Authors: Mois Benarroch
He sat down and began writing an article entitled “Borges, Couscous and the Library of Babylonia,” in which he declared Borges the best Moroccan poet of all time and in which he explained, in great and convincing detail, that in its heart of hearts, the great library was the Torah.
Brosh said nothing. He concealed the article in his library until his grandson’s wedding.
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T
HE DISTANCE
It has been a year that I have attempted to get to Lucena. It is three hours away but there is no way. There is always something in the way. As if I wanted to do something positive for mankind and God forbids it. As if the world depended on my travelling to Lucena, a tiny village almost a city, as the books and the internet page say. A city where the birth rate is increasing, a city which is progressing by industrial standards. But I, I don’t want to see its present state, I want to see its past. I want to see there my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. I want to see the door whose key I have kept in the strongbox. I want to see the marks in the dirt, in the mud and in the cement. I want to hear the shrieks from the day of abandonment, and the cries of joy when the man from which I came was born. I want to smell the food from Friday slowly cooking for hours until ¿Saturday midday. I want to see the dress the day before the wedding. I want to see the underground synagogue, subterranean like the true Lucena. I want to see the battle after which the Jews fled. Did they fight? Or did they leave like the Jews always do, with their heads down and without their worldly goods, seeking a new road and a place to rest their heads? Did they perhaps expect the coming times? I want to see and hear the songs which they wrote there, the songs which were heard among the trees in the snowy winters of Lucena. I want to see my rabbis. Oh my rabbis! Where are you? Where are you, with all your knowledge of astrology, astronomy, and all the sciences? Where are you: knowledgeable of languages and marvelous translators? Where are you? Where are my Sephardic rabbis? My poetic rabbis? Where are you composers of verse?
Today I feel like an orphan from you, I feel like an orphan without anybody of sufficient size to guide my questions. I feel orphaned from you because you were the intellectuals who taught us to walk. Today there are sighted, excavators of tombs and fabricators of amulets but I don’t have anything to do with them. They are as far from me as Lucena is far from me. As Lucena is far from herself. They are as far from me as the distance between Sefarad and Lucena and the Israel of today. They are as far as the distance between Mugador and Tetúan, like the distance between Bagdad and Granada they are as distant as from Tblisi and Córdoba. Everything is far from me. The Jews closest to me lived in the eleventh century in Lucena.
AND, A BREATH OF GOD
It was the most disquieting dream I have ever had in my life. I am in Jerusalem, on the terrace of a house and suddenly my book isn’t clear because the letters have all been placed in a different order. I look at my book but I don’t understand anything. But it is my book. Suddenly it all becomes clear. Each word, suddenly takes on its own, different, meaning. The words have attained their own, independent existence. There is a very fearsome darkness. And then I understand it is the end. We all expect the end. And I go walking down a street and I see rabbi Stawski and I tell him, “Well, this is it. It’s the end.” And he looks at me. I ask him where he had been up to now, and he doesn’t answer me. And then I ask him if I can overcome this. And I know that very soon there will be a big, instantaneous explosion, and he agrees, and tells me I don’t have to worry.
And then there is a big explosion which isn’t dynamite or atomic; but a spiritual explosion wherein part of the humanity appears up above and the other remains on earth. Up there, there is no need for oxygen and we are as light as a feather. And we all have to look forward. And I don’t know if my family is with those up above or if they have stayed with those down below. And underneath us we see a sea.
And then I see a woman who is disrobing. She has beautiful black hair. And her pubic hair is short and formed in a line. And she says that if we are there we must go in the water. We go in but nobody says anything. She continues into the water and then it becomes evident that it is a cloud. And she falls down, to earth.
We are all very frightened. I wake up and feel the presence of the dream very strongly in my home.
WHO ARE YOU?
-I am the son of the head.
-Where are you going?
-Every day I travel from head to feet. Sometimes I also return.
-Where were you born?
-On the seashore. I grew up thanks to the smell of the salt.
-You are the shore from birth to death.
-I am shore, salt, and water.
-What will you call your son?
-Salt of the earth.
-Your son will be a foreigner in every city.
