Happy Christmukkah? Jews, Assimilation and Hanukkah
SERMON Hanukkah 5785 December 27, 2024
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai, South Burlington, VT
Today, I had an emotional melt-down in my car at the drive through car wash in South Burlington. I was listening to a podcast about Jews and Christmas, and particularly about non-religious Christmas music in American Culture. They mentioned Joni Mitchell’s “River”, that starts with a slow melancholy version of Jingle Bells and then launches into her lyrics about breaking up with Graham Nash and wishing she had a frozen riven she could skate away on. I decided to listen to the song at the carwash, and as soon as the open bars started, unexpectedly I just started sobbing. For me, Joni Mitchell’s music was such a profound part of my adolescence self-creation, that I often get choked with Joni, but this was different. I’m still not quite sure why it hit me so hard, but I think it has something to do with just how emotional complicated and layers the American Jewish experience of Christmas is, how the music expresses both a beauty and a longing, but also a sadness.
Christmas is a pretty complicated time for many American Jews. We might have written most of the most popular Christmas songs, but how to navigate Christmas as individuals, as couples, as families brings up lots of issues and feelings about identity, assimilation, and our desire to be citizens of the world.
My father loved Christmas. He loved the tree, the songs, the tinsel – the entire American gestalt of commercial Christmas. For my mother, Christmas was a fraught time of family fights about being Jewish or not being Jewish, having relatives through marriage screaming she was going to hell because she was a Jew and others yelling she wouldn’t because she was Jew.
Because I was a good singer as a kid, I was repeatedly asked to be a soloist at the local Christmas Cantatas at churches, and I also sang in choirs that did a Christmas concert every year. Then on the ride home where my father would insist we drive to see all the Christmas lights, my mother would turn around and say, ‘well it’s a pretty story, but you just have to be nice to people who believe a virgin can give birth because, well, bless their hearts. They aren’t so bright.”
Of course, I was growing up at a time when as Jews we didn’t need to fear Christmas time. That wasn’t true for Jews fleeing Europe to come to America. It turns out that Christmas was a particularly scary time for Jews in European history. Too often, preachers would give antisemitic sermons on Christmas, and then violent attacks on Jews would follow. It became known as “Nittel Nacht” and was a time to close the curtains, draw the blinds and stay inside. Nittel either is from the Latin word for Christmas natalis, or from the Hebrew word “The Hanged One” which was a Jewish epithet for Jesus. At any rate, Jews had a tradition of laying low on Christmas and celebrating a big Hanukkah carnival helped convince Jews that it was safe to come out to Jewish spaces on Christmas. It helped Jews assimilate into American culture while keeping their Jewish identity.
It is ironic, perhaps, that Chanukkah becomes a tool for assimilation given its original focus which was fighting against assimilation to Greek Hellenistic culture, but even that is the over-simplified version of the events that gave us this beautiful holiday.
Hanukkah at its core is about how much, or how little to assimilate into the dominant culture, how much to be Jews and how much to be citizens of the world. At that time, Hellenism – Greek culture – was viewed by most of the cultures it conquered as a universal culture. If you wanted to be a citizen of the world, a global citizen around the Mediterranean and Europe, what you really meant was you were embracing Greek culture. In Israel at the time, lots of well-to-do Jews, particularly in cities, loved Greek culture. They ate Greek food, changed their names to Greek names, work Greek clothes, went to Greek schools. People went so far as to not circumcise their kids, and those who had been circumcised sometimes hung heavy weights to try and grow it back so they could pass in Greek baths, sports, and other naked Greek activities.
Other Jews hated all things Greek, and felt that Jews should only keep to what they saw as strict Jewish law and culture. That left most of the people somewhere in the middle, liking Greek things, liking Jewish things, and finding a way to have some of both.
Hanukkah asks us to reflect on a serious question: How much assimilation is good and healthy, and when does it cross the line to self-erasure? How do we be fully American, fully global citizens, and also be authentically Jewish? There is no right or wrong answer. It is a difficult question that the Jews of Hanukkah faces, and that those who immigrated here faced, and that we are now facing.
Indeed, we face this question in every generation; most minority groups do. I know Native Americans who have this same discussion, and African Americans, and LGBT folks.
As Reform Jews, we were leaders in the push for more assimilation, until it seemed that American Judaism was losing its Jews as so many Jews left our tradition, either for Buddhism, or other spiritual pursuits, or simply to be secular Americans. Our movement’s return to more tradition is meant to return the balance.
In the past few years, and particularly since October 7 with the rise of such pervasive antisemitism, this question is again front and center. Since October 7, the American Jewish world is having a renewed relationship with this ancient Hanukkah question. Have we been lulled into a false sense of safety? Have we let too much of our tradition go? Do we need to go further? Will the next generation have enough to carry us forward? Will they choose to?
I don’t believe there is one right answer to this, but I do believe it is important to ask the question and to reflect personally on it, because each generation must wrestle with this question anew and in the light of the times we live in. Hanukkah and these lights don’t so much show an answer as they ask us a question. May these lights we light in a dark time help show us the way.
Shabbat shalom,
David
