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12th December 2014, 11:39 AM
Trashing Christmas
The last of the Halloween candy has been eaten. The harvest moon is a radiant memory. The family festival of Thanksgiving has drawn us closer together. All of these warm seasonal memories can mean only one thing: It’s time for the Christmas haters to shift into high gear.
Who are the Christmas haters? Well, if we are to draw a conclusion from the hundreds of heartfelt and articulate commentaries currently on display on the Internet, they fall loosely into these self-identified groups: Jews, atheists, secular humanists and pagans. While many Jews, atheists, humanists and pagans make an effort to distinguish themselves from members of the other unhappy groups, there is a tremendous amount of overlap between the groups. For example, the word Jew can be used to designate a devout adherent of Judaism or simply anyone who has grown comfortable with Jewish customs, sentiments, perspectives and rhythms. In short, there are religious Jews and there are ethnic Jews and the ethnic Jews might also be atheists or pantheists or Wiccans or heaven knows what.
A 1998 poll of Los Angeles Jews commissioned by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles revealed that only 41 percent of respondents were firm in their belief in any sort of willful conscious deity. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey makes clear that only half of American Jews are affiliated with any Jewish congregation. Jews are most likely to join a synagogue when they have school-age children, often because of family pressure; they see the synagogue as a place where their children can receive an education in Jewish heritage, an education the parents themselves are ill-equipped to communicate because of their own meager religious educations and because of a lifetime of holding Jewish rituals, or any organized Jewish life, at arm’s length. After their sons have had their Bar Mitzvah, most Jews dump their synagogue memberships. The odd reality is that these parents sought out a synagogue to imbue their children with religious beliefs that the parents themselves do not hold dear. The American Jewish Yearbook estimated the total number of American Jews of all descriptions to be 6,155,000 in 2001. That would mean that Jews are about 2.1% of our total population. To put that in perspective, there are more fundamentalist Christians living in the southern states commonly called the Bible Belt than there are Jews of any description on the entire planet.
In her handbook God-Optional Judaism author Judith Seid quotes a rabbi who says of his congregation, “Probably more than half of them are atheists or agnostics.” These Jews are, it seems, unbelievers in search of a culturally defined comfort zone; they are the children and grandchildren of the great wave of Jewish immigration that broke on our shores in the early Twentieth Century; their numbers swell the great mass of unaffiliated, unreligious Jews. These Jews maintain an emotional attachment to the mood and rhythms of Jewish life, but also cling to their parents’ and grandparents’ socialist utopian fantasies, including socialism’s notorious hostility toward religion. It is these Jews who form the hardened spear tip of annual jabs at expressions of Christian spirituality at Christmas time. Now throw into the mix a bunch of enthusiastic atheist zealots and a handful of showboating Wiccans eager to share the stage with any recognized religion and you have the nucleus of a nasty seasonal tradition of trashing Christmas.
Why Do the Jews Hate Christmas?
For many Jews, their grudge against Christmas begins in September, or thereabout, when their employers do not allow them Yom Kippur as a holiday from work, even though it is the most important holy day of the Jewish calendar. These Jews must take a vacation day for their observances.
In her essay Christmas, shmistmas! an unhappy Penelope Trunk informs us that “as workers, Jews have to observe Christmas. It’s a weird day to have off from work. No stores are open. There’s nothing on TV. Most restaurants are closed. It’s a boring day, a good day to be at work . . .But we are forced to take a holiday.” She goes on: “Given the nothingness of Christmas to most Jews, it is absurd how much Christmas cheer the Jews partake in just to fit in at the office. . . Jews are having to be someone they are not in order to fit in...”
For many Jews the Christmas season brings the December Dilemma, for it is then that those who do not celebrate the holiday must acknowledge their marginality. Resourceful Jews have responded with a host of adaptive behaviors: going to Chinese restaurants and to movie theaters are the most popular. There is also Klezcamp in the Catskills, Matzo Balls for singles, gambling in Atlantic City or time away in Florida. Some go to comedy clubs such as Kung Pao Kosher Comedy on Christmas Eve in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The shows are sold out. Experienced Jews buy their tickets two months in advance.
Kung Pao Kosher Comedy was begun a decade ago by Jewish comedian Lisa Geduldig as an antidote to “getting Merry Christmas’d to death” as she put it. At Kung Pao, comic lines like “When the millionth person says ‘Merry Christmas’ to you, don’t you feel like replying, ‘Fuck You’?” excite enthusiastic applause.
According to Rabbi Joshua Plaut such angry material arises from an anger toward Christmas, what the rabbi calls “Claus-trophobia.” Last year Geduldig took her show to Los Angeles and plans to take it to New York this year.
The Jewish Forward announces “Noisy Night” events on Christmas Eve such as Jewsapalooza, which feature new-wave klezmer and songs such as “What I Like About Jew” and “It’s No Fun to Be a Jew at Christmas.” Jewish museums nationwide remain open on Christmas and may attract their largest crowds of the year.
That thunderclap moment when a Jewish child first encounters the bounty of a Christian child’s Christmas gifts is now a staple of modern Jewish comedians. Lewis Black, performing on Comedy Central, recounts such a moment and then recalls, with barely contained anger, that for Hanukkah his parents “gave me a top. They said it was a dreidel, but I knew . . .it was a top!”
The perpetually cranky Ed Asner, who thinks President Bush is a war criminal while simultaneously proclaiming that Joseph Stalin has been “misunderstood,” tells us of his childhood Jewish trauma: “I learned there was no Santa Claus when I came home from temple one December day and there weren’t any presents.” Perhaps it was this early encounter with the inequitable distribution of Christmas presents that led to Ed’s life-long infatuation with socialist systems of wealth redistribution.
