By Adar
Jews love holidays. I think that’s safe to say. Holidays for planting trees (Tu B’shvat), holidays for miraculous oil (Hanukah), holidays for dressing up in costumes (Purim), holidays for freedom (Passover), holidays for being lost in the desert for too long (Sukkot), holidays for ending a plague hundreds of years ago (Lag Ba’omer). You name it. Each comes with its own foods, its own ceremonies. Some are rooted in the Torah and others on history. And each community celebrates differently, often depending on the size and religiousness. For example, Yom Kippur is a day when those who are religious fast and pray for atonement. It’s one of the holiest days of the Jewish year, and anyone who considers themselves a “one a year Jew” will use Yom Kippur as their time to demonstrate their devoutness by showing up to synagogue. And apologize for the weeks they accidentally missed the other 51 times that year. For many ultra religious, Yom Kippur is a day of purification, atonement, fasting and seriousness. They pray from evening till morning till evening again. For secular kids, on the other hand, it’s a day when absolutely no cars are driving; when the streets are empty; when school is closed and when all of their friends are available. If there’s a better excuse to go bicycling and play soccer in the middle of a usually-busy street, I haven’t heard it.
This week’s holiday is Shavuot: a celebration of when Jews received the Torah from God. As the story goes, Jews went to bed very early in order to be well rested for the upcoming Torah Reception that was to happen the next day. They overslept, as sometimes happens before the invention of alarm clocks, and in order to make up for this terrible mistake a couple thousand years ago, Jews today stay up all night studying holy texts until just before dawn. It’s one of the three pilgrimage holidays, when Jews are expected to make their way to Jerusalem (the other two being Passover and Sukkot), and since 1967, tens of thousands of Jews dressed in ritual white clothing rush to the Western Wall as soon as they’re done studying for the night. It’s supposed to be quite the event.
Another aspect of Shavuot is eating tons of dairy. Basically, what happened was the Jews got the Torah, which told them that they had to separate milk and meat. This means that you can’t use the same plates for dairy and for meat. So, what are they supposed to do if the plates they had been using touched milk before they got the Torah. Well they certainly couldn’t put meat on them, and until they got new plates using all of their handy desert plate-making abilities, they ate dairy-based foods.
I’m serious.
Secular Jews in Israel tend to ignore the staying-up-to-study-torah part of the holiday, and instead use it as a very good excuse to make a lot of cheesecake, blintzes, and other dairy foods. In small communities they’ll have ceremonies with everyone from the kibbutz or moshav showing off their cute children wearing white dresses and little crowns, and basically take the two days off to get together and have a nice break.
As much as I’m not one to complain about getting holidays regularly thrown on the schedule, it is actually quite an issue here, especially for families with kids. Not only do kids get the holiday itself off, they get the day before (or most of it) to prepare for the evening (when all Jewish holidays start). If a holiday or the evening of a holiday falls on a weekend, schools will often add another day off that they would have gotten had the holiday not already been on a day off. In total, school kids get 77 days off during the year, in addition to summer vacation. Often, these are days when parents still work, because they don’t get the extra day off and because not every single random Jewish holiday is practiced by many. While the public school system of a Jewish state must take time off for all the holidays, private businesses don’t have to. What do you do if you’re a working parent of a five year old who gets so many days off that you have to be at work for? It can become quite a challenge for many families, and I nearly ever year there is some discussion about “what to do” to solve this problem. Many solutions have been found. None of them are good.
Even taking it down a notch to the issue of regular weekends becomes a debate. Saturday is the day off. It’s the Jewish sabbath. But, as I mentioned, all Jewish holidays start the evening before and so Friday is already a half-day. This day-and-a-half for the weekend means that businesses are closed, buses don’t run, and other services are shut down. But what about the muslim Arab population? Their holy day is Friday. And the small but present Christian population’s day is on Sunday, as is the majority of the western world. As it stands now, and probably simply because I go to the most religiously and ethnically diverse university in Israel, I get all three days off. Every week. It makes for great opportunities to travel, but come on. I think most of us can agree that it’s excessive and you can get so much less done during the school year if you arrange your schedule this way.
I’ve really enjoyed having so many Jewish holidays stud the semester. I’ve gotten quite the opportunity to learn about them and celebrate many in ways I hadn’t heard of before. But I realize that economically it’s quite difficult to support, and poses a challenge for many families.