Dear Sir,
I have long appreciated Allyn Hunt’s articles that enhance the quality of the newspaper. He is obviously very intelligent and his writing displays political, social and ideological creativity. That is why I was particularly confused regarding his article, “South of North” (January 2-8) in which he wrote:“The religiously - adverse - call this epoch, with notable clumsiness, ‘BCE’ (before the current era). They use vagaries that are as traditional as associated with B.C. for they recite the date Catholic Christianity fixed for Christ’s birth - a purely arbitrary and political expedient choice.”
I gather the “religiously - adverse” he is referring to is we Jews, Moslems, Buddhists and Hindus whose religious calendar is different than that of the Christian tradition, yet who make up the vast majority of the world’s population.
While we non-Christians appreciate the need for a civil calendar that unites the world’s many countries and cultures, we also are proud of how our respective sages understood the connection between time, God and the sanctity of life. In the case of the Jewish calendar, which bases a year’s time on lunar months with a solar correction so it is in sync with the civil calendar, we are dealing with a calendar that predates the Julian Christian calendar by 600 years. And the fact, that we Jews and others use the terms BCE, before the common era, and CE common era, is not for the purpose of disparaging Christianity or because we view the Julian calendar “ purely arbitrary” or “politically expedient,” but for affirming our own sense of religion and history.
In the case of Judaism, we believe that Jesus was an important rabbi of his time out of whose teaching came a great religious faith. But we do not believe that his life and death as expressed in the expression BC, before Christ, and AD, after his death, warrant a division of chronology and time that is valid for those of us, again the world’s majority, who do not believe in his divinity as “Christ.” That fact does not make us “religiously - historically adverse,” anymore than the fact that Christians don’t use BCE and CE.
Both expressions reflect our different and unique religious traditions and our ability to understand time as God’s gift to humanity. In that sense how each religious tradition chooses to calendar our time is far less important than how we use our time for universal and eternal justice and peace as seen in Christianity’s understanding of a second coming, or Judaism’s messianic age.
Philip M. Posner, Rabbi retired,
Chapala Jewish Congregation
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