Our Jewish cultural identity in Israel has two real and tangible characteristics: the Hebrew calendar and the Hebrew language.
In the early 2000s I found myself living in the US. The experience of Yom Kippur in an American suburb was hallucinatory. In the tribe.
When the Jewish people sought to deal with the memory of the Holocaust, some believed that Remembrance Day should be attached to one of the fasts in the calendar or even to T. Bab - a day commemorating the destruction of the First Temple, the Second Temple and other disasters that befell the Jewish people for generations.
Had they done so, Israeli society would surely in many days treat the memory of the Holocaust in the way that the Israeli public treats the memory of the destruction of the Temple.
That is, does not really address, except for the anger and frustration of a significant portion of the public about the fact that pleasure houses and restaurants close for one evening in the middle of summer.
Only in recent decades has the eve of T'Av begun to gain a place in the public space in discourse circles and individual events.
But if we really admit it, the number of participants in all the circles that take place across the country is down to sixty.
Not to mention Tu B'Av - Israeli Valentine's Day, which is almost completely absent from the Israeli consciousness.
The initiative to change the summer vacation and replace it with the August-September vacation - apart from being technically illogical, since there are years when Tishrei falls precisely on the month of October - could be a nail in the coffin of our collective cultural identity.
My concern is not "only" for the education of the children, or for the question of when or not they will learn in kindergarten and school about the shofar and teshuva, but first and foremost about our cultural identity in the country.
We have been privileged to live in a generation where the holidays take on different meanings and diverse expressions in cities and communities.
Although these are three weeks in which work and studies are sporadic, most of the public is in the country, in contrast to the months of July-August.
Some people mark the Tishrei holidays in synagogues, and some people mark them with trips, family reunions and camping.
The week of Sukkot is one of the only periods in which the Israeli public, for the entire sequence of Jewish identities, together with the non-Jewish public in the country, meets in parks and entertainment complexes.
Tearing this period out of the realm of the "sacred," from a distinct or unique language, and turning it into a "vacation," will harm our cultural identity, language, and unique Jewish-cultural discourse in Israel.
Instead of talking about comparing students' vacation days to vacation days in the economy, in the form of reducing the big vacation days, it would be better to think about the workers in the economy, who are required to give many hours above the OECD average and receive at least vacation days.
It is worthwhile to stop referring to the education system as a babysitter, and to pay attention to the traditional public, who will find that he will spend half of his August-September vacation in synagogues and not on trips.
The author is the CEO of the Tali Foundation
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