In his essay Beating the Christmas Blues: One Jew’s Guide to a Merry X-mas, author Seth Brown declares that “we live in a Christmas-laden society” and “Christmas is a royal pain in the tuchus.” “By far, the most painful aspect of Christmas has always been the music,” he laments. “You’re just out at the bookstore for some enjoyable downtime and then up come the strains of Christmas music. I never expect it the first time each year, but my beautiful classical music has been tossed in favor of some classic Christmas song that echoes in my head as, ‘Jesus and Santa and Rudolph and everyone else celebrates Christmas except you.” As for Christmas Day, Seth Brown says he looks forward to it with great anticipation every year. “Oh, I used to think of Christmas Day as the culmination of the entire depressing Christmas season. But you know that on December 25th, when the rest of your town shuts down and puts up blinking lights, the Chinese restaurants are going to be open. And in those Chinese restaurants, there will be Jews. Lots of Jews.” He rhapsodizes, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s something wonderful about a restaurant filled with Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas. It just feels right. I can’t explain it . . .it’s not just a feeling of solidarity, but you look around at Goldberg, Mandelbaum, Shapiro, Rosenblatt, Weinman . . .”
Clearly, Mr. Brown has found his comfort zone and he expresses the sentiments of countless other Jews in search of a comfort zone. If Chinese food isn’t kosher, they don’t care. Only about 25% of Jews observe any kosher guidelines, the rest are happy to feast on pork rolls and pork ribs and pork fried rice. At Christmas time it’s a case of “any pork in a storm”; they are contented to eat treif, the scripturally unclean food of the gentiles.
It’s easy to imagine that a collective of such disgruntled Jews might use a sympathetic organization like the American Civil Liberties Union to carve out an even larger comfort zone for themselves by using relentless litigation to press visible expressions of Christian spirituality into the shadowed margins of our national life. As Seth Brown says, “Jesus was just a mediocre carpenter.” Steven Bayme, director of Jewish Communal Affairs at the American Jewish Committee puts it more politely: “Christmas is a holiday of another faith, rooted in historical events in which Jews reject theological significance. We do have a real theological difficulty with this; we disagree on whether or not Jesus was the Messiah.”
The Campaign Against Christian Culture Begins
At the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website (www.jcpa.org) Steven Cohen enlightens us to the fact that “American Jews, in their struggle to win and assure their full acceptance in the larger society, have long placed church-state issues at the top of their political and community relations agenda.” Mr. Cohen does not explain how the rigorous Jewish campaign to marginalize Christianity in a culture that is 86% Christian will “assure [Jews] their full acceptance.”
Prior to the great wave of Jewish immigration in the early part of the Twentieth Century, Americans were comfortable with a sense of themselves as a Christian people. This didn’t sit well with the newly arrived Jewish foreigners. According to Mr. Cohen the assertion of the native Americans that they were a Christian people “drove Jews into an alliance with more secular, non-religious elements in American society who were long seeking a more thorough and clear disengagement of church and state.” By “non-religious elements” Mr. Cohen is referring to atheists, who comprise a mere 0.4% of our population and also what was then a rapidly expanding godless religion that went by the name of Secular Humanism.
At first blush, the expression “godless religion” might appear a contradiction of terms. Furthermore, our culture is now so thoroughly saturated with the values of Secular Humanism that almost no one living can remember when it was a young, upstart, insurgent philosophy being promoted for the express purpose of marginalizing religious people and Christian perspectives.
Secular Humanists have long promoted the false notion that Secular Humanism simply “emerged” from human history, that it is the collective gift of history’s most enlightened thinkers, that it is the bright light of modern intellects who shunned the superstitious nonsense of a bygone (Christian) era. No Secular Humanist today ever refers to his comfortable collection of attitudes as a religion. But that was not always so.
In fact, Secular Humanism did not simply “emerge,” it was consciously invented; it has founding documents; it has a manifesto; its inventors boldly declared their infant philosophy to be a new religion. It is now the de facto establishment religion that shapes the curricula and the texts in every public school classroom in America.
In 1876, Felix Adler, a former rabbi, toiled like a Trojan to create the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City. This society spawned kindred societies that were later combined into the American Ethical Culture Union, which was also an invention of the same Dr. Adler. It was this American Ethical Culture Union that promoted a vision of a godless universe inhabited by humans who imagined themselves to be the standard for measuring all things.
In 1929, a Unitarian preacher named Charles Potter created the First Humanist Society of New York. A year later Mr. Potter penned Humanism: A New Religion in which he boldly declared, “education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
The humanist program got a big boost from the influential educator Horace Mann. In 1933, thirty-four prominent Americans signed the Humanist Manifesto, among them the educator John Dewey. The Humanist Manifestospurned Christian beliefs and explicitly endorsed in their stead the humanist values of materialism, rationalism and socialism as the new cultural foundation of America. The Humanist Manifesto made explicit the humanist objective “to elevate, transform, control, and direct all institutions and organizations by its own value system.” Their agenda was to tear down Christian values and elevate godless materialistic socialism; they have been wildly successful. Humanism provided the organizing principles around which educators, steeped in the writings of John Dewey, would sally forth and make Secular Humanism the dominant philosophy of America’s public schools. Humanism, as a stealth religion, has succeeded in becoming America’s de facto state-sponsored religion. It was a brilliant end run around the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment; while feigning neutrality, the new religion pushed Christian values into the shadows and replaced them with a grab bag of different, secular values. John Dewey proclaimed humanism our “common faith,” but it is a faith that seeks to obliterate all other faiths; it is nakedly hostile to Christian values. Humanist Manifesto III was released in 2003; it reiterates the humanist belief system: its faith in the perfectibility of humans and the finality of death.
