On the 29th of Ḥeshvan, Am Yisrael celebrated Sigd, a festival brought to Israel by the Ethiopian Diaspora upon their return home to our land.
Unlike Thanksgiving and Novy God, however, this holiday is not a cultural import from the idolatrous nations among which we were exiled, but rather a deep expression of the Jewish longing for a national return to our land, to Jerusalem, and to the Beit HaMikdash.
Sigd – fifty days after Yom Kippur in the same way that Shavuot follows Pesaḥ – was always about the longings of exiled Jews to return home. It happened to develop amongst the Jews of Ethiopia but it expresses the deep aspirations of Jews throughout the world.
A friend of mine, the son of immigrants from Ethiopia, expressed his frustration with the growing awareness of Sigd in Israeli society.
He sees the festival not as the exclusive inheritance of the Beta Israel but of all of Am Yisrael, since the ideals of the day and its observance express the national aspiration of Jews in all of our exiles over the last two millennia. He’s therefore frustrated by the perception that it is an “Ethiopian” holiday, and that other Jews are guests, or outsiders in its observance.
This brought us to another sensitive subject around the observance of Sigd today.
For many Jews, in Israel and across the Diaspora, Sigd is their one day of the year to taste Ethiopian food, see traditional Ethiopian clothes, and learn about the history and culture of Ethiopian Jewry.
Even the descendants of olim from Ethiopia often relate to the day as a kind of Ethiopian Heritage Day. But this approach completely contradicts the actual meaning of Sigd. The day is properly observed through fasting and tefilla, looking towards Jerusalem and redemption, rather than back at life in Ethiopia.
This is not to suggest that there is no place for appreciating and learning about the unique traditions of our brothers and sisters from Ethiopia. Ashkenazim should feel as comfortable eating injera as they do with falafel. Moroccans should be just as happy to share some dabo as they do munching on schnitzel. But that’s work that needs to be done year-round. It shouldn’t distract from the actual meaning of Sigd – our national longing to build an ideal society in Israel, for Torah to emanate from Jerusalem in the form of economy, politics, art, and warfare (when necessary).
So when Jews, especially those still in exile, celebrate Sigd by appropriating the external trappings of the Ethiopian Jewish festival, and then return to their lives in Western society, just as comfortable in their exile as they were a day earlier, they aren’t respecting the traditions of Beta Israel. They’re gutting them of value and disrespecting generations of Jews who longed to leave Ethiopia for Israel, and those who died making the dangerous journey on foot.
If Jews truly want to connect to Sigd next year, they should first examine their own relationship to exile and redemption. They should take time to understand what the Ethiopian Diaspora dreamed of and yearned for every year on Sigd. And they should do the work to decolonize their daily life, first and foremost by recognizing that all of us, even those of us here in Israel, have yet to see the complete end of our exile and the realization of our deepest collective aspirations.
