Dismantling the Ignorance with Emmanuel Acho
Blessings to All Y’all People of Conscience,
Last night we had the honor of performing our song, To This Darkness (Part 1), at an event hosted at The Temple entitled, “An Evening of Uncomfortable Conversations.” The event featured New York Times bestselling author, Emmanuel Acho, in conversation with Rabbi Peter Berg of The Temple and Rev. Dr. John H. Vaughn of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Together they covered a wide range of topics inspired by Acho’s book, “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew” co-written by Acho and Noa Tishby.
Together with more than 900 interested and concerned community members of diverse backgrounds, we listened as Acho responded with great passion, humor, and eloquence, to questions from Rabbi Berg and Reverend Vaughn on topics ranging from antisemitism to Black-Jewish relations, to responses to October 7th, and much more. There was much that was said from the dais that resonated with us and we wanted to highlight just one of those takeaways: the idea of “dismantling the ignorance.”
Early in the conversation, Acho explained that his desire to write a book on the topic of antisemitism came from his frank and honest self-assessment that this was a topic with which he was both unfamiliar and uncomfortable. In other words, Acho wrote the book to dismantle his own ignorance (his phrase) and the ignorance that he identified as all too pervasive in communities that he considers to be his own. One of the tricky things about ignorance is that it can be surprisingly difficult to arrive at the simple fact of becoming aware of one’s own ignorance. After all, ignorance is… well… ignorance. Once we’ve become aware, how do we dismantle ignorance? By listening, by building relationships with people who have different experiences than our own, by getting curious, by being vulnerable, by caring, by refusing to stand idly by.
As the son of a preacher, part of Acho’s native language is a language of faith and spirit. He referenced the prophetic tradition of Isaiah and Esther as well as the New Testament in articulating his vision of a life well-lived. Echoing Isaiah, he spoke of the power of the simple words: I am here, send me. We found ourselves feeling that it was impossible to deny the central role that faith plays in his pursuit of “truth, grace, and love” (also his phraseology). That too resonated with us, as we feel compelled as well as nurtured by our respective faith traditions and the ways in which they intersect.
Acho praised the diverse crowd that had come to hear what he had to say and also lamented that, all too often, we remain separate and siloed. Somehow we’ve created a world wherein the simple fact of showing up in diverse spaces feels like an act of moral courage. That should certainly give us all pause.
Not knowing exactly the direction the Uncomfortable Conversation would go, we had selected a piece of music that we hoped would fit the tone and mood of the evening. So we chose our song “To This Darkness (Part 1)” the chorus of which contains the words, “To this darkness I will sing, a song of love, my offering.” Writing these words, we want to lift up Acho’s powerful teaching that love alone, while powerful, may not be sufficient. As mentioned, Acho spoke of “truth, grace, and love” and the necessity for all three of these concepts to be in dialogue with one another as a kind of check and balance. We agree with Acho that it is in the intersection of these three powerful moral concepts that we might all benefit from dwelling a little more fully so that we might one day be even more ready to declare: I am here, send me.
