I loved Christmas as a child. My family had some annual Christmas traditions. We would drive down to the neighborhood called Sauganash to look at Chicago’s fanciest Christmas lights. And we’d go downtown to the Loop to gawk at the Marshall Fields window displays – mechanized and ornate. Christmas week we’d watch all the specials on TV – from Andy Williams to Charlie Brown to the Rankin/Bass stop-motion classics – Rudolph, Frosty, Little Drummer Boy. And we’d curl up with the old movies they’d roll out with Christian themes and Christmas scenes.
I loved them all – the twinkliness, the pageantry. I knew they were not about me and to the extent that they were for me it was not as a Christian but as a consumer. But there were moments in some of these TV shows and films that grabbed me and held me. Depictions, even with Hollywood overkill, of devotion, of reverence – something we didn’t get the rest of the year and for which there was no Jewish equivalent in popular culture. Witnessing those moments of devotion – whether it was Bing Crosby in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” or Rosalind Russell in “The Trouble with Angels” or even a clay puppet of a drummer boy – these images landed in me powerfully.
Of course I was young and had not yet been fully inducted into the long history of Judaism under Christian rule and the sufferings therein. I knew nothing of Crusades or Disputations or Inquisitions. I did not have personal cause for bitterness, although I did have a sense that my enthusiasm for Christmas was in some way naughtier than nice.
Eventually I caught up. I was schooled in Jewish-Christian tension. I defiantly resisted the all-encompassing pervasiveness of Christmas in American culture. And I became conscious of our powerful Jewish allergy to Jesus, which continues to live even in me. Even here at Ner Shalom I’ve noticed how easy it is for me to quote Sufis or Buddhists from the bimah. But I notice myself avoiding quoting – or even mentioning – Jesus, thinking it would make me somehow suspect.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, may his memory be a blessing, saw this tendency as well and encouraged Jews to begin “making friends with Jesus.” His thought was this: that religious language and concepts are a sectarian way of giving voice to longings, sorrows, and aspirations that are universal and human. And our Jewish inability to speak Jesus’ name was getting in our way – getting in the way of having meaningful, God-filled conversation and relationship with people who are probably more like us than not.
In Reb Zalman’s view, Jesus was a kind of rebbe in almost the Chasidic mold. He had a quality of being a neshamah klalit – a communal soul. Meaning that he had a deep and intuitive understanding of the souls of his followers. He was able, in an uncanny way, to be their voice, their vehicle.
My own interest in what Jesus had to say spiked eight or nine years ago when I visited Monticello, the plantation house of Thomas Jefferson. There I discovered that among the obsessive things Jefferson did was to take multiple copies of the New Testament, cut them up with a scissors, eliminate redundancies and all the miraculous stories, and reassemble what was left to form a single narrative of the life and words of Jesus – The Jefferson Bible. Somehow this made New Testament less daunting for me. I bought a replica and began to read.
When I got to the Sermon on the Mount, patched together from Matthew and Luke, I was stunned at how much of it I already knew. The sermon seemed to be the source of half the common idioms in the English language; that is, all the ones not written by Shakespeare.
In the Sermon on the Mount, speaking to Jews living under Roman occupation, Jews who were – like us – not satisfied with the the orthodoxy of the time, Jesus gave hope and encouragement. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Give tzedakah. Don’t seek power. Pray from your heart and not for show. Let your light shine. There are, of course, a few cringey moments. But as a regular reader of Torah, I know how to endure cringey moments.
The Sermon could have been written by a Chasidic rebbe of the 18th Century. The rejection of rote or showy forms of prayer; the encouragement to find an internal light – all of this would be familiar to readers of the Baal Shem Tov or the several generations of rebbes that followed him. What I mean to point out by this comparison is that Jesus’ criticism of the structures of power in Judaism was not a critique from outside of Judaism. It was a Jewish critique. A little fringy, like us. But Jewish. It is only our cultural investment in a Jewish identity built, in part, on our distinctiveness from Christianity, that keeps us from noticing how Jewish, how familiar, Jesus’ words and ideas were. But, as my friend Bill, a former Jesuit, repeatedly reminds himself and his students, Jesus was “only and always a Jew.”
