More Israeli Jews Celebrating Christmas January 5, 2007

I can’t help but want to say, “I told you so.”

The idea of Jews en masse celebrating Christmas is disturbing to me, as a Jew in the diaspora. Absention from Christmas, to many Jews, represented assimilation into the larger non-Jewish culture, and not celebrating Christmas, still to many Jews, is the one way in which they know that they are different from their Gentile counterparts.

Today, Ha’aretz reported:

Be a Jew at home
By Yitzhak Laor

On Christmas eve, many Hebrew-speaking Jewish couples could be seen coming out of church in Jaffa after midnight mass. It is highly unlikely that you would find their counterparts in the West, i.e., non-Jews of the same social standing and educational level, going to any church on Christmas. Midnight mass in the churches of the West, at least in those countries that pride themselves on being secular, is only meant for the religious, specifically religious Christians. For everyone else, Christmas is a family event characterized by a mixture of semi-bourgeois and age-old semi-religious customs.

This has nothing to do with loving the music of Bach or rushing into the arms of Jesus, the son of Mary, as born-again Christians.

The Israeli eagerness to embrace Christian culture, as part of Western life, is not something sudden. It has been creeping slowly into Israeli culture, with a kind of historical cunning. It is enough to think about funeral rites in Europe, presided over by priests, while secular Jews in Israel stubbornly refuse to be buried in a Jewish service that includes the mourner’s kaddish and traditional graveside prayers.

While some of my co-religionists undoubtedly will sign a “thank G-d” over the fact that Israelis are not rushing into becoming evangelicals, this depresses me. This “Israeli eagerness”. Especially in the context of Modern Israel.

Shinui’s election ads forecasted doomsday for the country if the “charedim (religious Jews) return to the government.” Meretz’s ads implied that Israelis were praying for G-d to redeem them from religious Jews (chas v’shalom). Rabbis are roundly mocked in the media, and calls are made in Yediot Acharonot to impose martial law on the streets of Jerusalem (albeit after quite disturbing protests). Anyone who would even have the audacity to suggest that a country with a star of David on its flag should have some connection to the Torah of Judaism is lambasted like so many anti-Semites. And now we have this.

The article continues:

Sometimes, this Israeli craving for things Christian has a colonial aspect. Every week we watch people on TV discussing the percentage of Muslim citizens in Europe. Sometimes, it feels as if Israeli television anchors have become partners to the infamous dream of Europe as a “continent free of non-Christians.”

Is this what is driving some of the anti-charedi prejudice in the Israeli media? A feeling of partnership with the “infamous dream of Europe”? Besides being patently suicidal, it is also a slap in the face to the history of a country borne out of this infamous dream and on the backs of those for whom said “infamous dream” became a murderous nightmare.

The roots of this strange self-negation must be sought in the history of the Jewish people in the last 150 years. When the first “enlightened Jews,” as they are called today, accepted the imperative to “be a human being outside and a Jew at home,” the Jews took on a form of colonized existence. In European enlightenment terms, Jews (and now Muslims) were supposed to shed their Judaism when they mingled with the world. To be a “human being” was to be a “Christian,” of course, or to be what the West considered a secular person.

Ahh, the old Mendelssohn idea. Be a Jew in the home and a “German in the street”. One love to Mr. Lior for noting — this secularization is an implicit Christianization.

What’s disgusting is what this being chosen over. The Torah definition of “Who Is A Jew”? Struck down by a secular court. Jewish religious outreach? All but banned.

And Christmas is becoming more and more acceptable.