So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
Christopher HitchensTags: shakespeare einstein religion atheism security salvation marilyn-monroe antisemitism islam iraq germany jews rabbis debate poland india spinoza temples ancestors middle-east normality martin-amis damascus prague eastern-europe desecration synagogues jewish-question david-rieff jewishness annie-navasky arthur-miller bar-and-bat-mitzvah best-man budapest eritrea istanbul kurdish-people morocco religious-conversion robert-goldburg steve-wasserman tunisia victor-saul-navasky
In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.
Tahir ShahTags: morocco
A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.
Tahir ShahDuring this period of his life, Burroughs was seeking a physical utopia, a place where he could live and act as he wanted with interference from neither official state authority nor unofficial moral authority. In fact, he wanted to live in a place where he was out of place and where consequently he would be free.
Greg A. MullinsTags: exile burroughs beat-generation william-s-burroughs exiled morocco william-burroughs tangier
Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.
Elias CanettiTags: travel morocco marrakech
The past is buried deep within the ground in Rabat, although the ancient walls in the old city are still standing, painted in electrifying variations of royal blue that make the winding roads look like streamlets or shallow ocean water.
Raquel CepedaTags: history travel the-past traveling morocco ancient-walls buried-past rabat royal-blue
If Aphrodite chills at home in Cyprus for most of the year, then Fez must be the goddess’s playground.
Raquel CepedaTags: inspiration beauty travel traveling aphrodite cyprus morocco fes aphrodite-s-playground fez inspired-travel
I wish she’d said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can’t hide from it, not even here.
Raquel CepedaTags: travel traveling patriarchy morocco amazigh-girl atlas-mountains
Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people.
Raquel CepedaTags: beauty god spiritual travel spirituality traveling traveler morocco sahara sahara-desert
Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.
Raquel CepedaTags: inspiration life-experience journey ancestry ancestors sand build morocco trekking building-blocks sahara spiritual-journey sahara-desert globe-trotting trek
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