So maybe it’s not so hard after all to be friends with the historical Jesus. But then, what do we do about the mythological Jesus – son of God and messiah? Even if we are comfortable with the Jesus part, how do we hold the Christ part in a way that doesn’t feel like a personal threat or a danger to Jewish survival?
One answer, to the extent that anyone would like to follow such a path, is to reach beyond the mythological into the mystical. God’s incarnation in Christ has long driven the Christian mystics into long hours contemplating the nature of the Divine and the mystery of embodiment. How does the Divine come to dwell in physical form? At that level, this is a conversation we, in our mystical tradition, can participate in. After all, what are our Ten Sefirot but a way to describe a process through which the Divine becomes incarnate in the physical forms of the world? And what is Shechinah, but an expression of how that embodiment feels?
The most recent and, for me, accessible of Catholic mystics is Father Richard Rohr. Father Rohr, in his book The Universal Christ, makes the move of decoupling the concept of Christ from the historical figure of Jesus. He looks at this word, christ, Greek for “anointed,” and asks what anointing is supposed to signify. He backs up to the first instance of anointing in Torah – when Jacob awakens from his famous dream of a ladder with angels and God at the top and he says, “Adonai was in this place and I, I did not know it.” He then pours oil on the stone where his head was resting overnight, anointing this place and renaming it Beth El – the House of God.
For Father Rohr, the takeaway here is that anointment is a symbol of the direct experience of the Divine. Jacob recognized that the Divine was present where he had not been aware of it before. God didn’t suddenly come and dwell there; didn’t come and visit. God was already in-dwelling there as everywhere. But there was a shift in Jacob’s consciousness that allowed him to perceive it.
This God-consciousness, this sense of God filling and manifesting in the Universe around us, in every detail – this is what Father Rohr understands anointment to point to. For him, this is “Christ.” It is something we might call shefa (the Divine pouring into the Universe) or Shechinah (the immanent Divine Presence) or Ruach Hakodesh (the Holy Spirit) or maybe Malchut (the sefirah in which the Divine is embodied in Earth and nature). We might even see in what Father Rohr calls Christ the Eyn Sof: the Infinite God – infinite in both macro and micro ways.
All these are ways that we reach for words to describe our awareness of the integrated and saturated Divine, what Father Rohr calls the “Christ-soaked Universe.” This “Christ-soaked Universe” is not about Jesus and did not begin with him. Instead, in his words, “[t]he radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.”
At this level of abstraction and universality, there is quite an exciting conversation that can happen among Christians and Jews and the mystics of other traditions. Shared experience and insight for which we all have distinct language and metaphors, grown out of our own sacred stories.
I find this kind of conversation thrilling. And I recognize that we do not spend our lives living at these levels of abstraction and consciousness. We also live in our particulars: in our social frames, our cultural histories and personal identities. No matter how excited I am by the Universal Christ, when I come back to earth, I can no longer use Christ-language to describe my mystical aspirations. I am once again just a Jew on Christmas, tip-toeing through someone else’s brightly decorated yard, feeling marginally guilty at enjoying some of the trappings of the holiday, enjoying them and kind of pretending I don’t.
In just such a frame of mind, I came down to the kitchen this morning to discover my co-parent Anne had made a tray of cookies with colorful sparkles on them. “Christmas cookies!” I exclaimed with delight.
“No,” she quickly countered. “They are, um, Solstice cookies, a few days late.”
I bit into the sweet crunchiness. “Maybe,” I suggested, “we should call them Crispness Cookies.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Crispness Cookies.”
And with that appreciation for rigidity that can give way with a nice snap to a mouthful of universal sweetness, I wish you all a Merry Crispness.