I have over fity years of civic work – doing grassroots democracy, social justice campaigning, leadership development, nonprofit enterprise, and training. See my teaching work at https://tomsclasses.me.
Here are a few notable examples from my “CivicNotes” email newsletter:
Reflecting on Civic Love in Morocco
Happy Valentine’s Day, King Mohammed VI or Their King Defied Nazis, Ours Embraces Them
My wife, Merle, and I were recently in Morocco with a group from our synagogue, Temple Sholom, under the dynamic leadership of Senior Rabbi Shoshanah Conover. The trip was organized by an outfit called J2 Adventures, based in Israel. We visited Casablanca (yes, there is an ersatz Rick’s Café), Fes, Rabat, Marraketch, and a village in the Atlas Mountains.. You can download the itinerary here. The tour was led by the incredibly learned Yishay Shavit, from Israel, and Hassan Rakmi from Morocco.
What we saw, learned, and felt, made us fall in love with a king. His name is Mohammed VI and he has been the monarch of Morocco since the death of his father, Hassan II, in 1999. We Americans grow up with a disdain for kings and every July 4th we celebrate the revolution that separated America from the rule of a king. For the gazillion or so people who have seen “Hamilton,” we are reminded of the attitude of King George III when he sings:
“Oceans rise, empires fall. We have seen each other through it all. And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!… You’ll be back like before. I will fight the fight and win the war…’Cause when push comes to shove, I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”
And yet, inside the constitutional monarchy of Morocco. The king holds enormous religious and secular power. His word, in a real sense, is law. So, what is going on here?
From what we were told, saw, and read, the brand of Islam that is practiced in Morocco (and other places in Africa) is called the Maliki School and is more tolerant than other branches of Islam. And this fact has its roots in the founding of the Alawi Sultanate that gave birth to Morocco, and which stretched back to the 1600’s and before.
Mohammed VI is considered a reformer and has led multiple changes in the constitution. The Constitution of 2011 has this remarkable language in its preamble:
A sovereign Muslim State, attached to its national unity and to its territorial integrity, the Kingdom of Morocco intends to preserve, in its plentitude and its diversity, its one and indivisible national identity. Its unity, is forged by the convergence of its Arab-Islamist, Berber and Saharan-Hassanic components, nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic and Mediterranean influences. The preeminence accorded to the Muslim religion in the national reference is consistent with the attachment of the Moroccan people to the values of openness, of moderation, of tolerance and of dialog for mutual understanding between all the cultures and the civilizations of the world.
“Hebraic influences” is enshrined in the Moroccan Constitution. He also instituted a reform mandating more women in Parliament. Right now, 36% of the members of the Moroccan Parliament are women. This compares to 28% for the United States House of Representatives.
Mohammed VI is the grandson of Mohammed V and his story bears telling as it is the background and foundation for the current state of civic love we experienced in Morocco. The headline from the article from the March 2024 issue of The Smithsonian tells it all: “The Moroccan Sultan Who Protected His Country’s Jews During World War II.”
Morocco had become a French Protectorate in 1912 – you know, when one country invades and colonializes and then rules over another country. And during the early years of World War II it was ruled by Vichy France after the Nazis invaded France in 1940. The article states:
Vichy officials quickly moved to implement antisemitic decrees against the 250,000 Jews who lived in Morocco. The country was majority Muslim, but Jews were integrated into Moroccan society. Though antisemitism existed, the Jewish community was not actively persecuted. It was actually allied with the ruling Alaouite dynasty and benefited from the royals’ protection. “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects,” Mohammed reportedly said. Unsurprisingly, Vichy officials didn’t like that kind of talk, and the sultan butted heads with them repeatedly… “Moroccan Jews are my subjects,” he told the Vichy government, “… and it is my duty to protect them against aggression.”
Some 76,000 Jews were deported from occupied France, most from Paris. Most were murdered in Auschwitz. We were told that when the young king was told that yellow stars were to be worn by Morocco’s Jews, he said something like “Well, the first six must be sent to the palace for the Royal Family to wear.” The yellow stars did not appear in Morocco.