Steven Cohen continues: “Protecting the religious neutrality of the schools and other public spaces emerged as a central doctrine of the Jewish defense establishment. It enjoyed broad public support by mid-century among second- and third-generation Jews.” By “protecting the religious neutrality of the schools,” Cohen means the triumph of the values of the new self-proclaimed religion of Secular Humanism over the Christian values that had guided the nation since its birth. The Jews and the Humanists joined forces to sweep Christian sensibility from public life; it was a campaign brimming with bigotry. Secular does not mean value-free; humanism is bursting with values, ideas, and perspectives that are anything but neutral.
According to Steven Cohen: “Separation of church and state is but a part of a strategy on the part of modernizing Jews to establish a religious ‘neutral zone’ where religious and ethnic tolerance is a supreme value.” By “neutral zone” he means a comfort zone for Jews and atheists who are less than three percent of America’s population. This comfort zone has been created at the expense of almost four centuries of Christian culture on this continent. The public square has been artificially transformed into a mere marketplace, a kind of cultureless culture, flavorless, merely commercial, and uninspiring. We know that this transformation was artificial because the majority of our people are now under the boot heel of relentless litigation and threat of court order to behave in ways that are unnatural for them. A public square that was the product of the spontaneous expressions of the people who live there would naturally blossom with the symbols and rituals of their spiritual life. But try getting such a natural and spontaneous and organic society past the ACLU.
Cohen continues: “For many Jews, being a good Jew meant being a good liberal; and being a good Jew and a good liberal also meant being a vigilant separationist.” This agenda was some assurance that young Jews would not be exposed to Christian sentiments, but it also meant that 86% of the population was put on a strict diet of godless humanist values. Why Jews thought that promoting this alien agenda would increase their acceptance by the very same society that they were forcing to live unauthentic lives is anyone’s guess.
Mr. Cohen tells us that “also fueling Jews’ separationism is their relative secularity, at least when measured in terms of the frequency of religious service attendance, with probably the lowest attendance rate of any major religious group in the United States. . .Jews score lower than other Americans on conventional measures of pure religiosity. Hence, they have less impetus to support religious accomodationism.” In other words, Jews as a group are not a very spiritual people and they would feel much more comfortable if everyone around them would please just shut up about their heartfelt beliefs; if you have any religious symbols, then keep them out of sight. These Jews are determined to have their comfort zone and they will defend it with litigation.
Jews overwhelmingly oppose school vouchers. On the one hand, they don’t want Christians to be demonstratively Christian in the public schools, but they also don’t want Christians to get a Christian education in a non-public school funded by Christian taxpayers. Everyone must remain on the Secular Humanist plantation.
How the Jews Trash Christmas
In addition to the doleful seasonal chorus of Jews whining about how they are being victimized by Christian holiday cheer, there are other purposeful techniques used to trash Christmas. Here are several of them.
Technique Number One: Delegitimization
According to the Lubavitch-Chabad movement, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, righteous Jews are obligated to stamp out Christmas. Their literature quotes Hebrew text (Likkutei Sichos 37:198) to remind us that “...according to the known Jewish ruling...Christians are idol worshippers.” The Lubavitcher handbills go on to quote Rambam Mishne Torah - Hilchos Melachim 10:9 to the effect that “A gentile...is liable for the death penalty...if he has invented a religious holiday for himself...The general principle is we do not allow them to make new religious rituals and to make ‘mitzvahs’ for themselves by their own devices...and if he does make some new ‘mitzvah’, we lash him, and inform him that he is obligated with the death penalty for this...” It’s pretty heady stuff. Who knew that the Jew up the block might believe that you deserve death for having a merry Christmas or at the very least a severe ass whipping. The Lubavitchers proudly carry on their anti-Christmas campaign in cities around America. Their Noah’s Covenant website at www.noahide.com/paganism.htm goes on for pages spinning out their conviction that Christianity is just a cryptic revival of ancient pagan cults that “were notorious for practicing witchcraft, forced prostitution, self-mutilation, human sacrifice to false gods, and even burning children alive.” Someone should take these Jews aside and explain to them that the Baptists gave up forced prostitution months ago and the Methodists definitely do not sacrifice humans to false gods. As for the Lutherans and that whole child-burning thing . . .it was only little Jimmy.
But seriously folks, it’s strange to hear such slanderous nonsense from the same people who took offense at the totally bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax; some people are slow learners. Under the heading The“New Testament”: Pagan Revenge these Orthodox Jews make their case that Christianity is just a latter-day pagan cult. It’s worth a read, but it’s too long to include here, so you decide whether they are clever anti-Christian propagandists or just profoundly stupid. In any case they have illustrated the technique of delegitimization, a close companion of which is the next technique.
Technique Number Two: Misinformation
The Christmas story is a simple story; millions of children hear it for the first time every year. They have no difficulty understanding it.
