Halloween and Monotheism

Sermon Shabbat Lech Lecha 5786

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

I have to relate a funny incident we experienced at our daughter’s preschool early childhood education center last year at this time of year.  It’s at a Jewish institution, and more or less a Jewish preschool, even though many of the kids and teachers are not Jewish.  As October progressed, we received a few notices that Halloween wasn’t celebrated at our preschool, and that we weren’t to send our children in costumes nor would there be any type of encouragement of jack-o’-lanterns or pumpkin carving or that sort of thing.  Halloween is not a Jewish holiday, the notices said, and there are plenty of Jewish holidays to celebrate in the fall, of course.

Now, I’m comfortable with all of that, although I don’t have any strong objections to Halloween as it’s celebrated in America.  As kids, the children of a cantor and the grandchildren of a rabbi, we carved pumpkins and dressed up in costumes and trick or treated in our old neighborhood, and gave out candy, just like everyone else.  We even decorated the house a bit.  When my older children were little, we would have costumes and trick or treat, unless October 31st fell on a Friday night, and then we would go to services first and then trick or treat with them, or perhaps the other way round, depending on the timing of Shabbat services.  I don’t really have the strong negative reactions that some rabbis do to what is really a pretty innocuous festival, even if it has had terrible results for American teeth.  I mean, free candy!  How can you convince kids it’s not a good idea?

In any case, our preschool forbade any kind of Halloween celebrations, which was fine with me, since we have just finished a long run of Jewish fall festivals from Rosh HaShanah through Simchat Torah.  Good, let’s emphasize the Judaism, right?  Sounds good to me.

And then, just before Halloween, we received a note in our kid’s cubby that we should figure out what we wanted them to bring to put on the Dia de los Muertos altar in the hallway for Day of the Dead. 

Um… wow.  So Halloween, based on All Hallows’ Eve but basically a night to dress up and get candy and hear “Monster Mash” on the radio, is not OK in a Jewish setting.  But altars—altars!—dedicated to dead relatives for a Mexican Day of the Dead ritual, a kind of combined Christian and pagan “celebration” that includes giving people sugar candy skeleton heads is not only acceptable but encouraged?  Exactly how does that fit in a Jewish preschool?

And why was that pagan/Christian/ghoulish ritual allowed, while Halloween was identifiably not acceptable?

All of which brings me to comment a bit about assimilation, the gradual subsuming of Jewish identity into the American melting pot. 

Look, it’s pretty easy to disappear as a Jew in America.  Just stop going to synagogue, don’t join the shul, don’t wear a yarmulkeh, don’t celebrate Jewish holidays, don’t observe Shabbat, don’t study Jewish texts or subjects, and don’t worry too much about Israel or antisemitism.  Most Americans are a mix of ethnicities, and lots of them don’t have a strong sense of religious or ethnic identity.  In general, Jews can pass in America, particularly if they don’t do anything Jewish.  If you are at services tonight, or attending online—and, obviously, you are—you are already doing more to demonstrate your Judaism than lots of American Jews do regularly. 

Now I know that we don’t have altars dedicated to the souls of dead relatives; instead, we have living Judaism, energetic, active, and warm.  We do have goodies to eat after services—no Butterfingers, and no sugar candy skulls either, but tasty stuff still…

Which brings me to the remarkable Torah portion we chant this Shabbat, Lech Lecha. 

I’ve often wondered about the human experience of this call that Avram hears.  God tells him to leave his homeland, his birthplace, his father’s house, and go the land that God will show him, asher areka.  It’s certainly life-changing, but also super-ambiguous.  I can just visualize him going home to Sarai, his wife, and telling her the plan.  That conversation could not have gone well.

Avram tells Sarai: “God told us to leave here, right now, pack up and take everything.”

Sarai asks, “God told you?  Which God?” 

And Avram says “A God you have never heard of and can’t see.” 

So, Sarai answers, “Uh huh.  And where are we going?”

And Avram says, “I don’t know.”

That must have been a fun home life for a while, no?

