As Jews in America, non-Jewish national celebrations are occasions to consider the boundaries of our unique identity as members of a small religious minority. While it’s a polite “No thanks!” to Christmas, or “Can you pass the gravy?” for Thanksgiving, Halloween has always presented a more tricky challenge.
Some historians find the roots of Halloween in the early Church vigils the night before the feast of All Hallows, in which saints were honored and the recently departed were prayed for. Others have suggested that the holiday originates in the British and Irish Celtic festival of Samhain, in which New Year’s Eve was marked by lighting fires in order to chase away evil spirits. All sorts of demon-like creatures were thought to be spiriting about, including the souls of the dead revisiting their past homes. Regardless of its origins, by the Middle Ages, church bells were rung for those in purgatory, while “soul cakes” were baked for christened souls, a practice from which trick-or-treating quite possibly emerged.
To many Jews, marking Halloween seems contrary to our character. The patriarch Abraham, as the Midrashic tradition goes, shattered his father’s idols, marking a break with the pagan milieu of his ancient birthplace. His ethical monotheism, Judaism’s greatest tradition to mankind, emerged in opposition to the presumption that capricious deities decided our fate.
The people of Israel, Abraham’s descendants, were commanded to avoid imitating their neighbors’ observances - “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you,” God instructs the Israelites in Leviticus 18:3. “You shall not walk in their statutes.”
Additionally, for those observing Halloween by baking cakes and ringing bells on the streets of twelfth-century England, purgatory was exactly where our ancestors’ souls were presumed to lie.
America, hallelujah, allows opting out of practices foreign to one’s beliefs. The former Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it best. “A man,” he wrote, “is a better citizen of the United States for being also a loyal citizen of his state, and of his city; for being loyal to his family, and to his profession or trade; for being loyal to his college or lodge . . . [and] will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.”
Whether one chooses to pass on Trick or Treating or not, then, it’s important to remember there’s plenty of holiness to be found in Hashem’s Torah - no need to seek it in All Hallows or anywhere else.