Yay for a day spent telecommuting! I didn't want to use a vacation day, if I wasn't going to visit family or go to synagogue. I had a lot to get done, but most of it was in the form of teleconferences, so I asked if I could work at home today. Yes, I played the religion card; in fact, when one of my managers was giving me grief about having an easy day, I asked him how often he'd called into the office on Christmas or Easter.
Maybe New Year's Day would have been a better analogy. Problem is, there's no such thing as a serious major holiday celebrated by most generic/secular Christian Americans (you know: doesn't go to church but part of the heavily Christian-influenced American culture). Christmas and Easter are joyful holidays for both secular and religious types, Thansgiving's happy for everyone, July 4 is about fireworks, and the more somber and reflective holidays like Veteran's Day or Memorial Day aren't that big a deal. So it all takes a little explaining: yes, it is a big deal, no, it's not a fun holiday. Add in the fact that all I'm doing with my day home other than working is baking brisket (and brownies!) and that it will be just the two of us for dinner and explanations get even more difficult; on the other hand, none of that last bit is really the business of anyone at the office anyhow.
Even when it's just me or just me and Rudder, even the year when my Passover Seder was a bowl of matzo ball soup in a casino on a business trip to Las Vegas, I do feel somehow better when I do something, no matter how small, to mark the major Jewish holidays. I feel more connected not only to my ancestors but to myself and my own past, and as if I have not been assimilated out of all recognition. I don't suppose an Orthodox Jew would recognize what I'm doign as observance of the holiday, but it feels lilke it to me.
It's very hard to explain Jewish holidays to non-Jews. As a kid, I had to explain that we didn't write on Yom Kippur, so we couldn't just go to "church" before school. But I once explained the ten days of repentance by saying, "you can't schedule an event at the temple then because it's Holy Week."
Posted by: l-empress at October 5, 2005 04:19 PM