Theologian's Almanac for Week of September 24, 2023

Welcome to SALT’s “Theologian’s Almanac,” a weekly selection of important birthdays, holidays, and other upcoming milestones worth marking — specially created for a) writing sermons and prayers, b) creating content for social media channels, and c) enriching your devotional life.

For the week of Sunday, September 24:

September 25-26 is Yom Kippur this year (it begins at sundown on the 24th, and concludes at sundown on the 25th), the Day of Atonement, considered by many Jews to be the holiest day of the year. Traditionally marked with fasting, intensive prayer, and synagogue services, Yom Kippur concludes the High Holy Days, sometimes called “the Days of Awe.”

September 26-27 is Mawlid al-Nabi (again, evening to evening), the day dedicated to celebrating the birthday of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. In many Muslim-majority countries, Mawlid al-Nabi is observed as a national holiday — though Sunni and Shia Muslims differ on the date by a few days.

September 27 is the 60th anniversary of the day Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring was published in 1962. A marine biologist, Carson was also a nature writer who had already published three enormously popular, exquisitely lyrical books about the sea, one of which — The Sea Around Us (1951) — won the National Book Award. Silent Spring was an expose about the ways chemical pesticides were harming plants, wildlife, and people; its title warns of a future dystopia, a spring morning without birdsong. 

The book was a sensation, both controversial and influential: after reading it, President Kennedy ordered his science advisors to investigate concerns about DDT. Carson wrote the book while privately living with breast cancer herself, and didn’t live to see the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency — each of which owes a significant debt to Silent Spring. The book is now widely credited with helping to inaugurate the modern environmental movement.

September 28 is the feast day for Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia, born in the year 907, and best known from the Christmas carol that bears his name, “Good King Wenceslas.” He was said to have a kind, generous nature, and those virtues are memorialized in the carol: the good king wanders out into a bitterly cold winter night, bringing gifts of food and warmth to a poor peasant, pressing into the snow footprints that radiate his warmth — so that other good souls may follow.

September 28 is also considered the birthday of Confucius, the teacher, philosopher, and political thinker born in what is now Shandong Province, China, in 551 BCE. In his teachings, he emphasized self-discipline and always acting on the principle of “ren,” or “loving others.” He wrote: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”

September 30 is the day in 1452 the first section of the Gutenberg Bible was finished in Mainz, Germany. Johannes Gutenberg was the youngest son of a wealthy merchant, and his innovations in developing what became the modern printing press — capturing the moves of Medieval calligraphy in separable, movable type — transformed religion, literature, and politics. 

Before the printing press, a book like the Bible would take years to produce by hand; Gutenberg’s press made 185 copies in relatively short order, about 50 of which still survive today. The consequent printing revolution reshaped human culture, changing forever how (and how far) knowledge was disseminated, democratizing learning, and making new art forms possible. Known in its day as “the art of multiplying books,” modern printing was catalytic for the European Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Protestant Reformations. His legacy is carried on today by Project Gutenberg, a group of volunteers digitizing cultural and literary works, making them open and free to the public.

September 30 is also the birthday of writer and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel, born in Romania in 1928. Raised in a Hasidic community, he learned to love reading by studying the Jewish Bible. When he was 15, his family was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where his mother and sister were killed; his father was then killed in the Buchenwald camp. Wiesel’s memoir about his experience, Night (1955), has become one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust. Here’s a passage from Night:

“Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing. And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

"For God's sake, where is God?"

And from within me, I heard a voice answer:

"Where He is? This is where — hanging here from this gallows..."

Reflecting on Night, Wiesel later wrote, “I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer — or my life, period — would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.” In 1986, in honor of his writing and teaching, Wiesel received the Nobel Prize in literature.

September 30 is also the beginning of Sukkot this year, the Jewish holiday commemorating two things: first, the harvest festival marking the end of the agricultural year in Israel, and second, the Israelites’ 40 years of journeying through the wilderness after the exodus from slavery in Egypt (Exodus 34:22; Leviticus 23:42-43). “Sukkot” (pronounced, “soo-COAT,” rhymes with “blue boat,” and typically translated as “booths” or “tabernacles”) is the plural form of “sukkah,” a temporary, walled structure covered with branches or other plant material. It’s thought that such structures were used both by ancient farmers living out in the fields during harvesting and, according to Leviticus, by the Israelites as they wandered the wilderness after the Exodus.

Many Christian holidays are inspired by Jewish ones (Eastertide is a variation on Passover, Pentecost a variation on Shavuot, and so on), but so far, Sukkot has no official Christian counterpart. Some churches have experimented with a “Season of Creation” in the fall, which would resonate with Sukkot’s connection to the wilderness. St. Francis, whose feast day is in early October, would approve!