The Worship of Prophet Elijah in Beit She'an, Israel

ARAM, 20 (2008) 43-57. doi: 10.2143/ARAM.20.0.2033119Y. BILU 43 DREAMERS IN PARADISE: THE WORSHIP OF PROPHET ELIJAH IN BEIT SHE’AN, ISRAEL Dr. YORAM BILU (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) INTRODUCTION In recent years Israel has witnessed a proliferation of holy sites and cultic practices related to saint worship. Old-time saints’ sanctuaries are glowing with renewed popularity; new ones are being added to the native “sacred ge- ography,” and the list of contemporary charismatic rabbis acknowledged as tsaddiqim (holy men) is growing.1 While this revival appears too widespread to be the monopoly of one particular group, Jews from Morocco have emerged as a major force behind it, impregnating the cult of the saints in contemporary Israel with a distinctive Maghrebi flavour.2 The case I am presenting here may be viewed as part of this renaissance of Jewish Moroccan saint worship in Is- rael, even though the mythical space it consecrates and the figure it glorifies are not directly related to Jewish Maghrebi hagiography. According to a Talmudic legend the entrance to the Garden of Eden in its terrestrial form is located in the town of Beit She'an in the central Jordan Val- ley.3 In 1979 a man of Jewish Moroccan background in his late 30s named Yaish, a leader of a cleaning team in the local municipality, announced that he had discovered the Gate of Paradise in the backyard of his house. Elijah the Prophet, the protagonist of Yaish’s visitational dreams that precipitated the discovery,4 was declared the saintly patron of the site. The hillula (annual cel- ebration) for Elijah was conducted in the site in the beginning of the Jewish 1 Bilu, Y., “The Sanctification of Space in Israel: Civil Religion and Folk-Judaism,” in Rebhun U., and Waxman, Ch.I. (eds.), Jews in Israel, (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 371-393; Gonen, R. (ed.), To The Tomb of the Righteous: Pilgrimage in Contemporary Israel (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1998). 2 Ben-Ami, I., Saint Veneration Among the Jews in Morocco (Hebrew), Folklore Research Center Studies 8 (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1984). 3 “With regard to Gan Eden, Reish Lakish said: if it is in Eretz Israel, Beis Shean is its entrance” (Talmud Bavli. Tractate Eruvin 19a, New York: Mesorah Publications, ltd, 1990). 4 On visitational dreams in Maghrebi culture see: Bilu, Y., and Abramovitch, H., “In Search of the Saddiq: Visitational Dreams Among Moroccan Jews in Israel,” Psychiatry 48, (1985), 83- 92. Crapanzano, V., “Saints, Jnun, and Dreams: an Essay in Moroccan Ethnopsychology,” Psy- chiatry 38, (1975), 145-159. Kilborne, B., “Moroccan Dream Interpretation and Culturally Con- stituted Defense Mechanisms,” Ethos 9, (1981), 294-312. 07-0398_Aram20_02_Bilu 43 09-16-2008, 17:07 44 THE WORSHIP OF PROPHET ELIJAH IN BEIT SHE}AN month of Elul, near the small synagogue named after Elijah, which was erected over the presumed entrance. Throughout the first half of the 1980s, when I was doing fieldwork in Beit She’an, the Gate of Paradise was function- ing as a modest but regularly frequented shrine. It enjoyed a constant flow of female supplicants, particularly from the local neighborhood. The site became a healing shrine for many of the visitors to the neighboring Health-Fund Clinic, supplementing the medical interventions. All this thriving activity came to an end in the late 1990s when the site ceased to exist and its builder sold his house and moved to another town. I would like to situate this case study in a wider context by discussing the ways in which personal experience and cultural symbol, private dream and ca- nonical text, biography and community are mediated through the cultural idioms of site and saint. To account for the initial success of the shrine, the evo- lution of Yaish’s initiative from a private dream to a public resource has to be elucidated. A special emphasis will be put on the figure of Elijah, the patron- saint of the site, as articulated in the dream reports of Yaish and others in the local community. Given that many sacred sites in the contested territory of saint worship have a bounded life cycle, I would also like to shed light on the two-decade life span of the shrine and the dynamics of its eventual demise. The post-mortem examination of the vanished shrine has unexpectedly showed that it had inter- esting reverberations in Beit She’an which could be viewed as a type of “afterlife.” As we shall see, this afterlife too was intimately associated with the miraculous figure of Prophet Elijah. THE ROAD TO PARADISE AND THE BONDING WITH ELIJAH: YAISH’S LIFE STORY In accounting for the welcoming reverberations that Yaish’s revelation stirred in the local community, we should note again that the vision that in- spired him was not an idiosyncratic fantasy. The cultural representations he and other “saint impresarios”5 have employed were personal symbols with Janus-faced typification, at once mental and collective, private and public, internal and external.6 The associations between the Garden of Eden and Beit 5 Brown, P., The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981); Bilu, Y. “Jewish Moroccan ‘Saint Impresarios' in Israel: A Stage-Developmental Perspective”, Psy- choanalytic Study of Society 15, (1990), 247-269. 