OCEANSIDE, California — A benevolent calendar coincidence, occurring every few years, will bring us on Dec. 24 to the shared lighting of solstice calendars by both Christians and Jews. The solar and lunar calendar cycles have intertwined, and so this Christmas Eve will coincide with the third night of Hanukkah, 5780. The circumstances should work to everyone’s advantage on Earth and must be pleasing to the heavens.
Because the December holiday season, formally entwined this year, is too often undermined by commercial anxiety and social stresses, we might find serenity in the gentle purposes undertaken today in the name of Scripture. Didn’t Judah and his Maccabees battle for the very right that Christians feel about the birth of a messianic dream? Didn’t Jesus preach to the very benevolence that Christians must feel as they look out their windows and see their neighbor’s candelabra glowing?
Although they derive from different stories, their outcomes are really the same: give children some hope, shared values among all the valuables exchanged, and the Torah is revealed while the Gospel is made true. God looks down and sees that little ones are making light.
Jews should light our third candle that night in acknowledgment of the painfully diminished peace and certainty that we endure at this solstice. The 20th century was uncommonly harsh for us, and we too often could not collect enough wax for even one Hanukkah candle. The 21st century, politically-fatigued and divisively stricken, remains violently dangerous for us. Our response? To light the lights even more fervently and to pray that our Christian neighbors (whose global communities have also come under attacks) have the same access to spiritual rejoicing exactly at the darkest time of the year.
We Jews should note: In the past generation, more Christians have done more soul-searching about who Jesus the Jew actually was than in many centuries. Christian interest in the Jewish calendar and in the welfare of the state of Israel is unprecedented.
Christians should look upon their wreaths not only as winter decor but as the true crown of love. In doing this, they will learn more about the meaning and history of Hanukkah: It was, after all, the original rebellion against religious tyranny, occurring in 168 B.C.E. It paved the way for the notion of theological freedom — from the Maccabees to Paul to Mohammed to the founding parents of U.S. democracy.
The fact that December’s days are particularly short gives this year’s shared lights added luminance. We Jews think of the power of ideas that overcame the brutality back then at the original Hanukkah, and our children get special insight into the yearning for devotional freedom that still grips the globe, from Pakistan to Syria to Venezuela.
Christians, hopefully inspired by the incandescence of the messianic ideal and innocence of a baby-child who changed the world, should think of what Christmas means to the soul, and not to the budget. Hanukkah has also become a hostage to the issue of credit, when all the Maccabees wanted credit for what was the very right Jesus had—185 years later—to save a light from going out.
Let both houses remember that what the Maccabees died for and what Jesus was born for was to build a world safe enough for a child to see through the darkness. The day is short, but together, we make hope long.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in Oceanside, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com