A00277: Books of the Month for the Month of June 2024: A City on Mars and Searching for Zion: Excerpts from Searching for Zion

 "Once upon a time, Tamar had been my tribe, but a shadow wall had crept up between us.  I couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that, in spite of her leftist stance, which was about as far left as she could stand without falling off the edge, she was complicit in an unjust occupation.  Zion was a tinderbox of contradictions that left me confused.  It didn't matter to me then that the State of Israel was declared, in large part, in reparation for the Holocaust, or that some of its people were being attacked.  Palestine was under its colonial thumb.  It didn't matter that Tamar didn't live in a settlement, or that she participated in peace protests and rallies, or that she rolled her eyes at the slogans in her neighbors' windows (GOLAN HEIGHTS IS OURS!). They were still her neighbors, and she's chosen to leave me and live among them.  It didn't matter that she wasn't the one who had shined a flashlight between my legs to look for a bomb.  I couldn't shake the feeling that her choice to be Israeli had turned my best friend white."  (Searching for Zion, pg. 15.)

*****

"Avoiding my reflection in storefront windows, I meandered through Harlem and beyond: north to the Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park, east to the movable Macombs Dam Bridge and into the Bronx, west over the George Washington Bridge across the dirty Hudson, south down the long finger of Manhattan.  On one of these rambles, in the shadow of the elevated subway tracks off 125th Street, I came across a short stretch of the alleyway Old Broadway.  And there, in the middle of the alley, stood a small sweet shul with a dirty facade and bulletproof stained glass windows.  Here was Harlem's last remaining synagogue, a remnant from the neighborhood's former days of Yiddish theaters and crowded Jewish tenements.  When the darker "undesirables" began pouring in, Harlem's upwardly mobile Jews flew to the nearby neighborhoods of Washington Heights and the Upper West Side, or farther off to the outer boroughs.  In the case of East Harlem, the flood of incoming Puerto Ricans and outgoing Jews was called the New Spanish Inquisition.  When blacks started flocking in droves from Georgia and the Carolinas to Harlem in the 1920s, the number of Jews dropped from nearly two hundred thousand to just five thousand.  By the Depression's end, there were barely any Jews left in Harlem at all.  Yet this synagogue remained.  I stopped in front of it.  Why did I feel I'd been there before?  It was Friday evening and the sun was setting.  I was suddenly starving for Shabbat dinner at Tamar's old house on Murray Place.  Tentatively, I pushed open the heavy wooden door.

"Welcome!" cried an old black man with a velvet kippah on his head. "Good Shabbos."  He adjusted the tallis on his shoulders and took my hands in his.  "This is wonderful," he smiled.  He had the whitest teeth.  "Another wandering Jew has found her way home."  Either as a result of his kindness or as a result of his mistake, I was afraid I might begin to weep."  (Searching for Zion, pgs. 22-3.)

*****

"In the ancient South Semitic ecclesiastical language Ge'ez, the word falasha means "landless one" and, by association, "wanderer," "exile," "stranger."  It is used to describe the Beta Israel, meaning "House of Israel," Ethiopian Jews whose tradition holds that they descend from the line of Moses himself -- specifically fro the lost tribe of Dan -- though the origin of their Judaism remains contested by scholars, unlike the Lemba, a South African tribe of black Jews whose DNA has linked them to ancient Judea.  Many scholars theorize that Ethiopian Jews converted from the Christian faith during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Ethiopisant Ephraim Isaac, on the other hand, believes that Jewish presence in Ethiopia dates back to the period of the First Temple, hundreds of years before Christ.  He points out that the Bible mentions Ethiopia more than fifty ties, "but Poland, not once."  One thing is certain: the Beta Israel have longed for Jerusalem for centuries.  Maybe for millennia.

"The Israeli chief Rabbinate recognized the status of Ethiopian Jewry in the mid-1970s and, in so doing, paved the way for a mass exodus under the Law of Return.  Coming mostly from the mountainous northern Gondar region, where they made up only a small minority of Ethiopia's population and were denied the right to inherit land unless they converted to Christianity, their number in the State of Israel is now nearly 120,000.  A third of these Ethiopians were born Israel.  This is thanks in large part to two massive, highly publicized "rescue" efforts, Operation Moses (1984) and Operation Solomon (1991), which airlifted the Beta Israel from Africa."  (Searching for Zion, pgs. 28-9.)

*****

"More than two decades have passed since the first significant wave of Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia to the promised "Land of Milk and Honey" began.  While coming on aliyah and being physically present in Israel fulfilled half of the dream, the intolerance towards their language, culture and color, which they have encountered in every aspect of life since their arrival in Israel, has buried the other half of Ethiopian Jewry's dream.  Today we can speak more aptly in terms of the crushed dream."   (Searching for Zion, pg. 47.)

*****

The Black search for Zion in Israel is coming to an end.  The Black search for Zion in Jamaica is next.

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

Fairfield, California 

June 11, 2024 

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Sent: Thursday, June 6, 2024 at 01:09:06 AM PDT

Subject: Books of the Month for the Month of June 2024: A City on Mars and Searching for Zion

"Emily Raboteau's Searching for Zion takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith.  Both one woman's quest for a place to call "home" and an investigation into a people's search for the Promised Land, this landmark work is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.

"At twenty-three, Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend.  While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau couldn't say the same for herself.  As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she'd never felt at home in America.  But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of Zion as a place black people yearned to be.  She'd heard about it on Bob Marley's Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one.  In Israel, the Jewish Zion she was surprised to discover black Jews.  Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that had left home in search of a Promised Land.  Her question for them is the same she asks herself; have you found the home you're looking for?

"On her ten-year journey back in time and across the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau wanders through Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the Southern United States to explore the complex and contradictory perspective of "black Zionists." She talks to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Hurricane Katrina transplants from her own family -- people who have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit.

"In Searching for Zion, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of exodus."

(The bookcover inside statement for Searchin for Zion.)

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

P.S. I read the first chapter this evening and found it very intriguing.  Indeed, I got so caught up in it, that I missed my pre-midnight walk.  There will be more to come. ... soon.     

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From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>

To: Everett Jenkins <skipjen2865@aol.com>

Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2024 at 07:45:10 AM PDT

Subject: Books of the Month for the Month of June 2024: A City on Mars and Searching for Zion

For the Month of June 2024, I appear to be a bit ambitious, but it is doable.  This month I want to read A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith and Searching for Zion by Emily Raboteau.  These two books are based on recommendations from people I know so I want to give them a try.

My middle daughter recommended A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? because it provides a sobering assessment of the prospects for humankind to find another world to exploit.  I am halfway through the book, and I have become more sober.  Perhaps, if others read this book, they will as well.

A new Amherst acquaintance not only recommended the book Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, he actually sent me a copy.  I will be meeting this new Amherst acquaintance for lunch on Juneteenth.  I hope to discuss some of it with him there.  

Hopefully, some will come along on the journey.  As always, it should be quite a ride.

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins