JOY TO THE WORLD RABBI HANGS ON TO THE REAL MEANING OF CHRISTMAS.

Byline: Jonathan Dobrer

MY rabbi said that he really loved Christmas.

This is not what most of the people in temple were expecting. They were assuming that he would do the traditional ``yours, mine & ours,'' where Hanukkah is ``mine,'' Christmas is ``theirs,'' and ``happy holidays'' would be ``ours.'' I was pleased that he had the courage to speak for a broader sense of inclusiveness and a greater understanding of our wide inheritance and the wonderful Creole gumbo that America is.

He spoke how, in the spirit of Dickens, ``Christmas is a good time,'' a time of caring, when people seem more friendly and charitable, more considerate of our fellow human beings, more likely to help at the shelters and think of ourselves not as strangers but as fellow travelers on the same voyage.

My rabbi said he wished that Christmas lasted six months!

Last week, one of my university students asked me if I thought that Judaism had a single strand that one could take out of history, study in isolation. My response was, ``No.'' You cannot take the thread of Judaism, or any people or religion, out of the context of the larger world.

Wherever we go we leave social, cultural and religious DNA and pick up local DNA. We continue to grow, change and exchange our religious genetic information. It is impossible to strip away the evidence of where we have been and return to some mythical state of purity.

How could anyone understand modern Hanukkah apart from the influence that the celebration of Christmas has exerted? Hanukkah was ``repurposed'' as a holiday in reaction to the public and commercial celebration of Christmas. And Christmas: How would we understand Christmas apart from a social environment?

The date of Christmas is not biblical, but the birthdays of Saturn and Mithra; it is a universal holiday of the solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. How would we celebrate a pure Christmas? Would we banish the Christmas tree that comes from the Vikings or the Norse yule log? Would we join the Puritans who hated all jolliness and wanted a staid and dour acknowledgment? They felt about Christmas as Paul did about sex: You could tolerate it, under certain circumstances, but it was best to forgo the whole thing.

Christmas is not one simple thing. There is the Christmas of faith, the Christmas of history and the secularized social Christmas. We conflate them and make simple responses to a complex holiday.

Christians have a holiday of faith that celebrates the birth of Jesus who becomes the risen Christ of salvation. To this, I am only an observer. I can enjoy their joy, hope and faith without it being my own.

I remember one special Christmas in the Austria Alps, not far from where ``Silent Night'' had been composed. I remember the torchlight march from town to the little church and the people huddled together against the cold and dark. I still feel the warmth of body against body and hear the songs that rose up, filling the rafters with hope. I was a stranger in a strange land but felt the tidings of comfort and joy.

There is also the Christmas of history. It can be deconstructed into all the parts it has acquired from so many sources over two millennia. Most of what we consider to be our American Christmas is put together from many times and cultures.

Neither the Apostles nor the Church Fathers would likely recognize Santa Claus or know from figgie puddings. They would be as confused as I about its relationship to, clap clap, the Clapper.

Christmas is about eternal truths. It celebrates the rebirth of the sun closely following the winter solstice. It celebrates the miracle of love becoming flesh in the form of new life and old hopes incarnated in each new life. This is universal and public domain; it is the intellectual property of all, a rich gumbo put together from customs, traditions and archetypes across the ages, races and cultures of all humanity.

Then there is the secularized commercial Christmas: generic, safe and unsatisfying. This is simply a time for business, nothing personal or sacred, nothing holy in the day or the night - another excuse for a sale, another reason for a meal, another time for the inevitable disappointment of trying to fill holes in our lives with stuff.

It is not the sacred Christmas that bothers me, but the common commercial secularized and politically correct generic Christmas that tries to be safe and inoffensive. It is not about faith.

How could I be offended by faith?

But isn't it wrong to have public celebrations of only one religion and exclude all others? Why should there be a Christmas tree in the White House? Isn't it the house of all the people? Yes - but.

We have a history, and that history leaves tracks that inform and guide us. We were not founded as a Christian nation, but we were founded by people with a history that included their faiths. Shall we purge our history of their traces? Shall we, like the Bolsheviks who changed St. Petersburg to Leningrad, change Santa Monica to Monica and Los Angeles to just ``Los,'' since not all believe in angels or saints (and the Anaheim Angels apparently don't believe in Anaheim)?

Trying to purge history of religion is like the Taliban destroying the ancient Buddhas because they found them offensive and an affront, embodying the sin of idolatry. How can I know they were wrong for doing that and want myself to rid society of hints of religiosity not native to my family or tribe?

The principal is tolerance, and beyond tolerance joy in the celebrations of others.

How am I diminished by being wished a merry Christmas instead of happy holidays? I know that the Bible says that ``Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,'' but do we really have to fear religious words? Do I have to stop singing ``Silent Night'' because I don't acknowledge virgins conceiving? And what do I do about donning my gay apparel? Maybe I can just sing the carols as full-heartedly as I do ``Home on the Range''- even though I do not literally want a home where the buffalo roam.

Should we insist on our own purity and banish all traces of Christmas (and Valentine's Day, as long as we're at it?)? If we do, would it be morally inconsistent of me to object if Christians wanted banish everything Jewish from Christmas?

What is Jewish in Christmas?

Well, there are eight out of the top 10 American Christmas songs: ``White Christmas,'' ``The Christmas Song,'' ``Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'' to name a few. They were written by American Jews.

What else is Jewish and central to Christmas?

Well, there is Jesus.

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