In 1998 I traveled with Bill to Morocco. I liked Bill a lot. He was a smart, gentle, shy, unassuming man. He cared for me too, but we weren’t in love. We had fun together while it lasted.
On a main street, somewhere in Casablanca, on the façade of a yellowish building blanketed by the sun, I saw a plaque that read:
Docteur TYAL Mohamed Hachem Psychiatre
Maladies Neuro-Psychologiques et Psychiques
Des Troubles des Conduites Alimentaires (Obésité, Boulimie, Anorexie)
I didn’t think Morocco had Western problems. The country was majority Muslim. The airport was devoid of advertising. Emaciated, scantily clad women were nowhere to be seen. How could eating disorders exist here? What did I know? I didn’t know anything.
Bill and I headed south to Marrakesh. We wandered around the ancient city, enjoying the gorgeous sun-soaked morning. Men constantly approached us, offering to lead us around. “Guide, guide,” they’d say at every turn. We wanted to navigate the terrain alone, though we understood why they kept asking. We were Westerners, travelers with money and they needed the business. We turned them down again and again. But when a thin, middle-aged, balding man proposed the mellah—the Jewish quarter—we agreed.
He led us through narrow streets that resembled secret passageways, past gorgeous mosques with ornate minarets, luscious gardens, and colorful, geometric mosaics until we arrived at the Jewish cemetery surrounded by a stone wall. There were row after row of horizontal, coffin-shaped tombstones without epigraphs. Nameless, faceless graves added to the sense of a forgotten population, remnants of a vibrant community. For centuries Jews and Muslims lived harmoniously in Morocco, until two post-World War II events—Israel’s founding and Morocco’s independence from France—instigated violence against Jews. In the 1940s, Morocco had approximately 265,000 Jews, the largest Jewish population in a Muslim country. By the 1990s, about five thousand Jews remained in Morocco. Today, there are around two thousand. As with the conflict in Israel/Palestine, there are many competing narratives of what occurred. Some Moroccans say Jews didn’t have to leave, that they were persuaded by the nascent Israeli nation to make Aliyah. Jews say violence perpetrated against them by Moroccans caused their exodus.
Bill tipped the guide.
The guide looked at the coins in his hand. “For you, it’s not much.”
Bill gave the man another dirham, and he left.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a partially blind, diminutive rabbi appeared. He was dressed in a loose white linen set and brown leather sandals. One eye was glassed over, cloudy, wandering, drifting, the other eye sharp, alert, focused on us. “Est-ce que vos parents sont toujours vivants?”
I don’t remember how I understood that he asked if my parents were still alive. It’s almost like I sensed this would be his question. Or how I mustered the ability to construct a response in French.
“Mon père est mort.” My mother was still living, but my dad was long gone. I was ten and in a flash he dropped dead in front of me on a visiting day in my 5th grade classroom. He was forty-six. Gone from my life was also his observance, belief, spirituality, the sacred sense of Judaism he’d been bestowing on me by example, with warmth and love.
The rabbi, a woven blue, yellow, and purple kippah on his head, recited the Kaddish, an ancient Aramaic mourner’s prayer:
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di v’ra chir’utei; v’yamlich malchutei b’hayeichon u-v’yomeichon, uv’hayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba-agala u-vi-z’man kariv, v’imru…
I stood still, overwhelmed, moved, transported. The rhythm, cadence, and lugubrious tone of Aramaic, a language that predates Hebrew, resonated deep inside me. My world became self-contained. I saw and heard nothing around me except for him and his prayer. My body relaxed, releasing a stabbing ache in my gut, the center of my grief, where I tried to mask my pain by overeating.
I didn’t know the meaning of the mourner’s prayer. I preferred ignorance though, content just to listen to the sounds of this plodding, soothing, wailing prayer for the bereaved.
I first heard the Kaddish when I was at my father’s funeral, shell-shocked, not knowing how to make sense of what happened, my world turned upside down. I heard it over the years for all the people I lost subsequently, more than seemed my fair share, if one could even talk about death and loss in those terms. I have only heard the Kaddish in New York City. No one I knew ever died outside New York, my home, my place of deep connection, trauma, and history.
How did the rabbi know I yearned for this recognition, this spiritual connection to my father and Judaism, when I didn’t realize it myself? Was it standard practice for him to ask anyone who came by if he could say the Kaddish for them? Probably. Allen Ginsberg wrote Kaddish when grieving his mother, an epic poem still relevant today. Hitler, fascism, Buchenwald course through Ginsburg’s poem, through his mother’s breakdowns. But then went half mad—Hitler in her room, she saw his mustache in the sink.
Both sides of my family came to New York in the 1800s, fleeing Eastern European pogroms, long before the Nazis. Distant relatives died in the Holocaust, but we didn’t know their names.
Being Jewish was like being part of something almost inescapable. Not that I wanted to escape it, I just didn’t want it to define me. But it seemed to, whether I desired it or not. In New York City, being Jewish was not exceptional. The city’s culture and language were infused with Jewish influence, part of my identity, but not the only part. I was a proud New Yorker, raised on the inclusive, diverse, multi-cultural Upper West Side of Manhattan. I described myself as an Upper West Sider, a New Yorker before anything else.
But here I was in Marrakesh, brought right back to the core of my being, to my father, through a mourner’s prayer more than 2000 years old.
Today, there is still so much to mourn—the slaughter of European Jews, the exodus of Jews from Morocco, the October 7th massacre of Israelis by Hamas, and the Israeli army’s horrifying destruction of Gaza, the backlash for not being “pro-Israel” enough, or “pro-Palestinian” enough, the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia, rape, lost limbs, orphaned children, division, intractability, rise in Fascism, rounded up immigrants, climate catastrophe.
In 2020, Morocco and Israel normalized relations. If the wound between Jews and Muslims in Morocco can heal, perhaps other ancient wounds can heal, too.
“Merci,” I said to the rabbi. As Bill and I walked away, I, at least, felt momentarily healed from a trauma that had laid dormant. I no longer felt like a tourist removed from society, but that somehow, I too was connected to this place of beauty and history.
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