A very important date

Stuart Goodman Brentwood CM14

gets it right when he remarks on the odd way in which we humans fetishise dates ( 1

January).

25 December or 15 Nissan are humanly constructed dates and Jews (and our rabbis) have long felt comfortable fiddling our dates to fit our own convenience. (And that’s just the Orthodox ones!)

It also explains why I’ve never bothered to send him a birthday card. Who says he was born on that day?

For what it’s worth though, it is possible to say that this or that event happened 3 days before the summer solstice or one week after the winter equinox. Those are fixed anniversaries — but no-one gives us that sort of information.

He is unnecessarily dismissive when he says that “no other religious or ethnic group has opted to adopt” the Jewish calendar in order, I think, to accentuate how crazy it is. Indeed, it is true that the whole world has fallen for a calendar mostly devoted to responding to the egos of dead Roman autocrats.

But Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, traditional Chinese (check how Chinese New Year moves about) and others (that’s about half the world’s population) all use a luni-solar calendar just like the Jews, with 12 months in a regular year and a leap month every so often to bring things back in line with the seasons.

If David Aaronovitch is really fed up with going with the crowd, then he should try the sweet little Baha’i Calendar - 19 months of 19 days, which of course leaves 4 days over if it wants to line up with the solar calendar. Baha’is hold a National gathering for those four orphaned days without a month to belong to. If Jews adopted this 19 day, 19 month thing, we could use the four leftover days, slot Limmud in there just neatly and never worry about 25 December ever again.

surprised to read that the Church of England still has an officially recognised missionary arm to “advance the Gospel to the Jewish people” ( Cross purposes, 1 January).

Perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury could clarify if they also have a department exclusively dedicated to converting Britain’s other religions?

I am responding to my friend Stephen Jaffe, who has challenged the Christian conversionists. I am a Christian theologian from Oxford, and I want to suggest that the ultimate antisemitism is to exclude Jewish people from the worldwide Gospel of Jesus. Any mission towards Jewish people must be sensitive and without any form of coercion or manipulation. Most of the original members of the early church were converted Jews, so why has it changed now? To exclude only Jews implies that they are beyond Christian love, and even tainted, which was the wicked trope over the shameful centuries of Christian antisemitism. The Pope and those Christians today, who refrain from including Jewish people, have to explain why yet again the Jews are excluded. Why do they regard them as having no part in the worldwide (but not the Jews) mission? Surely, this is antisemitism?

Rodney Curtis

Northwood Middx