Festival Days: A History of Jewish Celebrations. Chaim Raphael. 1990. 144 pages. [Source: Bought] [nonfiction] [3 stars]
First sentence: The Jewish calendar includes a host of major and minor celebrations in a continuous, almost non-stop process throughout the year.
This was a thrift store find. It ended up not being what I was wanting it to be. I was looking for a book about Jewish festivals--feasts, fasts, etc. "all" the holidays of the Jewish calendar. I was hoping for a fact-filled basic overview detailing everything--the what, when, where, how, who, and why. I was hoping it captured impact, meaning, and significance to communities--past and present.
The book touches on the basics to a small degree, however, I think it was not written with an outsider in mind. It did not seek to explain, to detail, to describe, to elaborate about anything. I think it assumed that the reader would know a lot already. Which could be a fair point indeed.
It did not seem a "history" to me. I would expect with the description of history that it would trace something from its beginnings to the present day [in this case the 1980s]. It mentioned that there were [at the very, very, very least] three HUGE shifts in how festivals were observed: the Babylonian captivity; the destruction of Jerusalem; and the Holocaust. For the first two it centered around if there is no "Jerusalem" as the center-point and literal PLACE of worship [and fellowship] how do we worship, how do we celebrate, how do we observe. For the last, it was more a focus of when being Jewish, when practicing Judaism becomes dangerous--how do you change your practices? do your circumstances alter how you worship. But this discussion, this "history" lesson, seems to take up very little space. I would have found these subjects fascinating if they had been elaborated on. But again, it was more a slight mention--maybe a sentence or two here and there.
So if the book doesn't focus on a particular time of history, what does it do? It seems to mainly be about how the Bible [his words, not mine] is not literal, that Moses never existed, that Jews were not monotheistic, that monotheism was a very late development, that all the festival days are rooted in pagan religions and that the Bible itself borrows freely and liberally from multiple pagan cultures. It seemed to want to strip the festivals from their roots as revealed in the Pentateuch.
The last chapter focuses on how festivals have found their ways into poems and songs through the centuries.
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