Many centuries ago, the Christmas celebration had not yet found a place in the Christian calendar. It could have found a home somewhere in the spring. We know that Joseph and Mary were traveling to their hometown to pay a tax and these taxes were collected in the warmer months. The calendar decision was finally made by Pope Julius the First in 336 AD. In an effort to strengthen the infant faith in an unconverted world, Julius chose to celebrate the mass of Christ on December 25th, the day of the winter solstice on the old Roman (Julian) calendar. The night of the winter solstice is the longest night of the year; from that moment onward the hours of daylight increase. It was the pope’s intention that the celebration of the Nativity be associated with the natural emergence of the world from the chilly darkness of winter toward the increasing light and the new life of spring. The symbolism was charming.
The symbolism of the solstice wasn’t lost on the pre-Christian pagans; all sorts of people created calendars and pegged celebrations to the winter solstice. It was the intention of the early Church to imbue these pagan festivals with Christian significance and to direct existing pagan feelings of reverence toward those things revealed in the New Testament. It also protected Christians from being wooed back to the old pagan celebrations. Along the way, Christmas, the festival of Christ, incorporated a few artifacts, such as a Yule log, a decorated evergreen and lots of candles. They remain with us like pieces of antique furniture put to new purposes.
All of this is understood by any fair-minded person, but the Lubavitcher-Chabad literature deliberately conflates the pagan and Christian festivals. The Lubavitchers send out their missionaries to preach weird sermons about how Christianity is a revival of ancient cults seeking to lead the pious Jew astray. Their website complains that other rabbis have criticized them for expressing their beliefs so clearly and for being so forthright as to actually call what they are doing an “anti-Christmas campaign.”
Some people need to be reminded what a cobbled-together thing Judaism is. The Jews began their moral evolution as a violent, xenophobic band of pork-eating polytheists. Yahweh was their god of war, the Hebrew Mars. To enforce a disciplined monotheism on them, a caste of priests centered all Jewish ritual life in the temple in Jerusalem. Kosher laws evolved over time. After the destruction of their temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people, the Jews reinvented a Jewish life centered on Torah study and guided by rabbis (teachers). The pagan Egyptians and Babylonians, among whom the Jews dwelled for so long, gifted to the Jews some of their most cherished traditions. For example, the Egyptians were practicing circumcision for religious purposes long before the Jews; the Jews adopted this practice and invested it with their own meaning. No one calls the Jews neo-pagans for doing this; their adaptation of circumcision is thought to be inspired: the Jews captured a cultural form and made it their own.
Another example: The story of Noah and the flood is a blow-by-blow retelling of the Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh. In the Jewish retelling of this tale it becomes the threshold event of a new covenant between God and his chosen people. It’s an inspired reshaping of an ancient story. No one calls the Jews born-again Babylonians for doing this.
But Christmas is now the annual high-water mark of a rising tide of nonsense aimed at Christian believers. It is at this time each year that the voices of disgruntled Jews are joined by the chorus of witches, pagans and the aggressive advocates of atheism.
Enter the Pagans
In her essay Reclaiming the Season: Yule, Jehana Silverwing echoes so many other non-Christians: “How do we deal with Christmas when our children ask about it? Should we, as Pagans and as Witches, merely content ourselves with removing the crèche, while leaving the other accoutrements alone?” It’s a tough question. Silverwing explains that “The situation which presents itself for current-day Pagans and Witches at this season is multiple . . ., we share with the Jews the difficulty of raising our children in a culture geared more to Christmas than to our specific holiday.” She notes the unintended irony of a Supreme Court decision: the law allows local governments to display Nativity scenes on public property only when the emotional impact of such scenes is diluted by the presence of objects and symbols deemed by the Court to be non-religious, such as plastic reindeer, inflatable Santas, Kwanzaa knickknacks, blow-molded snowmen and the ever-popular Christmas tree.
Rather than clutter up a sacred symbol, many towns have chosen to cease mounting Nativity displays. The pagan Ms. Silverwing says, “The crèche is not my religious symbol, but that tree standing there proudly bedecked is. By removing all but the Pagan symbols, we are allowing towns to declare that the Pagan symbols are NOT spiritual/religious, and have no more than passing associations to the season.” For Silverwing and her fellow pagans the tree and the Yule log are living religious symbols invested with spiritual meaning. The American Religious Identification Survey estimated that the community of Wiccans had shot up to over 134,000 by 2001. That’s a seventeen-fold increase in a decade. These witches and their witchcraft religion are here to stay, so we are now stuck with the irony that the Supreme Court has bounced the baby Jesus from the courthouse lawn but left in place the sacred symbols of the Wiccans. Can you say, “Weird Republic?”
Yes, Virginia, There Is an American Atheists, Incorporated
Meanwhile, American Atheists, Inc. is exercising its First Amendment rights by picketing Christmas displays on public property. Christmas is their busy season; it’s their best chance to grab a little on-camera time in their local television markets. On their website they quote “local American Atheist and state-church separation activist” John Messina who has a grudge against San Jose, California’s annual “Christmas in the Park” display. Mr. Messina complains that “It is now blatantly obvious that the winter festival is being used to promote Christianity.” The hyperventilating atheist declares that “the crèche must be removed.”
This is how the American Atheists, Inc website describes the offending display: “There are elves, reindeer, lighted trees, even the Aztec Quetzalcoatl . . .and the baby Jesus.” Well, that is offensive. It’s one of those hodgepodge horrors that have been forced upon communities by foolish court decisions. So now an effigy of the blood thirsty feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl sits on public display at Christmas time, but the atheists are getting cranked about the little pink baby Jesus. They planned a protest at the Christmas-in-the-Park crèche; they urged members to attend: “Picket signs and other material will be provided, and there will be an informal lunch after the demonstration.” Gee, it sounds like a church social.
continued:
The last of the Halloween candy has been eaten. The harvest moon is a radiant memory. The family festival of Thanksgiving has drawn us closer together. All of these warm seasonal memories can mean only one thing: It’s time for the Christmas haters to shift into high gear.
