Thread by @Delafina777

Good morning, people who aren't Jewish! Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, starts this evening. Antisemites/messianic "Jews"/etc. tend to ramp up their harassment of Jews on our major holidays, so please, if you have bandwidth, be on the lookout to report. Thanks!

Also reminder: if you're thinking of how to do some sort of Christian Rosh Hashanah thing: don't.

Not only is it appropriative and gross, it's also theologically unsound! Your religion has a whole different system (Jesus) for dealing with repentance/renewal.

Like maybe you're wondering, if you're Christian, hey, we've got Easter in place of Passover, we've got Pentecost in place of Shavuot, we have the whole Christmas season in place of Hanukkah, why don't we have anything for the Jewish High Holidays?

Like, your founders made a deliberate decision NOT to create Christian versions of those holidays (Yom Kippur is mentioned in the NT, but there's no mention of Christians observing it) because they saw the whole thing as obviated by Jesus.

So you don't need to appropriate Jewish holidays just to do an end-run around your own system of repentence/renewal.

Also, unrelated to all that:

Many Jewish communities welcome non-Jewish visitors during major holidays and are only too happy to explain everything, guide visitors through what's going on, etc.

Yom Kippur is a little different.

Communities vary, obviously, but if you'd like to explore Judaism or just want to get to know your neighbors better, I'm going to suggest that Yom Kippur is not the right holiday for that.

Passover is explicitly a teaching holiday. Purim is a big, fun, carnival-esque holiday. Hanukkah is food-focused and festive. Sukkot has treehouses! Shavuot is a learning holiday! Tu B'shvat is all about celebrating trees!

Any of those are great times to visit.

Yom Kippur is an intense, inward-focused, and yes, difficult holiday. There's a whole segment about remembering our dead, and for people who've lost someone recently, and even for those who haven't, it can be very raw.

Plus, most people have been fasting and are hangry or at least cranky, we're all thinking about the ways we haven't been who we wanted to be in the past year, etc.

Most don't have the emotional bandwidth, the mental cycles to spare, or even the physical energy to guide a visitor

Rosh Hashanah is more in-between. Depending on the community, it might be more festive or it might be more focused on Yom Kippur approaching.

Also, while most rabbis are usually very welcoming to visitors and happy to teach/explain things, this is their busiest and most stressful time of year. They have a LOT of long, intense, and big-deal services to prep for.

So, again, I'm going to respectfully suggest that if you want to visit a synagogue, explore the possibility of converting, learn with Jews, etc. you wait until after Yom Kippur.

And if you are invited to participate, please remember all this.

(this message brought to you by having to deal with a Christian lady last year in my breakout/discussion group who wanted to "deepen her Christianity" and decided to monopolize the whole time talking about Jesus)

of all. the days. of the year.

So anyway, in conclusion:

1) Please help out your Jewish friends on Twitter by reporting when you see antisemitic activity during the HHD

2) No, Christian Rosh Hashanah is not a thing

3) Please bear in mind that this is maybe not the best time of the Jewish year to visit