My two favorite holidays- Halloween and Purim- share a lot of the same props. Candy, costumes, masks, even drinks for the older celebrants. Back when I went to day school, many of my classmates would buy their Purim costumes in October. (There were also dorks like me who always dressed as biblical characters for Purim, but hey, they could look like anything, right?)
Not all religious Jews are keen on Halloween, though. I distinctly remember an evening before Halloween when I brought home a letter from the school principal asking parents not to send their children trick-or-treating. “It has deep pagan roots”, the letter went, “and is, at heart, a Christian holiday.” I was heartbroken, but my parents- a rabbi and a woman who was, at that point, getting her PhD in Jewish studies- thought it was absolutely hysterical. They took me trick-or-treating as usual.
“There are no bumper stickers,” they told me, “that say ‘Put the Hallows back in All Hallows Eve’.”
They had a point. Halloween is pretty disconnected from Christianity, and I imagine there were a few Christian schools who sent their students home with similar letters that evening. As for pagan roots, I was later to learn that there isn’t a single holiday about which that can’t be said in one way or another.
(Someday I’ll talk about the time I was told blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanna was meant to scare away demons…but that’s a story for another time.)
The thing about a secular holiday is that religious Jewish kids could get excited about it. Christmas spirit left us cold, and Passover meant nothing to the world at large, but for the month of October we could get excited about the same thing the rest of the children were excited about. It sounds like a little thing, but it wasn’t- and still isn’t for me, to this day. And if someone wasn’t into Halloween, that was also culturally acceptable. You don’t see any big heartwarming family movies about forcing one family in the neighborhood who doesn’t like Halloween to get into the spirit of things, after all.
(Well, maybe Trick-r-Treat, but I will accept that kind of behavior from demons and dark gods.)
I used to live in a neighborhood that got super into Halloween decorations. One day, my father pointed something out to me about them.
“Every decoration, from a house covered in skeletons to one with only a pumpkin, tells children that they can knock on the door and ask for candy. How often do we really advertise that sort of thing? Religious folks like to talk about feeding the hungry, but how many holidays have us hang signs on our doors that say, come to my house, stranger, and I will give to you?”
I thought about it at the time. I’m still thinking about it to this day.
Judaism and Halloween
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