Rabbi Micah Citrin

December 29, 2006

"I am Joseph, I am Jewish"

Call me Ishmael.  I am what I am…I’m Popeye the sailor man.  I’m Batman.  What does Moby Dick, Popeye, the superhero Batman, and our weekly Torah portion all have in common?  Like the statements of the well known fictional characters, our Torah portion, Vayigash, includes a famous statement of self definition, the revelation of the core of a person’s being.  After being sold into slavery, ascending to the heights of viceroy of Egypt , and becoming the arbiter of life and death as the distributor of grain during the regional famine, Joseph stands face to face with his brothers.  He has tested them, their loyalty to one another and to their father.  Joseph reveals himself with five of the most powerful Hebrew words in the Torah, “Ani Yosef, Ha-Od Avi Chai?-I am Joseph, does my father still live?”  I am Joseph.  The words ring out through Egypt as this great Egyptian, reveals his true self, that he is the humble son of a Hebrew shepherd. 

This year our Shabbat Torah portion follows on the heels of Christmas.  In many ways, we American Jews are like Joseph.  We have succeeded in a land in which we are a minority.  We have become comfortable in its culture, and we have made it our own.  A few days ago, the majority of Americans joined in the cultural and religious celebration of Christmas.  Of course this makes sense. The vast majority of Americans are Christian.  However, if you read recent articles in the NY Times, the LA times, and other media, you will have also found pieces about the prevalence among some Jews to join in the celebration of Christmas.  It makes me wonder if we Jews in America are in need of an “I am Joseph” moment; a moment, especially at this season when we remind ourselves, our communities, our nation about who we are. 

On the front page of the Sunday styles section of last Sunday’s NY Times, there is a front page article entitled, “Jewish in a Winter Wonderland,” by Cindy Chupack.  Chupack admits, with only a tinge of Jewish guilt, her love for the Christmas season, so much so that, she and her Jewish husband decide to celebrate Christmas in their home.  In fact, she threw herself into the celebration and writes, “I love that as soon as I told a Catholic friend what I was up to, she invited me to a gingerbread house decorating party.  How fun is that?  And why wasn’t I invited before?  What does a gingerbread house have to do with Jesus?   So here we are two newlywed Jews celebrating our No No Noel, not because we secretly want to convert to Christianity, but because the rampant commercialization of Christmas works!”  Cindy Chupack and her husband love the idea of Christmas trees and stockings, Christmas songs and Christmas kitsch.  In the end, she reassures the reader, the Jewish reader in particular, that if she and her husband were to have kids, they would do away with their new found Christmas tradition.  Though she concludes, “On the other hand, maybe it is nice to teach children that holidays can be done a la carte.  Every religion, every culture has so many beautiful rituals and traditions to choose from.  Maybe celebrating can be a step toward tolerating.” 

Now before you say to yourself, “I know where this is going, this is just the rabbi’s version of a bah-humbug sermon,” or, “Come on rabbi, lighten up, have a sense of humor,” I will have to come clean to you about a few things.  First, I like the Christmas season.  Not the kitsch that Cindy Chupack loves, but I appreciate beautiful Christmas music and Christmas carols.  In my home town of Albuquerque , I loved to see homes and sidewalks lined with luminarias, paper bags filled with sand and a candle to light the way for the Christ child.  I love the quiet of Christmas day. 

Second, to state the obvious, I am a rabbi and that colors my reaction to Jews celebrating Christmas.  Appreciating Christmas is one thing, joining friends in their celebration of their holiday is wonderful.  Embracing Christmas as our own holiday and in our own homes raises problems of identity and challenges an important Jewish value. 

Many point out that a Christmas tree or a wreath is simply a secular symbol and has no connection to Christianity or Christian theology.  And yet symbols are powerful because they shape who and what we are.  They become the building blocks of our identities.  Symbols connect us to larger cultural moorings and contexts.  Many Jews put a mezuzah on their doors to indicate that their home is Jewish.  The only thing that is important from a traditional standpoint are the words of Shema inside, but it is the casing of the words that carries the symbolic weight. The Christmas tree may not be religious in and of itself, but it appears only in the cultural constellation of one of the most important Christian celebrations, the birth of the Christian messiah.  Furthermore, the origins of the Christmas tree are pagan, something that our tradition reminds us to steer clear of.

