prayers to her are devoted to pregnancy, birth, miscarriage, illness in the family, menstrual cramps: women's stuff. Even though Suleika was executed in 1834, at the age of seventeen, for refusing to renounce her faith, contemporary women sense her baraka, the mystical ability to transcend borders imposed by humans.

Arab women. Jewish women. Side by side. Praying to a dead teenage girl. In death, obliterating the border that in life she couldn't cross.

* * *

"Pray for a miracle!" a woman shouts, thrusting a box of candles in my hands. "Tonight prayers come true!"

I tear open the box. It's filled with stubby, smooth white candles. Made of cheap wax, the kind that sticks to clothing and flesh, and erupts instantly into flame. Okay, here goes. I throw a candle in the fire. For you, Suleika: for you, my sister, my obsession for so long. It dissolves immediately, lost in the waves of fire licking the sky. I fumble in the box, pull out another candle and throw it: for my father. Another one: for my mother.for my whole family. By now I'm throwing in a few candles at once, watching them spurt and burst into flame, each small explosion giving satisfaction. More, more. Without turning away from the fire, I grab three and toss them in, not sure if I'm silently mouthing words or shouting like everyone else. One candle remains: for me, help me find my truth. I stand like the others, watch the flames, wait for a sign.

What are you doing? Where is the anthropologist in you? Are you losing your mind, praying into a fire?

Freezing again, I turn from the flames and search the island of orange-lit faces surrounding me, this island in the dark, the saddest, most magnificent sight I've ever seen: beauty and rage and a demand to be heard. Eyes closed in ecstasy, or raised in perfect trust to the sky. Mouths trilling the "you-you," open in song, muttering prayers under their breath. Here is the soul of religion, stripped of its civilized trappings--its buildings, prayer books and committees, its rules, laws and codes.

These people are stained-glass windows bursting into flame. They are the true temple, the sacred scrolls and letters, the lights that burn without oil for eight days. These people have burned--and are still burning--for a sign from God--without having been fed a miracle, a signal, anything, for over a thousand years! The true miracle is in them, in us: our clawing, desperate need to create meaning and beauty and order out of chaos, to impose a pattern of justice and judgment over the random and brutal. We ourselves are the miracle, but on this dazzling spring night, we forget that--or maybe we never knew it. And so, we throw in our candles and shout our prayers, and wait.

A shrill voice pierces the night: "Ha wa ja! Ha wa ja! Dao'dyalna!" He is here! The saint is here. Our light is here!

Then a man screams: "Now! It's midnight! Pray now! The saint hears you. Now, oh God, now!"

The cry reaches the moon. The world stops. Prayers and songs break off in mid-breath. Flames halt in their dance to the sky.

And slowly, the sky fills with our prayers.
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