For thousands of years of beautiful tradition — from Moses to Sandy Koufax, as a great thinker once pointed out — the Jewish high holidays have been observed more or less the same way. Rosh Hashanah is all apples-and-honey and happy-Jewish-New-Year and get-your-uncle-some-chopped-liver; Yom Kippur’s all about fasting and repenting and generally remembering all the shitty things you did in the previous year, apologizing to God (the Old Testament God, who is already kind of peevish) for them and hopefully earning yourself another year to not fuck up as much. Those are the exact words of the Talmud, I’m pretty sure. It has long been thus. It long will be thus, lord willing. This year, though, it will be different.

At least for Jews with the misfortune to also be Jets fans. The just-released NFL schedule has the Jets playing at home during Rosh Hashanah and erev (night of, for those not in the Tribe) Yom Kippur, when any Jewish person who even tries to act religious is headed for Kol Nidrei services. Also, as Pete Segall, who sent me this link, notes, “when you start talking about the prospect of having to watch Kellen Clemens play, even if only for a quarter, it seems awfully close to piling on in terms of the whole Yom Kippur discomforts thing.” The unbylined AP piece reports:

The conflict with the two holiest holidays on the Jewish calendar may keep the team’s Jewish fans who observe the holidays from attending…On Wednesday, the Jets called the NFL to complain about the scheduling conflict, according to the New York Daily News.

Howard Katz, who oversees the creation of the NFL schedule, took full responsiblity for the oversight. “The Jets are hearing from their fans,” Katz, the NFL’s senior VP of broadcasting, told the newspaper. “There was miscommunication between the Jets and the NFL office, for which I take full responsibility. All we can continue to do is look and see if there is a solution to this.”

The Giants requested they play on the road on the two holidays. The Jets did the same, but the message didn’t get through to the league office, Katz told the newspaper.

This is doubly bad news for any Jewish Jets fans in the loutish T-I-T-S Brigade, who will have to carry the sins of Gate D around with them for a whole calendar year before getting the chance to apologize to G-d about the whole regimented-mob-scale sexual harassment thing.