6 On the articulation of psychological experiences through cultural idioms see: Obeyesekere, G. Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago and Lon- don: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Obeyesekere, G., The Work of Culture (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1990). Spiro, M.E., “Collective Representations and Mental Represen- tations in Religious Symbol Systems,” in Kilborne, B., and. Langness, L.L. (eds.), Culture and 07-0398_Aram20_02_Bilu 44 09-16-2008, 17:07 Y. BILU 45 She'an were not born in Yaish's mind as many local inhabitants were familiar with the talmudic tradition connecting Paradise to their town. Prophet Elijah figures highly in Jewish legend, mysticism and folklore as an immortal prophet, “the angel of the covenant”, teacher of esoteric knowledge, and di- vine emissary sent to earth to combat social injustice. His special vigilance as the emblematic protector and helper of the innocent and the needy has given him a privileged place in the Jewish Moroccan pantheon of saints. In fact, Gilui Eliahu (“The revelation of Elijah), studying Torah with Elijah, was a common claim for saintly stature in the Maghreb.7 More specifically, Elijah has been also intimately associated with Paradise, having ascended there alive.8 As the precursor of the Messiah, who is ensconced in Paradise until the time of redemption, Elijah was presented in Jewish sources as one of the Ce- lestial Garden’s most prominent inhabitants.9 Lastly, there might be a geo- graphical connection between Elijah and Beit-She’an as Gilead, the native territory of the biblical prophet, is located east of the town, in the mountainous plateau just across the Jordan River. Still, it was Yaish alone who appropriated this tradition by claiming that the Gate of Paradise and prophet Elijah were located in his own backyard. We must account for Yaish's singular undertaking by asking what individual experiences had fashioned his internal schemas of Paradise and Elijah into a cognitively salient, life transforming motivational system.10 Hence, before discussing the acceptance of his vision in the community I will portray Yaish’s personal journey to the Garden of Eden, dwelling on those life events and experiences that supposedly endowed his personal notion of Paradise and Elijah with rich subjective meanings. Yaish was born in Oulad Mansour, a village in southern Morocco where most of the Jewish inhabitants found their living in agriculture and animal hus- bandry.11 Yaish's mother boasted a line of pious ancestry, and related to her children many stories of her grandfather and father’s miraculous feats. In con- trast, Yaish’s father, a plain, hard-working man, came from a plebeian background, and in terms of learning and spirituality was a far cry from his mater- nal forefathers. The awareness of this gap might have left Yaish in an ambigu- Human Nature, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 161-184. Stromberg, P., “The Impression Point: Synthesis of Symbol and Self.” Ethos 13, (1985), 56-64. 7 Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration Among the Jews in Morocco, 23-24. 8 See II Kings, 2, 11. 9 Wiener, A., The Prophet Elijah in the Development of Judaism (London, 1978). 10 Spiro, “Collective and Mental Representations;” Strauss, C., and Quinn, N., A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 11 The agricultural nature of Jewish Oulad Mansour was so exceptional that Pierre Flammand, who studied the Jewish communities of southern Morocco in the 1950s, depicted it “un accident de l’economie juive. ” Flammand, P., Diaspora en Terre D’Islam: Les Communautes Israelites du sud-Marocain (Casablanca: Presses des Imprimeries Reunies, 1959), 84. 07-0398_Aram20_02_Bilu 45 09-16-2008, 17:07 46 THE WORSHIP OF PROPHET ELIJAH IN BEIT SHE}AN ous state of “distant proximity” vis-à-vis the family blessing.12 Is it far-fetched to add to the motivational bases underlying his grandiose initiative an enduring wish to affirm his share in his forefathers’ blessing? It might be argued that as a personal symbol Prophet Elijah was molded by Yaish in the cast of these family tsaddiqim. Yaish viewed his childhood with nostalgic affection, portraying life in Oulad Mansour as idyllic. In his recollections, the community enjoyed abun- dant, unspoiled natural resources, harmonious interpersonal relations, and special spiritual ambiance.

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