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New York's City Council voted to add two Muslim holidays to the city's public school calendar, citing the annual observance of Christian and Jewish holidays. Mayor Bloomberg objects, saying the city isn't obligated to accommodate all faiths: "If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won't be any school."

My heart tells me that we should include the two requested Muslim holidays in the school calendar. My head tells me that Mayor Bloomberg's slippery slope argument is weak, at best. But the fact that most respondents to this issue do nothing more than bang the drum for their own cause, should make us all pause and ask what's really going on here.

Not surprisingly, Muslims favor the new school holidays, conservative Christians and secularists oppose them (and you gotta love that alliance of convenience!), religious liberals favor them because "everybody should always be included", and those who follow non-Abrahamic traditions remind us that whatever decision is made, it's not all about the "big 3".

How typical and how unlikely to get a solution which feels like more than knuckling under to religion in general or to one group in particular.

Instead of rushing to advocate for the "right answer", I suggest we use this moment to ask new questions about the relationship between genuinely accommodating the religious needs of an entire society and the obligations which each group must assume for the society of which they are a part, in order for that accommodation to really work.
The case of the New York City school system provides a great opportunity to do just that, but it requires looking back to how the first day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur came to be school holidays.

Dr. Gary Tobin was burried yesterday, and with his death, the Jewish community has lost an important voice for inclusiveness, fearlessness, and the idea that there must be room in the Jewish community for anyone who wants a place.

From the New York Times Obituary to which I was proud to attach my name:

TOBIN--Gary. The faculty and Board of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership extends its deepest condolences to Diane, Adam, Amy, Sarah, Aryeh, Mia, Jonah, and Josiah on the terrible loss of Dr. Gary Tobin, loving and dedicated husband, father, and grandfather. The Jewish people has lost one of its most visionary, courageous, creative, wise, passionate, and loving scholar- activist- community builders. No one in Jewish life has done more to nurture a more inclusive paradigm of Jewish peoplehood for the 21st Century. Gary was not only a leader and our teacher, he was our dear friend. We honor his memory by continuing his work, bringing every Jew, wherever they live, however hidden or disconnected and however they practice, into the one Jewish People Gary so loved. Rabbi Irwin Kula, President Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, President Larry Gellman, Chairman

For more about Gary's life work:

While most communal professionals were bemoaning the loss of Jews to intermarriage and assimilation, Tobin assailed the community for its insularity and hostility toward converts and the gentile spouses of Jews. While Jewish organizations were complaining that wealthy Jews were directing their philanthropy to non-Jewish causes, Tobin told them to quit kvetching and give them a good reason not to.

Jo Amar, a Moroccan-born Jewish singer whose melding of Andalusian and Israeli musical influences made him a star in Israel and a popular performer in Jewish communities around the world, died on June 29 at the home of his son Ouri in Woodmere, N.Y. He was 79 and lived in Jerusalem.

Even if you have never heard of him, or didn't like his music if you had, Jo Amar lived the full arc of the modern Israeli story, from his youth in Morocco, to musical fame based in the integration of multiple cultures, and all of his kids ending up in the United States. It's a powerful story with lot's of good that we have lost, like the cultural fluidity which defined his music, and many real challenges presented including how the dream of life in Israel became unsustainable for his entire family within a single generation.

The city of New York has settled a lawsuit brought by a man who was ejected from Yankee Stadium for getting up to go to the bathroom during a rendition of "God Bless America". I believe in God, I believe in America and I even believe in the Yankees, but this is nuts! Is God insulted or America weakened by one guy's need to pee during a collective round of "God Bless America" at Yankee Stadium?

The story should not be about the suit being settled, but that it ever had to come to this - that a NY City police officer would toss a guy out of the stadium for getting up to use the bathroom during a rendition of a patriotic song. It actually sounds like something out of Mussolini's Italy or the former Soviet Union.

That the city had to pay for this, is entirely appropriate, but what about the cop who ejected the guy in the first place? And if he did not do so, then why not fight it?

The New Patriot's Bible continues an old tradition found among at least one of the founding fathers; i.e. privileging the reader's word over God's. I expect however, that Pastor Richard G. Lee and the other editors of this new edition of scripture would object to their being placed in the same category as Thomas Jefferson, who edited his own version of the Bible, including only those passages which fit with his deist views. But like the former president, Lee and his colleagues have made editorial decisions which place their views ahead of the received tradition. So like it or not, in the name of the Bible, they have subverted scripture. It's pretty funny, actually.

Of course the idea that a received sacred text can grow and even comment on itself is as old as the bible. The book of Chronicles is clearly a commentary on Kings, as is John on the other three Gospels, and that is just to name two obvious cases. But the implied claim that this process is still unfolding with regard to either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament places these so-called fundamentalists in a camp with the most theologically radical folks who reject that the canon is closed at all. Again, the humor of this should not be missed. Nor should the fact that once again we see how those we often think are most different from us, may actually be the most like us.

But unlike those who edit scripture to privilege the poor, or women, or Africans , these people think that God is a white, conservative American and it's in their understanding of what that means, that things become decidedly less funny. "This Bible is designed for the decent, hardworking core of America, the ordinary man or woman who loves this nation and believes it springs from godly roots," says Pastor Lee. Does that mean that other bibles (or The Bible) are not? Does he mean that those who find editions of scripture other than his are not "decent"," hardworking" or part of the country's "core"?