Secondly, for a Jew to embrace Christmas as his own challenges the Jewish value of being distinct.  In Deuteronomy Moses wa rn s the Israelites not to adopt the practices of the surrounding nations instructing them, “Do not inquire about their gods, saying, ‘How did those nations worship their gods?  I too will follow those practices.’” (Deut 12 : 30).  Our tradition asks us to find ways to be different, to stand out.  As much as we shape our Jewish identities by saying what we are, we also shape them by being clear about what we are not.  While the dominant Christian culture in America celebrates Christmas in all of its iterations, we Jews can take this opportunity to observe the mitzvah of being distinct and refraining from bringing Christmas symbols, in fact Christian symbols, into our personal spaces. 

Another article in the Sunday NY Times Magazine, entitled “Jewish Family Christmas” suggests some of the consequences of not setting up markers of distinction.  Jennifer Gilmore writes, “My father who is 100 percent Jewish has always been obsessed with Christmas…He decorates the mantel with Christmas cards and tapes mistletoe to the doorways, and one year he even tried to get my mother, also Jewish, with a much more observant upbringing, to allow an evergreen wreath on our front door.  “I can’t live with that,” she said.  “I just can’t.  Nothing outside of this house.  We’re Jews for Christ’s sake.”  Throughout the article Gilmore chronicles her Jewish family’s celebration of both holidays and the dissonance it caused her concluding at the end of her article, “We continued to celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah and all the Jewish holidays, and my parents gave me many gifts, but none of them were about what being Jewish really meant.  Our Jewishness was everything my family was not: quiet, unexpressed, easy to shed.  I would have to work to find mine in other ways.”  Gilmore longs for her family to have taught her what it meant to be Jewish.  I think that part of her longed for boundaries that kept their Jewish home separate from a holiday that belonged to another tradition and culture.

The irony of these examples is that these are intrafaith Jewish families struggling with the December dilemma.  These articles do not even begin to deal with very real complexities of Christmas for interfaith Jewish families and all of the identity issues that this time of year brings to the surface.  I am sensitive to this from my own childhood experience of celebrating Christmas dinner with my step grandparents.  My step father converted to Judaism, but we would go to his parents’ on Christmas to open gifts under the Christmas tree.  While this always made me feel slightly uncomfortable, and my father more so given that he was the Reform rabbi in Albuquerque , I did not find it particularly confusing.  Home, both at my mother’s house and my father’s house were defined by Jewish symbols and Jewish culture.  For many inferfaith families in America , and our Beth Am community, it is not so simple to say that Christmas will be ignored, that their Jewish home will be without any symbols or feelings of Christmas.  Often, Christmas is the only connection for the non-Jewish spouse to the traditions of their childhood; traditions that in many cases they have shed in order to create a Jewish home and be part of the Jewish community.  How can we begrudge them a Christmas tree?  And yet, one cannot escape the reality of these choices.  It is these very symbols that go into creating the childhood memories that will in tu rn form the identities of these individuals as adults.  There is not an easy answer.

It took Joseph his entire adult life to face his brothers and say, “I am Joseph,” to reveal himself.  Joseph had to be face to face with his past and his family in order to declare before all of Egypt that he was Yosef, a Hebrew.  And though Joseph came to live as an Egyptian and succeed as an Egyptian, he was not complete until he said, “I am Joseph, I stand apart and I am different.”  Ultimately we American Jews must join our ancestor in making such a declaration.  And not only when the questions of identity, symbols, and celebration stare us in the face each December, but throughout our lives in this land in which we are free to be or not to be anything that we desire.  We can lea rn to say, “We are Joseph, we are Jewish.”