Rise Up Moroccan Style
Dear friends,
Tomorrow night we begin a seven-week journey that will attempt to lead us from doubt to acceptance, from possibility to actuality, from the Red Sea to Mount Sinai. We begin our Kumah Festival learning from the former black slaves of Morocco how to transform their Boulila, their chains, into Hamdulillah, praise, through music.
Gnawa, the musical form we will enjoy a concert of, is a mystical Moroccan Muslim tradition, with roots in the pre-Islamic faiths of the Sub-Sahara, where the black slaves were taken from beginning in the 11th century. Like the slaves in our country, their song was their refuge and their offering, rising to the heavens like smoke from an altar. When our ancestors emerged onto the other side of the Sea of Reeds they broke into song:
My song to Yah is my strength
In it I am redeemed.
They must have been singing their way through 400 years of slavery before that as well. Otherwise, how could they have known that in music a person can find redemption, regardless of their circumstances? Singing can do that in part because it demands honesty. Like the Blues, Gnawa music expresses sadness, difficulty, rage. It brings us in touch with reality as it is. It’s through that straight look at who and what we are that the beauty and the gratitude can emerge.
Out of the narrows I cried out: Yah!
She answered me with wide open space.
The music then opens up into celebration, which will be our main mode tomorrow.
Mimuna, the Post Passover celebration of the Jews of Morocco takes fear and mistrust and flips it on its head. The tradition is said to have begun in the 18th century, when the Muslim neighbors of the Jews would bring them platters of leavened food and sweets as soon as the holiday was finished. They would eat and sing together in a joint celebration of brotherhood. Today we are in the narrows of distrust between Jews and their Arab neighbors, so we will take a page from the Moroccans and bring together Jews and Muslims, Hebrew and Arabic, new and old to make music. The ensemble, which includes Grammy-nominated, award-winning musicians, will combine traditional Muslim Gnawa songs to Allah with devotional songs by Moroccan Jews and verses from the Psalms. I’ve gotten some sneak previews of the music. It’s transportive, beautiful, meditative, invigorating.
Kumah means Rise Up in Hebrew (and the similar Kumu means the same thing in Arabic). The Kumah Festival is devoted to the overlapping spaces between faith, art and politics, three realms in which we often need help to find the energy to rise. I’m sure our musicians, Ran, Eden, Eran and Samir will start us off on the right foot to begin our march from the lip of the sea toward the great mountain of God.
Please invite one and all to join us — and if you can, bring a pair of headphones or a Bluetooth connection to a speaker to enhance the experience. And if you haven’t already, please complete the two-second registration form.
Shabbat shalom, and see you tomorrow night at 7:30!
Rabbi Misha
PS. If you'd like to pass this on here's the link to the letter on Medium.