We visited several Jewish sites in Morocco, synagogues and extensive graveyards. These sites have all been restored meticulously and with great reverence and are being maintained and protected by the Moroccan government.
The Jewish Cemetery was extensively restored by the government and is the resting place of many Righteous Souls which are visited by thousands of Jewish pilgrims annually to this day. The nearby Aben Danan Synagogue dates from the 1600’s. It also was restored and our fellow congregants, as well as the Rabbi, were astonished at the details and sense of history this place radiated.
We were visited by a number of notable people during our tour. Two stand out. Abdelhak El Kaoukabi is the Director of Education or an extraordinary organization, Mimouna. He spoke to us in Rabbat. Mimouna is “a cultural non-profit association created in 2007 by young Muslim students willing to promote and preserve the Jewish-Moroccan heritage. The name «Mimouna» symbolizes a common heritage of Moroccans. Traditionally celebrated at the end of Passover, Mimouna is a traditional Jewish Moroccan celebration. Jewish families often invite their Muslim neighbors Muslims who, among other things, bring bread to join the festivities.One of the founding principles of the Association is to reclaim the cultural diversity of Morocco through its history. In a context where intolerance and extremism are rampant, Mimouna, as a Citizen Patriot Association, would like to contribute to the preserving and strengthening of the plural Moroccan identity.”
Abdel’s father is Muslim, and his mother is Jewish and, as a young person, he experienced the High Holidays of both faiths and heard the story of his grandmother. As a young woman she could not nurse her child and a Jewish neighbor took the infant and nursed him. This organization has been holding conferences, exhibits, and special events, such as an exhibit at the Moroccan Book Festival on Jewish literature and culture. The organization brings together Jews from all over Africa to meet and share history. They produced a learning guide to the Holocaust for Moroccan schools and much more. The organization takes no money from the state and is dedicated to reclaiming and reaffirming the past or else “we are doomed to relive the mistakes of the past.” Part of the work of the organization is to give Moroccan’s a full story of the Massacre of October 7. He says people do not have the full story and many believe that Israel has attacked Gaza without provocation. I can’t imagine this young man and his colleagues operating in Syria, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Libya, or Saudi Arabia.
The other guest who stood out was the Chief Imam of The Kutubiyya Mosque in Maraketch. This mosque was founded in 1147 and is a pillar of Moroccan architecture and culture. The learned doctor addressed us in English and went over the basic tenants of Islam. He spoke of the Maliki School of Islam and its dedication to moderation, critical thinking, and denunciation of violence. He said Morocco has some 14 million people and 45,000 mosques and that it is a “success story” of tolerance and stability for the region. He said “We all live together in peace, harmony, and love.” I say, amen, or amin, to that!
There were other lessons in civic love from this trip that I will address in later posts. I have written and taught a great deal about the idea of Civic Love. I believe that harboring and nourishing and proclaiming a state of love and acceptance – of welcome and empathy – is essential for a successful and expansive democracy. Civic Love can be taught. It can be modelled. It can be rewarded. But it can’t be forced – I can’t make you, I can’t coerce you to love – to be generous – to be welcoming to the stranger, to the neighbor, to the new kid on the block.
So, when you have a national leader, a ruling monarch practicing national civic love to the Jewish people and writing acceptance into the constitution, this is something to be celebrated. When this tradition follows in the footsteps of his predecessors who risked destruction and devastation for pursuing civic love, this is something to be proclaimed. And fostering a country where the work of Mimouna can flourish is something that needs to be duplicated. Starting here in America.
We Fought Nazis and Dictators and Learned – What?
79 years after VE Day, time to get back into the fight
I’ve been reading a LOT of books about World War II, fighting Nazis, and the unheralded role of women in the fight. I’ve also been reading Masters of the Air – How the Bomber Boys broke down the Nazi War Machine, which tells the story of the Eighth Air Force flying out of eastern England and bombing the Nazis across occupied Europe – an outfit which my dad, Allan Tresser, was part of.
