Deeeep Mid-Day Stuff
Michelle made Chocolate Waffle Trifle for Yarn Night. It was unbelievable. I kind of want to do indecent things to it. I will distract myself from these urges with work-rambles:
We've been working around a couple of painters this past week, as our landlady finally touches up the shabbier parts of the office complex. They're...interesting guys. They're perfectly polite, but they'll stand right outside my office and talk about porn, and while I have no problems with PORN, I am uncomfortable to learn a stranger's preferences. It helps that I had some difficulty understanding their very heavy Southern accents. But then, I work with women who regularly break into Yiddish, so this is not unfamiliar.
At any rate, someone in the office made a reference to the Passover holidays, which are a few weeks off. One of the painters looked to me and said: "So, what's this Passover thing I keep hearing about?"
That gave me a moment's pause. As far as I know, the South is predominately Christian, but I would have thought that the Christian faith was at least somewhat familiar with Passover. I mean, Jesus returned to Jerusalem to preach on that very holiday, because (VAST oversimplication off the starboard bow) that's when all the Jews came to town. That particular trip ended in his crucifixtion, and we all know how it goes from there. I have vague memories of Easter Sunday sermons that mention Passover for that very reason. And what about Moses and the Pharaoh? That's a pretty popular story, isn't it? I'm sure most Christians know about the flight from Egypt, so has it just never been connected to Passover in so many words?
But, when I thought about it, I realized that I couldn't pinpoint when exactly I had picked up on what Passover was about. I never attended Sunday school; my mother only dragged us to Easter and Christmas services, and even that stopped when we moved to Italy. None of my childhood friends were Jewish, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a Jewish family I knew, growing up. However, I know I was familiar with it before I ever took a Religious Studies course. Can I attribute this knowledge to movies (hello, Dreamworks), or to some other form of cultural osmosis? Did I read it somewhere?
So I can't help but wonder, how much of any other religion does a religious person ever know? Are those of us who don't hold to any one faith more open to picking up these tidbits, or do we just ignore them all equally? What do you consider "common" religious knowledge?
I think I was mostly surprised because Christianity and Judaism are closely related, with the former ultimately a breakaway-sect of the latter. There are ENORMOUS differences, but they're relatively amicable cousins (by which analogy Islam becomes my cousin Jenny; I don't agree with a lot of her life decisions, but I would never presume to get in her face about them). Then again, I've met a number of people on BOTH sides who have only a passing aquaintance with their own dogma. Maybe this is just a case of me assuming something to be common knowledge, only to end up being an utter snob about it. I do not deny my snobbery, I just try to keep it to a tolerable low.
All of that went through my head in about two blinks, and then I answered, "Um, Sherrie could probably give you a better idea, but as I understand it, Passover remembers Moses leading the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt."
"Oh," he said. A pause, and then, "So, you're not Jewish?"
Oh, here we go.
We've been working around a couple of painters this past week, as our landlady finally touches up the shabbier parts of the office complex. They're...interesting guys. They're perfectly polite, but they'll stand right outside my office and talk about porn, and while I have no problems with PORN, I am uncomfortable to learn a stranger's preferences. It helps that I had some difficulty understanding their very heavy Southern accents. But then, I work with women who regularly break into Yiddish, so this is not unfamiliar.
At any rate, someone in the office made a reference to the Passover holidays, which are a few weeks off. One of the painters looked to me and said: "So, what's this Passover thing I keep hearing about?"
That gave me a moment's pause. As far as I know, the South is predominately Christian, but I would have thought that the Christian faith was at least somewhat familiar with Passover. I mean, Jesus returned to Jerusalem to preach on that very holiday, because (VAST oversimplication off the starboard bow) that's when all the Jews came to town. That particular trip ended in his crucifixtion, and we all know how it goes from there. I have vague memories of Easter Sunday sermons that mention Passover for that very reason. And what about Moses and the Pharaoh? That's a pretty popular story, isn't it? I'm sure most Christians know about the flight from Egypt, so has it just never been connected to Passover in so many words?
But, when I thought about it, I realized that I couldn't pinpoint when exactly I had picked up on what Passover was about. I never attended Sunday school; my mother only dragged us to Easter and Christmas services, and even that stopped when we moved to Italy. None of my childhood friends were Jewish, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a Jewish family I knew, growing up. However, I know I was familiar with it before I ever took a Religious Studies course. Can I attribute this knowledge to movies (hello, Dreamworks), or to some other form of cultural osmosis? Did I read it somewhere?
So I can't help but wonder, how much of any other religion does a religious person ever know? Are those of us who don't hold to any one faith more open to picking up these tidbits, or do we just ignore them all equally? What do you consider "common" religious knowledge?
I think I was mostly surprised because Christianity and Judaism are closely related, with the former ultimately a breakaway-sect of the latter. There are ENORMOUS differences, but they're relatively amicable cousins (by which analogy Islam becomes my cousin Jenny; I don't agree with a lot of her life decisions, but I would never presume to get in her face about them). Then again, I've met a number of people on BOTH sides who have only a passing aquaintance with their own dogma. Maybe this is just a case of me assuming something to be common knowledge, only to end up being an utter snob about it. I do not deny my snobbery, I just try to keep it to a tolerable low.
All of that went through my head in about two blinks, and then I answered, "Um, Sherrie could probably give you a better idea, but as I understand it, Passover remembers Moses leading the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt."
"Oh," he said. A pause, and then, "So, you're not Jewish?"
Oh, here we go.