Jinjin Sun/YH

Two weeks ago, I couldn’t have told you the date of Halloween. When some friends asked me for my costume plans, I said that I didn’t have any, and that I didn’t even know when Halloween was. “How can you not know when Halloween is?” they demanded. I said that I had never celebrated Halloween, or ever really thought about it before.

My friends were perplexed. They know I’m an Orthodox Jew, but they had never considered Halloween a religious holiday. For them, it’s a day when people dress up and carve pumpkins, and little kids run around asking for candy. There’s nothing religious, or even remotely objectionable about that. Halloween may have begun as a holiday with pagan significance, but since then it has morphed into something entirely different. Halloween is part commercial holiday and part simple communal revelry. It’s a secular American holiday, no different than Thanksgiving. “Do you celebrate that,” my friends wondered, “or is part of being religious separating yourself for separation’s sake?”

That was a tough thing to be asked, especially because the answer is not simple. There are concrete reasons for a religious Jew to avoid Halloween. But other thoughts leading me to keep my distance are harder to express.

For starters, there’s the whole spirits and paganism thing. And even the faintest tinge of paganism is enough to drive underground the descendants of the first and fiercest monotheists. But it’s not just the pagan origins that make me uncomfortable. Halloween seems a grotesque mixture of the glorification of the horrible with the celebration of the meaningless. What precisely does Halloween celebrate?

Thanksgiving is a concrete affirmation of good values. Giving thanks to each other and to Providence, appreciating the greatness of our country and the unique story of its creation—these are all tangible and fundamentally justifiable reasons to mark a day on our calendars. By contrast, the concept of a holiday totally divorced from anything remotely resembling meaning seems downright silly. What’s more, as someone who frequently celebrates holidays pregnant with religious meaning, a narrative-less, value-devoid holiday isn’t just jarring. It borders on blasphemous.

And if there’s any meaning at all, it’s an emphasis on the horrible and terrifying, and the exaltation of evil. I know that hardly anyone worships demonic spirits anymore, but “worship” is a flexible term. That veneration and deification may be a thing of the past, but a collective emphasis on, and privileging of, terror and pain is still around. I’m not saying that horror movies and haunted houses are inherently evil in some Puritanical witch-burning sense; rather, a communal, institutional fascination with this stuff strikes me as dangerous and offensive. Every time we delight in scaring a friend and chuckle at how real the blood looks on that vampire’s fangs, I worry that we make suffering more tolerable, that we make evil a little easier to stomach.

And I think that this may be the departure point for the college-specific critique. The general revelry that exists on college campuses spikes on Halloween. Because Halloween is so devoid of meaning, the horrifying can morph into the excessively hedonistic and sexual (as is perhaps inevitable when dealing with 18- to 22-year olds). We don’t really need a special day to devote to people “skankifying” themselves to begin with, but the decision to use Halloween for that purpose comes with its own set of perils. The Playboy Bunny outfits and sexy-fairy costumes are one thing, but when they come in conjunction with the Jokers and Sweeney Todds, I get really nervous. Sex is no longer just about pleasure, but connected to blood, violence, and the darkest impulses of the evilest men. I don’t think I have ever used the word “unholy” before, but that is what I felt when watching a bloody axe-murderer drunkenly stagger along College Street with a barely-dressed “slutty princess.”

Am I uncomfortable with this because of some social religious conditioning that urges me to criticize hedonism? Is my need to stand apart the product of a deep-seated sense of the Jew as an outsider to a phenomenon that has its origins in the pagan world of antiquity? I think that religion is undoubtedly a piece of it. But at the same time, I hope that there is something universal in my reaction. I like to believe that there is a basic human desire to reject darkness and to eliminate terror. Brutality and sex should be kept far apart: I don’t think it’s a good thing when the guys are bloody and the girls are slutty.

I share a lot with my classmates, and I think that our values usually go hand in hand. But for one night of the year, I’ll separate myself.