Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

EDITORIAL

Christmas and Chanukah

by Michael Lerner

Christmas and Chanukah share a spiritual message: it is possible to bring light and hope into a world of darkness, oppression, and despair. Building on preexisting celebrations in the ancient world in which people lit lights in symbolic enactment of the hope that even in physical darkness, humanity could remember the light and affirm our certainty that it would return again, both Christianity and Judaism turned this message from its focus on the cycles of heaven into the realities of history.

In recent years, the Religious Right has correctly noted that there is a huge spiritual vacuum around these holidays as they are celebrated in the United States, but they have blamed that spiritual vacuity on Jews and secularists. Many fundamentalists have argued that the holidays have been diminished because civil libertarians, secularists, and Jews have forced Christians to keep the singing of Christmas carols out of the public schools and kept Christmas nativity scenes from being erected on city property. As usual, the Right starts with a correct perception (spiritual crisis) but then has a wrong analysis that leads them to blame the wrong people.

In order to understand this more fully, let's first reclaim the spiritual messages of the holidays, then see what undermines them. We'll look at Chanukah and Christmas in chronological order.

Chanukah celebrates the first recorded national liberation guerrilla war, waged by an entire society seeking to remake the world through struggle against an oppressive political and social order: the Greek conquerors (who ruled Judea from the time of Alexander in 325 B.C.E.) and the Hellenistic culture that they sought to impose.

Though the holiday, celebrated by lighting candles for eight nights, recalls the victory of the guerrilla campaign led by the Maccabees against the Syrian branch of the Greek empire, and the subsequent rededication (chanukah in Hebrew) of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 B.C.E., a more difficult struggle took place (and in some dimensions still rages) with in the Jewish people between those who hoped for a triumph of a spiritual vision of the world embedded (as it turned out, quite imperfectly) in the Maccabbees, and a cynical realism that had become the common sense of the merchants and priests who dominated the more cosmopolitan arena of Jerusalem.

The cynical realists in Judea—among them many of the priests charged with preserving the Temple—argued that Greek power was overwhelming and that it made far greater sense to accommodate to it than to resist. The Greek globalizers promised advances in science and technology that would benefit international trade and enrich the local merchants who sided with them, even though the taxes that accompanied their rule impoverished the Jewish peasants who worked the land and eked out a subsistence living.

Along with Greek science and military prowess came an entire culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theatre of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

To the Maccabees (the guerrilla band that Jews assembled to fight the Greek Empire and its Seleucid dynasty in Syria) and to many of the Jewish supporters of that struggle, the issues of Greek militarism, social injustice, and oppression were far more salient than the accomplishments of Greek high culture. Whatever might have been the value of Athenian democracy, the reality that it exported to the world through Alexander and his successors was oppressive and exploitative.

The "old-time religion" that the Maccabees fought to preserve had revolutionary elements in it that went far beyond the Greeks in articulating a libratory vision, not only in the somewhat abstract demand to "love your neighbor as yourself," "love the stranger," and pursue justice and peace, but also concretely in Torah prescriptions to abolish all debts every seven years, allow the land to lie fallow every seven years, refrain from all work and activities connected to control over the earth once a week on the Sabbath, and redistribute the land every fifty years (the Jubilee).

The miracle of Chanukah is that so many people were able to resist the overwhelming "reality" imposed by the imperialists and to stay loyal to a vision of a world based on generosity, love of the stranger, and loyalty to an invisible God who promised that life could be based on justice and peace. It was these "little guys," the powerless, who managed to sustain a vision of hope that inspired them to fight against overwhelming odds, against the power of technology and science organized in the service of domination, and despite the fact that they were dismissed as terrorists and fundamentalist crazies. When this kind of energy, what religious people call "the spirit of God," becomes an ingredient in the consciousness of ordinary people, miracles ensue.

In Jewish history, Chanukah was always a minor holiday. Yet it was one of many aspects of Jewish culture that helped to sustain hope during the many centuries of Jewish homelessness and persecution. It had particular poignancy for Jews during the Holocaust—the memory of a moment when Jews had been more successful in fighting against oppression. Yet it was given a different meaning by the Zionist movement, which made Chanukah into a major holiday, because they saw in the Maccabees the historical precedent for a new kind of Jew that was emerging in Israel—tough, able to fight, and capable of overcoming overwhelming odds through military prowess. Soon enough, that would and did produce a new kind of cynical realism—in which power and domination over others was accepted as the vindication for past suffering. Jews became the Hellenists proclaiming the ultimacy of nuclear arms and superior military skills, scornful of the ideas of reconciliation and atonement for the sins we had committed in our domination over the Other. Tragically, the arrogance of the Maccabees in power is being relived today, and as that happens, the power of the original message of Chanukah gets lost.

Chanukah has not faired well in the United States either, where it lost its powerful message for still another reason: the deep desire of a significant section of the Jewish population to "fit in" to the grand celebration of American materialism and power. In that culture, the anti-Hellenistic idea of Chanukah, its rejection of the ultimacy of power and domination, its insistence on being in the world in a different way (even to the extent that we would die for the right to not fight or exercise domination and control over any aspect of our lives one day of the week—Shabbat), seemed totally out of place and counter-productive to our "making it" in America. So it was not surprising that Jews, many of whom felt ambivalent about not being Christian, tried to turn this into a major holiday to provide their kids with compensation for being a religious minority by buying them lots of Chanukah gifts ("See? We have gifts for eight days, not just for one!"). Joining in the grand materialistic melee of holiday-season consumption, Jews could prove how patriotic and like-everyone-else we were by acting as consummate consumers. I don't deny that this desire to fit in was at least partly a reflection of abiding Jewish fears of oppression—and therefore deserving not of ridicule but of compassion. Yet in the process, at least some Jews lost touch entirely with the real spiritual revolutionary message of the original Maccabean struggle.

