Poll: Should Jews celebrate Valentines Day? | Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle

Poll: Should Jews celebrate Valentines Day?

Valentine’s Day is also known as St. Valentines Day and, as you probably know, saints are not a Jewish thing.

Should Jews celebrate Valentines Day?

Columnist Miriam Steinberg-Egeth took on this thorny issue (thorny like a rose):  “If you have a Jewish child whose class is exchanging Valentine’s Day cards, I see no reason to exclude them from the activity. You can frame it as, ‘This is a day when people like to … write nice cards to people and eat candy.”

She adds that “even people who take Valentine’s Day seriously, assuming those people do exist, aren’t doing so in memory of a saint.”

But Rabbi Yirmiyahu Ullman writes in his Ask the Rabbi blog that the holiday’s “public demonstration connecting indulgence and romance is antithetical to Jewish values. In fact, the icon of Valentine’s Day, Cupid, in Roman mythology is the god of love and intimate relations, which in turn is based on the Greek god Eros.”

He adds that “whether Valentine’s Day is Christian, pagan or immoral, one thing it’s not is Jewish.”

What do you think?

Should Jews celebrate Valentine’s Day?

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