But what about the Jewish Easter Bunny?

Even though I’d still really like to be Jewish, I’m not doing a very good job of abandoning my Christian brainwashing. Recently one of my lucky-to-be-Jewish friends was telling me how her grandchild asked her (sotto voice since her younger sister was listening) whether their parents were really the tooth fairy. Thinking quickly, my friend cleverly suggested she could stay up all night to find out the answer for herself.

I said, stupidly, “Does she still believe in Santa Claus?”

“Well no, she’s Jewish,” my friend responded.

And then (I still can’t believe myself) I said, “What about the Easter Bunny?”

“Well no, she’s Jewish.” (Said with admirable restraint.)

I was conflating religion and culture, much the way our son did once when asked by a friend to sing “God Bless America.”

“I don’t know the words,” he replied. “We don’t go to church.”

Actually, that’s conflating religion and patriotism (or jingoism), the unfortunate result of a Reagan-Bush childhood.

But I can’t really blame Eisenhower for my myopia. Christian holidays are so woven into our culture that it almost seems natural to imagine a secular Santa or Easter Bunny, until you remember what’s being celebrated.

It’s lucky I figured all this out today, on the second Day of Repentance. I’m going to go apologize to her so God can change his book.

Pentecost

Syncretism is one thing if it happens over centuries. Like let’s say you’re Italian. A long, long time ago your ancestors had a mid-winter festival in honor of Saturn celebrating the birth of the sun; and then Constantine, who ruled over those ancestors’ children, came along and converted to a new religion that was started by a guy called Jesus; and then those children’s children gradually came to believe that that Jesus was born at that same time, in the dead of winter, and. . .

But I keep thinking about those apostles who, just ten days ago, had seen Jesus’ body disappear; coming together there in Jerusalem to pray about the Torah; and then those tongues of fire appeared over their heads and they could suddenly speak all kinds of languages; and so they went out into Jerusalem and converted 3,000 people to this new religion.

Well I guess all that is pretty persuasive, and I guess it’s like suddenly becoming born-again. The only part I don’t get is why they were still celebrating Shavuot.

Shavuot

I wonder if Jesus, assuming he really existed, meant for all the special days he celebrated to get turned into something else. I can understand why his apostles might have forgotten about Passover, given that he died the day after and then came back to life. But apparently they were still counting the omer 49 days after Passover, because there they were celebrating Shavuot when those tongues of fire appeared over their heads and all of a sudden it was Pentecost.

I’m not sure I get it. If they’d really seen Jesus along with his body going up into the sky, why were they celebrating the giving of the Torah just ten days later? And what happened the next year? Did they finally stop counting?

Ascension Day

I’m trying for the life of me to figure out how anybody could believe in this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way is not to think about it too hard.

I can get to the belief that this man named Jesus existed; that he was wise beyond his time and his years; and that he was crucified. I can even stretch it to believing that his followers, like Mary Magdalene and his apostles, were so much under his spell that they believed they saw him after he died. I mean I do believe people see ghosts – or, better put, that they believe they have seen ghosts.

But that he rose, bodily, into heaven, forty days after he came alive again?

If I did believe this, I’d want to go to one of those churches with a hole in the roof where they take this statue and somehow, with great Broadway stagecraft, make it rise up into the sky.

Beltane/May Day

It’s funny that the Catholic Church, in its syncretic fashion, didn’t overlay some important feast on Beltane/May Day. It’s a pretty bad holiday, from a Christian point of view, with all those pagans worshipping that sun/fire god Bel and ritualistically driving their animals between two fires. And to the Druids it was even more important than Samhein, the cross-quarter day at the other side of the year, which got covered up by All Saints’ Day.

Then there’s that awfully phallic maypole, where boys and girls got all wrapped up together, banned not by the Catholics but by the Puritans in 1644.

And then there are all the Marxist International Workers’ Day connotations, not to mention the tanks and guns in Moscow.

Fortunately, Pope Pius XII finally got around to doing something about this in 1955. He gave St. Joseph a second feast day, and called him The Worker; but, unlike on Samhein/All Saints Day, you don’t have to go to church.

St. Mark’s Day

It wasn’t easy for St. Mark to become the patron saint of Venice.

For around eight centuries he was just lying peacefully (well, not so peacefully since he was martyred, but at least that was over) in his tomb in Alexandria, when suddenly some businessmen from Venice decided to abduct him. So they dug him up (or whatever one does with a body in a tomb), put him in a basket covered with herbs and some pig’s flesh (to keep the pork-forbidden Egyptian Muslims off the scent, as it were), and set sail for Venice. A great storm blew up, whereupon poor Mark got himself out from under that pig and told them to lower the sails.

A miracle; and now he’s supposedly there in his Venetian Basilica, where a mosaic at the entrance tells the whole story.

All that, and he’s also the patron saint of notaries!

Patriots’ Day

It’s okay that the dates of Easter and Passover float around, since nobody knows when (or if) they really happened. But although three-day weekends are great, it just doesn’t seem right to me that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Washington always have to be born on a Monday; and that the Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought after the switch to the Gregorian calendar (so they really did happen on April 19), now get celebrated (albeit with the exciting Boston Marathon, which people probably need a weekend to get ready for) on a different day.

But we should all look up to Massachusetts – after all, they’ve led the way on marriage equality and universal health care. So I say they deserve their own holiday, even though they moved it to a Monday.

Eastern Orthodox Easter

It turns out that this day is more accurately Easter, or at least the more astronomically accurate Easter.*

The complicated calculation goes like this: Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. But the Eastern Orthodox Church, for some reason, uses the astronomical full moon and the actual equinox while, strangely, Western Christianity uses a fixed date (March 21) for the equinox, and something called the paschal full moon (which may or may not be the actual full moon), derived from a table of ecclesiastical moons.

Who knew?

The Eastern Orthodox system is also more logically correct. In the West, Easter sometimes precedes Passover, but the Orthodox calculations ensure that Easter always follows Passover – as the resurrection followed the last supper.

You’d think they’d all want to get together. In 1963, the Second Vatican Council suggested Easter be fixed at the second Sunday in April, if all the Christian churches could agree – but nothing happened. Then, in 1997, the World Council of Churches proposed that both East and West use the most sophisticated astronomical calculations for their joint formula – but nothing happened.

WWJD?

*Turns out I’m quite wrong about this! (See Mockingbird‘s comment, who clearly knows a lot more about this than I do.)

Easter

It’s a very complicated calculation, involving ecclesiastical and Paschal moons and the vernal equinox, all having to do with the Emperor Constantine who converted to Christianity but didn’t want Easter to be the same day as Passover; as well as with the Church’s clever syncretism that scooped up all the pagan sun-worshipping and fertility and resurrection festivals into their own holiday.

And if Jesus really lived, and if he really was divine, and if I could have been one of the disciples, I would want to be Thomas – just to be sure.

Holy Saturday, more reflections

The other day I read about an atheist who for an hour each day pretended he believed in God. It’s an interesting thought experiment, especially for this somber purple-shrouded day, the last of Lent.

So let’s try. Let’s pretend that the things Jesus said in the Bible are commandments from God, since he was supposedly the son of God.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind;
and your neighbor as yourself.”

According to Luke (10:27), that’s what he said to a lawyer who wanted to know what laws he had to follow to gain eternal life.

What would Jesus say, then, to the Republican legislators in Iowa who think they can overturn their Supreme Court; to the Mormons who funded the California Proposition 8 battle; to the governor of Vermont; or to the National Organization for Marriage’s “Two Million for Marriage” drive (which they propose to call, hilariously, 2M4M)?

I say, let’s give all of them WWJD bracelets.