Christian, Jewish holidays coincide

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Christian, Jewish holidays coincide

Hanukkah begins on Dec. 25 this year, something that hasn’t happened since 1959.

01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, December 20, 2005

BY RICHARD C. DUJARDIN
Journal Religion Writer

Rabbi James Rosenberg says that if the truth be told, he has always enjoyed the Christmas season.

In fact, says the Reform leader at Temple Habonim in Barrington, he probably loves it more than his Christian colleagues because he doesn’t have the stress of preparing for special celebrations.

Besides, he was married on Christmas Eve, and his father was born on Dec. 26, giving him more reason to enjoy the season.

This year, however, the alignment of the calendars is helping to make Dec. 25 a joint holiday for Christians and Jews.

For the first time since 1959, Jews will begin their eight-day festival of Hanukkah at sundown Sunday, the evening of Christmas Day.

As far as Jewish holidays go, Hanukkah is relatively minor, celebrating the time 2,170 years ago when Jews recaptured the temple from the Syrian general Antiochus. According to the story, the Jewish priests were cleaning the temple on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev when they found a jar of oil. The amount of oil supposedly was only enough to burn for one day, but instead burned for eight.

Contrary to popular belief, the dates of Jewish holidays don’t change from year to year. They are very consistent – if you are using a Jewish calendar. Hanukkah is always the 25th of Kislev. And the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are always at the start of the month of Tishri. But because the Gregorian calendar calculates the months and years differently, Hanukkah and Christmas Day have rarely been together on most people’s calendars.

The confluence this time with the Christian celebration of Jesus’ birth is not unlike the one that took place earlier this year when Yom Kippur, a solemn day of fasting for Jews, fell at the same time that Muslims, using their own calendar, were fasting for the holy month of Ramadan.

To be sure, the confluence of Christmas and Hanukkah can present a particular challenge for many interfaith families.

Though some religious leaders argue against trying to raise a child in two religions, they acknowledge that families have a number of issues that they have to work out in regard to their relationship with their Jewish and Christian in-laws, as well as how to honor the religion of each spouse.

 

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At whose house will the holiday be celebrated this year? If the family is having Christmas dinner with one set of in-laws, will they cut the celebration short to get home and light the menorah? Or will there be an attempt to incorporate the menorah and the eating of latkes, potato pancakes, into the Christmas dinner?

Should they exchange Hanukkah presents or Christmas presents, and are there any lines to be drawn as far as decorating a tree?

Rabbi Rosenberg estimates that 30 percent of the families in his congregation are interfaith, and he personally would not criticize a family that decides to have a tree at home, even if the children are raised Jewish, knowing how meaningful it may be to the Christian spouse.

Nor does he think it’s necessary for parents who are attempting to raise their children Jewish to forbid their children to go to a friend’s or relative’s house to decorate a tree. His daughter, he says, used to do it all the time.

“If your children are secure in their identity, they can enjoy the identity of other people,” he says.

To find out what effect this year’s confluence of holidays will have on everyday practice, the group InterfaithFamily.com conducted an informal survey of interfaith couples. It discovered that most of the interfaith respondents were planning to celebrate both days, but would be keeping them separate – either by concluding Christmas celebrations early or holding Hanukkah for another day.

Edward Case, the president of the Massachusetts-based group, said one of the most surprising things emerging from the survey was that 76 percent of respondents said they expected to decorate a Christmas tree in their home – up from 53 percent last year.

While that may surprise many, Joelle Asaro Barman, an assistant editor at Jewish Family & Life magazine in Boston, said those are the sorts of things that happen in interfaith families such as the one in which she grew up. She observed that as long as she could remember, her parents kept a Christmas tree on one side of the living room, in honor of her mother’s holiday, and an assortment of menorahs on the other.

She says her parents were always very careful to convey the universal messages of Christmas – family, love and peace – “and left the job of savior to Judah Maccabee.”

Families, of course, can approach the two holidays in a variety of ways.

Jill Glickman, who is Jewish, and her Catholic husband, Michael Hill, of Barrington, did have a tree in the early days of the marriage but decided to stop once their daughters Rachel, 11, and Sarah, 6, were born, in the interest of raising them Jewish.

Nonetheless, they have kept the ornaments and still use them to decorate the house, along with the menorah and a small wreath.

On Christmas Day, Glickman predicted, the children will find a gift from Santa – “one small present because Santa knows we are Jewish” – but the heart of the day will come in the afternoon when they go out to deliver meals to shut-ins, in what is becoming for them a new tradition.

That night, they will join with members on Glickman’s side of the family at a Hanukkah celebration, where they will give the children new dreidels.

Saul Zeichner, and his wife, Emily, who is Catholic, took the approach of offering Christmas gifts with her side of the family and Hanukkah gifts with relatives on his side of the family and with their two daughters and one son, all of whom they raised Jewish.

Now that their children are grown up – their oldest daughter became Catholic and is raising her daughter in Louisiana; the younger daughter is married to a Jew and raising their child Jewish; and their son, who is Jewish, married to a Catholic girl and is raising their child Catholic – they continue with the same practice of honoring their family’s respective faith traditions.

Saul Zeichner says he has always felt bad that his wife did not have a Christmas tree at home, and so he has tried to assuage that by accompanying her to Christmas Mass.

Through it all, he thinks they’ve done very well. “We both have a strong belief in God, so we are in tune with each other.”