yet i long for them

This month, I am leading a book group about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, The Message. I want to take the opportunity to share some of the insights and invite you all into the learning too. For those who have not yet read it, the book begins as a letter to his students about why he writes. And then in each subsequent chapter he writes about a distinct and recent pilgrimage in his life. It is his hope, in his own words, that the book “haunts.” That it makes you say to everyone you see, “"Have you read this yet?" Which has actually been my personal experience. 

The first trip he takes is to Senegal, retracing his roots across The Transatlantic Slave Trade and back to the shores of Gorée. The island of Gorée lies off the coast of Senegal, opposite Dakar. From the 15th to the 19th century, it was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast. 

As Coates writes about the experience of arriving at Gorée, this passages haunts: 
“Here is what I think: We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess they are imagined…

We have a right to that memory, to choose the rock of Gorée, to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning. And we have a right to imagine ourselves as pharoahs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.” 

So much of Jewish prayer and practice is rooted in our imagined traditions and places. Coates’ words grant me a kind of spiritual permission to long for the places my ancestors sojourned. Rome, Rhodes, Izmir, Andalusia, the Pale of Settlement, Brooklyn. Yet in my own experience, the rare times I have had to revisit one of these places, I realize how imagined my relationship is. This is my best understanding of exile. I am no longer of these places yet I long for them, for what I imagine them to have been. 

We are in the midst of a very brutal three week period in the Jewish imagination. It stretches from Yom HaShoah, which was observed last Thursday on April 24, includes Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut, which were observed Wednesday and Thursday of this past week. And concludes on May 14 with Nakba Day. Some might even say it began on the 10th of Nisan, known as Yom HaAliyah, which is an Israeli national holiday to commemorate the Jewish people entering the Land of Israel as written in the Hebrew Bible. The holiday was established to acknowledge Aliyah, immigration to the Jewish state, as a core value of the State of Israel.

These are days, which for many Jews are holidays, were created alongside the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. They collapse the religious and political imagination in ways that are deep and devastating, and divide. 

It feels absolutely appropriate and important to honor the memories of our ancestors who died in the Holocaust once a year. In the words of Coates, "We have a right to that memory ... to consecrate it, to cry before it, to mourn its meaning."

So why did I not mention it last week?
Yom HaShoah is actually timed specifically to lead up to Yom Hazikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut. To inspire us to imagine that the State of Israel redeems the Nazi Holocaust. This narrative haunts and fails.

Which is why there is a different day, January 27, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date of January 27 aligns with the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army in 1945. This is a day I hope we might begin to observe more collectively. This commemoration holds no ulterior motives.

I think it is precisely this week when Coates’ words are meant to haunt us, to invite us “to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.” And then to invite out memories and our mourning to tell a different story.


Where are the places you long for?
What piece of your history do you long to recover, redeem, remember?

As we pray in the weekday Amidah, 
תְּקַע בְּשׁוֹפָר גָּדוֹל לְחֵרוּתֵֽנוּ
Sound the great shofar of freedom, 
וְשָׂא נֵס לְקַבֵּץ גָּלֻיּוֹתֵֽינוּ
Let there be a miracle, and may all refugees, all dispossessed people, all who have been forced to migrate, torn from the fabric of land and community, be regathered, returned, to themselves. 


בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵֽינוּSpeedily and in our days.
May it be so.