What the Jews Can Learn from Christmas, and what Christmas Can Learn from the Jews
The miracle of America and the most wonderful time of the year
Dear Better Thinkers,
I have to admit, I love the red and green Christmas cups that appear at Starbucks around Thanksgiving time and hold your lattes and cloud macchiatos through New Year’s. I like it when sales associates wear those elf hats: it’s goofy and endearing, and feels like the sort of thing, if not the exact thing, that should be encouraged more often. Christmas trees manage to be both kitschy and beautiful, and the smell of pinecones always brings me somewhere else, even if my ancestors were more at home in shtetls than primeval forests.
All of this feels innocuous enough, but things this time of year are a little more fraught for Jews. The smallest admission of warmth for Christmas can be seen as the first step towards assimilation. Temptation is everywhere, and it is especially seductive when it wears mistletoe. It is all secular fun and games until a Nativity scene pops up and next thing you know you’re taking a swim in the baptismal font.
This makes lots of sense. Jews have been a minority in Christian lands since time immemorial, and the experience has been largely an unhappy one. Christianity’s Jewish roots didn’t inoculate it against Jew hatred but seems to have predisposed it towards the world’s oldest prejudice. To describe the status of Jews in Christian Europe as one characterized by “systemic racism” would be the most massive of understatements. To be a Jew was the most crippling of disabilities for the longest of times, in ways that are almost impossible for us to imagine now.
But for Jews as for many others, America is different, a New World that represents a fresh start from the pathologies that took deep root across the Atlantic. Sure, Jews will always be a minority outside of Israel, but America at its best is what the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called “a home we build together,” a place where everyone can put their feet up on the couch because nobody can evict anyone else. That is why Jews should not be afraid of Christmas, and why Christmas has much to learn from the Jews.
In that spirit, Christmas can teach Jews about the joys of living faith in the public square. “Happy Holidays is perfectly fine,” but “Merry Christmas is better” because it allows sacred time to make its way into the everyday. Many people decry Christmas’s commercialization, but that’s what a common culture, the thing this country desperately needs, looks and feels like. Sometimes, it is the lowest common denominator that solves for the better angels of our natures.
Besides, occasions for joy, whatever their provenance, are reason enough for celebration. Judaism is both a culture and a religion, and it thrives in the same soil as other cultures and religions do. The health of one bodes well for the thriving of another. Because Christmas is everywhere, its barrier to entry is low. Even Christians who would never be caught in a church will hang stockings and store presents under a tree. Often perceived as a weakness, this is in fact a strength, testimony to the power of ritual, which requires participation and not necessarily belief.
At the same time, Jewish tradition can contribute much to what makes Christmas glow. Sometimes, it is the very ubiquity of Christmas that makes it feel taken for granted, like background noise. Jews know what it means to have holidays that are invisible to the wider world, and the intimacy and sense of community that can create. They also are carriers of the insight that faith is strengthened by regularity: by the mundane, not just the momentous. Like a best friend or lover, it is the details that accumulate over time that build affection. Christmas should be a regular cadence, not just a once-a-year event.
This year, Christmas falls on Shabbat, in a perfect confluence of two holy days. Only in America are they able to converse as equals. That conversation is the blessing of this diaspora, and to not embrace it with gusto would be to waste the privilege American Jews have been granted, to live in this time in this place. There is no doubt that we must strike the old Jewish balance between particularity and universality, but that can be done from a place of joy and confidence, not fear.
The resurgent pandemic throws us all in the same boat even as it sends everyone into shades of isolation. The call of this season is to root for the things that make us feel warm and embraced: a Friday night dinner, a lit menorah peeking out a window, a tree in whose glow everyone looks a little happier and healthier. Small things that feel like the biggest things.
Merry Christmas to those celebrating, and Shabbat Shalom-
A