The Hiloula

The candle weighs three kilos. The bidding starts at five hundred dirhams.

The man who wins it has flown in from Haifa. He carries it to the tomb of Rabbi Amram Ben Diwan in Ouezzane, in the foothills of the Rif Mountains. The rabbi came from Palestine in the 1770s to collect funds for yeshivas in Hebron. Got trapped in Meknes for seven years by political instability. Died in Ouezzane. Thousands come for his hiloula every May. Four continents.

Hiloula. Aramaic for celebration. But what's being celebrated is a death — the anniversary of a saint's passing, when the soul ascends closest to God and carries your prayers with it. You light the candle, touch the stone, move your lips. The bigger the flame, the louder the prayer.

At the shrine of Moulay Ighi in the Atlas Mountains, the story gets stranger. The rabbi — possibly Rabbi David Laskar, 1717 — sensed his death coming. Asked the local burial society to follow him to a hilltop. They dug a grave at his request. He washed himself in the river below, climbed up, lay down, and told the earth to close. A myrtle bush grew beside the grave. Centuries of pilgrims have lit hundreds of candles around it. The bush has never caught fire.

Muslims guard these shrines year-round. Not as a favour. As a continuation. The tradition of praying at saints' tombs came from the Amazigh, who practised it before either Judaism or Islam arrived in Morocco. The white domed structures dotting the countryside — marabouts — are the same practice, different prayer. Same mountains.

In Ouirgane, just outside Toubkal National Park, a white compound sits on rocky terrain. Three tombs inside. The Muslim caretaker opens the gates in May and the Jewish pilgrims enter a space that is simultaneously theirs and his.

In Essaouira, 1,500 pilgrims arrive every September for the hiloula of Rabbi Haim Pinto, born in Agadir, 1749. His synagogue still works. Joseph Sebag may be the city's last permanent Jewish resident. When the pilgrims leave, he stays.

Morocco has roughly 200 Jewish cemeteries. Many renovated in recent years under royal patronage. The dead are not leaving. The living keep coming back. The candle auction raises real money. The Muslim caretakers who guard these sites twelve months a year are not performing tolerance for cameras.

They are continuing a relationship that predates the categories we use to describe it.