The previous post talked about 1-day and 2-day individuals vs. 1-day and 2-day communities. This post is just here to clarify that there are far more than two possible stances that a community can take on this issue.
For example, Tikkun Leil Shabbat (featured in HP8) has explicitly not taken a communal stance on the issue. (Explicitly not taken a stance, as distinct from simply not taking a stance by default, like any community in the state of nature, or like TLS as of a few month ago.) You might think this is unusual, even unique. And perhaps it is, among prayer communities that meet for prayer on 16 Nisan, 22 Nisan, 7 Sivan, 16 Tishrei, or 23 Tishrei. But there are other types of Jewish communities out there, such as Hillels (which contain multiple prayer communities under one roof), or non-denominational Jewish organizations that are not ritual-focused. Such groups can and do take neutral stances on 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov (though the implementation is not always given enough thought).
And among those communities that have either 1 day or 2 days as the norm, there are different ways of approaching this. There are communities for which "1 day" or "2 days" is the answer to the question "How many days of yom tov should we do?", and there are communities in which the question is never asked in the first place. For example, (and people who know otherwise can correct me if I'm wrong) when the first Hadar Shavuot Retreat was being planned, I suspect there was not an initial gabbai meeting at which they discussed (or even rubber-stamped) whether it would be 1 or 2 days.
A useful way to think about the range of possible stances on this issue is the concept of the Overton window, which incorporates not only the actual position of a given community, but the range of other positions that are considered acceptable within that community's discourse (which is generally smaller than the range of all possible positions).
The Overton window is named after the late libertarian activist Joe Overton. The classic example is on the issue of education, in which he ranked different public policies from "least government intervention / most freedom" to "most government intervention / least freedom". (As a public education advocate, I obviously disagree strongly with Overton on the framing of the various policies. I'm citing him here for the structure, not the substance.)
His ranking was:
No government schools
Parents pay for only the education they choose
Private and home schools monitored, not regulated
Tuition tax credits
Tuition vouchers
Private and home schooling moderately regulated
Charter schools
Public‐school choice
State‐mandated curricula
Private and home schooling highly regulated; parents pay twice
Home schooling illegal
Private schools illegal
Compulsory indoctrination in government schools
The point is that in addition to the status-quo policy, there may be a "window" on either side of it containing other policies that are considered within the realm of possibility.
So if we arrange the possible communal stances on 1-day vs. 2-day yom tov on a spectrum, it might look something like this:
- 2 days as the unquestioned communal standard
- 2 days as the unquestioned communal standard, but individuals who observe 1 day can be open about their practice
- the number of days of yom tov is a question, and the answer is 2 days
- the number of days of yom tov is a question, and the answer is no official communal stance
- the number of days of yom tov is a question, and the answer is 1 day
- 1 day as the unquestioned communal standard, but individuals who observe 2 days can be open about their practice
- 1 day as the unquestioned communal standard
Your Overton window clearly counts exactly 5 of the 6 possible "second days" as worth talking about. A community may consider only observing 1 day of Rosh Hashanah as within the realm of communal possibilities. Or they may disentangle the 5 days you're talking about, perhaps considering 1 day of Shavuot (but 2 days of other things) a possible option (because day 2 of Shavuot makes less sense than the others), or 1 day of end-of-Passover (because the 8th day of Passover and matzah is more onerous than the additional day in the other cases).
ReplyDeleteThough 2 days of Yom Kippur is probably beyond the pale for everyone.
There is evidence that חסידי אשקנז (perhaps even in ספר חרדים?) of the thirteenth century observed two days of Yom Kippur, although the practice never seemed to make into the mainstream, for unfathomable reasons. :-)
ReplyDeleteThe Reform shul in my old town in MA celebrated one day of Yom Tov, unless first day Yom Tov was shabbat, in which case they celebrated 2 days. The rabbi's opinion (or possibly experience?) was that no one showed up for second day during the week.
ReplyDeleteDesh writes:
ReplyDeleteYour Overton window clearly counts exactly 5 of the 6 possible "second days" as worth talking about. A community may consider only observing 1 day of Rosh Hashanah as within the realm of communal possibilities.
Wow, that's embarrassing. But in my defense, it's not that I don't think 1-day vs. 2-day Rosh Hashanah is "worth talking about", it's more that I think of it as a totally separate issue (so much that it didn't even occur to me while writing this post). I also think the war in Afghanistan is worth talking about, but not germane to this post.
Adding Rosh Hashanah to this spectrum might make it too cluttered; instead, one could construct a second identical spectrum for Rosh Hashanah, and plot a community's position (and its Overton window) on a 2-dimensional grid. Except I think that most (if not all) Overton windows would be on the same triangular half of the grid, since in my experience it's true without exception that the number of recognized days of Rosh Hashanah is greater than or equal to the number of recognized days of other holidays. (That's not counting the folk observance of the 8th day of Chol Hamo'ed Pesach - see below.) So actually these two issues are more entangled than I've given them credit for.
Or they may disentangle the 5 days you're talking about, perhaps considering 1 day of Shavuot (but 2 days of other things) a possible option (because day 2 of Shavuot makes less sense than the others), or 1 day of end-of-Passover (because the 8th day of Passover and matzah is more onerous than the additional day in the other cases).
