Jewish holidays that don’t exist on the office calendar (and the resentment when you take them)

Every year, the same thing happens at work: you put in for Rosh Hashanah. Fine, everyone’s heard of that one. Then Yom Kippur, still fine, if a little tighter smile from your manager. Then, less than two weeks later, you’re back in their inbox asking for Sukkot. And Shmini Atzeret. And Simchat Torah, because in the Jewish calendar, the holidays don’t space themselves out to be considerate of your Slack status.

By the third request, you can feel it. Nobody says it out loud. It shows up in the reply that’s one degree cooler than the last one, the meeting suddenly scheduled for the one day you’re out, the “again?” that lands in a tone that wasn’t quite a question.

The fact is the Jewish calendar has roughly 3000 years on the office one, and the truth is, it was never built to fit inside 10 vacation days.

A few the office calendar has genuinely never met:

Sukkot. Seven days, a hut, a lot of joy, and approximately zero name recognition outside a Hebrew school classroom.

Shavuot. Marks getting the Torah at Sinai. Most calendar invites just see “OOO.”

Tisha B’Av. A day of mourning old enough that explaining it in a Slack thread feels almost insulting to the day itself.

Purim. Costumes, noise, and a work culture that assumes you took the day off for fun, not for a holiday that started with a plot to wipe out the Jewish people.

None of that is the part that actually stings. The part that stings is doing the math on your own calendar before you even ask, wondering if this is the year you skip Shavuot so nobody raises an eyebrow at the next PTO request.

Jews have become very good at pricing our own holidays against other people’s patience.

You don’t owe anyone a syllabus on Jewish practice to justify a day off for it. Rosh Hashanah gets a company Slack banner in a lot of places now. Sukkot probably won’t for a while yet. That’s just the current state of things, and it only changes when we keep asking anyway.

Put in for the holiday. All of it, every year, without the pre-apology. It’s just what being fully, unapologetically Jewish looks like on a calendar built around someone else’s year.

That’s the whole idea behind Luxe Jewish Life, really: building a Jewish life you don’t have to shrink, explain or apologize for.

Holidays included.