A letter in last week’s Harvard papers opined that the schools’ recognizing anyone’s religious holidays is a “broke” policy. The writer went on to say that insensitivity is a meaningless justification for a position, and cautioned us about a world in which Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax would not simply absent themselves from a baseball game on a Jewish High Holiday, but the games themselves would be postponed.
To compare a private enterprise—composed of adults and answerable to its customers and/or stockholders—with a public school, answerable to the community, and whose sole mission is to teach our children, strikes me as an apples-to-oranges comparison. Corporate and public policies, of course, are not guided by the same laws and principles. Having said that, in 2009 Major League Baseball did indeed demonstrate the kind of sensitivity three members of the current Harvard School Committee recently chose not to, when the Red Sox-Yankees game was rescheduled to avoid Yom Kippur.
To fully implement the writer’s proposal to eliminate all religious holidays from the school vacation schedule would mean to include the Christian holiday of Christmas, which non-Christians do not consider sectarian. I don’t foresee that happening, nor do I advocate it. All a great number of us—Jews and non-Jews alike—have been asking for is, in baseball terms, a level playing field. We had one for many years in Harvard until this School Committee, bafflingly, proposed the change without any call from the community, and snatched away the existing fairness policy.
Bob Eiland
Harris Lane