I know people who do this for Shavuot (and maybe you do too), but have you heard of anyone doing this for Pesach? If anything it's the opposite -- there are people who do 1 day of everything (including the final yom tov of Pesach), but still stay chameitz-free for 8 days, as well as people who go to work on the 7th and 8th days of Pesach and do 8 days of no chameitz. And this makes sense even on a formalistic level: the prohibition on chameitz has a punishment of kareit (which none of the other yom tov prohibitions do), so it could be coherent for someone mildly concerned about s'feika d'yoma to dismiss this safeik for all issues except those that incur kareit (i.e. chameitz).
Though 2 days of Yom Kippur is probably beyond the pale for everyone.
Though again, on a formalistic level, 2 days of YK makes more sense than 2 days of anything else, since YK is also subject to kareit. And even if fasting for 2 days is impossible, one who is concerned about this should still refrain from melacha for 2 days. On the other hand, the time to make this argument was >1500 years ago, since no one is really concerned with s'feika d'yoma anymore -- the reason anyone does 2 days today is minhag avoteihem, and no one has the ancestral minhag of 2 days of YK.
Larry-
ReplyDeleteI've blogged about this practice before. And I think it's utterly without integrity -- if it's yom tov, then it's yom tov even if you're not in shul, and if it's not yom tov, then it's not yom tov even if you are in shul (for Shabbat).
On the other hand, based on the rabbi's comments, maybe there is some coherence to it -- maybe this was a 2-day community on paper, which didn't hold services on every day it considered yom tov. (There are certainly many such communities today, in our shulhopping monthly-minyan world.)
I know people who do this for Shavuot (and maybe you do too), but have you heard of anyone doing this for Pesach?
ReplyDeleteI do know such people for Shavuot, but not Pesach. Though I've often considered that, at least in theory, there's a hierarchy of most-likely to least-likely 2nd days to keep:
* Rosh Hashanah (because the reason is totally different)
* Shemini Atzeret (because of Simchat Torah)
* Pesach start (because of the 2nd seder)
* Sukkot
* Pesach end (because it feels like it's about nothing at all (you don't even say shehechiyanu) and you're sick of matzah)
* Shavuot (because the reason for 2 days holds less water)
* Yom Kippur (because you're thirsty)
Perhaps you could swap Shavuot and the end of Pesach, because the 2nd day of Shavuot can be useful for readjusting to a normal sleep schedule. (Though in practice, most people who are still 2-day this far down the list will still keep 8 days of Pesach at least in some manner, like you say.)
I do know such people for Shavuot, but not Pesach. Though I've often considered that, at least in theory, there's a hierarchy of most-likely to least-likely 2nd days to keep:
ReplyDeleteWe should be careful not to conflate the number of days recognized in principle with the number of days observed in practice (and I know I've been somewhat sloppy about that in this thread too). There's a difference between saying that X is not a day of yom tov, on the one hand (and therefore treating it as chol even if you are surrounded by people who think it's yom tov), and recognizing X (explicitly or implicitly) as a day of yom tov but not making it a priority (over work, etc.) to actively observe it every year (though perhaps being more likely to observe it in some way if it falls on Shabbat or Sunday).
If we're talking about the first category, I know of very few people or communities who distinguish formally among any of the 5 non-RH non-YK days listed here. Exceptions include the aforementioned Shavuot people (for sound reasons IMO), and I also knew someone who did 2 days of everything except Sukkot, because the 2nd day of Sukkot was the only one without any special rituals (which always seemed ass-backwards to me -- first you determine which days are yom tov, then you decide which rituals go with them!), and perhaps some of the 1-day communities that do "Simchat Torah" on 23 Tishrei aren't careful to mark it as chol.
If we're talking about the second category, this sort of hierarchy is, of course, much more of a reality, though in the same vein, one could also make a hierarchy of 1st days.
* Shemini Atzeret (because of Simchat Torah)
And this is one of the few holidays where the 2nd day may rank above the 1st day in the hierarchy. Sigal and Ehrlich wrote: "In reality, through our insistence on keeping this second day as a Yom Tov, we become makhshilei harabim, misleading thousands of our congregants. ... Our synagogues are crowded on the eve of Simchat Torah or the hakafot, but empty on the eve of Shemini Atzeret. Thus, by trying to maintain a custom (minhag) we cause our people to disregard the law (din)." (Here, as in the rest of this teshuva and its siblings, they use synagogue attendance as a (highly inappropriate IMO) proxy for yom tov observance in general.)
* Pesach start (because of the 2nd seder)
Oh right, I guess there are also a lot of people who go to 2nd seders and say kiddush on the 2nd night, but don't otherwise think of it as a yom tov even in theory.
* Pesach end (because it feels like it's about nothing at all (you don't even say shehechiyanu) and you're sick of matzah)
If we're talking about practice on the ground, we should distinguish between observing the 8th day of Pesach and observing the 2nd day of yom tov acharon shel Pesach. In the US, I suspect that there are more people who observe the latter than people who observe even the 7th day of Pesach as yom tov.
Sorry, that last sentence should have said "...who observe the former..."
ReplyDeleteYeah, I once worked for a nominally Jewish organization that gave off for some holidays but not others, seemingly at random. I had off for the 1st and 8th days of Pesach (but not the 2nd or 7th).
ReplyDelete