It's the most wonderful time of the year.
A time filled with such good feeling! A feeling of such, um, whatever the gender-inclusive equivalent of brotherhood is. It is a time ripe with the possibility of ecumenical exchange, interspiritual understanding, interfaith love! A time for us all to be uplifted together, grateful for each other's uniqueness, and rooting wholeheartedly for each other's joy!
It's the most wonderful time of the year.
Or maybe not. I, for one, was a complete ecumenical failure this week.
Failure is not unfamiliar to me, but more often than not it's in ways you don't get to see. They are private failures. But this one was a kind of official failure, a public failure, and it happened right here.
It was Tuesday night. I worked until 7, which at this time of year looks and feels like midnight. I had just decided to clock out. I was the last one here, so I turned out the lights in the building, set the alarm, locked the front door and stepped out. And there, heading toward the steps was someone coming to set up for the 12-step meeting that happens here on Tuesdays. I greeted her and apologized that I'd just locked up. So I unlocked the door, went back in and shut off the alarm, turned on some lights, stepped back outside and held the door open for her.
She was moved by my gallantry, and thanked me pleasantly. Then she added: "And merry Christmas."
Now normally if, say, I'm at a store during Christmas season, where really almost everyone there is in fact Christmas shopping, and a cashier says "Merry Christmas," I say, "You too," or "Happy holidays," or whatever. All Jews are used to that moment and either have a gentle strategy or let it go.
But this wasn't Target or Macy's. It was a synagogue. My synagogue. And I will add, to make myself look not quite as bad as I'm about to look, that it had been a hard day. A day in which I kept encountering and getting drawn into people's difficult interactions with each other, all of which were undoubtedly exacerbated by nasty impeachment hearings and the general angst that hovers so closely around us during this obligatorily happy time of year. Whatever – I guess maybe I was in a state of what the Chasidim call mochin d'katnut – small mind, a kind of pettiness born of spiritual contraction. And who knows? Maybe I hadn't eaten.
That's the state I was in when she said, "Thank you. And merry Christmas."
I looked at her for a moment and said, "Really? You're saying 'merry Christmas' to the rabbi of the synagogue?"
"Oh yes," she replied. "It's next week!"
And that's where I should've called it a night.
But instead my blood started pumping faster. After all, this is a tense moment of the world. We are seeing the visible rise of White Nationalism here and elsewhere. We are witnessing violence against and vilification of Jews and others. So in that moment I felt like the Representative of the Jewish People, selected by the Universe and by circumstance to respond to White Christian America. I was duty-bound to offer a short but brilliant polemic on the nature of pluralism. To explain with moving words about marginalization. About erasure. About how it feels to be made invisible in our culture. About how it is privilege that allows her to think of a Christmas greeting as neutral and universal. If all went well she would be wiping away tears, grateful that her understanding was now so much deeper. Who knows? This could end in a tearful hug.
"So," I began, "you don't wish a Jewish person 'Merry Christmas."
"Oh yes I do," she said proudly.
"No," I replied. "I can wish you a merry Christmas––"
"Thank you. And I wish you one too."
We went around like this a few times, Abbott and Costello on the synagogue steps. I was getting hot under the collar, and frustrated that I'd already said many words and she still wasn't understanding at all what my complaint was. But, I was a man, clearly arguing with her, with no other people around, so I did succeed in making her nervous and defensive.
"Why would you wish me 'Merry Christmas,'" I asked in frustration. "It's not my religion."
She replied, "Well now you're dissing my religion."
"Wait, you're not understanding me," I said, as if that would convince her that she wasn't understanding me.
"Well good night now," she said, gently but firmly closing the front door in my face. And I stood there on the front step, blinking, dismissed and ejected from my own synagogue by a total stranger.
It's the most wonderful time of the year.
So I spent much of the week wondering about all the many things that I did wrong in my shining moment of interfaith dialogue.
I have always lived my life visibly as a Jew. It's always felt important to me to be seen in my identities, and like many of us here, I've had to come out over and over.
But right now being out as a Jew feels more loaded. Because being visible as a Jew has not always gone well. And as of last week there's an Executive Order declaring us a nationality, a decision not made, I believe, with our best interests at heart. And that unsettling turn of events happened a week after I found on the internet an identity card issued in 1940 to a German cousin who shared my name, with a large, Gothic letter "J" printed on it, so that his nationality as a Jew could be ascertained at the quickest of glances. So it's not clear to me that being identified as a Jew in this moment is a risk-free thing. And maybe I'm being alarmist and maybe I'm just being alarmed – it's so hard to tell the difference.
So there I was, alarmed, feeling somehow in danger, threatened by a nice lady setting up for a 12-step meeting.
And my alarm made it impossible for me to receive from her what she was in fact offering, which was a blessing.
That really is what she was doing. Offering me a blessing. And I couldn't see it.
Sometimes, you see, we need to be listening deeper than the words. This is a lesson from the tradition called "Deep Ecumenism" developed by teachers such as Mathew Fox and Richard Rohr and our own Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, of blessed memory. Deep Ecumenism suggests that our religious traditions are overlays on the primal spiritual matters that concern us: where do I come from? what is my purpose? how do I face fear? or death? what is this experience of expanded consciousness or unity or God that I sometimes fleetingly feel? how do I hold my worries and my joys? illness, healing, gratitudeh, belonging, and rebirth?
At a "deep" level, we are so similar. We grapple with these questions no matter what religion we follow, if any. And at that level, we share everything. Our specific religious language and rituals and outlooks and investments make us look so different. But at the deep level, we are so similar, and if we can communicate on that level, our religions disappear. As the poet Rumi writes:
For those in love,
Muslim, Christian and Jew do not exist . . . .
Why listen to those who see it another way?
So yes, at some deeper love level, our differences cease. Or maybe when we move together to a deeper level, what we instinctively find and what we instinctively offer is love. This is what the Chasidim would call mochin d'gadlut – the expanded mind. The consciousness that is big enough to touch yours.
So to a passerby, this woman's words were simply "Merry Christmas." What they sounded like to me, worried about my extinction, were, "I'm a Christian and I'm expecting you to be also." But on the deep level, what she was saying might have been more like: "In this dark time of year, this fearful time, I have come to appreciate this moment of the return of the light and the rebirth of the Divine, and all the joy that comes with it; and I wish that for you as well."
It is so hard to hear beneath or above the words that hurt. To let go of our own fear long enough to hear someone else's heart beating behind their words. To hear what we share when we are so well practiced at experiencing people with different beliefs – either religious or political – as different species altogether.
But maybe right now, in this most wonderful time of the year, we have our chance to practice. To take the risk of letting go of our safe and familiar investments. To let our fierce defense of our identities relax for a minute, so that we can listen generously and hear each other's deeper hearts a little better. To be able to look across the table at a Christian, a Muslim, a Republican, or whoever our "other" is, and speak our deeper truths – what we love, what we long for, what we fear – human to human. It feels so risky. But maybe it is worth the risk just the same.
And it is with that prayer – that we may learn to connect heart to heart, that we may take the risk of using our imperfect metaphors and inconsistent language to speak our deepest places, that we may together experience the joy and magic of love and light and rebirth – that I wish all of us here tonight a merry Christmas.
Thank you to Rachel Remen for encouraging me to process this publicly, and to Mia Zimman for her needed feedback on an earlier draft.