By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — “What are you doing for Christmas?” people ask one another, naturally, often affectionately. (Let me quickly remonstrate that I not one of those Jews who is either offended by this kind question or by someone greeting or saying good-bye to me with the expression, “Merry Christmas!” Such an utterance is neither a devaluation of my faith nor the opening declaration of a pogrom. It is a seasonal indication of goodwill.)
The fact is that I rather relish the fact that I’m arriving in the Holy Land on December 25—for the occasion of my daughter’s official and full religious wedding ceremony later in the week. I performed her “US wedding” and signed the civil certificate here in California back in October.
But the two young lovers, both Americans working and living in Tel Aviv, are completing the nuptial cycle among their many friends and family members in the place, and in the language, of their true home.
Christmas is huge in so many ways that have nothing to do with the mercantile co-opting of its deep and sacred consequence. Non-Christians spend (no pun intended) a lot of time and energy attempting to dodge it, marginalize it, or replicate it. Many Christians rightfully lament the drowning out of its theological center via the din of the cash register, the frightfully brutal commercial pressures attendant, and the sometimes tacky, tinsel quality of these latter weeks of “the holiday season.”
I don’t know if a savior-baby was born on Christmas Day or any other day (most biblical historians agree that Joshua of Bethlehem was not likely born on 25 December). But here’s what I do know: a) the day has been convocation of hope for millennia and b) its spiritual poetry has been vanquished by business and fiscal calculations, propaganda, and promotional manipulation.
So it’s meaningful to me, as an inclusive Jew, someone who respects other faiths, and who thinks that one’s own liturgy is strengthened, not threatened by diversity, to alight on the scriptural soil this Tuesday. There will be no snow, no eggnog, no rush to unwrap material gifts, no scrambling for return receipts, and no gluttony around a table. There will be just that special sense that one is in the actual territory of something that is heralded as miraculous by so many for so long.
And there will be no jingles, no sales, no coupons, and no packaged holiday music. Just the stillness of history warmed deliciously the by sea-salt breeze of holiness.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com