Halloween

[cellio]

A couple weeks ago, the assistant rabbi called and asked if I could lead the minyan tonight. (This amount of advance notice is unusual.) It's customary for the person leading this service to give a two-minute mini-sermon; I haven't done this the last few times because I had little or no notice, but I certainly should do so this time.

Until last night I didn't know what I was going to talk about. This week's parsha is Chayei Sarah -- the death and burial of Sarah and Avraham's efforts to find a wife for his son Yitzchak. There's plenty of stuff to talk about there -- funeral customs, marriage customs, business ethics, what to look for in a spouse, more -- but none of it was coming together for me.

So I'm going to talk about Halloween instead. Basically, I don't think Jews should encourage trick-or-treating. (I would make that statement broader, actually, but it's appropriate to focus here.) Consider the values that this activity teaches: that it's ok to demand gifts from your neighbors; that extortion is appropriate; and that vandalism is ok if it doesn't really hurt anyone. Are these really the values we should be teaching kids?

I can hear the objection now: "but it's all in fun, and no one gets hurt". That something is "all in fun" should condone it? I can think of some things that were "all in fun" that were not at all pleasant for people on the receiving end, most from childhood; I'll bet you can too.

Halloween is an interesting contrast to Purim. At Purim, we (sometimes) dress up, and we also do lots of stuff with food. Specifically, we give food to our neighbors. Give, not take. Isn't that a great value to teach? So much of Judaism (and polite society) is built around tzedakah and generosity, and here is an easy way to make that real for kids (and adults).

Now granted, in the neighborhoods where I and most of my friends live, trick-or-treating doesn't have the unpleasant overtones I've described, especially for the younger kids. I haven't been vandalized since moving to Squirrel Hill. And it can be fun to dress up and visit your neighbors. But I think the community parties that started to crop up when I was a kid are a better way of meeting those goals.

I'm not being a Scrooge here; we give out treats at our house (though this year, I don't think either of us will be home in time). I develop blind spots for the college-age "kids" who don't even try to dress up, and just hand over the Reeses' Cups. It's easier that way. And I'm also not saying that Halloween is evil and will ultimately be responsible for the fall of civilization etc, the way some of the rabid right-wingers get about everything from TV to role-playing games. But I think there are better things to teach our kids. If I had kids, I think I would take them out for Chinese food and a movie that night, and get them excited about Purim. Those are much better values to be teaching.

Update: This post should not be taken to mean that I have problems with other trappings of this holiday. I'm all for sugar rushes and gourd-enabled artistic expression. (Translation: I like candy as much as anyone, and I had fun carving pumpkins at Ralph & Lori's on Sunday.)

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I wanted to chew on this for a while to make sure that my response wasn't just a case of "how dare you mess with my favourite holiday".

The message I got from trick-or-treat was rather specific: that on that one day it was part of that holiday's custom for the younger members of the community to dress up in costumes and go around the neighbourhood showing off those costumes and getting treats from participating households. If the porch light wasn't on, that house wasn't playing the game and was to be ignored, not vandalized nor harrassed.

The "trick" part of trick-or-treat felt more like a historical footnote, and it was made clear that if we engaged in petty vandalism, we'd get in trouble for it. It was also pretty clear from the way the stories were told that the tricks of past generations weren't supposed to be any worse than soaping someone's windows or TPing a tree.

We didn't pay much attention to "mischief night", though once in a while we'd find some neighbour's tree "decorated" by some other neighbour -- it was presumed to be "the bad kids" that had done it.

If I'd gotten the message that it was okay to demand stuff from my neighbours, I'd be a whole lot better at asking for help when I need it than I am now. I have trouble asking for help from friends who've said, "If there's anything we can do, please tell us," much less from random neighbours. Of course, I can't speak for anyone else's children regarding what messages they got.

When I got older, handing out the candy -- and decorating the house for Hallowe'en so that visiting trick-or-treaters would have something festive to see instead of just a bare porch -- felt (still feel) like just as much a part of the fun as going trick-or-treating did when I was younger. It wasn't what we had to do to avoid "tricks"; it was a way to participate, and participating meant we got to see all the cute costumes the younger children wore. There was some overlap between the two roles, by the way: I started understanding the spirit of the decorating and handing out candy parts before I outgrew going trick-or-treating myself. I saw the really impressive displays when I knocked on doors, and I wanted to create something like that. (We never even came close, but I did find little things I could do to the porch some years. But oh, the grandiose plans for mazes and haunted houses that my siblings and I designed even though we never had the resources to implement them!)

So maybe it was just my community's interpretation of the tradition, or my parents', but I didn't get the bad messages from trick-or-treat that you're worried about.

[cellio]

I guess it's different environments. I actually got pretty much the same message you did as a kid: we were only allowed to go on our block and maybe the next one over, most of the houses we went to were those of our school friends anyway, and we never, never went to a house that didn't have the light on. What I've seen as an adult, on the other end of this, though, is pretty different: carloads of kids that come in from other neighborhoods (they're making the rounds), kids old enough to drive who are still trick-or-treating, older kids not even trying with the costumes, people going to dark houses, and, yes, vandalism. I had never before had to clean raw egg out of a car-door lock, and the dead snake wrapped around the door knob was definitely not appreciated. This is way beyond TP.

So it looks to me like at least some of today's kids are not getting the message that we got growing up.