Saints to Sali

Saints to Sali

A saint is an extraordinary human being that has divine powers and has been called to a life of holiness. All religious traditions, whether Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Cuban santeria, have their pantheon of saints. These saints seem to fill a popular human longing for veneration, awe, and supernatural healing powers.

I can remember that, as a little boy growing up in Toronto, my mother would tell me about one such Jewish Moroccan saint, Baba Sali. That was his nickname. His real name was Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira (1890-1984). He was a venerated healer, mystic, rabbi, and kabbalist that was born in Morocco. He was a leader for the large Moroccan Jewish community that came to Israel after Israel's independence in 1948. He was said to have extraordinary powers of healing for the afflicted, including injured or crippled IDF soldiers. His burial site in Netivot, Israel is a popular pilgrimage site for Moroccan Jews. It is estimated that a whopping 100,000 people attended his funeral in 1984!

Actually, I discovered Baba Sali when I was cleaning my room one day. Now, god bless my parents, but they know how much I hated cleaning. Cleaning was often early on a Sunday and I just wanted some extra snooze time! Well, one morning I had to take my mattress off my bed to vacuum the dust below. And to my great surprise, there was a key chain with the photo of one Baba Sali. See the picture of Baba Sali above. Baba Sali was a very old man with an extremely long white beard. Just the way you imagine a mystic-healer-kabbalist should look like! So I asked my mother about the picture of Baba Sali. She told me that it was a good luck amulet Moroccan Jews carried with them. This Baba Sali was larger than life for a young boy. Wow, I imagined, how nice it was that I had a protector and his name was the venerated Rabbi Baba Sali!

It was through my encounter with Baba Sali that I realized there are worlds between the worlds; worlds beyond the worlds; worlds that are shining with the bright light of holiness. There are worlds that they do not tell us about. Worlds that we must discover, if we have enough hope, courage, and willpower. Baba Sali taught me that there were people that could do great things in the world. Their presence is a blessing to us all. We can be those people.

There is a Baba Sali in each one of us! Baba Sali taught me that the divine spark is within each one of us. What a lesson! So many people today walk around lost, confused, unhappy, devoid of meaning. It is not that Baba Sali, God, or any saint is the answer to all of life's great mysteries and its problems. They are simply the vessels through which we might connect with other worlds, with deeper worlds within this world. Baba Sali was my entrance to the doors of universal awe, reverence, and inspiration. An entrance to the gates of heaven, which are within our grasps here and now.

Another saint, a Sufi mystic named Rumi, would make toasts to the "here and now," and the "then and there." How gorgeous! How elevated! The grandeur of life and death is that we navigate between many worlds. Today's philosophers such as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Onfray specialize in extreme skepticism and the furthering killing of the divine in a Nietzschean vein. But of course they conveniently ignore the saints and mystics like Rumi and Baba Sali. There are more than 10,000 Roman Catholic saints alone. There are profound Christian mystics from St. John of the Cross to Theresa de Avila. And others in other religious traditions such as the Indian Hindu Neem Karola Baba, who sought to engage in lifelong service to others as the highest form of unconditional love to God. The Hindu mystic rejected fame and recognition.

Moreover, the post-modern murderers of the divine fail to understand that authentic faith allows for questioning within faith. It allows for a radical questioning of God. When a young Tutsi boy in Rwanda saw his family massacred in a Church by Hutu thugs during the genocide in 1994, he would have been entitled to wonder later in life if there was a God. How would a magnanimous God allow for the Holocaust, asked Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in Night?

Finally, there is no doubt that traditional institutional religion has caused great human suffering. Mainstream Christianity and Islam legitimized plundered for land and resources, forced conversions, and the massacre of Native cultures through illness, hard labour, and the gun. So the reaction that all religion is bogus is an understandable one. Yet, within all religious traditions there are adherents that practice the way of simple living, charity, love, self-surpassing, reverence for humans and nature, tolerance, and non-violence. Buried underneath the institutions of the Church, mosque, or synagogue, there is a saintly, mystical tradition. It does not ask what altar you worship. It does not ask whether you are with us or against us. It does not ask whether you are believer or unbeliever. It does not ask whether you are an atheist, agnostic, monotheist, polythesist, or witch.

What Baba Sali and other saints taught me was that we should worship the divine, which is integral to all of creation. One cannot worship Baba Sali as a substitute for the worship of God. Baba Sali is one piece of the puzzle of human creation. From Baba Sali I also take the lesson that we should all ask of more from ourselves. We should all ask of better from ourselves, not others. We should all listen to the voices in our hearts that speak of alternative worlds and the possibility of an opening towards the divine.

Tamir Bar-On