Yom Kippur in the streets
Yom Kippur in the streets
On returns, reparations, and recoveries
"That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe." - Walter Benjamin
October 12, 2024. By the Barcelona shore, the buildings of the Spanish navy are draped in red and yellow flags. Standing atop a forty-metre column, a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus points to the seas. In the port waters, the Americas Cup — the world's elite sailing race — is taking place. Ships worth over $100 million cut through the Mediterranean waves, emblazoned with the logos of fossil fuel companies and luxury brands.
Metres away, in the city streets, a parade of resistance unfurls. Abya Yalan diasporas — joined by Palestinian, Lebanese, Kurdish, Senegalese communities and rights groups — along with others, pour into Las Ramblas. A candombe group syncopates the groove of the demonstration.
This day commemorates the moment Cristóbal Colón set foot in Guanahani (the Bahamas) in 1492; for the Spanish state, this an anniversary of glorious celebration, a festivity for la Hispanidad. For counter-colonial movements, it is a day to honour Indigenous resistance against empire. To sit with the brutal legacies of dispossession and erasure, and the gifts of ancestral struggles.
Many consider 1492 to be a decisive turning point in the development of contemporary colonialism, global inequality and the climate crisis. There are years that birth such vicious atrocities that these reverberate throughout the centuries, becoming intergenerational crimes, sustained thefts of the future.
In Barcelona, the atmosphere this year is one of sober fury. Of indignation against the institutional racism of Europe, against detentions and deportations, against the politics of unmemory and forgetting, against a continental complicity in genocide, against Spain and Catalonia's unashamed embrace of colonialism. Wiphalas, wenufoyes, and Palestinian flags fill the sky. Songs and chants — "Europe, question your wealth. Your comfort is our poverty" — fill the air, confronting throngs of tourists with the city that pulses beyond the brochures.
I think back a few years, to when I experienced the 12th of October in Palos de la Frontera, the southwestern Spanish port from which Columbus departed on his first expedition. Today, Palos is home to massive agribusiness plantations, where exploited migrant workers pick blueberries and strawberries to be sold across Europe. Nearby, the Cristóbal Colón power plant further pollutes one of the most contaminated areas of the continent.
There are years of such vicious atrocities that these reverberate and wound throughout the centuries. 1492, the year of Columbus' departure, was also the year of the Alhambra Decree, the expulsion of Jews from the Spanish kingdom. The Spanish kings would prohibit the practice of Islam four years later. As Spain established its emergent empire, it demolished and dismantled Al-Andalus, a time-space where Islam and Jewishness shaped each other for centuries, where some of the most fascinating political and cultural expressions in Arab-Jewish history were woven. What survived was smuggled into diaspora.
As I walk through the Barcelona street, I think of 1492, of Jabalia, of the distance of what was given what is, of Isabella Hammad’s words: “To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak.”
This year — 2024, 5784 — the 12th of October overlaps with Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a day of repentance and intensive self-examination. Jewishness is many things, but one way of looking at it is as an architecture of attention. The calendar enshrines a cycle of motions and seasons. When the year's spiral reaches Yom Kippur, the requirement is teshuvah: to return.
To retrace our steps, to come back to goodness, to return to who we can become. Yom Kippur is about rekindling the wild and sometimes burning questions of justice that dance inside: where have I and where do I cause harm? Who am I accountable to? Where might I mend? If the most reparative apology is transformation, how am I morphing?
Reparation requires a commitment to the past, embodied through a different future. A return, an invitation to abandon a path of distraction.
As historian Yakov Rabkin reminds, early political Zionist leaders repeatedly promoted Zionism to European powers by stressing its potential for distracting Jews from other gravitational pulls that were imperilling empire, such as socialism or internationalism or Jewish anarchism. As Winston Churchill, the unapologetic British colonial military officer and statesman, would reflect: "the International Jews...this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing...It becomes, therefore especially important to foster and develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at this present time."
In this period of the early 20th century, from the depths of a Belarusian forest, the respected rabbi Aaron Shmuel Tamares denounced Zionism as a form of "hypnosis", a brazen overturn of spiritual focus. Could approaching dominant Zionism as a hypnotic distraction open us to return to a wider memory, to a wider affinity, to a wider possibility of collective flourishing, to more potent and effective actions right now?
In these days devoted to awe and accountability, dear loved ones approach me with tender yet clear mirrors: here is where you can change, here is where you can grow, here is where you are hiding. Being made aware of our complicity in harm, both subtle and severe, is a painful expansion; the stronger the sanctity, the heavier the desecration. The inner chorus of critique joins in: have you done enough to stop the genocide, to refuse to adjust to injustice? Have you done enough to fight for those still living?
Teshuvah, like any rite of return, can be deeply disorientating, even disturbing: who am I, beyond this? What can I - shorn of a little more fear or certainty or ego - become? A friend consoles me: "that vertigo is vitality".
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