From the Archives: The Shared Roots of Hanukkah and Christmas
The Campaign to De-Judaize Jesus’ Birth and Birthplace Escalates
Though many of the most famous Christmas songs—”White Christmas,” “Silver Bells,” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” to name just a few—were written by Jews, Yuletide was never a very bright time for Jews. In contrast to my college roommate who decorated his Christmas trees with dreidels, the vast majority of Jews regard December 25 with a feeling of anomie, if not unease. It’s like some luminous party to which everyone has seemingly been invited but us. Indeed, the only joy we can derive from the day is by wishing warmth and fulfillment to our gentile friends and by subscribing to their prayers for peace.
This Christmas, though, is different. Along with the sense of being left out, a great number of Jews feel threatened. This is the second Christmas of the Middle East war, the second in which antisemitism has once again become a reality of Jewish life. From Amsterdam to Australia, Columbia University to Colombia, South America, Jew-hatred remains on the rise. And what better time to target Jews than Christmas?
That is the holiday in which hundreds of millions remember a baby born 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, and the opportunity for antisemites to deny that baby’s Jewishness or the location of his birth in the Land of Israel.
Such efforts are hardly new—the late Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, once referred to Jesus as “the first martyr [and] the first Palestinian.” The fact that the word Palestine, coined by the Romans a century after his death, would not have been known to Jesus, did not deter Palestinian officials and anti-Israel propagandists such as Linda Sarsour from proclaiming, “Jesus was a Palestinian from Nazareth.”
Now, as war in our region still rages, the efforts to de-Judaize Jesus and the entire nativity story have resurged. Millions online have responded to calls to boycott the new Netflix series, “Mary.” The crime: producers’ decision to cast an Israeli, Noa Cohen, in the leading role, with other Israelis supporting her. The same people who’d be outraged by a Western actor playing an Asian character or a straight man playing a gay man are incensed when a Jew plays a Jew. “A film about a Palestinian woman played by actors from the settler state that is currently mass slaughtering Palestinian women,” one massively viewed tweet protested. “Oh the disgusting audacity.”
Meanwhile, in the Vatican, a creche designed by Palestinian artists and viewed favorably by the Pope posed the baby Jesus wearing a keffiyeh. The message was unequivocal: just as the Jews killed the Palestinian Christ, so, too, are they murdering his innocent descendants.
No, Christmas is not always the easiest time for Jews, and notably not this Christmas. In a relatively easier season, during my time as ambassador to Washington, I wrote an op-ed about those challenges. While acknowledging its religious significance for Christians, I emphasized our shared values of freedom, tolerance, and devotion to family. I also stressed the historically undeniable connection between Hanukkah and Christmas. Without the first, I wrote, the second would not have occurred.
This year, especially, it is crucial to remember that tie, and not only because Christmas corresponds with the first night of Hanukkah. This year, along with wishing a most Merry Christmas to our non-Jewish friends, we must recall the ideals that bind us and fortify us all in the face of common threats.
The Shared Roots of Hanukkah and Christmas
Religious News Service, December 14, 2012
Growing up in the only Jewish family in my New Jersey neighborhood, I always felt left out at Christmas. Our house alone lacked decorative lights, wreaths, and reindeer. Instead, we had a small menorah which, even when all nine candles were lit on the last night of Hanukkah, cast a modest light.
At school, we sang Christmas carols and the town’s center boasted a glowing tree. While I enjoyed watching my friends unwrap their gifts on Christmas morning, I was keenly aware that their holiday was unrelated to mine. While they were blessing the birth of a new faith, we were celebrating the survival of the Jewish people from spiritual annihilation.
I eventually moved to Israel where, each December, Hanukkah hymns jam the airwaves and Dec. 25 — unless it falls on the Sabbath — is a regular work day. Still, Israel has the only growing Christian community in the Middle East and, on Christmas, the country’s churches are packed. Near my home in Jerusalem, the road to Bethlehem teems with pilgrims, their path illuminated by festive lights.
So imagine my surprise when, decades later, I returned to America and found a similarly inclusive spirit. Menorahs and Christmas trees now stand side by side in public spaces. Storefronts wish all a Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah. The president holds a gala Hanukkah reception in the White House while, outside the White House gates, a crane hoists a rabbi to light towering candles.
But such common displays of joy are more than ornaments. Christmas is intrinsically linked to the story of Hanukkah.
Hanukkah recounts the struggle of Mattityahu (Matthew), a Jewish leader who lived 2,170 years ago in the land of Israel. At the time, the country was under the rule of a brutal empire forcing the Jews to adopt its pagan rites. Mattityahu realized that the fate of the Jewish people, their faith and their civilization, was at stake.
He and his five sons — the Maccabees — rose up in revolt and regained ancient Israel’s independence. They rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem — Hanukkah in Hebrew means “rededication” — and reaffirmed Jewish values.
A century and a half later, according to Christian tradition, a child was born to a Jewish family in the land of Israel, in Bethlehem. He received a Jewish education and was reared on biblical values. Those hallowed ideas survived because the Maccabees fought so selflessly to preserve them.
Those same concepts helped form the foundations of our civilization. They inspired America’s Founding Fathers, and stir us still to protect human dignity. “If the Maccabees had not triumphed, world history would have developed very differently,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “In standing up for their independence, the Jews of antiquity defended values that were important for all mankind.”
Today, as in the Maccabees’ time, Israel upholds those values. But Israel does not stand alone. “These are not simply American or Western values,” President Obama recently told the United Nations, “they are universal values... Freedom and self-determination are not unique to one culture.”
The Maccabees would not have agreed more.
This holiday season, whether we and our families gather around a menorah or a tree — and are joined, perhaps, by our Muslim and Buddhist friends — we celebrate our freedom to believe. We rejoice in the values for which our forefathers fought and passed down for centuries. The lights that illuminate our homes burn bright for all of humanity.
This article originally appeared in Religious News Service on December 14, 2012.
Quoting the racist Barry Soetoro who signed the death warrant for Israel with Irans nuclear Mullahs is a classic example of the kind of thinking that Greek sympathizer Jews used before the Maccabees showed up. They take the form of woke tenured professors at Columbia, Harvard and other cesspools of antisemitism today.
Interesting to read the Obama quote in the context of what we now know about him, minimizing Israel’s and Judaism’s influence in world history. Quite a contrast from a decade ago.