{"id":143,"date":"2006-10-04T13:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-04T13:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/10\/holiday-fatigue-or-no-protestant-model.html"},"modified":"2006-10-04T13:28:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-04T13:28:00","slug":"holiday-fatigue-or-no-protestant-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/10\/holiday-fatigue-or-no-protestant-model.html","title":{"rendered":"Holiday Fatigue, or No Protestant Model?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m inclined to agree with Rabbi Grossman<\/a> about the virtues of Sukkot relative to Yom Kippur. Too many American Jews are “twice-a-year Jews,” meaning they show up at synagogue for Rosh Hashanah<\/a> and Yom Kippur<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now granted, these are extremely important holidays, but they also give a skewed picture of what Judaism is, with their emphasis on sin and atonement. More than one rabbi has observed how different American Jews\u2019 sense of Judaism would be if they came twice a year, on Simchat Torah<\/a> and Purim<\/a>. The sense of joy and celebration would certainly be a corrective to a stereotype of Jews as anxious and guilt-laden. Again, not that the High Holidays and their message aren\u2019t important\u2013but they need the other holidays of the annual cycle\u2013not to mention the weekly celebration of Shabbat<\/a>\u2013to put them in their proper perspective.<\/p>\n

Why does Sukkot<\/a> get such short shrift? I think in part because American Jewish life operates against the background of Protestant life, where there are only a few major holidays. Easter is the holiest day of the year, so in Jewish terms, that\u2019s either Yom Kippur (with Rosh Hashanah thrown in for good measure) or Passover<\/a> <\/span>(connected by season). Christmas is an important wintertime holiday, so that gives Jews Hanukkah<\/a>\u2013but that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n

I think that many other Jewish holidays go unobserved because there isn\u2019t a convenient Christian analogue (either thematically or seasonally) to “justify” them. This hypothesis is supported by a completely unscientific measure of the relative prominence of various Jewish holidays in the popular mind: seeing how many results you can get of Microsoft Office Clip Art designed for each holiday. The instructive results follow:<\/p>\n