lavendersparkle: Jewish rat (Rat)
lavendersparkle ([personal profile] lavendersparkle) wrote2008-03-20 11:12 am
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A lonely Jew at Easter

I'm enjoying the bizarreness of I and most of my religious friends celebrating festivals on the same day, which have completely different feels to them. This year, Purim and Maundy Thursday/Good Friday coincide. So this evening, whilst my Christian friends are commemorating the last summer and garden of Gethsemane, I will be wearing fancy dress, drinking and generally being silly for religious reasons. I'm guessing in times gone by the consequences of this potential overlap were a lot more serious than friends being in different spiritual head spaces. A rowdy drunken festival on Good Friday in which we celebrate having executed some guy on a stick, probably wasn't the best way to not be murdered by angry Christian mobs.

It's when Jewish and Christian festivals coincide that the difference between being a member of the majority national religion and a minority religion becomes most obvious. A friend of mine just posted about her plans for the week end and I thought 'Oh, she's taking Friday off to go the church' before remembering that most people have Good Friday off. The BBC, which is usually vaguely secular in a default C of E sort of way, tends to get into the spirit of Easter, usually by broadcasting some kind of radio play of a Lenten narrative in which all of the disciples have Northern English accents. Sometimes I find this interesting but sometimes their annoying because, in keeping with the Gospels, the Pharisees sometimes take on a pantomime baddie quality. This is fair enough in other people's holy books but it's a bit much hearing it coming out of the radio unchallenged. The Pharisees are the people who formed my religion. Some of them were horribly martyred because they tried to keep the religion alive in oppressive times.

On the other hand there are advantages from being a minority. As with Christmas, the annoyance with Easter must surely be that most people's practice of it are wrong in an annoying way. The general cultural encouragement to gobble chocolate during Lent and Advent must be irritating to those who observe these times as penitential times. The way popular culture treats both festival as ending on it's first day rather than acknowledging the days of feasting involved in each one. It's probably much more annoying to be surrounded by people who are getting your festival wrong than by people who just don't know that your festival exists.

[identity profile] robhu.livejournal.com 2008-03-20 12:19 pm (UTC)(link)
in keeping with the Gospels, the Pharisees sometimes take on a pantomime baddie quality
Hold on a minute. That's what they told me in church... are you telling me it's wrong!?

I thought they schemed and plotted to have God killed?

[identity profile] snjstar.livejournal.com 2008-03-20 03:20 pm (UTC)(link)
It makes Purim be on a Bank Holiday, which is nice!