Who are the Christmas haters? Well, if we are to draw a conclusion from the hundreds of heartfelt and articulate commentaries currently on display on the Internet, they fall loosely into these self-identified groups: Jews, atheists, secular humanists and pagans. While many Jews, atheists, humanists and pagans make an effort to distinguish themselves from members of the other unhappy groups, there is a tremendous amount of overlap between the groups. For example, the word Jew can be used to designate a devout adherent of Judaism or simply anyone who has grown comfortable with Jewish customs, sentiments, perspectives and rhythms. In short, there are religious Jews and there are ethnic Jews and the ethnic Jews might also be atheists or pantheists or Wiccans or heaven knows what.
A 1998 poll of Los Angeles Jews commissioned by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles revealed that only 41 percent of respondents were firm in their belief in any sort of willful conscious deity. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey makes clear that only half of American Jews are affiliated with any Jewish congregation. Jews are most likely to join a synagogue when they have school-age children, often because of family pressure; they see the synagogue as a place where their children can receive an education in Jewish heritage, an education the parents themselves are ill-equipped to communicate because of their own meager religious educations and because of a lifetime of holding Jewish rituals, or any organized Jewish life, at arm’s length. After their sons have had their Bar Mitzvah, most Jews dump their synagogue memberships. The odd reality is that these parents sought out a synagogue to imbue their children with religious beliefs that the parents themselves do not hold dear. The American Jewish Yearbook estimated the total number of American Jews of all descriptions to be 6,155,000 in 2001. That would mean that Jews are about 2.1% of our total population. To put that in perspective, there are more fundamentalist Christians living in the southern states commonly called the Bible Belt than there are Jews of any description on the entire planet.
In her handbook God-Optional Judaism author Judith Seid quotes a rabbi who says of his congregation, “Probably more than half of them are atheists or agnostics.” These Jews are, it seems, unbelievers in search of a culturally defined comfort zone; they are the children and grandchildren of the great wave of Jewish immigration that broke on our shores in the early Twentieth Century; their numbers swell the great mass of unaffiliated, unreligious Jews. These Jews maintain an emotional attachment to the mood and rhythms of Jewish life, but also cling to their parents’ and grandparents’ socialist utopian fantasies, including socialism’s notorious hostility toward religion. It is these Jews who form the hardened spear tip of annual jabs at expressions of Christian spirituality at Christmas time. Now throw into the mix a bunch of enthusiastic atheist zealots and a handful of showboating Wiccans eager to share the stage with any recognized religion and you have the nucleus of a nasty seasonal tradition of trashing Christmas.
Why Do the Jews Hate Christmas?
For many Jews, their grudge against Christmas begins in September, or thereabout, when their employers do not allow them Yom Kippur as a holiday from work, even though it is the most important holy day of the Jewish calendar. These Jews must take a vacation day for their observances.
In her essay Christmas, shmistmas! an unhappy Penelope Trunk informs us that “as workers, Jews have to observe Christmas. It’s a weird day to have off from work. No stores are open. There’s nothing on TV. Most restaurants are closed. It’s a boring day, a good day to be at work . . .But we are forced to take a holiday.” She goes on: “Given the nothingness of Christmas to most Jews, it is absurd how much Christmas cheer the Jews partake in just to fit in at the office. . . Jews are having to be someone they are not in order to fit in...”
For many Jews the Christmas season brings the December Dilemma, for it is then that those who do not celebrate the holiday must acknowledge their marginality. Resourceful Jews have responded with a host of adaptive behaviors: going to Chinese restaurants and to movie theaters are the most popular. There is also Klezcamp in the Catskills, Matzo Balls for singles, gambling in Atlantic City or time away in Florida. Some go to comedy clubs such as Kung Pao Kosher Comedy on Christmas Eve in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The shows are sold out. Experienced Jews buy their tickets two months in advance.
Kung Pao Kosher Comedy was begun a decade ago by Jewish comedian Lisa Geduldig as an antidote to “getting Merry Christmas’d to death” as she put it. At Kung Pao, comic lines like “When the millionth person says ‘Merry Christmas’ to you, don’t you feel like replying, ‘Fuck You’?” excite enthusiastic applause.
According to Rabbi Joshua Plaut such angry material arises from an anger toward Christmas, what the rabbi calls “Claus-trophobia.” Last year Geduldig took her show to Los Angeles and plans to take it to New York this year.
The Jewish Forward announces “Noisy Night” events on Christmas Eve such as Jewsapalooza, which feature new-wave klezmer and songs such as “What I Like About Jew” and “It’s No Fun to Be a Jew at Christmas.” Jewish museums nationwide remain open on Christmas and may attract their largest crowds of the year.
That thunderclap moment when a Jewish child first encounters the bounty of a Christian child’s Christmas gifts is now a staple of modern Jewish comedians. Lewis Black, performing on Comedy Central, recounts such a moment and then recalls, with barely contained anger, that for Hanukkah his parents “gave me a top. They said it was a dreidel, but I knew . . .it was a top!”
The perpetually cranky Ed Asner, who thinks President Bush is a war criminal while simultaneously proclaiming that Joseph Stalin has been “misunderstood,” tells us of his childhood Jewish trauma: “I learned there was no Santa Claus when I came home from temple one December day and there weren’t any presents.” Perhaps it was this early encounter with the inequitable distribution of Christmas presents that led to Ed’s life-long infatuation with socialist systems of wealth redistribution.
