Christmas

Friday night, December 22, 2017

Congregation B’nai B’rith Santa Barbara, CA

         The hardest moment for me as a Jewish kid at Christmas time was the annual television broadcast of the Charlie Brown Christmas.  I loved everything about that show.  The animated falling snow.  The kids skating on the frozen pond.  The simple humanity of Charlie Brown, who couldn’t understand why he felt depressed when he was supposed to feel happy, and best of all…Vince Gueraldi’s theme song “Christmas time is here,” which never failed to touch me, and to beckon me into the sweet and honest, sad and funny world of Charlie Brown and his friends.  All of these things I loved about “A Charlie Brown Christmas” were exactly what made it so painful.  I was drawn to watch every year, and yet was profoundly unsure whether it was OK for me, as a Jew, to do that.  That is the question I want to explore with you tonight.  Can a Jew participate in Christmas in some ways, without betraying our ancestors and our ancient covenant?

 Here are a few related questions: “what exactly is Christmas?”  and “what does it mean to “participate?”  Can a Jew have a Christmas tree?  What if they call it a Hanukkah Bush?  Can a Jew string colored lights on their house?  What if those lights are strictly blue and white? Can a Jewish child sing the words to “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen” in their school’s holiday concert?  Should they just mouth the words “For Jesus Christ Our Savior was born upon this day??  Should they sing those words, out loud, but without kavanah, without intention or feeling?  What should a Jew say when someone wishes them “Merry Christmas?  Is it OK to say “Merry Christmas” back?  The more specific we make our questions, the sillier they may feel….but they are all just versions of the same very big, very non-trivial question: “What does our Jewish covenant ask of us at Christmas time?”

I do not know any way to answer to this question other than to reflect upon my own life experience. Christmas has been big in my life, in my early childhood, in my college years, and when we were raising our children Rachel and Ari here in Santa Barbara. 

I grew up in a Jewish home.  It was Rochester, New York.  There was almost always snow, and we spent the winter days sledding, throwing snowballs and ice-skating.  Then coming inside for popcorn and hot chocolate next to a real fire.  None of that technically is Christmas, but on a deep level… maybe it is.  Christmas is a season, and a season is a woven fabric of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, weather, songs, and stories. We breathed in the atmosphere, we experienced in our blood and our bones the richness and the beauty of the season.

My best friend across the street had a beautifully decorated Christmas tree in his house, and his family always invited us over on Christmas. I remember a few houses having Christmas lights, but all houses were spectacularly decorated with long icicles hanging from the gutters…and most homes (not ours) had beautiful wreathes hanging on the front door.  In our home, we ate latkes, and played dreidl, and lit our menorah, and sang the blessings and songs….and our home was a tiny island of Hanukkah in an ocean of Christmas. 

At times, the boundary around our home opened and the world of Christmas came in.  When my brother and sister and I were very little, my mother made us stockings, with our names on them, Stevie, Davie and Sharon, which she hung on the fireplace and filled with little treats.  Two out of three of us became rabbis, so she must not have done us too much harm... she just did not want us to hate being Jewish!  The huge spruce tree in the front yard, we decorated with strings of popcorn and cranberries for the birds.  That spruce tree was not a Christmas Tree….but why were we doing that?  In the school Christmas concert I sang enthusiastically about demanding figgy pudding, and God rest ye merry gentlemen, but then shut my lips when we got to the name Jesus Christ.  From the time I was very little, I knew that there was a boundary, and that I had to guard my Jewish identity.

         When it came time to go to college, I went to school in Boston….a beautiful city at Christmas time.  I played in the Harvard University Band, and on one December day every year a group of us would take our drums, our trumpets, and clarinets on the subway into Boston and play Christmas carols for the downtown shoppers late in the afternoon.  One evening as we were playing, a thick snow began to fall and we stood under the gazebo in the middle of the Boston Common….playing music in the darkening silence, in a magical pool of light under the gazebo, as the snow fell thick all around and the night gathered.  That might be my very favorite memory from all four years of college…a Christmas memory.

         That memory of playing Christmas carols in the falling snow long ago came back to me recently, when our doorbell in Goleta rang and Marian and I went out and found a large group of the young families of our neighborhood standing in our driveway.  Parents and children, some playing guitars and a few banging pots, who as soon as we opened the door, started to sing “Jingle Bells,” and then when they finished they shouted “Happy Hanukkah!!”  That has never happened before…it’s a new younger generation in our neighborhood, and they are creating a fantastic community feeling.  And they made a point of including us.  We called back “Thank you!  And Merry Christmas!” and one of them called “come and join us!...we just have one more house!”  But I was not ready to cross that boundary...so we said goodnight and went back inside.

         Here is the crux of the dilemma.  The hyper-commercialized Christmas is not a problem; it is not even a little bit tempting, and is easy to reject.  But it is the beautiful Christmas, the warmth, the friendship, the good music, a group of neighbors walking and singing together and homemade food.  This is the very best that American culture has to offer.  Why would we turn inside, and remove ourselves from this moment?

         There is a great line in A Charlie Brown Christmas in which Charlie Brown asks Linus why he feels depressed when he should be feeling happy and Linus says in exasperation: “Charlie Brown, you are the only person I know who can take a wonderful holiday like Christmas and turn it into a problem!”  We American Jews can relate.  It does sometimes seem like our questions and confusions about Christmas are just us being neurotic.

         But that is NOT the point of view of A Charlie Brown Christmas, which eventually offers a profound insight about Christmas that we Jews might embrace.

All of Charlie Brown’s worrying and agonizing about Christmas end up not being neurotic; his questions actually lead to the deep message of Christmas….which would have remained buried without his questioning.  His problem, his question, is like a pick axe, digging away until a nugget of gold is revealed.  The true meaning of Christmas is finally revealed when Linus turns and responds to Charlie Brown by quoting to him about the birth of Jesus.

         In just the same way, I would suggest….our Jewish problem with Christmas is also a pick-axe.  The Jewish word for a good question is a kushiya—which literally means something hard.  Our JewishChristmas kushiya, our hard question, is this: can we eat, and laugh, and talk and sing and hug our non-Jewish neighbors in this season of peace and friendship and at the very same time maintain our Jewish identity here in America, and avoid dissolving and disintegrating into the great mush of America?  That kushiya---that hard question—is our Christmas gift. 

         There are many Jews who choose not to experience it as a dilemma.  Some Jews live in a Jewish bubble and completely and utterly reject any contact with Christmas. At the far other extreme some Jews embrace Christmas completely…with a tree and lights and stockings and carols… and deny that it raises any issues for their Jewish identity. 

But for those of us who are willing to experience Christmas as a problem, to seek to live thoughtfully with the good hard question, for us the Christmas question will be “like a hammer on a rock.” The word of God, said the prophet Jeremiah, is like a hammer striking a rock.  The hammer strikes the rock, and scatters sparks of light in every direction….new thoughts and new insights on a whole range of topics: 

·      what does it mean to be a human being?

·      what does it mean to be a Jew?

·      how does a holy season work?

·      what intention do we bring to the words of our songs?

·      how should we greet the friendly stranger when they reach out to us with words of seasons’ greetings?

Our questions are sparks of light, flashing in the darkness of our lives.

The question of how to be a Jew at Christmas is a kushiya, a hard problem.

The question itself is a gift from God...the hammer striking the rock....and our thoughts and insights are sparks of light, exploding in the night, in this season of many lights.

         Shabbat Shalom.