So, @ifitistobeitisuptous, the wording of this ask has gotten stuck in my brain like a popcorn shell stuck between your teeth, and I want to treat it as good faith, but I need to address a few things.
To begin with, there’s a rhetorical trap here that I want to address. I don’t “express disdain towards Christians who observe Jewish festivals”. But “disdain” is an interesting choice of words, and I need to dissect it. Because first off, it’s fairly mild, as such words go, describing a feeling of contempt, dislike, disgust… but also carries with it the implication that I consider myself superior to those I “disdain”.
That is not the case, and this is part of why this ask was so hard to treat as being asked in good faith. Saying that I “express disdain” conveys the implication that I’m somehow the person on top, looking down with scorn at these poor Christians who just want to “observe the Jewish festivals”! And that ties into antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish supremacists (i.e. “only Jews are good enough,” “Jews are the Chosen People,” etc) and that’s a game I don’t want to play.
So, no, I don’t “express disdain”, because I don’t hold myself as superior. I just want my minority culture to be treated with respect and allowed to exist without having to justify it in a Christian context.
Now, with that being said, no, I do not hold them in “disdain”, because, as noted, that word is fairly mild as far as communicating dislike goes. So let me be clear to communicate the depth of emotion here. I express boiling outrage and furious loathing for these people. I loathe them on a level I can barely express without dipping into superlatives. I have ‘disdain’ for inconsiderate smokers. I have dislike for “civility over substance, and promoting false balance” journalists. I have disgust for anti-maskers. I loathe Christians who “observe Jewish festivals”.
Because “like we are stealing something from you, from your culture”, desecrating it” is in fact completely accurate–and the fact that you include yourself in that number does not do you any favors, which is why this was so hard to treat as a good faith ask.
I’ll be blunt: Christianity has an entitlement problem when it comes to other people’s cultures, and always had. In fact, as non-Christians are so frequently reminded at this time of year, “Christmas” started as a pagan holiday. So did Halloween. So did any number of other holidays that were made Christian. So there’s the whole “learn from history” thing there, where I, and other Jews, would very much like it if our festivals didn’t end up becoming Christianized over the next few centuries. Because we’ve learned from all of the other religions that Christianity has wiped out and paved over. That’s the first point.
The second point is that the reason we have our own festivals is that we inherited them from our ancestors and maintained them despite persecution. And very often, that persecution was from Christians. In Christian Europe, the Jewish people were marginalized, tortured, forced to do the horrible work, repeatedly expelled from our homes, legally discriminated against, made scapegoats of, and massacred. European Christians hated Jews so much that one of the rationales given to legitimize the Irish conquest by England was that they were “Judaizers”! And that legacy hasn’t gone away. So after over a thousand years of brutality and violence, Christians don’t get to just “observe the Jewish festivals” as they see fit–because that’s just a continuation of that history of violence. Just now, instead of expelling the Jews from their homes and taking those homes, like Christians used to do, this mindset is expelling the Jews from our own culture and taking it for yourselves.
And third, if you want to talk Christians stealing our culture and desecrating it…
Let’s talk about “Messianics”.
Fifty years ago, a bunch of Christians who were dismayed that they were not having much success with converting Jews, which they believe is required in order to bring about the Second Coming, created a fake religion called “Messianic Judaism”–which is literally taking all of the festivals, rituals, and trappings of Judaism and profaning them by making them all about Jesus. Jewish ritual objects are desecrated with the name of a Christian god. Our prayer shawls are embroidered with Christian symbols. Our Torah scrolls are handled by bare hands. Even our foods are reinterpreted in light of Jesus. And this was all with the goal of tricking Jews into worshiping Jesus and thus wiping out Judaism, as per point one.
And that’s not even counting the fetish Christians have for Jewish paraphernalia. The Green family (the ones behind Hobby Lobby) have a museum full of Torah scrolls acquired under… questionable circumstances. Far-Right Christians love blowing Jewish shofars for some reason. Buying Jewish prayer shawls by Christians is typical. And on and on and on…
And there’s also the simple fact that, in their interpretation of Christianity–an interpretation that is common enough to be a plot point in those “Left Behind” stories–in order for the Second Coming to come about, all of the Jews must be gathered in Israel, the Gospel preached at us, and then we all die. And those of us who accept the Gospels (supposedly exactly 144,000) will ascend to Heaven to escort down Jesus, while the remainder go to Hell.
So our purpose in their worldview is for us to die as a sacrifice to bring back your god.
So for any Christian that wants to “observe the Jewish festivals with respect, with empathy”… yeah. You have all of that baggage, and the only way to achieve that respect is to come in as a guest.
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