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With the first night of Hannukah coinciding with Christmas Eve this year, Rabbi Ben Kamin reflects on how Jews experience Christmas and its associated gift-giving.
(Lynn Ischay, The Plain Dealer, File, 2015)
Rabbi Ben Kamin is former spiritual leader of The Temple in Cleveland.
SAN DIEGO -- I remember secretly praying, when I was a lad of ten years, for Santa Claus to mistake our home for a Christian household and slide down our chimney with presents. It was a serious and plaintive devotion; my good Catholic neighbors were going to have the reindeer adventure and the morning dash of gifts; why not me? I felt, well, envious and left out.
The first night of Hanukkah and Christmas Eve literally converge tomorrow night, Dec. 24 -- a calendar coincidence greeted with joy by many, including me. But the inherent apprehension about the annual parallelism of these two festivals is actually magnified by this solstice concurrence.
Over the decades, Hanukkah's new acquisitiveness has been tethered into the overall December mercantile rush. The meaning of Christmas is diminished by this commercialism while Hanukkah (a minor Jewish festival) is inadvertently inflated into the consumer tsunami.
It's now less of a question of who is a Christian and who is not; it's more a matter of who has money and who does not. The spirituality of both holidays, related only by a timing quirk, has converted the entire season into the vanquishing of valuables over values.
And yet: We Jews are at the party as proxies and not as participants. We joke about trekking out to the nearby Chinese restaurant on Christmas (and a lot of us really do eat there, as an almost supplicatory ritual); our families gather together and mingle because, well, it is a federal holiday and there is not much else to do.
A small percentage of us actually have a Christmas dinner and share presents and empty out stockings -- further adding to the ambiguity and conflicted feelings of privation and competition and some resentment that marks a national convocation that is not inclusively sectarian.
The reality is that for Jewish people, Christmas is a day that we simply live through. Even the most pluralistic among us feel that twinge of alienation, that discomfiture of being intrusive, almost voyeuristic within our own community -- a sense of, no matter how hard we try to participate or acquiesce, we are still, for those 24 hours, somehow manifestations of "the other."
By January, however, we will be very much like all of our good friends who never tried, deliberately, to exclude us from their beacon festival. We will all be the same again, mulling over our credit card statements, offering New Year's resolutions that quickly fade into platitudes, and beginning the painful organization of our federal and state income tax returns. 12/25 will morph into Form 1040 and we will all realize that the tinsel was expensive, perfunctory, and that most of us will have forgotten about Santa coming down our chimneys. Instead, we'll all be hearkening to Uncle Sam knocking at our doors.
Christmas, a glorious consecration of the birth of hope, is nonetheless not quite a perfect fit for those of us who are involved but not ultimately included. So we light our little candles tomorrow night and pray that the days do grow longer and brighter going forward -- for all.
Rabbi Ben Kamin, former spiritual leader of The Temple in Cleveland, is the author, most recently, of "I Don't Know What to Believe: Making Spiritual Peace With Your Religion."
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