#106 - Rosh Hashanah - September 17, 2012

Monday.  This entry is out of order.

The kids were off school again today.  It was their first Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah.  I am slightly embarrassed to still not know what it’s about, but I’ll get it eventually.  Aria has made some good friends, it seems.  The kids were all invited to her friend’s brother’s birthday party.  Sounds weird, but that’s the gig.  Turns out that Aria’s friend has siblings almost exactly the same ages as our kids, and dad is much like me.  They’re a theater-geek family, he has an electric drum set he plays, and the parents do theater.  So he called to invite the kids to the house on the next Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur.  I am equally clueless about this one.

Aria brought up an interesting issue recently.  She came home from school Christmas music for choir.  She commented that not everyone is Christian, and this was a very Christian piece.  And I’m hopeful that this school district has a grown-up look at religious tolerance.  Because you can do things with your music program to remove much religion from it, as most music programs in Oregon have done and continue to do.  Here, I think it’s a more all-comers policy.  You may be Jewish or Muslim or Atheist.  But the piece of music is good, so we’ll sing it anyway.  And when we bring out a Jewish piece or something else, the Christians will sing it, too.  We can agree that participating in a moral life is a good thing, respect each other’s different ways of living that moral life, and come together sometimes.  In our private lives we can do things very differently, and in our public lives we meld.

 

I love this kind of cultural difference.  Looking back at our culture in Oregon, we talked a lot about tolerance and acceptance.  But the way tolerance and acceptance is shoved down the throats of unwilling citizens is different than here.  Maybe that’s a difference in the citizenry – the birthplace of FDR is a “red” county, but our property taxes are 3 times property tax in Oregon.  And the schools are massively better, the parks are better, and there are a million things to do for free or close to it.  The people here will vote “yes” on a school levy, and vote for Mitt Romney.  There’s a lot of grumbling about government, but few people are up in arms about it.

In contrast, it makes me think that liberal culture out West (that’s where you guys are, you know, “out” West) is still in its infancy.  

Kids at the bake sale fundraiser with the kid-specific cupcakes.
These were sold for $0.25 each, no auction required.  Everybody got one.