The following is a letter to the editor and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a letter to the Opinion Section, click here.
In “Why is the Office of Religious Life celebrating Israel’s Independence Day?” Zachariah Sippy ’23 protests the inclusion of Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut — Israel’s memorial and independence days — on the Office of Religious Life’s (ORL) calendar of religious holidays. “The University,” Sippy writes, “should not be in the business of declaring new Jewish holidays, especially when such proclamations serve exclusionary and reactionary ends.”
I set Sippy’s claims of ethnic cleansing and of the “exclusionary and reactionary” nature of these days aside not because I accept them — I do not — but because they distract from his argument’s main flaw: What exactly does Sippy think the ORL’s calendar is supposed to do? Is it a prescriptive set of rules declaring who must celebrate which holiday? Certainly not. Yud Tet Kislev, for example, is marked as a Jewish holiday on the ORL calendar. I, a Jew, do not celebrate that holiday because it is actually specific to the Chabad Hasidic sect. Many of my Jewish friends at Princeton of varying levels of religious observance do not celebrate one or more of the holidays marked as Jewish on the ORL calendar. No one feels pressure to observe them because the ORL listed them as Jewish.
That’s because the purpose of the calendar is not to endorse religious holidays. Instead, it is to note holidays that are celebrated by certain students to increase understanding of others’ religious practices. It recognizes reality; it does not create or endorse it. And the reality is that Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut are observed by Jews on Princeton’s campus and around the world. Many of us observe these days not as the invention of a “nation-state” but as religious holidays. On Yom HaZikaron, our community will recite prayers commemorating those who died fighting for a Jewish state (and those who died in acts of terror just for living in it). On Yom HaAtzmaut, we will recite Hallel, the traditional prayer of gratitude, in recognition of what we believe to be the miraculous restoration of Jewish self-rule after two millennia.
Sippy need not recognize those days with me and the dozens of Jews on Princeton’s campus who will. But if anything is “reactionary,” it is his demand that our very real religious practices be excluded and ignored.
Yonah Berenson is a sophomore from Los Angeles, CA. He can be reached at yberenson@princeton.edu.
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