strange holiday timing

[cellio]

Most years, Pesach and Easter fall within a few days of each other. This makes sense, because the Christian event is understood to have fallen during Pesach. But because Christianity does not follow the Jewish calendar for setting the holiday, and both computations are lunar, when the holidays aren't a few days apart they're about a month apart, with Easter being first. Fine; everyone knows that, pretty much.

The holiday of Purim falls approximately a month before Pesach.

Easter is constrained to fall on a Sunday, but Pesach can fall on "any" day. Well, there are some calendar oddities that actually rule out a couple days (Wednesday and Friday, IIRC), but mostly Pesach is unconstrained.

This year Pesach happens to fall on a Sunday and Easter is early.

What does this all add up to? That the celebration of Purim, a day on which feasting and drinking are commanded, falls on good Friday, a fast day.

I have heard that there are Christian denominations that observe some Jewish practices, like the seventh-day aventists who celebrate the sabbath on Saturday. I wonder if any of them celebrate minor holidays like Purim. If so, I wonder how they will resolve the contradiction this year. For that matter, I wonder how interfaith families address this. (A similar problem arises in the winter, when a Jewish fast day can fall on Christmas.)

Comments

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I would doubt that a Christian group that would celebrate Good Friday would also be mindful of Jewish observances, since the two types are on the opposite ends of the Catholic-Protestant spectrum.

[cellio]

Oh, good point! I hadn't made that connection.

Though, even without fasting [1], don't pretty much all Christian denominations view good Friday as sort of like a day or mourning? It's the day on which their god died, after all. That might be incompatable with Purim even if there's no bar on eating or drinking.

[1] This presumably varies by denomination, but the definition of fasting I learned involved no meat, smaller meals, and no snacks. It's not the definition Jews use, which is no food or drink at all.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but I would imagine that groups like the JWs and the Seventh-Day Adventists kind of do away with all that Catholic residue of thing like "fasting" on Good Friday. Though those groups do not necessarily know much of Judaism beyond the general concept of shabbat and the occasional seder. We have such a person who attends our services (Christian, but comes every week and knows Hebrew pretty well). I'll ask her.

Still, I would guess that it's not like they'd dance in the street or get drunk or something... oh wait, no, that's us.

Man, this kind of convergence must really have caused some major problems in the Old World!