Why I Worked This Rosh Hashanah

It’s difficult to explain to those who have never lived in a place where they are cultural or religious minorities the dilemma of choosing to work on an important holiday.

Where I live, for many people, holidays are something you get off work as a matter of course: everybody gets a break on Christmas and Thanksgiving, whether or not they celebrate those holidays. And I can see the sense in that — if so many people celebrate the same holiday that the work world will be disrupted no matter what, you might as well legislate it so at least everyone knows what to expect.

If holidays like these — statutory holidays — are the only ones you celebrate, you may be wondering what the big deal is about asking for a holiday off. After all, aren’t businesses legally required to excuse employees who need time off for religious reasons? Surely it’s as simple as asking for the time one needs to observe one’s traditions.

Well, it is, and it isn’t.

Yes, employers are required to give time off for religious observances. Yes, technically if they didn’t, I have legal recourse.

But it’s not about whether I expect to be granted time off. Getting the go-ahead from the administration is the easy part — like it says above, they have no other (legal) option. The thing is, the permission is the simple part.

I have it relatively easy: not only do I live in a country where it’s illegal to deny me time off for the High Holidays, but I work at a diverse institution that’s more than used to accommodating a variety of cultural and religious needs. Moreso than anywhere else I’ve ever lived, there’s a strong Jewish population in Toronto — and a Catholic population, and a Muslim population, and a Hindu population, and… etc. Lots of students and professors are Jewish, and the people I work with are all great individuals.

But taking time off for a holiday that no one else celebrates isn’t like not having to work on Christmas. It’s more like taking a vacation in the middle of the busiest time of the school year.

Obviously, it would be silly to ask everyone to stop working on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur just because I observe those holidays. But in practice, that means that I have to work twice as hard right before or after I leave to make sure that everything’s in order. When I hang out doing nothing* on Christmas, I’m not missing anything. My colleagues are at home relaxing (or not, depending on the exact nature of their celebrations and/or families). But on the High Holidays, life — and work — roll on without me. My emails still pile up, my students still have questions, and my marking still looms forbiddingly on my hard drive.

To be fair, that’s similar to the point of yom tov, the Jewish word for holidays like Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, the Sabbath, and many more, during which observant Jews don’t do many kinds of work. Part of the point of avoiding melacha (the special kinds of work forbidden on the Sabbath and yom tov) is how it reminds us that even when we cease all our creative work, G-d’s Creation still carries on, because G-d is the ultimate Creator.

And that’s great, theologically speaking. But practically, it means that asking for a holiday is asking for more work: preparing whatever work I’ll be missing so it can wait a day and then working double the day I get back to catch up. For one day of the world rolling on without me, I pay a day of remembering that I cannot roll on without the world, especially not during one of the busiest times of year for students and teachers.

But wait, you might ask, why do you care about this theological stuff if you’re an atheist anyhow?

Well, that brings me to the second sticky point about asking for minority religious holidays off work.

Nobody cares if workers actually accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour when they get Christmas off. It’s understood that even if you don’t share Christian religious convictions, you might still come from a background that makes Christmas important to you as a secular family time, and that you might celebrate Christmas traditions without adhering to Christian theology. No one would say, for example, that you shouldn’t get Christmas off if you don’t keep Lent, because that shows you’re not a “real” Christian.

But although I haven’t heard this attitude at my current work, I’ve still encountered resistance to giving people their holidays off if they don’t display strict adherence to their faith. For instance, as a Jew, at other times and places than my current job, I’ve been asked about other Jews: is the accommodation this person is asking about actually part of your religion? But you don’t do that… they probably don’t need to either, right?

I understand why people sometimes worry that those requesting a day off for faith are taking advantage of the system to get free holidays. Most people don’t know much about other religions, which is OK, and because they know their own lack of knowledge, they want to make sure they judge requests equitably. Which is fair enough — when students ask me to take off a holiday with which I’m unfamiliar, I sometimes ask them to email me the name of it or write it down so I can Google it. That helps me learn for the future when other students need the same accommodation.

But it turns into a tricky situation when the employer or teacher doubts that the person asking for time off actually cares about the holiday. Legal entitlement isn’t the same as emotional acceptance.

Speaking as a not-very-observant Jew who eats milk and meat and works on the Sabbath, the idea that anyone else can judge what’s important to me about my holiday — to tell me whether I am “Jewish enough” to value the holiday I say I do — is insulting. So is the idea that someone else can tell me which holidays should be important to me. Or how to celebrate them.

Essentially? I worked this Rosh Hashanah because I didn’t think I could do right by my employers and students without doing so. It doesn’t mean that I don’t value Rosh Hashanah as a holiday — that, given the choice, I wouldn’t rather have observed my family’s and culture’s traditions. Nor does it mean that I am okay with sacrificing all the holidays I celebrate to work.

It just means that this time, I weighed the meaning with my work-related mental health and found the former wanting, even though it’s very important to me. Do I wish I could’ve taken it off? Yes. Was it ultimately my choice whether or not to take it off? Absolutely.

But just because I had a legal choice doesn’t mean that it was simple.

* Eating Chinese food and going to the movies. Sometimes stereotypes are true.