A Black Jewish poet’s call: High Holiday atonement means reckoning with racial injustice
Last year’s High Holidays followed a summer filled with racial justice protests, as many Jewish communities reckoned with their treatment of Jews of color and broader history on issues of race.
Amidst this tumult, Aaron Levy Samuels, a co-founder of the media company Blavity, began to write a new poem, titled “Forgiveness.” The poem ties the atonement rituals of Yom Kippur to the fight for racial justice, exploring along the way the emotional space Jews occupy during that holiday.
The poem has now been brought to life in a short film made in partnership with Reboot, a Jewish arts and culture nonprofit, and Hillel International. In it, Samuels, who is Black, speaks about walking through a metal detector on his way into a synagogue, comparing his fear in that moment to the experience of being pulled over by the police, or being looked at suspiciously while buying candy in a new neighborhood as a child.
And he juxtaposes the rituals of Yom Kippur with the murder of Black people at the hands of the police, their names chanted over and over during the summer’s protests just as we repeat our sins during prayers.
“Elements of the poem’s words deal with, at different points of times, being a Black Jewish person engaging in a larger white Jewish community,” said Samuels in a Reboot discussion with poet Mahogany L. Brown. In making the film, he said, he wanted to center images of Black Jews, to show that “their stories are worthwhile to tell in and of themselves.”
The poem ends by examining the very concept of atonement, wondering whether it is truly possible to be forgiven for wrongs we committed knowingly. It’s an ambiguous conclusion: “Poems aren’t meant to have answers, necessarily,” Samuels said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO