Dreamers in Paradise: The Rise and Fall of a New Holy Site in Beit She'an, Israel

In recent years, Israel has witnessed a proliferation of holy sites and cultic practices related to saint worship. Old-time saints' sanctuaries are enjoying renewed popularity, new ones are being added to the native "sacred geography," and the list of contemporary charismatic rabbis acknowledged as zaddikim is growing.¹ While this revival is 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 saints in contemporary Israel with a distinctive Maghribi flavor.² The case I am presenting here may be viewed as part of the contribution of Moroccan Jews to Israel's holy map. This chapter traces the life cycle of a new shrine, modest in scope but pretentious in its vision, that was precipitated and later sustained by a torrent of visitational dreams. I analyze the decisive role played by these dreams in validating the new shrine and in empowering the community around it. But I also draw attention to the limitation of the dreams as sources of authority and legitimacy - in the absence of other, more tangible, sources of support, such as endorsement by rabbinical and municipal authorities. 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 Valley.³ In 1979, a man of Moroccan background in his late thirties named Ya'ish, the leader of a cleaning crew 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 the visitational dreams that triggered Ya'ish's discovery, was declared the patron saint of the site. The hillulah (annual celebration) for Elijah was conducted in Ya'ish's backyard at the beginning of the Jewish month of Elul, near the small synagogue that had been erected over the presumed Gate of Paradise. Throughout the first half of the 1980s, when I was doing fieldwork in Beit She'an, the Gate of Paradise functioned as a modest but regularly frequented shrine. It enjoyed a constant flow of female supplicants, primarily from the local neighborhood. The site became a healing shrine for many of the visitors to the neighboring Kupat Holim health-care clinic, supplementing rather than supplanting its medical interventions. But all this activity came to an end in the early 2000s, when Ya'ish sold his house and moved to Yavneh, a town twenty miles south of Tel Aviv, and the site ceased to exist. In what follows, I will situate the case of the Gate of Paradise in the broader context of saint worship in Morocco and explore its vicissitudes through the analytic prisms of authority and legitimacy. Specifically, I am interested in the diferent effects of several potential sources of legitimacy on the "life course" of the shrine, from its onset to its demise. First, I will analyze the processes by which Ya'ish was initially successful in exerting his authority and attracting believers to his project, despite his humble standing, his non-charismatic personality, and his scant resources. The peculiar nature of the Gate of Paradise as one man's apparently idiosyncratic initiative, lacking institutional support and based primarily on his dreams, makes the questions of authority and legitimacy all the more compelling. Without the backing of municipal and rabbinical authorities, Ya'ish's initiation dreams, which guided him to the holy site and transformed his life, served as an alternative means of lending the project legitimacy. Self-generated and relatively independent of scriptural sources of authority, his dreams functioned as "charismatic significants"⁴ and provoked a flood of visitational dreams among members of the local community, endowing the dreamers with rich and engaging subjective experiences associated with saint and site.⁵ To this end, I will discuss Ya'ish's initiatory dream sequence as the apex of his life story, and then analyze two other dreams reported by local inhabitants involved with the shrine from a corpus of 150 dream reports that I collected in Beit She'an from 1981 to 1983. Second, I will argue that visitational dreams enhanced the legitimacy of the Gate of Paradise because they functioned as "swing concepts,"⁶ bridging mental, intrapsychic processes and collective, interpersonal and intersubjective ones. Unlike the modern psychological view of dreaming as emblematic of private, subjective, and largely ineffable experiences, these visitational dreams stemmed from an established tradition of dreaming and relied on a widely shared vocabulary of cultural symbols, given that visitational dreams played a central role in the Jewish and Muslim cults of the saints in Morocco.⁷ The authority of visitational dreams and their power to bind people to the shrine were predicated on this shared vocabulary, in which saint and site were major cultural idioms. The dreamers employed the idioms of Elijah and paradise in order to articulate and cope with a wide variety of personal experiences, but while their dreams served a "therapeutic" function that enhanced the attraction of the shrine, they also served an "authorizing" function, supplying corroborative evidence for the validity of the revelation underlying it. This authorization process was predicated on the Janus-faced nature of the idioms of saint and site as personal symbols, mediating subjective experience and collective representation, biography and community.⁸ Third, I will make the methodological argument that, in order to understand the processes through which these dreamers projected their individual visionary experiences on the public arena and corroborated them by means of it, one must study the dream-based discourse that evolved in Beit She'an from two perspectives. We must focus our analytic lenses on the performative and rhetorical aspects of the dream as narrated orally and textually, and on the domain of dream psychology and the experiential aspects of the dream as remembered.⁹ Even if we accept that visitational dreams functioned in Beit She'an as self-generated sources of authority, one must still evaluate their efficacy relative to other, more official and hierarchical, forms of authority, the paucity of which alerted me in the first place to the role of dreams as substitute modes of legitimacy. My final argument is that the eventual demise and disappearance of the shrine may be taken to indicate the limits of dreams as loci of empowerment on the micro-level. Dreams were easily available and widely distributed among the rank and file; the religious authorities viewed them as too facile, fanciful, and "contagious" to constitute a valid means of authenticity and legitimacy. But this after-the-fact assertion could hardly be predicted during the heyday of the shrine in the early 1980s, when many local inhabitants, inspired and guided by their dreams, flocked to the Gate of Paradise. To shed light on the two-decade life span of the shrine and the dynamics of its eventual demise, I take a diachronic approach, against the once-prominent anthropological genre of "writing in the ethnographic present." In the contested territory of saint worship, the life cycle of many sacred sites is very short.¹⁰ "Failures" appear to outnumber successes, since the limelight of research is usually cast on functioning shrines. But the postmortem examination of the vanished shrine shows that it continued to have interesting reverberations in Beit She'an - a type of "afterlife." This afterlife, too, was intimately associated with the legitimizing power of visitational dreams.