Hello everyone!! Apologies for Ted and I being lame again this month...we were both busy working on our applications for HUC! Ted's is in and mine is practically done! Very exciting.
Anyways, in my return to blogging I want to discuss wintertime in the United States. Immediately after Thanksgiving (and sometimes even before) we hear Christmas carols everywhere we go, see pine trees spring up all around us, and even experience different cups at Starbucks. It seems as though winter time and Christmas time have become practically interchangeable. Usually I am indifferent to the Christmas cheer all around me- I feel like its not completely my culture, that I am a separate entity from it since I don't celebrate the holiday that drives all of the excitement. This year, I allowed myself to engage a little more than usual with this phenomenon. I realized that, despite being slightly uncomfortable because I got the feeling I was supposed to celebrate Christmas just because it was wintertime, I like the concept of holiday cheer. Its ok to be happy for no reason, to rejoice in ones good fortune and think about all the good things in ones life, and if the season of Christmas is what motivates people to do so, who am I to judge? I feel like during the time between Thanksgiving and New Years, people smile more, and are kinder to strangers. Things seem to have magical airs about them. While in previous years I automatically associated all of this with a holiday I don't observe, this year I allowed myself to get caught up in it too. It can be a wonderful time of year, even if I don't believe in Jesus.
I think one of the things that helped me gain this insight was that Hanukkah fell during Christmas this year. When people wished me Happy Holidays, I could genuinely thank them instead of feeling weird that I had no holiday but had to smile and wish them the same anyway. Plus, when strangers wish me Merry Christmas, I can genuinely say "Merry Christmas to you", as I want them to have a nice time even if I won't be stuffing a stocking or waiting for Santa.
However, something funny happened to me this year: three of my friends, one of whom is a very close friend of mine, wished me a Merry Christmas, two in response to a mass text I sent out to all my Christmas-celebrating friends, and one on his one accord. While strangers wishing me a Merry Christmas is slightly weird but not unexpected, friends who have been aware for years that I'm Jewish wishing me a Merry Christmas was downright strange and uncomfortable. These are friends who know I want to be a Rabbi, and have even been present when I've led mini Shabbat services. These particular Christmas greetings only heightened the feeling I get each year when I feel like society expects me to celebrate Christmas just because its winter, and because the majority of the population celebrates it. When I wrote back to them stating that I don't celebrate Christmas, they responded with Hanukkah greetings instead. While that was nice because it was indeed Hanukkah at the time, what happens when the two holidays don't fall at the same time? I didn't mean to be rude or make them equally as uncomfortable as I was by telling them that I don't celebrate, but it just felt really weird to accept well-wishes for something I wasn't doing. It also feels weird that a large portion of the population, which, in all fairness, doesn't know any better, equates Christmas with Hanukkah just because they happen to fall at the same time of year. But that's not a problem that can be easily solved with a text message.
Moreover, I happened to be visiting my Grandma in Florida at the time, and my family and I were invited to Christmas dinner at my mom's cousins' house. These cousins happen to be Jewish. However, their entire house was decorated for Christmas, complete with a tree, lights, and even Santa and reindeer-themed place-cards at the table. (If they served ham for dinner I was going to walk out, but luckily it was turkey). For me, this crossed the line from making me uncomfortable into making me sad. Not only do members of my extended family not consider themselves Jewish, but they celebrate Christmas! My fourteen year old cousin (who, sadly, did not become a Bat Mitzvah last year), was talking to me about the holidays. "You celebrate Hanukkah, right?" she said to me. "I celebrate Christmas. But I celebrated Hanukkah once, in like third grade". I didn't even know how to respond to that. I wanted to tell her how she's Jewish, how there's so much in her heritage that she was missing out on, but I was so shocked at this that I couldn't think of how to respond. Its the same way I feel when I see Jewish friends of mine not really care about the holidays, or about going to synagogue. That's why I'm so insistent on showing my friends how meaningful my religion can be for me, on doing Shabbat with them and discussing all the holidays. I want to show them that religion doesn't have to be words on a page, but can be a way of life, a set of values, a community, and a consistent force to ground you throughout life. (Can you tell I've been writing application essays about this stuff?!?)
Anyway, at the party, happily, they did have a menorah, and asked my brother to light it. I helped him, and lead the blessings. It turned out that everyone my cousins had invited was Jewish, and they all knew the blessings even better than my cousins did! One of their family friends even requested that we do the Shehecheyanu, so I led that too. That made me happy; at least my cousins associated with Jews, even if they didn't act like them!
I don't really know what to take away from all this, but I'm glad I can take a step back and reflect on it. As a (hopeful) future Jewish leader, experiencing these situations, while uncomfortable for me at the time, gives me an even wider range of occurrences and lessons learned that I can use for my personal edification and potentially teach about one day. This year, I strove to continue the process of balancing the holiday cheer all around me, with maintaining my Jewish roots, being open-minded to the culture I live in while holding on to my interpretation of my religion. And isn't that what Reform Judaism is all about?
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