Toronto presently has its knickers in a twist about religious symbols in public buildings. A judge, you see, has had a Christmas tree removed from her courthouse and the radio call-in show switchboards have gone supernova. Is a Christmas tree a Christian symbol? Is putting a Christmas tree in a courthouse the same as a giant monument to the Ten Commandments, as occurred in Alabama a few years back? I'm not going to answer this question.
More interesting is that this fooferaw happened the same week that the Toronto Globe and Mail published an article about an eruv located in a Orthodox Jewish suburb north of Toronto. An eruv, for those not in the know, is an implied spatial container than extends the privileges of indoor space to the outdoors. A man need not wear his prayer shawl when walking to synagogue while inside the eruv, whereas he would if it did not exist. An eruv is typically established by stringing a very thin filament around the area, usually around telephone poles and trees. To see if the Toronto eruv is intact, you can visit www.torontoeruv.org.
I've been interested in eruvs for awhile. Back in 2001, in my former home of Montréal, there was a major controversy because city workers kept cutting down the filament in the very Orthodox area of Outremont. Apparently non-Jewish people had complained. (I find this hard to believe — I lived in the 'hood for years and never managed to find the thing.) The upshot, and this brings us back to the Christmas tree, is that the local city councillor told the newspaper that she thought it deeply inappropriate that religious symbols (even if they are invisible) be put in public spaces.
And here's the punchline -- did this councillor ever stop to think that a four-storey cross located at the highest point in the city might be a religious symbol in a public space? I mean, my god, it lights up purple when the Pope dies! Talk about how everybody's version of "normal" is embedded in our personal cultural landscapes...
Has anyone else encountered eruvs or other hidden or semihidden religious landscapes?
As for the Christmas tree, it's dear old Presbyterian Toronto stamping out the pagan symbols!
As elsewhere, the religious symbols are offensively omnipresent here in Mtl, where streets named for farcical saintly figures (St-Joseph) are retained even as fully legitimate place-names (Dorchester, av. du Parc) are renamed in honour of quasi-religious figures (Robert-Bourasse, René-Lévesque). But that's an old story (after all, Square Phillips...). I haven't yet found the eruv here, either, tho I keep looking... I'll post photos from the field if/when I discover it... As you may have guessed, I'm sketching up a piece on this topic of 'what's-in-a-place-name?' ...
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