The latest book I read recounting the role of women in the war effort is The Enigma Girls – How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II by Candace Fleming. As a sort of companion to Masters of the Air, which recounts the heroic efforts of America’s young men flying hundreds of dangerous missions over occupied Europe to take out the Nazis air defenses and war-making capacity before D-Day, this book introduces us to a wide assortment of teenage girls who served in the British military as code breakers and clerks who deciphered hundreds of thousands of enemy messages in one of the most secretive aspects of the war. Both books tell of courage, determined and relentless pressure to “get the job done,” and enormous personal sacrifice.
One of the books I read was Code Name: Lise – The True Story of the Woman who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Spy, by Larry Lofts. It is full of hair-raising exploits and the grind and danger of operating a spy and sabotage operation in occupied France and staying one step ahead of the Gestapo and the French police. Death was around the corner and one false move, one confidence betrayed, and your fate was sealed – capture, imprisonment, torture, death.
The Enigma Girls is no less compelling. Though the young women were not in mortal peril, they threw themselves into the secretive work where sleep and sanity were threatened by the pressure and isolation of the job.
Fleming tells us how some of the young women felt after Germany surrendered and VE Day was celebrated on May 8, 1945. “It was a wonderful moment,” Patricia recalled, “like a collective exhalation at the end of a long period when we’d all been holding our breath.” (p. 309). Patricia was one of over 2,000 women posted at the top secret code breaking facility known as Bletchley Park. Fleming brings in King George VI and quotes part of his VE Day radio address:
Today we give thanks to Almighty God for a great deliverance. Speaking from our Empire’s oldest capital city, war-battered but never for one moment daunted or dismayed – speaking from London, I ask you to join with me in that act of thanksgiving. Germany, the enemy who drove all Europe into war, has been finally overcome…Let us remember those who will not come back, their constancy and courage in battle, their sacrifice and endurance in the face of a merciless enemy: let us remember the men in all the Services and the women in all the Services who have laid down their lives. We have come to the end of our tribulation, and they are not with us at the moment of our rejoicing. Then let us salute in proud gratitude the great host of the living who have brought us to victory…With those memories in our minds, let us think what it was that has upheld us through nearly six years of suffering and peril. The knowledge that everything was at stake: our freedom, our independence, our very existence as a people; but the knowledge also that in defending ourselves we were defending the liberties of the whole world; that our cause was the cause not of this nation only, not of this Empire and Commonwealth only, but of every land where freedom is cherished and law and liberty go hand in hand… We knew that, if we failed, the last remaining barrier against a world-wide tyranny would have fallen in ruins. But we did not fail. We kept our faith with ourselves and with one another; we kept faith and unity with our great allies. That faith and unity have carried us to victory through dangers which are times seemed overwhelming…There is great comfort in the thought that the years of darkness and danger in which the children of our country have grown up are over and, please God, for ever. We shall have failed, and the blood of our dearest will have flowed in vain, if the victory which they died to win does not lead to a lasting peace, founded on justice and established in good will. To that, then, let us turn our thoughts on this day of just triumph and proud sorrow; and then take up our work again, resolved as a people to do nothing unworthy of those who died for us and to make the world such a world as they would have desired, for their children and for ours.
Oh, so much to ponder from George’s address. “Everything was at stake – our freedom, our independence, our very existence as a people.” Wow. The stakes were high. They could not have been higher. And what about going forward? “If the victory which they died to win does not lead to a lasting peace, founded on justice and established in good will” – Let us do “nothing unworthy of those who died for us” – Are we following his advice?
The sacrifices made across the planet to defeat fascism and dictators eighty plus years ago must not be in vain. My own father was part of that fight. How about your people? Any veterans in your family? My dad was a waist gunner and bombardier with the Eighth Air Force, flying out of east England. The Eighth suffered 26,000 casualties – more than the entire Marine Corps – in World War II. 33,000 members of the air force were prisoners of war.
So, to honor my dad and the millions of others who fought, bled, suffered, and died fighting the Nazis and their allies – we simply must defeat all Republicans running for office across America. It is just that simple.
