With Halloween approaching, we can expect the same debates about tradition vs. assimilation that we often hear in the Jewish community to be trotted out. While every Jewish kid I knew growing up in what was a very tight-knit Jewish community in Winnipeg went trick or treating, and the vast majority of Jews I now know also celebrate the holiday, the question of whether Jewish kids should be trick-or-treating still rears its head in Jewish circles.
“Do Jews celebrate Halloween?” asks Rabbi Tzvi Freeman in an article on chabad.org. (Rabbi Freeman was my seventh grade Judaics teacher at Vancouver Vancouver Talmud Torah in 1985. Our class had some good debates then, and it is partly in that spirit of nostalgia that I seek to take on some of his ideas here.)
Contrasting Halloween with Purim, Rabbi Freeman writes, “Flip it over (October instead of March, demanding instead of giving, scaring instead of rejoicing, demons instead of sages, etc.) and you have Halloween. There you have it: a choice of one of two messages you can give to your children. I call that a choice, because one of the beautiful things about kids is that, unlike adults, they don't do too well receiving two conflicting messages at once.”
If you’ll forgive the metaphor, like a piece of Halloween candy, Rabbi Freeman’s statement is rife for unwrapping. One of the most memorable parts of Rabbi Daniel Gordis’s book How to be a Jewish Parent is precisely his attempt to scale back the automatic attempt by Jews to present their holidays as alternatives to ones in the dominant culture. Purim is Purim, not a Jewish Halloween, Gordis wisely stresses.
There are a host of other problematic assumptions in Rabbi Freeman’s statement. “Trick or treat” may be about demanding, but trick-or-treaters instinctively know that, as they are knocking on their neighbour’s door, their own family is home giving out candy to others. Scaring instead of rejoicing? Hmm...sorting through Halloween loot is a pretty joyful experience, I’d say. And let’s take Purim: discussing a story of threatened genocide capped by a public execution ranks pretty high on the horror and gore scale.
I have heard one Jewish parent say that she and her husband don’t let their kids go trick or treating because “Judaism is about the celebration of life rather than death.” But that’s not how I see the meaning of Halloween. Sure, there are ghosts, goblins and zombies. But are trick-or-treaters celebrating death? Or are they challenging the innate fear of our own mortality?
And what of Freeman’s claim that kids can’t digest multiple ideas, especially if they are in tension with one another? Two diametrically opposed messages are certainly problematic. But I see the idea of Jewish kids celebrating Halloween as a nested idea. When I send my Jewish kids out for Halloween, I am sending them as kids who happen to be Jewish, just as one happens to be a girl, and the other a boy. (The one group that is officially excluded from trick-or-treating is, of course, grownups!)
My kids celebrate Halloween neither because they are Jewish nor in spite of being Jewish. For one chilly Ottawa night per year, they get to share a memory-making slice of childhood with the rest of the kids across the city -- whoever they are, and whatever masks they are parading behind this year.
Freeman concludes by suggesting that our kids “belong to a people who have been entrusted with the mission to be a light to the nations -- not an ominous light inside a pumpkin, but a light that stands out and above and shows everyone where to go.”
But being a light unto the nations means leading by example. Unless one has an intrinsic concern with Halloween as a holiday -- and I’ve already suggested that Jewish holidays can be just as macabre, that Halloween isn’t so much glorifying death as it is making fun of our intrinsic mortality -- then standing apart for its own sake isn’t actually leading by example.
Canada sadly has a dearth of inclusive, non-religious holidays. With the exception of Canada Day and possibly Thanksgiving, Halloween is the only holiday that brings children of all backgrounds together. Most importantly, Halloween is the only holiday that is specifically about that most precious of urban commodities. “It’s very neighbourly,” is how my eight-year-old daughter describes Halloween. It’s an apt summary, for a girl whose Hebrew name comes from the Biblical word for neighbour.
Any holiday that encourages the residents of cities and towns to walk the streets and interact -- even if fueled by a little too much sugar -- is a way of invoking the best of everyday, community life. And that is very Jewish.
**A version of this article appeared in The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin**
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