Growing up, I was someone who would be mortally offended if a stranger wished me a merry Christmas. To me, it was no different than saying “Hanukkah doesn’t matter.” I couldn’t appreciate the sentiment in the spirit in which it was given. •
My hurt feelings came from a wounded place. I felt lonely as a Jew on the fringes of a heavily Christianized society. After being asked by more than one classmate if Hanukkah was the “Jewish Christmas” (every year it was someone different!), you can see why having strangers assume I celebrated their holiday was the last straw for my patience. •
While there is certainly an argument to be made that Christmas has become too secular, too focused on consumerism, it certainly hasn’t gotten less popular. The debate over which greeting is more important is small in comparison to larger issues of religious tolerance, but really- what harm does it do to simply be inclusive? Will it detract from the meaning of Christmas at all? •
I can’t say I’d have converted any sooner if more Christians considered this. But I probably would have viewed them with a little less annoyance for the remainder of my childhood.
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I had a good run as a freelance writer for the last two years, helping pay the bills for the first time in my marriage. And then like a row of dominoes, the jobs fell through. My income got slashed in half. And just before the holidays. •
Oddly enough, I'm not panicking (not yet, anyway). Instead, in between searching for jobs on Indeed and LinkedIn, I'm rereading my favorite Advent devotional, and sitting with the darkness of what this waiting period means. Christmas has become a loud, obnoxiously decorative, brightly-colored festival, but roughly 2,000 years ago, there was none of that. There was just a scared young girl, pregnant with her first baby that was not fathered by her fiance, facing public ridicule and homelessness and poverty. •
Behind all the pageantry, there is a filthy stable and a whole lot of uncertainty: when will our hope be fulfilled? When is deliverance coming? But God's provision and redemption don't always look as we think it should. They do not occur on our timetable. And they aren't always as obviously as a display of colored lights. •
So this Advent season, I am waiting. I am hopeful. I am active in my waiting and my hoping, not passive.
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People talk about a "honeymoon phase" of marriage, but I'm still not sure what that is. We never got one. Shortly after our engagement, my father learned he was dying. We lost him two months before the wedding. Save-the-dates were mailed out the same week I wrote his obituary. I brought grief, depression, and alcoholism into our marriage from the start. The first two years are somewhat of a blur, until I realized (after hitting rock bottom of course) I needed to get my shit together: get back on antidepressants, go back to therapy, get myself in AA. Be the wife Josh deserved. •
Once I finally started getting better, and six months after we bought our first house, Josh lost his job. We lost our health insurance and I lost those coveted antidepressants, undoing months of progress. But it was during that period of unemployment that I started freelancing full time, going from earning $100 a month to eventually paying the mortgage by myself. Even when we were at our lowest financially, Josh never wanted me to give up writing for a “real job” with a salary and benefits. •
So to look back on five years of marriage, this really feels like an accomplishment. We heard from older couples in our lives that marriage is like a school of sanctification, and boy were they not kidding. Marriage is hard and not always pretty. It is refinement through fire. But if it were easy it wouldn’t be worth it.
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I am still asked from time to time why Judaism wasn’t “good enough” for me to keep it. One of the first things I can remember that told me I wouldn’t make a good Jew was reading The Diary of Anne Frank, and coming across the part where she says “In spite of everything, I still believe people are good at heart.” I can’t say I ever agreed with that. •
While I’ve never experienced anything nearly as horrific as she did, I have seen just how easy it is for “good people” to do terrible things; to gloss over their own microagressions toward others without realizing the full extent of the damage done. Even the most well-intentioned of humans will end up making decisions that contribute to the capitalist machine, systemic oppression, and the destruction of our environment. •
Simply realizing that I believe humanity is intrinsically flawed - starting with myself - was one of the first blocks of Judaism to fall for me. One of Judaism’s basic principles is that humans are fine as they are, and do not need a savior. Over time, I could no longer agree with this. Humanity needs redemption more than it needs anything else. And that, long before I learned to embrace a human messiah who is also God (the most anti Jewish concept of all), was what started the ball rolling toward eventual conversion.
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