The Jewish holidays are behind us.

This simple statement evokes a rather ironic feeling in many people—joy. Our joyous holiday season is over, and the response is that we are happy? Let’s dig in a little. Who is happy and why?

Let’s start with the people responsible for cooking all the yom tov meals—Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, Simchat Torah—add in the people who host others for meals or even host holiday parties—it’s a lot of work.

How about the rabbis writing the sermons for all these holidays? (I would add a line about the people who must listen to all the sermons, but that would be disrespectful to our rabbis, so I won’t.)

How about the people trying to get work done who have been in the office an average of only 2.5 days/week for the past month? I almost have my email inbox cleaned out. (Apologies if I haven’t been in touch, I’ll get back to you soon.)

How about our observant students who take off during the holidays? Some of our school districts are very good about not scheduling exams, school pictures, etc., on our holidays. Other districts, not so much. (Note: Jewish Federation makes sure that every school district has the complete list of our holidays going out three years for planning purposes.)

Good news for those overwhelmed by the month of Tishrei and all its holidays. The month of Marcheshvan starts today, and it is completely devoid of holidays, except Shabbat of course.

With Jewish holidays behind us, we can also get back to regularly scheduled community programming. We have what should be an interesting program this Thursday evening at Federation on Iran with Ilan Evyatar, co-author of Target Tehran. You may register here.

And, of course, Tuesday is Election Day.

“Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.” -- George Jean Nathan

“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.” -- Franklin D. Roosevelt