In his essay Beating the Christmas Blues: One Jew’s Guide to a Merry X-mas, author Seth Brown declares that “we live in a Christmas-laden society” and “Christmas is a royal pain in the tuchus.” “By far, the most painful aspect of Christmas has always been the music,” he laments. “You’re just out at the bookstore for some enjoyable downtime and then up come the strains of Christmas music. I never expect it the first time each year, but my beautiful classical music has been tossed in favor of some classic Christmas song that echoes in my head as, ‘Jesus and Santa and Rudolph and everyone else celebrates Christmas except you.” As for Christmas Day, Seth Brown says he looks forward to it with great anticipation every year. “Oh, I used to think of Christmas Day as the culmination of the entire depressing Christmas season. But you know that on December 25th, when the rest of your town shuts down and puts up blinking lights, the Chinese restaurants are going to be open. And in those Chinese restaurants, there will be Jews. Lots of Jews.” He rhapsodizes, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s something wonderful about a restaurant filled with Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas. It just feels right. I can’t explain it . . .it’s not just a feeling of solidarity, but you look around at Goldberg, Mandelbaum, Shapiro, Rosenblatt, Weinman . . .”
Clearly, Mr. Brown has found his comfort zone and he expresses the sentiments of countless other Jews in search of a comfort zone. If Chinese food isn’t kosher, they don’t care. Only about 25% of Jews observe any kosher guidelines, the rest are happy to feast on pork rolls and pork ribs and pork fried rice. At Christmas time it’s a case of “any pork in a storm”; they are contented to eat treif, the scripturally unclean food of the gentiles.
It’s easy to imagine that a collective of such disgruntled Jews might use a sympathetic organization like the American Civil Liberties Union to carve out an even larger comfort zone for themselves by using relentless litigation to press visible expressions of Christian spirituality into the shadowed margins of our national life. As Seth Brown says, “Jesus was just a mediocre carpenter.” Steven Bayme, director of Jewish Communal Affairs at the American Jewish Committee puts it more politely: “Christmas is a holiday of another faith, rooted in historical events in which Jews reject theological significance. We do have a real theological difficulty with this; we disagree on whether or not Jesus was the Messiah.”
The Campaign Against Christian Culture Begins
At the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website (www.jcpa.org) Steven Cohen enlightens us to the fact that “American Jews, in their struggle to win and assure their full acceptance in the larger society, have long placed church-state issues at the top of their political and community relations agenda.” Mr. Cohen does not explain how the rigorous Jewish campaign to marginalize Christianity in a culture that is 86% Christian will “assure [Jews] their full acceptance.”
Prior to the great wave of Jewish immigration in the early part of the Twentieth Century, Americans were comfortable with a sense of themselves as a Christian people. This didn’t sit well with the newly arrived Jewish foreigners. According to Mr. Cohen the assertion of the native Americans that they were a Christian people “drove Jews into an alliance with more secular, non-religious elements in American society who were long seeking a more thorough and clear disengagement of church and state.” By “non-religious elements” Mr. Cohen is referring to atheists, who comprise a mere 0.4% of our population and also what was then a rapidly expanding godless religion that went by the name of Secular Humanism.
At first blush, the expression “godless religion” might appear a contradiction of terms. Furthermore, our culture is now so thoroughly saturated with the values of Secular Humanism that almost no one living can remember when it was a young, upstart, insurgent philosophy being promoted for the express purpose of marginalizing religious people and Christian perspectives.
Secular Humanists have long promoted the false notion that Secular Humanism simply “emerged” from human history, that it is the collective gift of history’s most enlightened thinkers, that it is the bright light of modern intellects who shunned the superstitious nonsense of a bygone (Christian) era. No Secular Humanist today ever refers to his comfortable collection of attitudes as a religion. But that was not always so.
In fact, Secular Humanism did not simply “emerge,” it was consciously invented; it has founding documents; it has a manifesto; its inventors boldly declared their infant philosophy to be a new religion. It is now the de facto establishment religion that shapes the curricula and the texts in every public school classroom in America.
In 1876, Felix Adler, a former rabbi, toiled like a Trojan to create the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City. This society spawned kindred societies that were later combined into the American Ethical Culture Union, which was also an invention of the same Dr. Adler. It was this American Ethical Culture Union that promoted a vision of a godless universe inhabited by humans who imagined themselves to be the standard for measuring all things.
In 1929, a Unitarian preacher named Charles Potter created the First Humanist Society of New York. A year later Mr. Potter penned Humanism: A New Religion in which he boldly declared, “education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
The humanist program got a big boost from the influential educator Horace Mann. In 1933, thirty-four prominent Americans signed the Humanist Manifesto, among them the educator John Dewey. The Humanist Manifestospurned Christian beliefs and explicitly endorsed in their stead the humanist values of materialism, rationalism and socialism as the new cultural foundation of America. The Humanist Manifesto made explicit the humanist objective “to elevate, transform, control, and direct all institutions and organizations by its own value system.” Their agenda was to tear down Christian values and elevate godless materialistic socialism; they have been wildly successful. Humanism provided the organizing principles around which educators, steeped in the writings of John Dewey, would sally forth and make Secular Humanism the dominant philosophy of America’s public schools. Humanism, as a stealth religion, has succeeded in becoming America’s de facto state-sponsored religion. It was a brilliant end run around the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment; while feigning neutrality, the new religion pushed Christian values into the shadows and replaced them with a grab bag of different, secular values. John Dewey proclaimed humanism our “common faith,” but it is a faith that seeks to obliterate all other faiths; it is nakedly hostile to Christian values. Humanist Manifesto III was released in 2003; it reiterates the humanist belief system: its faith in the perfectibility of humans and the finality of death.
