Initially, I did not realize the elegant, modestly dressed Sara was the wife of the aging man who sported long springy grey hair, a shirt unbuttoned to reveal a hairy concave chest, adorned with a gold chain.
Sara's story starts with her parents, of course.
As a young couple with young children, Sara's parents endured the fear of the Nazi incursion into Morocco, which fortunately never arrived to their area.
(Most people don't know the Nazis wedged their way into Morocco, terrorizing and murdering the Jews in that area of invasion. Baruch Hashem, the Nazis never managed to expand their Moroccan invasion, and eventually withdrew.)
Then Sara was born in 1953.
Sara described how one of her grandmothers and that side of the family lived in the mountains of Morocco.
"Every year," she said, "heavy rains and melting snow caused terrible floods to go rushing into their village. Each time, they needed to grab the children and babies and run up the hill to avoid drowning. Then they came back down to mud and a destroyed home. Every year! Every year, everything they owned got destroyed. Can you imagine? Every year, they needed to rebuild anew, knowing it was all going to get destroyed again. How did they live like that?"
She also revealed how her grandparents used to carve a hole in the ice so her grandmother could use it as a mikveh.
"Really?" I said. "I had no idea Moroccan women did that too!"
Smiling, Sara nodded and said, "Uh-huh. That's right. Most people don't know. But Moroccan women did that too."
"Wow, this is so exciting to know," I enthused. "I always thought it was just, you know, like Russian women in those harsh Russian winters."
Sara chuckled understandingly and said, "Yeah, everyone thinks that. But in the mountains of Morocco, the rivers also freeze. So they also needed to cut a hole in the ice to immerse."
Then she described a recent trip she took back to Morocco with her husband, visiting her family's old town.
The Arabs came out to greet their long-lost Jewish neighbors, crying, "We MISSED you! Why did you leave?!"
I've heard this several times from Moroccan Jews who traveled back Morocco. The Arab residents come out, crying, "We MISSED you! Why did you leave?!"
And then they show the Jews around, sometimes offering personal memories like, "This is where your older brother and sister used to play, right near this tree."
The Early Years of Deprivation
Once in Eretz Yisrael, the secular Leftists authorities claimed they were taking the newly arrived immigrants to a neighborhood near a prominent city, but which ended up being at least an hour away from that city.
The authorities packed these newly arrived immigrants into cramped apartments, which Sara described as having "no doors and no windows."
(I think she meant the apartments lacked glass in the space for windows and no bedroom or bathroom doors existed within the apartments, but they did have a window "hole" and front doors.)
With no money and little access to anything else, these Moroccan immigrants relied on the powerfully secular Jewish Agency to provide them with food.
It's a terrible power imbalance, if you think about it — to be dependent on people who look down on you for your most basic sustenance.
Regularly, the immigrants received food parcels consisting of white bread, some other pathetic edibles, and something Sara called "black jelly."
She still doesn't know what it was.
I could only imagine how demoralizing and disabling this must have been for her parents.
Also, knowing how important well-cooked meals and good-quality food is to traditional Moroccan women, I wondered how Sara's mother managed in her seriously downgraded and helpless situation.
After all, the standard fare in Morocco consisted of fresh fruits and vegetables and spices, legumes, grains, and what we would now call free-range organic poultry and meat — and fresh fish.
I also wondered about the emotional and physical effects of the drastic degradation in the family's diet.
For people used to eating good-quality nutritious food, the high-sugar unvaried and malnutritious food must've devastated their physical health and caused a negative chemical response in their emotional well-being (especially as we've documented the damaging effects of sugar and malnutrition on mood and energy).
I mentioned the contrast to Sara, then asked how her mother managed during that time (which included additional pregnancies).
Sara thought it over, then answered, "I really don't know. I never thought to ask her how she managed and now that I think about it, she never mentioned that time period. You know, for her generation, it's not their way to talk about the bad times."
The Typical Story of What Happened to the Younger Generation after Their Arrival
She met her husband while still in high school and married him at age 17 — her first and only love.
She ended up with 2 children by the age of 19, then feeling overwhelmed, decided to put the brakes on child-bearing (until she became frum later).
She and her equally assimilated Moroccan husband lived secular lives, though Sara refused to compromise on certain issues.
For example, she always lit Shabbat candles, prepared Shabbat meals, observed the chagim, and refused to eat any non-kosher meat (even when touring with her husband through Europe).
Sara Does Teshuvah as a Journey of Steps & Not-Always-Resolved Struggles
In addition to returning to the way she'd been raised, she started having children again.
As committed and satisfied as she is with her re-adopted frum lifestyle, she's also upfront about how it was really NOT easy.
Even today, with all the kids grown up, she has some secular kids, some super-frum kids, and her husband is still decidedly assimilated.
Dealing with schools and everything else wasn't easy either.
Making the decisions she made meant that things were messy and even now, her life is rife with inconsistencies.
But she has made peace with those inconsistencies. She deals with them head-on yet with equanimity.
The Odd Situation I'd Never Encountered Before
She looked resolved yet anxious as we engaged her in conversation and invited her sit with us for the seuda.
With Sara looking relieved and clearly trying to determine whether we really meant it, we warmly reassured her we'd love her company.
(Sara ended up being GREAT company as you can tell from all the stories in this post.)
Yet I immediately sensed something strange because Sara joined us alone, but had clearly come with her husband.
With the help of my husband (who'd met her husband several times before), I realized Sara's husband was the older, secular guy helping the non-Jewish German tourists.
But he didn't join his wife.
Instead, he sat a couple of tables away from us with an older German couple.
He came over to make sure Sara had her favorite beverage on the table and that we were seated comfortably.
Then he went back to sit with the Germans (who never seemed at all bothered by being the reason he wasn't enjoying the Shabbat seuda with his wife).
