Exile and the Prophetic: The day without a future

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

Yom Kippur has arrived. I am done with thought poems and deflection.

Yom Kippur is the most hypocritical day of the Jewish calendar. This is true of all holy days of the great world religions and, no doubt, the lesser ones as well. Citing the hypocrisy of Yom Kippur is a cheap shot. Too obvious.

Critical thought and action are more important than reading sacred texts and chanting prayers. When piety serves the continuation of empire it’s worse than meaningless. It’s a form of blasphemy.

The sacred texts and prayers of most religions subvert empire pretensions of the powerful. Yet in a curious transposition, subversion becomes a form of legitimatization. Against the meaning of the text, the powerful become agents of good. In their own minds, of course.

Historically speaking, Christians are global experts in textual inversion. Squaring the teachings of Jesus with empire is more than difficult. It’s impossible.

Some think the current inversion experts are Muslims. On the historical scale, Jews have entered the distortion sweepstakes only recently. Once on the scene, though, we’ve taken the plunge. Rosh Hashanah at the Big House is illustrative. Yom Kippur without mentioning the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestinians is another.

It isn’t just Israel/Palestine where the confession is needed. The day after I sent off my interview to Brazil, I received another invite from a city nearby where the interview is being translated. They’re going to be holding a forum creating a Kairos Brazil document. So getting ready for my travel to Brazil, I picked up a copy of a book on Jewish history. I found these passages of (un)Israel/Palestine confessional interest for Yom Kippur.

But first a short Yom Kippur “Jews in Brazil” history lesson to set the stage.

The history of the Jews in Brazil is one of displacement and success. The thumbnail sketch finds Jews present in Brazil from the beginning of European settlement in the Americas. Jewish presence accelerated when the Inquisition reached Portugal in the 16th century. The arrivals were mostly Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal to the religious freedom of the Netherlands. At that point, Brazil was under Dutch control.

The development of Brazil’s sugar industry was accelerated by Portuguese Jews. More Jews arrived when the Brazilian constitution of 1824 granted freedom of religion. With the rubber boom in the nineteenth century, Moroccan Jews began arriving. Then there was Jewish immigration with the rise of the Nazis in Europe. In the 1950s, another wave of immigration brought thousands of North African Jews to Brazil.

The book on Jewish history is by Marc Lee Raphael. I happened on his comments about the other side of Brazil’s – and America’s – Jewish immigration success story. The first is on Jews and the slave trade in Brazil. The other is even closer to home:

Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.

This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the ‘triangular trade’ that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750’s, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760’s, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760’s and early 1770’s dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent.

The tangled web of Jewish history is an important Yom Kippur theme. It won’t be heard in most synagogues today. We’re the poorer for it. Because the confessional reckoning is refused, our ability to change direction in the future is diminished.

Every day without a reckoning is a day without a future. So it is with Yom Kippur.

When piety serves the continuation of empire, reading sacred texts and chanting prayers is blasphemy.

But then Isaiah already encapsulated this thousands of years ago. It’s even read in synagogue on Yom Kippur:

To be sure, they seek Me daily,
Eager to learn My ways.
Like a nation that does what is right,
That has not abandoned the laws of its God,
They ask Me for the right way,
They are eager for the nearness of God.

“Why, when we fasted, did You not see?
When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?”
Because on your fast day
You see to your business
And oppress all your laborers!

Because you fast in strife and contention,
And you strike with a wicked fist!
Your fasting today is not such
As to make your voice heard on high.

Is such the fast I desire,
A day for men to starve their bodies?
Is it bowing the head like a bulrush
And lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call that a fast,
A day when the Lord is favorable?

No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free
To break off every yoke.

Feigned fasts. Isaiah, an original Jew of Conscience, knew it well.

The Jewish prophetic won’t let Yom Kippur go down easy.