The peril of false parity

[pktechgirlbackup]

My post on Rick Perry sparked a conversation with a Jewish friend about whether Christmas is a secular holiday (my friend thinks it's not, I thought it either is, or is a trick pagans play to get you to celebrate our holidays), which sparked a conversation with a culturally Jewish friend about whether she thought it was, in which she (despite being 30 years older, non-practicing, having a different sect of origin, and growing up in a different state) said pretty much the exact same things. I don't want to overgeneralize from two people, but the fact that they said such astonishingly similar things makes it clear there is a major cultural phenomenon I didn't understand, and that Christmas is not secular.

As I left, the second friend wished me a Merry Christmas*, and I had sort of a dilemma. I knew she didn't like being wished Merry Christmas in return, because she doesn't celebrate it. And I knew she didn't like being wished a Happy Hanukkah, because it implied a false equivalence between the two holidays. So I asked what the proper response was, and it turns out that it's "Thank you."**

This goes against every instinct in me, all of which say "when given a gift, reciprocate with a gift of equal value, even if it's something as insubstantial as rote good wishes." But there was no gift of equal value to give, and any attempt would in fact be an insult.*** At first I just logicked myself through this, but I think there might be a more important point about the search for equivalence in general. It's the same thing we see when WASPs assume everyone would be happier with more education, extroverts assume introverts would be happier if they went to more parties****, or doctors assume everyone wants heroic care even though they themselves do not. Simply accepting a gift- or a compliment- is something we're actively taught not to do.

*Actually, both gave me some form of holiday well wishes, which is additional food for thought
**Obviously she's still not a spokesperson for all of Judaism, but I do suspect this with hold true for people besides just her.
**Said friend realizes that people wishing her Happy Hanukkah mean well, but given that I had just been told that it bothered her, I felt I should aim higher.
****extrovert privilege is the worst privilege because it's the best one I don't have.

Comments

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

FWIW, my family does not go to the Christmas Day service at church, but that's partly because we attend the midnight service. Which has organ music and carols and so forth, but also conveniently puts us in church for part of December 25th. I *joke* about Christmas being a secular holiday, I don't consider myself what most Christians would consider Christian, but there has always been a strong religious element for my family.

[crystalpyramid]

If it were September, and you wished your Jewish friends Happy Holidays (or Shana Tovah — I'm not sure if there's a phrase in between those two, like if you recognize which Jewish holiday it is, but aren't yourself Jewish), presumably "thank you" would be the correct thing for her to say? It seems like it makes sense in that context.

Also, not to nitpick, but I've known some Jewish people to be very emphatic that Judaism doesn't have sects. It has... branches, or I think technically "movements"; Wikipedia calls them denominations, but I'm not sure they're supposed to.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. Thank you is definitely a right thing to say in that context,

Branches was probably the word I was looking for, since I meant Ashkenazi vs. Sephardic. But is sects Christian-only? Should I not be using it for Buddhism either?

[crystalpyramid]

WP:Jewish religious movements does a decent job of confirming what I thought the distinction was. "Sects" refers to groups like you get in Christianity, where they split off because of differing beliefs, and then keep having differing beliefs and practicing separately. (And then you get that horribly stupid thing where two Christians from different sects can't take Communion together because their churches have different rules for what initiation you need before you can take communion.) I can imagine it could apply to things in Buddhism that work that way. The Jews tend to not like it because they all orbit around the same religious texts, and there's enough argument and interpretation involved within any given Jewish community that you don't have that kind of discrete units. More of a bell curve of beliefs and practices within any given Jewish group. (Although, yeah, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim are the most discrete groups of anything, or at least they were until they started muddling it by immigrating here and intermarrying.)

[crystalpyramid]

Also: the Christmas my Jewish relatives and students celebrate is definitely a secular holiday. To clarify, since it might be unclear, that's the secular Christmas with the tree, not the secular Christmas with the Chinese food.

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

You were going to be one of my examples of Jews doing secular Christmas, but I realized every Jew I knew who did that had a culturally Christian parent. Is that true of your students as well, or am a suffering from a small sample size?

[crystalpyramid]

Hmm. Yeah, I feel really uncomfortable with being an example of a Jew doing secular Christmas, because I'm not very Jewish and I hate secular Christmas. At least one of my students who does secular Christmas has a Catholic parent; I don't know about RY though. For all I know she doesn't even do Christmas. I have a vague recollection of my aunt L's kids doing Christmas, but these days she's a Messianic Jew; I don't know if she did Christmas before that. My dad himself does secular Christmas, of course, but he keeps marrying women who were raised Catholic. Even if my stepmom identifies as more Buddhist than anything else.

I know there are good examples, I'm just not myself one of them.