I want to wish all of you who are People Of The Book a very Happy Easter and Passover.
Easter in Ireland…
This image is of a typical holiday procession from where I grew up. It could be Easter, or Patrick’s Day or whatever holiday. Not too many egg hunts and rabbits with this lot. (In fact, this piccie is from 2000-something. This is after the West of Ireland had lightened up. 😀 )
Becomes Passover in America
Now almost all my American relations were very observant Jews so when I came to America in the 70’s I expected a similar degree of somber religiosity. After all, these were people who did not drive on Saturdays. Who made their kids wear funny outfits to public school. I expected we wouldn’t have much to talk about. Not so.
Every Passover, I would get invited to my Uncle’s house for the Seder and as soon as everyone was done with the Haggadah and Elijah and searching for that hidden thingie with the prizes, we’d all retire to a magical place called “the den” to watch Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner go at it for five hours on ABC.
Because it just would not be Passover for the Jews in their neighbourhood without the Ten Commandments going full blast in some other room.
So even though about half of the rigamarole was quite different from the rigamarole I grew up with, after all the parsley and horseradish, you can sit on the couch and cheer for Moses and boo at Edward G. and it’s all good.
My cousins now do this with their kids. This has been going on now for over 50 years! So it’s kinda become welded into the fabric of their observance in a very unironic fashion:
- Morning Temple
- Afternoon Seder
- Evening Ten Commandments
Now that’s tradition. 😀
If some of you find that sort of piccie somehow ‘disrespectful’, yeah, my guess is that you’re probably one of the unfortunate goyim. 😀 (keeeeding.)
One of the many gifts my Jewish/American family gave me was the ability to see the humour in that reference. It takes a real self-confidence to be able to laugh at one’s self. You can be ferocious in maintaining your identity and not take yourself too seriously. (I also credit them with the ability to argue like a m^%@*f&%@ker. Walking away from a good debate? Sissy. Thank you for that.)
Shared References
And for a good while, I thought I was pretty darned ‘culturally aware.’ In addition to my upbringing, living in Detroit in the 1970’s, gave me some vague knowledge not only about Easter and Passover, but also Ramadan and Kwanzaa.
And that covers the belief systems of….
Maybe half the population of Planet Earth.
But forget religion. That goes for every reference I’ve got. Hee Haw, Star Trek, Wizard of Oz, James Brown, Da Vinci. I cannot take for granted any of the cultural references I thought would last for-ehveeeer. (I now routinely run into people now who have no idea the basics of ‘Easter’. Ouch.)
And that’s not about ‘privilege’. Having shared references makes it easier to connect with people beyond just “Wow. Ireland, huh? It’s so green. Love the er… castles. And the hats, right?” 😀 Back in the day, having shared references like the Ten Commandments was quite the ice breaker.
Wait, he’s not the guy who parted the Red Sea?
And forget Moses. Hell, for people who still remember Charlton Heston their most recent reference would be:
But a decade before that…
And less than a decade before that…
My father-in-law remembers Heston marching with Dr. King for civil rights legislation in the early sixties.
But you have to go back a decade before that to get to the ‘Moses parting the Red Sea’ my generation still laughs about. That’s the problem with people. They can be more than one thing.
The ice breaker…
There was a point here when I started. 😀 Oh yeah: I occasionally mention a sliver of my background only as a way to try to connect to your background. As I’ve tried to make clear, my references are now the minority. I don’t expect people to know what a Eucharist is, any more than you should automatically expect that I know what your cultural practices are.
But I want to learn about your world. And there need to be ice breakers to get to those deeper conversations. And I believe the City has an obligation to give your cultural references a prominent place in the civic life of Des Moines.
Because the truth is? Back in the day there were three channels on TV. So everyone saw Charlton Heston part the Red Sea at least once. Whether they wanted to or not. 😀
Easter
For me, Easter is the most important day of the year. I can’t tell you exactly why except to say that those somber processions I opened with must have had a profound effect on me. If you ask anyone who knew me back in the day that I’d be playing organ at Mass? The word ‘miracle’ springs to mind. 😀
To this day I recall the reverence everyone had during those slow walks along the Sky Road which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean. Forget Christmas or funerals or whatever. This was the one moment of the year where the entire town stopped; sort of a ‘group meditation’. It created a sense of awe in me, which left me with the nagging feeling that the whole story–as unbelievable as it sounded? Yeah, it just might be true. 😀
For whatever reason, that feeling never left. It waxes and wanes. But whether at St. Joseph’s then or St. Philomena now, it persists.
(And the same could also be said of those Passover meals. Because the part I left out was that, all kidding aside, there were always moments where the enormity of the story hit everybody. What it took, just to survive, to get from there to here over 2,000+ years. It’s not hard to feel something miraculous in that as well.)
- Beannachtaí na Cásca, Happy Easter.
- Guten Pesach. Happy Passover.
🙂