TIKKUN.

My existence is not an ongoing audition for those never meant to judge me.

Am I Jewish?

Hi. Rícky J. Marc¹ again. I am from Brooklyn, born and raised. I grew up in Boca Ratón. My faith came through my mother’s side of the family, through a line that bears the name Rosemberg in blood and memory. My first decision to believe arrived around age thirteen, at the same time people around me began to treat me as a young man.

Long before then, Shabbat has framed every week of my life. I keep kashér כָּשֵׁר‎. I enjoy matzoh ball soup with the kind of affection that belongs to food tied to story and heritage. The high holidays bring a rhythm that feels settled and familiar.

None of this is costume. It is the daily life of a Ḥadashí man, ordered around Scripture, prophetic conviction, and a path of discipline that Tikkun Ḥadash תִּקוּן חָדָשׁ already describes. My Afro-Latīné body carries this identity through worlds that often do not expect it, let alone understand it.

The practices that feel natural to me still register as surprise to people who only accept a narrow picture of who walks inside this faith and what they look like.

A BODY THAT DOES NOT MATCH THEIR TEMPLATE

The question arrives in many tones. Are you Jewish? Sometimes it drops out of a stranger’s mouth without restraint. Sometimes it settles into a side glance or a comment that pretends to be a joke.

The wording changes. The energy stays the same. I hear shock that an Afro-Latīné man moves through these observances, speaks this theological language, cares this much about these texts, and does it all from the inside.

The template behind this reaction formed long before I took my first breath. Eurocentric expectations assigned this faith a certain skin tone, accent, and family story. Anything outside that assignment triggered confusion.

I walked into synagogues and community gatherings with a kippāh on my head and felt eyes carry that template onto my presence. That experience trained me early. In those rooms, a Black body in ritual space carried an unspoken demand for explanation.

I did not create this demand. I live under its gaze.

RACISM INSIDE FAMILIAR WALLS

The harshest racism in my life often came from people who claimed the same scriptural basis I held. In Boca Ratón, I watched how quickly some faces shifted when they realized I belonged in spaces they thought of as theirs.

I listened to comments that treated my presence as spectacle. I swallowed disbelief from people who could recite blessings fluently but could not imagine that a Afro-Latīné teenager might carry the same faith with equal seriousness.

Those moments did more than sting. They exposed a fracture inside the community’s own ethics. The texts we read spoke clearly about the image of God in every human life, about the stranger, the orphan, the vulnerable.

The behavior I saw too often rejected that standard when a body like mine stood in front of them. That hypocrisy shaped me. It carved out a space where I had to decide whether to internalize their prejudice or submit them to the judgment of the very Word they claimed.

Tikkun Ḥadash answered that dilemma. My identity as a Ḥadashí does not bend around their bias. Their gaze does not confer legitimacy. The Most High ﷻ names me. The disciplines of Tikkun ha-Brit and Tikkun Olam ha-Brit define my obligations. Racism inside these spaces falls under that structure and faces the same scrutiny as any injustice.

AFRO-LATĪNÉ, HEBRAIC, AND UNAPOLOGETIC

My blood carries the story of indigenous Kiskéyà, Cuba, and the House of Soúlouque. My line also carries the Rosemberg name across an ocean. Empire, exile, violence, and survival run through these branches. Faith grew in that soil. When I name myself as a Ḥadashí, I claim all of it. I do not shrink my identity to match anyone’s comfort.

Afro-Latīné presence within this faith language exposes the limits of a racialized imagination. People who have only met this tradition through Ashkenazi whiteness struggle when standing in front of someone who does not match that pattern, yet lives and practices from the inside.

They are not prepared for a Brooklyn-born, Boca-raised Afro-Latīné who observes Shabbat, keeps kashér, studies Scripture through a historicist lens, and frames the world through Tikkun Ḥadash.

Their lack of preparation does not constitute a crisis for me. It reveals a crisis in their formation.

TIKKUN ḤADASH AND THE LAND OF PALESTINE

My earlier writing on Tikkun Ḥadash laid out the framework: a life of renewal, integrity, responsibility, and liberation under the sovereignty of the Most High ﷻ. That framework does not remain abstract. It extends into land, law, and power.

When I look at Palestine through Tikkun Olam ha-Brit, I see an occupation with clear features: a settler-colonial apartheid state that rules through dispossession, siege, military domination, and engineered precarity.

The second chapter of Habakkuk² speaks directly to this pattern. The twelfth verse declares woe upon those who build towns with blood and establish cities through iniquity. That line passes through history and lands on every empire that treats human beings as material for its projects.

The present regime in Palestine fits that description. It builds security through checkpoints, demolitions, prison, and mass death. It claims holiness while enforcing a system that crushes the image of God in Palestinians.