-Only in the sea will he feel part of the world.
THE SEVENTH DAY
I am the man who saw the sea inflamed with the shouts of your ancestors, fathers of your fathers, from those who created you and from those who disappeared on the way. Samuel, never forget those who disappeared on the way, those who were fodder for fishes, those whose seed disappeared. Those who had no descendants. Those who travelled to the end of the road. Don’t forget the women whose uterus did not produce children. Never, ever, forget those whose uterus did not open up.
Samuel, I saw sons, sons of sons, great grandsons, sons of great grandsons, grandsons of grandsons. I have so much sorrow in me that I could have filled this sea with joy. There is, in me, so much sorrow that I could have filled this sea all over again.
I also saw joy, my son. I say happiness, I saw births, and death of an elder of advanced age, nevertheless the death of an elder in our people is the occasion of great joy. When one of us arrives at an advanced old age we have huge celebrations. No one but us knows the importance of the years, of life. So many deaths force us to love life.
Until not so long ago our children were like dust in the air, small children, like clay in the hands of the one who creates the depraved mind, sent to threaten on the ocean, to change into fellers of trees and into good Christians. At the age of two they were kidnapped and their mothers preferred to kill them rather than have them baptized as Christians.
The world wants us to forget, wants you to forget. The Jews want you to forget, the gentiles want you to forget, the Ashkenazi’s want you to forget and the Sephardi want you to forget. But there is no power in the world strong enough to keep a man like you from remembering. And if just one remembers Lucena will continue to exist. If just one man remembers, all of our world of Lucena and Granada continue existing and subsisting. If only one man remembers, the past shall be converted into the present. If just one man remembers, his ancestors continue to live in his memories if just one man remembers; the past is converted into the present. Always struggle against forgetting.
I do hope you now understand the first day otherwise you have not wanted to listen. You will live one thousand years. Be wary of doctors. They are the only ones who can do you harm. Be careful with fire and avoid gallows. Live a simple life without standing out. Now you will face more dangers than existed in my time. Avoid x-rays and don’t live in an area close to radioactivity. I’m sure things will come up for you that I haven’t even dreamed about. Make every effort not to become well-known. And when the time comes, try to save yourself the best way you can. Success and power are merchandise that are very difficult to get rid of. Every forty years, distance yourself from people. Go to the mountains, to an isolated place where no one can see you in the state you will be in. Under no circumstances let doctors get their hands on you. How do I know you will live a thousand years? I know those who are like you. I have found others like you. All the excesses that you have lived with your friends and acquaintances up to now came up because your time is different from theirs. The rhythm of a thousand year man is different from the rhythm of one who lives seventy eight years.
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A
SHKABA
Lucena died here, in Jerusalem. Here the Sephardic culture was buried. What the Inquisition could not do, nor a thousand years of exile, nor five hundred years of Muslim domination the Ashkenazi’s managed to destroy in under a hundred years. They kept out of sight all the poets of old, and silenced those of today. They made the rabbis unrecognizable, turned the people into criminals and police to entertain them. They simplified history and called the grand creations folklore.
Perhaps you have found this book by accident. The members won’t talk about it, or the professors, or the literary critics. You have most likely stumbled on it accidentally, forgotten, in some nook in a book store. It is your destiny, like that of the Sephardi’s. They struggled against us, and they destroyed us. And for all those years we didn’t even know there was a war. And when we awoke, we had no arms or legs. And the head was unable to comprehend the magnitude of the moment. Some of us just continued on in our wheel chairs receiving a few crumbs and thinking we should be grateful we had something to eat. Others left the country we had dreamed of, and others, we simply went mad.
No major publishing house will publish this book. So it will not be a major book. It will not be important because the Ashkenazi’s will not publish it because in it, it is said that their existence is no more than an irritating grain of sand in the eyes of the Sephardim. That the whole dead culture survived better without them, than with them. What is left of one hundred years of Zionism? Ridiculous singers singing Ladino songs on a television program. Madmen who talk of the past, of what life was alongside the Muslims. What the Holocaust could not accomplish with the Jewish culture of Salonica, Zionism managed to destroy.