Now, mind you, this command to leave everything behind a head out to a place he had never been was only the second craziest idea that had washed over Abram, Avram.  The craziest was the entire idea of monotheism.

To understand the drama of Abraham’s initial choice requires a bit of background, which begins with a simple question. What percentage of the world’s population believes in one God?  That is, what proportion of the 7.2 billion people on the globe today, in 2025, believe that there is one and only one God?

When I ask classes or other groups that question the answers range hugely.  Some people are sure that 90 or 100% of the world believes in one God—surely, everyone believes in one God, right?  Some people think it’s no more than 5 or 10%—almost no one believes in one God, right? 

The answer lies somewhere in between.  The word for belief in one God is monotheism, and when you start to survey world religions and how many official adherents they have it quickly gets interesting. 

Let’s start by looking at the major religions of the world and the number of people who belong to them.  While it’s hard to be exact, most studies agree that there are around one billion Hindus, the majority religion of India and a significant minority in Indonesia, and elsewhere.  Hindus believe in many gods, of course, so that means that 15% of the world’s population is not monotheistic.  Buddhists don’t have a god-concept at all, and therefore are definitely not monotheists, and they comprise somewhere around 500 million people—another 7%--which raises the non-believers in one god to 22%.  Atheists, those folks who religiously believe that God does not exist, total about 15-16%, raising the non-one-Godders to 38%.  A variety of African, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Island tribal religions—the worship of fetishes, idols, local gods, cargo cults, folk heroes, and such—add in another 400 million people or so, an additional 5% or 16% who have multiple gods, raising our non-believers in one God to about 45%.

So who does believe in one God today? 

Well, certainly Moslems do.  Islam is a pristine form of monotheism that attracts the adherence of perhaps one and a half billion people, roughly 23% of the world’s population.  Whatever else people may say about Muslims, they surely believe in one God.  And of course, there are the Jews—after all, we invented monotheism—but we compose about 15 million people, just one fifth of one percent.  That makes, oh, on a good day, 23% who believe in one God.

What about Christianity, you say?   There are over 2 billion Christians in the world, and they believe in one God, right? 

Well, yes—and perhaps no.  The concept of the trinity is problematic if you are a monotheist.  One god in three parts, or three divine entities, including a human, walking manifestation of god, plus one in heaven, and one that is all spirit.  And that’s without accounting for the Virgin Mary or the many saints, which are so central to Roman Catholicism and Greek, Russian, and other forms of  Orthodox Christianity… 

To elide the controversy a bit, let’s just assume that Christians are believers in one God, Trinitarian or otherwise.  That still means that at most half the people in the world today believe in one God—and all of those folks are from what are sometimes called the Abrahamic faiths, spiritual descendants of our ancestor Abraham, the subject of this week’s great Torah portion. 

Now if today about half of the world believes in one God, 3800 years ago, when Abraham came along, no one believed in one God.  The very idea, in a world populated by gods for each town and city, gods for every mountain and river and sea, gods that represented every animal in the forest, gods for every natural process—wind, lightning, thunder, rain, volcano, and earthquake—in a world filled with gods, the idea that there was only one God in the universe was spectacularly revolutionary.  It was outlandish, crazy, beyond consideration.

One creator of goodness?  One source for justice?  One source for right and wrong?  No one except Abraham believed it then. And over half the world still doesn’t.

But without that great leap of Abraham’s there would be no way to develop a concept of universal morality, no way to have a single understanding that some acts are simply wrong, and that some responsibilities are universal.  Abraham’s brilliant, radical understanding of the oneness of God and the uniqueness of the divine underlies all morality, and all of western civilization. 

It is thanks to Abraham, and this week’s Torah portion of Lech Lecha, that we are able to live lives of holiness and purpose, and to seek justice and morality.  And it is belief in one God, no matter how marginally popular it is, that makes it all possible—today, just as it did nearly four millennia ago, in Abraham’s time.

No altars or sugar candy skulls.  Just one God.  One Source for morality and meaning.  A Jewish path to holiness, goodness, and meaning.