Thread by @pedantka

So Yom Kippur is tomorrow and I'm in a department meeting.
This is the first time in years I asked for the day off, and was told I really needed to be at the department meeting. Previous years I haven't bothered asking because it's been things like induction or away days.

I mean, I gave up fasting several years ago because you try being friendly, enthusiastic, and coherent at a bunch of incoming students and having a meaningful fast at the same time. I spent Rosh Hashanah this year in IKEA, FFS.

I'm not saying that work demands are the only reason I'm not spending the next 26 hours in shul. I'm saying that somewhere along the line going to shul at all stopped being a live option for me because no university in the UK takes Jewish holidays seriously in its calendar.

OF COURSE I expect that my religious observance would be accommodated, if I were to make an issue of it (I have been told as much). But that would require me to become observant enough to make an issue of it.

There's a vast grey area between frummers and apikorsim that the language of "accommodation" doesn't touch. That's the space that civic and institutional norms are supposed to protect--the freedom to figure out what to do with one's holy days on a case by case basis.

In the UK, that freedom is protected by default for Christians. The rest of us have to decide, on a case by case basis, whether this particular holiday this particular year is worth making an issue out of.

The more often the answer is "no" (through, say, years of insecure employment), the more easily the answer remains "no", through sheer force of habit. And our employers remain free to pat themselves on the back at being so accommodating, because nobody ever complains.

What this retroactive accommodation approach accomplishes in practice is almost guaranteeing that nobody from a "diverse background" ends up in a secure position of seniority without having multiple years of practice muting complaint.

And so Jewishness becomes even more easily reduced to an ethnic/political identity, because the inconvenient aspects of Judaism as a religious practice are safely trained out of anyone who attempts to engage in public life (unless they are very well insulated by orthodoxy).

For my part in this and the harm it has caused, forgive me. And a meaningful fast to those of you who are still able.