Christianity was also born in struggle, against the Roman imperial successors to the Hellenist conquerors of Judea.

Jesus and his followers were part of the revolutionary movements of their time, challenging both Roman rule and the Jews who collaborated with them, but simultaneously challenging Judaism to take more seriously its message of love for the stranger and identification with the plight of the poor and the powerless. A Jewish prophet, Jesus reiterated the message of Jeremiah and Isaiah, of Micah and Amos, and took the biblical message one step further, insisting on nonviolence and honoring the most vilified in society.

The imagery of Christmas embodies some of the deepest hopes of the human race. A vulnerable, homeless young woman gave birth to a child in the manger, the most humble of circumstances, yet this young child, the baby Jesus, would become the messiah destined to bring salvation to the world. All the softness and vulnerability of a powerless humanity are summed up in this picture of a loving mother and newborn babe. And all the hopes of humanity could be channeled into that one moment in which goodness is reborn on the planet.

Throughout the ages, many who lived in conditions of oppression could take hope in that vision of light in the darkness, of vulnerability and abject poverty destined to assume power, of love triumphing in a cruel world. Here too was the essence of both Jewish and Christian spirituality: the way things are is not the only way things can be, and the world need not be based on violence and oppression, but on love and generosity of spirit, and that the power of the powerful is vulnerable to the power of the spirit.

So Judaism and Christianity both have messages for this season of the year that could inspire us to challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism that is continuously celebrated in the advertisements and storylines that dominate our contemporary media.

And yet, that message has been largely lost to mass consciousness as Christmas has taken on a largely materialistic form. The generous impulse to take care of each other, to share with each other, that could be acted upon through a Christmas or Chanukah communal meal got overshadowed in the contemporary world by the notion of gift buying as the real way to show others that you really care. As the experience of community declines, people have faced this holiday with images of happy nuclear families exchanging gifts. (In recent years there have been ads with pictures of a brand new car under the Christmas tree, setting the bar for a satisfactory gift at something like $40,000!) But even for those whose gift buying is far less extravagant, the pressure to buy as a way to show how much you care—and about whom—becomes extremely oppressive for those who have less disposable resources to participate in this buy-for-all. And many people have families that do not fit the traditional images (single persons who live far from their parents, single parent families, divorced people, gay couples) and who find themselves not fitting in or not being invited to what-ever celebrations are available. The combination of financial and social pressures—the demands to spend and to prove that you are having a great time and are fully happy—generates society-wide depression that manifests itself in over-consumption of alcohol, suicides, and despair.

Last year, I was outraged to hear leaders of the Religious Right talk of a conspiracy against Christmas led by secularists and civil libertarians (some included Jews explicitly, others by implication by naming obvious Jewish names as leading the fight to keep Christmas carols out of the schools and manger scenes out of the public squares). When I appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, I pointed to the real culprit: the very capitalist marketplace that the Religious Right treats as sacrosanct, and for a moment O'Reilly was forced to acknowledge that it was the frenzy of consumption that was really at the center of undermining the spirit of these holidays.

Today, we at TIKKUN seek to reclaim the underlying hopeful spiritual message of the holidays, not only for Christians and Jews, but also as a universal message: the way things are is not the only way things could be. The overwhelming power of the ruling elites of the world (and their coterie of cheerleaders in the media) who disproportionately influence the universities and control corporations, can be overcome when the Spirit of God becomes an ingredient in the minds of the majority of people, and they realize that their desire for a world of kindness, justice, peace, ecological sanity, and loving connection to others is worth fighting for and could actually win!

Here are two concrete steps to change the character of your holiday experience:

Give gifts of time rather than gifts of things. Give a gift card to friends or family members offering to give them time to assist them with something that they actually need: paint their house or porch, clean their garage or downstairs or attic, provide babysitting or child-care so that they can go out, teach them some skill you have that you suspect they might enjoy, mow their lawn or plant their garden or trim their trees, make a gourmet dinner for them, go grocery shopping for them, volunteer time for a charity or political cause with which they are involved. This is harder with children who are often inundated by the "things are the only way people show caring" message at a very early age. You may have to capitulate to them, but keep talking about an alternative perspective, and model this way of thinking for them by the way you give gifts.

Focus attention every holiday night on the real message. During the eight days of Chanukah or from Christmas eve through New Year's Day, pick a theme each day that allows you to imagine how things could be. Then share with family members what would have to happen in order for your vision to be made real. Try this with your family, with your church or synagogue or mosque or ashram, and with your circle of friends, or with members of the local chapter of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) or the Tikkun Community.

For example, each day you could pick one of these themes and ask yourself and everyone in your family or network to imagine the changes you'd like to work for: the world of work, relationships with your parents, spiritual or religious community, your neighborhood and relationship with neighbors, society, American politics, social change movements, larger world.

Share your vision with others, without criticizing theirs. Then rejoice and sing songs of celebration and of struggle, drawing from the rich assortment of music and poetry that emerges from all the world's spiritual traditions and traditions of struggle.

Source Citation

Lerner, Michael. 2005. Christmas and Chanukah. Tikkun 20(6):14.