Steven Cohen continues: “Protecting the religious neutrality of the schools and other public spaces emerged as a central doctrine of the Jewish defense establishment. It enjoyed broad public support by mid-century among second- and third-generation Jews.” By “protecting the religious neutrality of the schools,” Cohen means the triumph of the values of the new self-proclaimed religion of Secular Humanism over the Christian values that had guided the nation since its birth. The Jews and the Humanists joined forces to sweep Christian sensibility from public life; it was a campaign brimming with bigotry. Secular does not mean value-free; humanism is bursting with values, ideas, and perspectives that are anything but neutral.
According to Steven Cohen: “Separation of church and state is but a part of a strategy on the part of modernizing Jews to establish a religious ‘neutral zone’ where religious and ethnic tolerance is a supreme value.” By “neutral zone” he means a comfort zone for Jews and atheists who are less than three percent of America’s population. This comfort zone has been created at the expense of almost four centuries of Christian culture on this continent. The public square has been artificially transformed into a mere marketplace, a kind of cultureless culture, flavorless, merely commercial, and uninspiring. We know that this transformation was artificial because the majority of our people are now under the boot heel of relentless litigation and threat of court order to behave in ways that are unnatural for them. A public square that was the product of the spontaneous expressions of the people who live there would naturally blossom with the symbols and rituals of their spiritual life. But try getting such a natural and spontaneous and organic society past the ACLU.
Cohen continues: “For many Jews, being a good Jew meant being a good liberal; and being a good Jew and a good liberal also meant being a vigilant separationist.” This agenda was some assurance that young Jews would not be exposed to Christian sentiments, but it also meant that 86% of the population was put on a strict diet of godless humanist values. Why Jews thought that promoting this alien agenda would increase their acceptance by the very same society that they were forcing to live unauthentic lives is anyone’s guess.
Mr. Cohen tells us that “also fueling Jews’ separationism is their relative secularity, at least when measured in terms of the frequency of religious service attendance, with probably the lowest attendance rate of any major religious group in the United States. . .Jews score lower than other Americans on conventional measures of pure religiosity. Hence, they have less impetus to support religious accomodationism.” In other words, Jews as a group are not a very spiritual people and they would feel much more comfortable if everyone around them would please just shut up about their heartfelt beliefs; if you have any religious symbols, then keep them out of sight. These Jews are determined to have their comfort zone and they will defend it with litigation.
Jews overwhelmingly oppose school vouchers. On the one hand, they don’t want Christians to be demonstratively Christian in the public schools, but they also don’t want Christians to get a Christian education in a non-public school funded by Christian taxpayers. Everyone must remain on the Secular Humanist plantation.
How the Jews Trash Christmas
In addition to the doleful seasonal chorus of Jews whining about how they are being victimized by Christian holiday cheer, there are other purposeful techniques used to trash Christmas. Here are several of them.
Technique Number One: Delegitimization
According to the Lubavitch-Chabad movement, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, righteous Jews are obligated to stamp out Christmas. Their literature quotes Hebrew text (Likkutei Sichos 37:198) to remind us that “...according to the known Jewish ruling...Christians are idol worshippers.” The Lubavitcher handbills go on to quote Rambam Mishne Torah - Hilchos Melachim 10:9 to the effect that “A gentile...is liable for the death penalty...if he has invented a religious holiday for himself...The general principle is we do not allow them to make new religious rituals and to make ‘mitzvahs’ for themselves by their own devices...and if he does make some new ‘mitzvah’, we lash him, and inform him that he is obligated with the death penalty for this...” It’s pretty heady stuff. Who knew that the Jew up the block might believe that you deserve death for having a merry Christmas or at the very least a severe ass whipping. The Lubavitchers proudly carry on their anti-Christmas campaign in cities around America. Their Noah’s Covenant website at www.noahide.com/paganism.htm goes on for pages spinning out their conviction that Christianity is just a cryptic revival of ancient pagan cults that “were notorious for practicing witchcraft, forced prostitution, self-mutilation, human sacrifice to false gods, and even burning children alive.” Someone should take these Jews aside and explain to them that the Baptists gave up forced prostitution months ago and the Methodists definitely do not sacrifice humans to false gods. As for the Lutherans and that whole child-burning thing . . .it was only little Jimmy.
But seriously folks, it’s strange to hear such slanderous nonsense from the same people who took offense at the totally bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax; some people are slow learners. Under the heading The“New Testament”: Pagan Revenge these Orthodox Jews make their case that Christianity is just a latter-day pagan cult. It’s worth a read, but it’s too long to include here, so you decide whether they are clever anti-Christian propagandists or just profoundly stupid. In any case they have illustrated the technique of delegitimization, a close companion of which is the next technique.
Technique Number Two: Misinformation
The Christmas story is a simple story; millions of children hear it for the first time every year. They have no difficulty understanding it.
