The God Squad: A rabbi’s Christmas card

Every year my friend Father Tom Hartman would write our annual Chanukah greeting and I would write the Christmas greeting. I miss him all the time but mostly during the Chanukah/Christmas season. This year as every year since 2016 when Tommy died, it is all on me. I am not the one who is worthy, but I am the one who is left.

Because Tommy loved Christmas so much, I feel a special obligation to try to convey his passion for all things Noel. This is, of course, a challenge for a rabbi. Jews like me who grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, felt a very deep sense of being an outsider during Christmastime. Christmas songs were just so much better than The Dreidel Song and then, of course, there were the Christmas trees. I had deep Christmas tree envy, particularly for those old tree ornaments I have not seen in a while with the colored water and bubbles rising in the tube. I always volunteered to help my neighbor Dick Albrecht decorate his tree. Even now I am something of a Christmas tree snob, preferring live trees with their intoxicating smell of pine perfuming a holiday festooned home. The paper Happy Hanukah greeting that we hung from our stairway seemed just spiritually outclassed. However, over time I came to realize that loving your neighbor’s holidays does not mean that you have to abandon your own.

Christmas is clearly and profoundly a Christian holiday that begins the Christian story as a story of miracles and hope. It is the beginning of the Christian story of salvation that culminates on Easter. This is the same message as Chanukah, without, of course, the messianic overlay. Light and hope unite us all during this season.

The birth of Christ is the central message of Christmas but it is not the only message. Christmas is about communal joy. I wish there were more carolers plying the streets on Christmas. Their songs made strangers into partners of joy. Their songs filled the quiet empty streets with the music of Christmas. Christians call this witnessing their faith and carolers remind their impromptu audiences that witnessing can enter the world as singing. This Christmas I wish all carolers a partridge in a pear tree.

Then there is Santa. The creeping materialism of our time has forced Santa into becoming a pitch man for commercials for every darned thing and that is just unfair to the jolly old elf, not to mention his flying reindeer. It took Tommy to help me appreciate the deeper meaning of Santa who was really St. Nicholas. In one moment of embarrassing insensitivity on my part, I once asked Tommy if he had ever told children that Santa was not real. Tommy pinched his face into a frown,which was an unnatural state for his warm and loving face, and he said to me sternly, “Santa IS real.” I knew enough to not push further but later — actually after Tommy died in 2016 — I realized that Santa is all about magic and mystery and innocence.

There is time enough in our secular and cynical lives as adults to accept the truth that MOST reindeer have forgotten how to fly. However, if your childhood has no room in it to welcome wonder, then you are spiritually deprived. After all, when magical wonder is abandoned, wonder can still survive. Tommy knew — he just knew — that in this Christmas season Santa Claus was indeed coming to town.

The Christmas greeting that is echoing in my soul this year is "The Carol of the Bells." It was written in 1916 by Mykola Leontovych, a Ukrainian composer who titled it “Shchedryk,” which means prayers for a bountiful year. Join me in praying that this Christmas might usher in peace and freedom for all Ukrainians who are suffering so deeply now.

Sing with me and pray with me:

Hark how the bells,

sweet silver bells,

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