It is the annihilation and the funeral of my culture. In Jerusalem and in Tel-Aviv Lucena has been destroyed. Here my rabbis and my poets have died. Here my protests and words were silenced. Here what I speak of is not understood. Here, in the Jerusalem of which I had dreamed, here, not in exile.
Yitgadal ve-yitkadash shimjá
, Great and Blessed be Your Name.
If there remains the possibility of resurrecting the dead, it will not be in Jerusalem. Possibly in Madrid, or in New York. Perhaps in London, or in Paris. The Ashkenazi’s have declared war on us and won, without us even knowing.
May God our Father and the God of our fathers accept me and accept my attempt to remember my ancestors, the rabbis of the rabbis, those of us who lost our way and fell into the nets of Christianity. My unsuccessful attempts to forgive the Ashkenazi’s who caused the damage they caused us. Give us new and vigorous generations who can see what Lucena did not see in our final days. That which I would prefer not to see.
A
shkabaPrayer in memory of the dead.
AzifúIn Haquetiya, pornography.
Embolico [los]In Haquetiya, they mess them up.
Bar-mitzvaIn Judaism, the ceremony which is carried out when the boy reaches age thirteen (13 yrs.) at which time he is required to observe all the commandments and to begin to participate in the community’s religious life. For girls, the ceremony takes place at age twelve (12) and is called Bat-mitzva.
Jatimá továGreetings for the New Year which is spoken the night of Yom Kippur.
Kaddish/KadishAramaic Word meaning “saint.” In reality it is not strictly a prayer for the dead but it is a prayer for consecration and praising God, asking for His kingdom to arrive on earth.
Se aplica con carácter especial a los alimentos que, según la tradición religiosa, pueden ser consumidos.
KashrutThe collection of Jewish dietary laws.
KiddushAt home prayer for the sanctification of the Sabbath and holy days. It is recited over wine before dinner on the eve of the holy day.
Meretz An Israeli parliamentary group of the center left created in 1992 from the joining of three distinct political groups. The three parties making up Meretz support the Arab-Israeli peace efforts and reject religious coercion.
MikveRitual purification bath by immersion in “living water.”
MinyanThis is the name for the ten males which are necessary to be able to celebrate public liturgy.
Passover/PésajCommemoration of the exodus of Jews from Egypt. It is also known as the Feast of Salvation or the Feast of Spring for its correlation with the cycle of agriculture, or the Feast of Unleavened Bread for the unleavened bread which is consume don those days in memory of the bread which did not have time to raise and the Jews had to eat in exile. On the first Paschal night the Seder takes place, a festive family ceremony within the tradition.
Pirké AvotLiterally “Words of the Fathers.” It is one of the treatises (= doctrine), of great importance in Jewish liturgy whose contents if moral/religious.
RASHIAcronym of Rabbi Shlomo Ben Itshak (1040-1105), founder of an important school of exegetica (critical explanation) and commentator on most of the books of the Bible.
Sajén, sajenáIn Haquetiya, neighbor.
Shemá Israel‘Hear Israel’ is the prayer through antonomasia, one of the rubrics of the daily liturgy in Judaism and the approach to affirmation of the creed. It is recited two times per day on rising and on retiring at night.
SidurBook of Prayers.
SnogaIn Haquetiya, synogogue.
SucotFeast of the tabernacles. Celebration in which remembering the shacks where the Jews lived during the exodus from Egypt. Shacks are constructed on patios, terraces, gardens, community centers at the end of Kippur.
TalmudRabbinical work formed a group of commentaries on theTorah. It is a reading manual on the Torah in which, in parts, appear divergent opinions. Tam Rabbi Tam. Name by which a famous rabbi is known, Jacob Ben Meír (1100-1171).
Tishá be-AvThe Fast of Mourning, commemoration as much of the destruction of the temples of Jerusalem: the first in 586 BC by the Babylonians, and the second in 70 AD by the Romans –as well as other misfortunes occurring to the Jewish people in the diaspora: The expulsion from Castilla and Aragon (1492) and the Russian Pogroms (1903