with Rabbi Marvin Goodman
How Do Secular Holidays Relate to Jewish Life?
If you have a question for our experts about raising Jewish children or issues about family life and relationships between people of different faiths, please email us at bridges@sfjcf.org.
Celebrating secular holidays is in our Jewish tradition. We are told to support the country in which we live – to be good citizens. Thus it’s natural to celebrate the holidays of our nation.
Like Jewish holidays, secular holidays are also holy days. On Jewish holidays we take time to acknowledge the moment and express our thanks and appreciation for the opportunity to do so. We can do the same on secular holidays. These celebrations can be more than just a day off. Why not consider the source of the holiday, its true meaning, and how you can acknowledge and sanctify that meaning.
Thanksgiving, originally the Puritan’s harvest festival, falls close in the calendar year to our Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. It’s easy to connect the two and remind ourselves in the midst of a feast to be thankful for the bounty of food – and everything else that we are privileged to enjoy in this country.
Independence Day and Presidents Day are other days to think about how lucky we are to be living in the U.S. We all have ancestors who came to America from somewhere else and endured hardships to provide better lives for their children.
I believe there’s value in putting the “memory” back in Memorial Day, and before taking off for a picnic or a day at the beach, to give some thought to how our past history can impact the future.
Martin Luther King’s birthday resonates especially for Jews. We too were slaves. We too were strangers in a strange land.
New Year’s is party time in the U.S. However, even as we celebrate, we resolve to change… to return to how we should live, as we do on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.
Finally, there’s Halloween. It has become a secular holiday, but it’s based on All Saints Day, once a pagan and now a Catholic observance. So, it’s not unusual for Jews to ask themselves if their children should participate. I remember when I was a kid, we collected pennies for UNICEF when we went trick or treating. Today, this may be an opportunity for children to consider people who are less blessed and figure out a creative way to help them.
Rabbi Marvin Goodman is the director of the Northern California Board of Rabbis and Rabbi-in-Residence at the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.
« Back to Main Page
|
