Maimuna

Celebrating a walk on the Maghreb

Maimuna, this Friday (4.10), Erev Shabbat @ 6:15 PM, Central Reform Congregation.

Jerusalem, 1977: My life was altered in a good way one afternoon just after Passover. I was 27 years old. I was out for a walk, sat down in a park and heard a series of performers on a stage. Everyone was barbecuing meats with their families.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Maimuna.”

Maimuna is a North African celebration loosely in honor of Maimonides (his father actually – Maimon ben Yosef). On stage there were oud players, dancers, singers, percussionists. I had never heard such sounds. It changed everything for me.

I bought an oud and began to experiment with it. I could not get the oud sound I had heard in Jerusalem out of my head. Inside me, the sound rearranged everything. I started to write as if I was telling someone else’s story. I documented everything.

I came back to the States and continued my studies. I cleaned up before I went to work in my current profession. I would have children and when they were old enough, I told them my story though the drama had passed. I was given a new life. There would be greater challenges; compared to my new life, my former life was a cakewalk.

It is almost fifty years later as I write this and those pathways I continue to follow. It has sustained me, one path the pursuit of a sound that seemed familiar to me though so far away from where I had come from, and other private avenues of healing. And writing from a place that tracked a journey unlikely even to me though I was living it seems to have some meta-personal application. Writing has also helped shape an unlikely story as if I am squeezing out story for more of what it means.

I found spaces to work in that were unoccupied. So too was the sound I was pursuing from that day at Maimuna. I didn’t come from the synagogue and to work in it later seemed strange and unnatural to me. I knew right away it would spit me out eventually and it has.

For me the preparatory learning was precious and pure and I hold a special loyalty to my teachers and the College of higher learning where I received it. If you’ve read my stuff you feel it. I was an outsider they knew it and they made room for me. I loved my education.

What helped me -- some things obvious, some things not so obvious. Love -- to fall into a life I never expected to have -- that led to a certain purity of intention and gratitude. And in defense of obsessions, some things got ahold of me that filled me up, the willingness to be drawn up into what animated my life and would not let me go.

One of the obsessions the sound of the oud and all that music it opened onto.

I also felt the necessity to give back because I had come to know some things that had been generously given to me. This kind of writing I suppose falls into that category. And some survival spirit – raw and animal -- to push through. Nothing fancy.

j/sg