I tactfully pretended not to be taken aback by the whole scene, but I couldn't believe this man would abandon his wife to sit with strangers at a Shabbat seuda while he sat with German Notzrim two tables away.
That's when Sara confided, "Those Germans, they force him to make Kiddush for them at six even though Shabbat hasn't come in yet! But they don't care. They want to hear Kiddush at six, so they force him to do it for them — those wicked Germans, may their names be erased!"
What she said made no sense. Also, despite her strong words, no strong emotion accompanied them — she spoke as if reciting a script prepared for such occasions.
And I'd run into this kind of dynamic before.
I nodded sympathetically, made sympathetic noises, and waited.
I figured Sara understood perfectly well that no German (or any other silly tourist) could "force" her clearly assimilated husband to make Kiddush.
And the fact that they ask him to make Kiddush at the wrong time (it's meaningless for them and how would they know the right time, anyway?) doesn't make them wicked.
He was happy to accommodate them, just as he was perfectly content to abandon his wife to sit with strangers at the Shabbat seuda while he hung out with the German Notzrim.
But experience also taught me that people like Sara speak that way to dissuade others from judging her husband too harshly.
Also, she wasn't to assert her own "protest" against the situation. She wants people to know she opposes it and cannot stop it.
She didn't know us, so she felt compelled to put forth this bluff that didn't even make sense.
As Sara grew increasingly comfortable with us (and Sara and I bonded; I couldn't get enough of her), she opened up more.
Her husband worked with this Notzri group for years. He even made visits to them in Germany.
Sara never accompanied him on those visits, partly because of the lack of kosher food and partly because their homes contained lots of Notzri symbols, their conversations always headed into proselytism, and overall, she just plain didn't want anything to do with any of it.
And rightly so.
"When he visits them in Germany, he eats their food," she said with a shudder. "I ask him how he can tolerate all their treif food and Notzrut and their religious symbols all over the place, but he just laughs and says they're nice and he that he's not bothered about the food or the symbols."
Despite his family background (he also grew up with Moroccan immigrant parents in Sara's city), he clearly lacks any whiff of yirat Shamayim.
At one point, she said, "I'm really grateful you guys are here. I can't eat with the Germans and I can't just sit all by myself while my husband sits at another table nearby. So if you hadn't invited me to join you, I would've just eaten in my hotel room all alone all of Shabbat."
A True Ishah Kasherah
I found her life story fascinating and she proved herself as a very good-natured and good-humored person too.
We kept reassuring her that we WANTED her to sit with us, so she shouldn't feel like we were just doing her a favor. And that was true! Shabbat was so much nicer and more fun with her around.
But what I found most fascinating was her equanimity in the face of her extremely uncomfortable situation.
Being raised in American culture (with a heavy dose of Southern culture on the side), I couldn't imagine myself doing the same, eating a Shabbat seuda a couple of tables away from my husband while he sits chatting with German Notzrim.
I would feel too mortified and also very self-conscious about what others were thinking of the odd set-up.
Also — once she saw we could deal with situation — Sara was very comfortable explaining it to us.
She expected us to NOT judge her. After all, it was her husband's flaw, not hers.
She spoke of and related to the situation as if it had nothing to do with her, despite how much she disapproved of her husband's lack of observance and his forays into Notzri Germany.
In her mind, it was clear her husband's behavior had nothing to do with her, did not reflect on her at all, and SHE had nothing to be ashamed of.
This stands in contrast to the more Western way of viewing such a dynamic, like blaming the wife and hassling her to do more, and how could she let her husband go to Germany to hang out with Notzrim?, and all those judgmental assumptions.
I noticed this kind of thing a lot with Moroccan women.
Though she disliked and disapproved of the situation, Sara felt totally comfortable with HERSELF.
She knew she was right.
And she knew no one else had any right to judge her. After all, SHE wasn't the one doing something wrong!
Sure, she'd be uncomfortable with feeling judged or looked at funny, which is why she said what she said at the beginning, and why she would eat alone in her hotel room if there was no one else to sit with.
But she totally lacked any PERSONAL insecurity about it.
And that's what I found so intriguing.
The Real Steel Magnolias & Iron Butterflies
Sure, there are different kinds and different kinds of personalities. And this strength is expressed in different ways — some discreetly and gently, some loudly, some more directly — but it's definitely there.
Particularly with these older Moroccan ladies, they remain wholeheartedly devoted to their husbands and consider their man the head of the house and very much wish to please him...but that's doesn't mean he's never wrong or that she needs to blindly submit to him — or that she can't do her own thing, when she realizes she's correct about an issue (as with Sara and her errant husband).
They also very much make their voice heard, but in her own style and the way that speaks best to her individual husband.
And if she can't manage to influence him for the better, her total lack of any kind of self-recrimination is mind-boggling (at least, to me).
It simply does not occur to them to blame themselves for their husband's behavior (as long as she tried).
And if you would try to get them to take responsibility for his behavior, they would just get offended or think you have something wrong with you.
Probably for Sara's situation, it makes it easier that she lives in an area with lot of people like her, where you see mixed families like this — one spouse frum and the other not, or the parents are frum but some or none of the children are, or the children are frum but the parents aren't...it's just much more common and people understand and accept it.
Mostly, it's a sign of growth — a sign that growing up secular and starting out in a secular family of your own doesn't mean you can't do teshuvah yourself.
After 53 years of marriage, Sara certainly isn't looking to get divorced (even if maybe she should because her husband acts like he's riding an express straight to Gehinnom). She doesn't like aspects of her situation, but she doesn't consider it her problem either.
After all, she davens for her husband and he definitely has free choice.
But that iron sense of self innate to so many Moroccan women is definitely something to learn from.