Hybrid holidays
If you read my blog regularly, you know that this year, and every year at the holidays, I’m rather morose, joyless, and ungrateful. I feel guilty about it, which only makes things worse. Now that the holidays are over, I think I can diagnose some of what ails me. This is hard to write, but I think it’s partly because I gave up my birth religion when I married and converted to Judaism.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not really a believer. At one point, before my mid-teens, I was. What I think I am now is a jolly, not overly judgmental agnostic, maybe some kind of pantheist, overawed with wild surf and a beautiful sunset and forests full of trees. Not that moved or convinced by anyone’s proclamations of faith, regardless of their religion. Also very irritated by atheists who need to shove their non belief down others’ throats or mock religious people en masse, a la Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.
At times, observing a religion of any kind seems to be a way of pleasing one’s parents, whether they are living or not, affirming their choices and lifestyles and honoring them. Both my husband’s and my parents did many things “right,” and we feel the weight of their respective faiths and have memories of cultural identity from the rituals we observed that still define us. Before our children were born, we attended temple regularly, finding our Reform temple to be an oasis of philosophical reflection at a moment in history and in a city that threatens to force us toward the path of excessive materialism and lack of action on the part of the poor and disenfranchised. When our children were born, we raised them Jewish, bringing them to religious preschool and participating with as much of our tired parent selves as we could in the life of the preschool and the temple. Every year, though, the Christmas trees and decorations and sweets would pull at my heart. The seasonal decorations reminded me of some of the happiest and most placid times in my childhood and adolescence, when my grandfather and my mom would spend days making cookies, cutting down an evergreen at the farm where I grew up, and decorating it with the boxes of inexpensive ornaments and lights bought some long-ago January at half-price from the Benjamin Franklin drugstore or Shopko. Christmas Eve opening tiny presents, chocolate bars, toothbrushes, books, and underwear, under the tree. Then settling in with cheese and crackers on the sofa, in front of Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing in the Nutcracker and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
When I converted to Judaism in 1998, four years before my first child was born, I had scorn for the few parents I knew who claimed to be raising their interfaith family children in both of the parents’ religions. “There’s no such thing! Just pick one!” I thought.
After my kids were born and as the holidays became difficult, I remembered what I’d had to repeat at my conversion ceremony — that I rejected my former religion. I also remembered at my beit din, when the three rabbis threw me softball questions about my understanding of Judaism and congratulated me on becoming a member of the tribe, that there had been one rabbi, the only woman, who wore a look of concern. Her worry was that spouses, especially women, tend to stumble into a religious conversion without fully understanding what the future holds. When she shook my hand to welcome me, she smiled but still wore a little furrow in her brow. I talked a good game, all intellect and ethics and history, but she must have suspected that I was in over my head.
And I was. The reality was, that my husband had said he wanted to raise the children Jewish. But he wanted me to convert in order to spearhead that effort. Because, for one thing, while he felt “very Jewish,” he didn’t have pleasant memories of his own religious education, or temple. In retrospect, he felt as though his family would have benefited more from spending a relaxing evening together rather than rushing to another obligation. Over the years we have spent countless hours arguing over “how involved” we will be in our religious institution, with me wishing to go but not be the person in charge of rallying all of the troops, including him. Some of my happy memories of church in childhood were attending the Easter Sunrise Service with my grandfather, attending the Christmas Eve Candlelight Service with my brother, mom, and grandfather and singing all the verses of the Christmas carols as tiny lights flickered in the sanctuary. That’s why I was willing to rally the troops for a number of years — I could easily place the communal spirit and family time I loved from my childhood onto the ritual of another religion with most of the same values.
It worked for a while. But the December holidays still hurt, or sometimes felt like a phantom, long-absent limb. And in 2000, my father died on Christmas, which only increased the pathos. And the other 11 months of the year were still filled with frenetic Fridays, coercing children who could see that the small benefit of the religious service was being outweighed by the family strife of ending the work day early, eating a dinner of cheese sticks and carrots in the car, driving through rush hour traffic, and still feeling guilty and lame. Then began the battle over religious school. And the cultural change of our religious institution that came with a new generation of families and leadership. Whereas in the past, we had both sensed a community of like minded people, the new community left both my husband and me with an acute awareness of our lack of faith. After battling these feelings for years, and inquiring at other temples, and plenty of hand wringing about what it is we “really” believe in, we decided to stop going.
We’re currently experimenting with secular ecumenicism. This year my husband only cringed a little when I brought a tiny potted Christmas tree into the house. We set it near the Hanukkah menorah, and lit the candles and sang the blessing each night. And my mother played Christmas carols on the piano, and we listened to some old time crooners singing carols. And since it’s Friday, I’m going to the bakery to buy challah bread, to set next to our Shabbat candles tonight before dinner. Because apparently that’s how we roll now.
