Passover Faux Pas

I’m not a very religious person, if anything I’m a sort of Buddhist/Christian hybrid, I often call myself a xenophile because I actually love and seek out people who are different than me. Anyway, I do like the seasonal greetings that surround holidays because they seem like an excuse to break the ice that tends to surround people during their busy and often stressful lives. I sometimes like to interrupt strangers walking down the street with a big smile and a genuinely jovial Merry Christmas or Happy Easter, 99% of the time you get a smile and greeting back. For this reason i’ve always railed against the politically neutral “happy holidays”, I’m quite happy to accept any seasonally related greeting. Anyway, recently Easter and Passover overlapped, which they do so sporadically due to Passover being driven by the lunar calendar and Easter by the Gregorian. Anyway, I decided to tweet a Passover greeting, and was going to say “Happy Passover to my Jewish friends” but I thought it would be nice to not limit my greeting to “friends” and wanted to include a little “goodwill to all men” type thinking, so I changed it to “Happy Passover to my Jewish brethren” I then included a little disclaimer, not sure if happy is appropriate, or brethren for that matter.

A little later I decided to look up the definition of brethren which I had assumed meant “brothers” or something appropriately inclusive. Here’s the definition I found:

“Brethren is a name adopted by several Protestant Christian bodies which do not necessarily share historical roots. These groups grew out of the Anabaptist movement at the time of the Protestant Reformation (16th century).”

The irony of this faux pas is right up there with my bout with procrastination which spawned this post.

It also reminded me of a brilliant segment from the Simpsons where Dr Nick, after a tank of gas explodes says “inflamable means flammable? English, what a language”