Many centuries ago, the Christmas celebration had not yet found a place in the Christian calendar. It could have found a home somewhere in the spring. We know that Joseph and Mary were traveling to their hometown to pay a tax and these taxes were collected in the warmer months. The calendar decision was finally made by Pope Julius the First in 336 AD. In an effort to strengthen the infant faith in an unconverted world, Julius chose to celebrate the mass of Christ on December 25th, the day of the winter solstice on the old Roman (Julian) calendar. The night of the winter solstice is the longest night of the year; from that moment onward the hours of daylight increase. It was the pope’s intention that the celebration of the Nativity be associated with the natural emergence of the world from the chilly darkness of winter toward the increasing light and the new life of spring. The symbolism was charming.
The symbolism of the solstice wasn’t lost on the pre-Christian pagans; all sorts of people created calendars and pegged celebrations to the winter solstice. It was the intention of the early Church to imbue these pagan festivals with Christian significance and to direct existing pagan feelings of reverence toward those things revealed in the New Testament. It also protected Christians from being wooed back to the old pagan celebrations. Along the way, Christmas, the festival of Christ, incorporated a few artifacts, such as a Yule log, a decorated evergreen and lots of candles. They remain with us like pieces of antique furniture put to new purposes.
All of this is understood by any fair-minded person, but the Lubavitcher-Chabad literature deliberately conflates the pagan and Christian festivals. The Lubavitchers send out their missionaries to preach weird sermons about how Christianity is a revival of ancient cults seeking to lead the pious Jew astray. Their website complains that other rabbis have criticized them for expressing their beliefs so clearly and for being so forthright as to actually call what they are doing an “anti-Christmas campaign.”
Some people need to be reminded what a cobbled-together thing Judaism is. The Jews began their moral evolution as a violent, xenophobic band of pork-eating polytheists. Yahweh was their god of war, the Hebrew Mars. To enforce a disciplined monotheism on them, a caste of priests centered all Jewish ritual life in the temple in Jerusalem. Kosher laws evolved over time. After the destruction of their temple and the dispersion of the Jewish people, the Jews reinvented a Jewish life centered on Torah study and guided by rabbis (teachers). The pagan Egyptians and Babylonians, among whom the Jews dwelled for so long, gifted to the Jews some of their most cherished traditions. For example, the Egyptians were practicing circumcision for religious purposes long before the Jews; the Jews adopted this practice and invested it with their own meaning. No one calls the Jews neo-pagans for doing this; their adaptation of circumcision is thought to be inspired: the Jews captured a cultural form and made it their own.
Another example: The story of Noah and the flood is a blow-by-blow retelling of the Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh. In the Jewish retelling of this tale it becomes the threshold event of a new covenant between God and his chosen people. It’s an inspired reshaping of an ancient story. No one calls the Jews born-again Babylonians for doing this.
But Christmas is now the annual high-water mark of a rising tide of nonsense aimed at Christian believers. It is at this time each year that the voices of disgruntled Jews are joined by the chorus of witches, pagans and the aggressive advocates of atheism.
Enter the Pagans
In her essay Reclaiming the Season: Yule, Jehana Silverwing echoes so many other non-Christians: “How do we deal with Christmas when our children ask about it? Should we, as Pagans and as Witches, merely content ourselves with removing the crèche, while leaving the other accoutrements alone?” It’s a tough question. Silverwing explains that “The situation which presents itself for current-day Pagans and Witches at this season is multiple . . ., we share with the Jews the difficulty of raising our children in a culture geared more to Christmas than to our specific holiday.” She notes the unintended irony of a Supreme Court decision: the law allows local governments to display Nativity scenes on public property only when the emotional impact of such scenes is diluted by the presence of objects and symbols deemed by the Court to be non-religious, such as plastic reindeer, inflatable Santas, Kwanzaa knickknacks, blow-molded snowmen and the ever-popular Christmas tree.
Rather than clutter up a sacred symbol, many towns have chosen to cease mounting Nativity displays. The pagan Ms. Silverwing says, “The crèche is not my religious symbol, but that tree standing there proudly bedecked is. By removing all but the Pagan symbols, we are allowing towns to declare that the Pagan symbols are NOT spiritual/religious, and have no more than passing associations to the season.” For Silverwing and her fellow pagans the tree and the Yule log are living religious symbols invested with spiritual meaning. The American Religious Identification Survey estimated that the community of Wiccans had shot up to over 134,000 by 2001. That’s a seventeen-fold increase in a decade. These witches and their witchcraft religion are here to stay, so we are now stuck with the irony that the Supreme Court has bounced the baby Jesus from the courthouse lawn but left in place the sacred symbols of the Wiccans. Can you say, “Weird Republic?”
Yes, Virginia, There Is an American Atheists, Incorporated
Meanwhile, American Atheists, Inc. is exercising its First Amendment rights by picketing Christmas displays on public property. Christmas is their busy season; it’s their best chance to grab a little on-camera time in their local television markets. On their website they quote “local American Atheist and state-church separation activist” John Messina who has a grudge against San Jose, California’s annual “Christmas in the Park” display. Mr. Messina complains that “It is now blatantly obvious that the winter festival is being used to promote Christianity.” The hyperventilating atheist declares that “the crèche must be removed.”
This is how the American Atheists, Inc website describes the offending display: “There are elves, reindeer, lighted trees, even the Aztec Quetzalcoatl . . .and the baby Jesus.” Well, that is offensive. It’s one of those hodgepodge horrors that have been forced upon communities by foolish court decisions. So now an effigy of the blood thirsty feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl sits on public display at Christmas time, but the atheists are getting cranked about the little pink baby Jesus. They planned a protest at the Christmas-in-the-Park crèche; they urged members to attend: “Picket signs and other material will be provided, and there will be an informal lunch after the demonstration.” Gee, it sounds like a church social.
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