Jewish Holiday Greetings Don’t Make Much Sense

My father, a Judaic scholar and a stickler for correct Hebrew, always scolded anyone who greeted him with ḥag same’aḥ, “happy holiday”—or as American Jews more commonly spell it, chag sameach—during ḥol ha-mo’ed, the intermediate days of Passover and Sukkot. The right expression, he told the greeter, was mo’adim l’simḥah, “[May] Sacred times [be] for happiness.” Only the first and last days of the holiday, he insisted, were true ḥagim, days whose customs of lighting candles, reciting the Kiddush, and abstaining from travel, work, and commerce resembled the Sabbath’s, and ḥag same’ah should be reserved for them alone.

Ḥol in Hebrew means “non-sacred” and a mo’ed is a sacred time, so that the two words when joined yield the seemingly oxymoronic “non-sacred sacred time.” Yet this has been the term for the middle days of Sukkot and Passover since the early rabbinic period, and though my father’s strictures—or at least such is my impression—are more widely hearkened to today than they were when I was young, many American Jews and most secular Israelis continue to say ḥag same’aḥ not just on the holiday’s opening and closing days but on ḥol ha-mo’ed as well.

I was thus surprised not long ago to come across a 2013 communiqué of Israel’s Hebrew Academy of Language from which I learned that not only did the ignorant ḥag same’aḥ sayers (as my father thought of them) lack the backing of Jewish tradition; my father did, too. As a holiday greeting, it turns out, ḥag same’aḥ is barely 100 years old! In illustration of this, the communiqué referred its readers to a 1928 leaflet issued by the Academy’s forerunner, the Hebrew Language Committee of the Palestinian Yishuv, on the subject of “[Hebrew] Greetings and Polite Expressions.”