My allegiance does not go there. My Ḥadashí path places my allegiance with Aḏōnāi Elōhîm אֲדֹנָי אֱלֹהִים ﷻ, who hears the cry of the oppressed and weighs nations by their treatment of the vulnerable. Palestinian liberation sits inside that allegiance as a requirement. It aligns with the command to love the neighbor. It aligns with the prophetic warnings. It aligns with the prophetic understanding of empire and false worship.

So when people encounter me—an Afro-Latīné man who keeps this faith and calls the regime in Palestine an illegal settler-colonial apartheid state—their categories short-circuit. Some treat my anti-Zionism as proof that I must stand outside the faith map they carry. In reality, my stance emerges from that faith.

THE COST OF THEIR QUESTION

The question Are you Jewish? rarely stands alone. It carries a history of exclusion, a suspicion of Black bodies in sacred space, and a demand that identity justify itself at the door. It arrives in classrooms, sanctuaries, holiday gatherings, and casual conversations.

It appears when I sit in leadership roles within faith-based organizations. It appears when I speak about Palestine. It appears when I wear a kippāh in a world that thinks it knows who wears that cloth.

Every repetition carries a cost. The question announces that my outward appearance sits under permanent examination. It implies that my name, my practice, my lineage, and my theology need defense in ways their whiteness never does. It exposes that the person asking has never fully reckoned with the diversity of this faith or the violence of the categories they inherited.

Tikkun Ḥadash does not instruct me to pour endless explanations into that void. The framework calls me to clarity, not performance. It calls me to witness, not constant self-justification. It directs me to speak when truth demands it and to withdraw when curiosity arrives without respect.

REFUSING TO PERFORM FOR A RACIALIZED GAZE

I write and speak publicly about my Ḥadashí identity. I lay out the structure of my faith. I anchor my positions in Scripture. I describe Tikkun Ḥadash, Tikkun ha-Brit, and Tikkun Olam ha-Brit.

I name Palestine as occupied and call plainly for liberation. I describe the racism I experienced in spaces that claim this faith and the solidarity I practice with those under the heel of empire. That witness exists for those willing to listen with honesty.

What I will not do is treat my existence as an ongoing audition. A racialized gaze that doubts my belonging because my skin and heritage do not match its template does not deserve endless reassurance. The same gaze that excuses apartheid when it wears a familiar flag cannot set the terms for how I describe myself.

My life in this faith stands on a different tribunal. The Most High ﷻ knows my name in every language that carries it. The Word I study and the mo’edim I keep do not need confirmation from people who only recognize this tradition when it appears in whiteness and nationalism.

So this entry ends where the question began, on my own terms.

Am I Jewish?

Because the truth is—if I didn’t look like me, you would never ask, so why should I dignify it with a response?

1. Yes, I am Rícky J. Marc. Surprised? Don’t be. My name takes on different forms, depending on the context. For instance, in Hebrew, my name is Ramíel ben-Yefeh Sālúq (Rājèmi) • (רַג׳ֵמִי) ‎שַׂר רָמִיאֵל בֶּן יֶפֶה גַּלְיָה מִבֵּית סָלוּק. In Amharic, my name is Rājèmi Wolde Wubetawi ልዑል ራጀሚ ወልደ ውበታዊ ወ ጋልያ ቤት ሰሉቃ. In Arābīc, my name is Rājèmi ibn Jamil al-Súluk السَّيِّدُ رَاجِمِي ٱبْنُ جَمِيلٍ وَغَالِيَةَ مِنْ بَيْتِ السُّلُوكِ. But you already knew that, because you read my previous article.

2. It reads: Behold the proud, his soul is not upright in him; but the just shall live by his faith. Indeed, because he transgresses by wine, he is a proud man, and he does not stay at home. Because he enlarges his desire as hell, and he is like death, and cannot be satisfied, he gathers to himself all nations and heaps up for himself all peoples. Will not all these take up a proverb against him, and a taunting riddle against him, and say, ‘Woe to him who increases what is not his—how long? And to him who loads himself with many pledges’? Will not your creditors rise up suddenly? Will they not awaken who oppress you? And you will become their booty. Because you have plundered many nations, all the remnant of the people shall plunder you, because of men’s blood and the violence of the land and the city, and of all who dwell in it. Woe to him who covets evil gain for his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the power of disaster! You give shameful counsel to your house, cutting off many peoples, and sin against your soul. For the stone will cry out from the wall, and the beam from the timbers will answer it. Woe to him who builds a town with bloodshed, who establishes a city by iniquity! Behold, is it not of the Lord of hosts that the peoples labor to feed the fire, and nations weary themselves in vain? For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. Woe to him who gives drink to his neighbor, pressing him to your bottle, even to make him drunk, that you may look on his nakedness! You are filled with shame instead of glory. You also—drink! And be exposed as uncircumcised! The cup of the Lord’s right hand will be turned against you, and utter shame will be on your glory. For the violence done to Lebanon will cover you, and the plunder of beasts which made them afraid, because of men’s blood and the violence of the land and the city, and of all who dwell in it. Pretty on-the-nose, isn’t it?