Esther and Easter: A Reflection for 26 March 2016

Yesterday was Good Friday.  Tomorrow is Easter.

As a Jew, I don’t worry too much about the Christian Holy Week observances, which culminate in Easter Sunday.  Except to make sure that the fridge is full on Thursday, and to remember not to expect to get any shopping done until Tuesday.  At least here in Australia, where the weekend seems to have more of a ‘holiday’ feeling than it did back in the USA.

Back in my former life as a US Air Force chaplain, I had to concern myself with the Christian calendar.  This, because the facilities where I worked were under heavier use during Christian observances.  I had to be careful not to schedule anything that would be pre-empted by Holy Week’s Christian events.  We had a definite pecking order in the chaplaincy for scheduling events.  Religious services had priority over everything else, including religious education.  And special holy day occasions had priority over the ‘standard’ weekly Sabbath services.  So, at least in theory, Rosh Hashanah would trump the Christian Sunday.  And Good Friday would trump the Jewish Shabbat evening.  But thank G-d, we all tried very hard not to interfere with one another’s important days…and we largely succeeded.

Another area where we generally succeeded, was in finding time to appreciate one another’s observances by experiencing them.  Thus, I’ve been to several Protestant Easter Sunrise Services.  And the Russian and Greek Orthodox candlelight vigils on Saturday night.  And more than one Catholic Easter Mass.  They’re all different.  But they all incorporate the same kind of solemnity that we bring to Yom Kippur.  But my Christian colleagues, and our Christian neighbours in general, cannot seem to fathom why our other observances are not so solemn.

Although Easter Sunday is particularly solemn, any Sunday’s worship in any Christian tradition – except perhaps Pentecostal or Charismatic – is likely to be particularly solemn.  But the typical Shabbat in Jewish circles – in whatever ‘flavour’ or Judaism – is not likely to be solemn at all.  In the course of the service, we joke and laugh and generally have a good time.  And then there are the observances where the levity can get extreme.  Once I was talking to a woman from a Catholic background who had married a Jewish man, the older brother of a friend.  I was at this family’s home for Pesach.  Talking with the non-Jewish sister-in-law, I asked her what was the ‘strangest’ – to her eyes – thing that her Jewish in-laws do.  And she told me that the Pesach Seder, which we are at that moment waiting to start, was a good place to start.  She understood Pesach to have a significance for Jews, somewhat analogous to that of Easter for Christians.  And yet, her Jewish family had a habit of celebrating the Seder with much levity:  throwing rubber frogs and bugs, interrupting and mocking the leader, complaining that they were dying of hunger so could the leader please move it along.

I nodded my understanding, wondering what she would have thought if she’d attended a Jewish gathering at Purim or Simchat Torah.

I was thinking about this today.  Oh, I’m not planning to drop in on any Christian services this Easter Sunday.  Those days are over, and besides I wasn’t planning to give my Sunday morning Hebrew students a day off.  No, sir!  But I was thinking about the rare occurrence of Purim and Easter in the same week.  No, not the similar sound of ‘Esther’ and ‘Easter.’  Perhaps it’s possible that both names have their origins in the same pagan deity.  But ‘Esther’ could also be a derivative of ‘hidden’ from Hebrew.  And given the content of the story, it fits.

Purim is a ‘minor holiday’ in that it does not carry any requirements for cessation of normal activities.  Only the positive requirement of hearing the Book of Esther read.  For those who were with me Wednesday night, we did it by discussing aspects of the book, rather than go through a traditional reading.  I hope you found it thoughtful and helpful.  That aside, it was just another occurrence of Jews being Jews together.  As in, Let’s eat!  But solemn?  Not hardly.

   What is it about our communal observances, that we only selectively bring an element of solemnity to them?  That we are more likely to dress our holy times and occasions in a degree of levity that is off-putting, or at least mysterious, to our neighbours?  In all honesty, I can’t say that I have an answer.  Oh, I have a gut feeling.  Perhaps our history has taught us not to take ourselves overly seriously.  Even when the occasion would seem to be serious.  We have survived by looking at ourselves and responding with humour to the ways that other people view us, and the way we view ourselves.  Perhaps this is because there is enough tsurres connected to being a Jew, that we don’t feel its necessary to add to it by enforcing a communal solemnity.  Anyway, that’s my gut feeling as to why we often lack solemnity and decorum.  And until someone comes up with a better explanation, I’m sticking to it!  Shabbat shalom.