Mosaic in Netherlands, reading, "בשמאלה עשר וכבוד" ("in her left hand riches and honor") (Proverbs 3:16), showing "Kohanim hands." (Kleuske via Wikimedia CommonsCC BY-SA 3.0)
Passover periodically coincides with First Contact Day, as it does this year, on April 5, 2023.
Passover is a major Jewish holiday, thus moves with the lunisolar Hebrew calendar. The cause for celebration is not exclusive to Judaism, as the holiday marks the Israelite escape from slavery in Egypt. Passover was on April 5 most recently in 1985, 1993, and 2004, but it won't happen again until 2069.
April 5 is also First Contact Day, a delightful celebration from the fictional Star Trek universe marking the day that earthbound humans first learn they are not alone in the universe. Vulcans revealed, or will reveal, themselves to humans on April 5, 2063, so the holiday often is identified with the Vulcan hand gesture of fingers paired and separated in a "V."
There's more connection between the two holidays than an occasional overlap on the calendar. In 1967, Leonard Nimoy, the actor who first played Mr. Spock, the famous Vulcan of Star Trek lore, borrowed the hand gesture from his Jewish heritage. The Takeexplained the origin:
[Nimoy] drew upon childhood memories of Jewish synagogue services he attended with his Yiddish-speaking grandfather. The V-shaped position is the shape of the Hebrew letter "shin," which is the representative letter of the word "Shaddai," a term for God, and is a gesture traditionally used by the Kohanim (Hebrew "priests"), Jews of priestly descent, during a blessing ceremony. It’s also the first letter of "Shalom," the Jewish word for hello, goodbye, and peace.
The "Vulcan salute" (🖖) earned emoji status in 2014. Usually accompanied by the utterance, "Live long and prosper," it's not so distant a cousin of shalom.
Thanks to attorney, and my long-ago TA, Kevin Hart for being the first to wish me a happy First Contact Day, and to my friend Professor Robert Steinbuch for reminding me of the Vulcan salute's Jewish heritage.
For two reasons, it pains me to see churches on the news violating stay-at-home rules. First, like almost everyone, I'm horrified by the potential impact on people's health and lives, put at risk utterly unnecessarily. Through the Bible, God calls on people to worship together, as a body, e.g. Hebrews 10:24-25. At the same time, as author Jon Meacham told Stephen Colbert in a terrific recent interview, during Passover and in anticipation of Easter, "Being willfully stupid is not part of the Christian tradition."
This might be an especially authentic Easter, Meacham suggested, in the sense that early Christians met in homes, e.g., Acts 12:12, and the disciples, if together, sought refuge behind locked doors after the Crucifixion, John 20:19. Moreover, I've written previously about the biblical precedent for quarantine.
Second, these stories on the news are man-bites-dog coverage; what's being reported is aberrational, not normal. And the truth about churches and other places of worship in this crisis could not be more poorly represented. My church is the norm. To protect congregants, the elders suspended our live worship service and other on-campus meetings before the law required. We had Easter services on a live feed, and we're having classes, prayer, and meetings on Zoom. Most importantly, we encourage and support one another, Romans 14, notwithstanding social distance. In the absence of coordinated leadership and a functional social safety net from government, communities of faith are filling the gap, keeping people sound of mind and body. That's the real religion story of the crisis (see also, e.g., NYT Wehner op-ed, Apr. 10).
Seeing authorities in Kentucky and Louisiana effecting arrests and citing drivers at live religious ceremonies that defy government orders, I started to worry what damage these aberrational observances might do to our jurisprudence and tradition of free religious exercise. Would this be yet another instance of #RuiningItForEveryone? That is, if courts start making rulings that approve authoritarian government controls over even ludicrous assertions of religious freedom, the unintended consequence might be to water down religious freedom for all of us—however much I try to remain cognizant of the First Amendment's critical function in anti-majoritarianism.
A Methodist preacher on Deal Island, Md.,
probably the Rev. Joshua Thomas in the 1830s.
From Adam Wallace, The Parson of the Islands93 (4th ed. 1872).
George Scoville, Nashville attorney and adjunct professor in political science at Belmont University, has written an excellent analysis of the present landscape in religious freedom law amid the lockdown, including explication of a recent federal court ruling in the Western District of Kentucky, and the potential application of the U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence on Native American peyote use. He writes:
As an initial matter, nobody contests that, under the structure of our
Constitution, states have always had plenary police power to regulate
the health, safety, welfare, and morals of their citizens–the simple
requirement being, at least after the 1860s, that people receive due
process of law before a state-sanctioned deprivation of life, liberty,
or property. On the religious liberty question, my gut reaction is
that, generally speaking, “safer-at-home” or “shelter-in-place” orders
that prohibit gatherings of people larger than some discrete number, or
which require that people maintain a proper social distance of some
discrete number of feet, are not per se constitutionally
problematic. Rather, these orders, like the criminal prohibition on
peyote use that applied to all Oregonians, apply to everyone.
However, As Scoville explains, there might be room for a challenge where the due process thread of the religious freedom argument intertwines with the equal protection thread. Thus the court in Kentucky entertained the argument that disallowing drive-through worship while allowing drive-through liquor sales was constitutionally problematic.
[UPDATE, April 26, 2020: Attorney Scoville has authored an op-ed for The Tennessean in which he additionally considers the potential impact of mini-RFRA litigation amid the pandemic.]
[UPDATE, May 15, 2020: The Sixth Circuit has issued an injunction allowing live church services despite the Kentucky Governor's orders.]
