The last time the first night of Chanukah overlapped with Christmas Eve was nearly 40 years ago in 1978. Before that, there were two other times in the twentieth-century: 1902 and 1940. The next time the first night of Chanukah is on Christmas Eve will be 2027.
Chanukah is a minor holiday in the Jewish tradition, compared to the importance of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. But Chanukah has grown in popularity and significance due to its proximity to Christmas. The technical term for how religious traditions influence one another — and can even become combined over time — is called syncretism.
Syncretism has also strongly influenced the Christian tradition of Christmas. Because Jesus was born to a Jewish peasant family, we have no records of the year in which he was born— much less the day. The earliest Gospel accounts of his birth were written more than 80 years after the fact, and do not mention the date of his birthday.
As the historical Jesus scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan remind us in their excellent and accessible book
The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth (HarperOne, 2007), “December 25 was not decided upon until the middle of the 300s. Before then, Christians celebrated his brith at different times —including March, April, May, and November” (Borg and Crossan, 172).
As a result of the choice to celebrate Christmas so close to the much more ancient holiday of Winter Solstice, Christmas is not only about Christ, but also retains many pagan elements that pre-date the historical Jesus by millennia — from yule logs and feasting to decorating evergreen trees with ornaments and lights. Setting aside all the nonsense about an alleged “War on Christmas,” the celebration of Jesus’ birth has been a mixed, messy tradition from the beginning — at the intersection of Judaism, Paganism, and the Roman Empire.
Along these lines, at the heart of the Chanukah tradition is the story of a king seeking to impose Greek culture on the Jerusalem Temple and the Jewish freedom fighters who resisted this oppression. In 165 B.C.E., more than 150 years before Jesus’s birth, there was a Jewish revolt, which reclaimed and rededicated the Temple to Judaism. The word Chanukah comes from the Hebrew verb which means “to dedicate.” Chanukah is about remembering and celebrating that Temple rededication. As the story goes, those Jewish freedom fighters only had enough kosher oil to last one night, but the oil miraculously lasted eight nights, the time needed to prepare a fresh batch of kosher oil. So candles are lit each year in remembrance of Chanukah for eight nights in a row.
This year’s intersection of Chanukah and Christmas is an invitation to see that the way forward is rarely simple and straightforward. After all, the lesson of Chanukah is not that Greek culture is always the problem. The Greeks helped give us philosophy, democracy, and so many other wonderful cultural gifts. Instead, a better takeaway from Chanukah is that individuals and groups should have the freedom to practice their religion as they see fit without the government forcing religion on them.
The lesson is also not that syncretism is always bad. If we take a step back and are honest about the messy history of the world’s religions, scholars have shown that just as Winter Solstice continues to be a strong influence on Christmas, so too has Greek culture influenced Judaism. After all, the word “Judaism” is itself a Greek term (Ἰουδαϊσμός), that originally meant “to side with or imitate the [Judeans].” The word “synagogue” is also Greek. (It’s simply the Greek word for “assembly.) The Hebrew equivalents would be Bet Kenesset (“house of assembly”), Bet Tefila (“house of prayer”), or the Yiddish shul. Likewise, the word bimah is also simply the basic Greek for “platform.” I could go on since scholars have counted “more than 3,000 loan words from Greek in the Talmud.”
Since cultures inevitably influence one another, the question becomes how to live together amidst our diversity. If we zoom out from Chanukah and Christmas to see the “rest of the story,” we know that those Jewish freedom fighters — the heroes of the Chanukah story who rededicated the Jerusalem Temple for a purer form of Judaism — ended up directly inspiring a zealous and rigid Jewish orthodoxy that created new forms of persecution that new reformers within Judaism had to resist.
Jesus was one among many of those Jewish reformers. And, in turn, his message of love, forgiveness, and mercy was eventually co-opted and perverted by others from the Roman Emperor Constantine to the Inquisition and the Crusades. The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. The same symbols and causes that once led to freedom, liberation, and equality can in fairly short order be coopted for repression and control. The invitation and challenge for people of conscience is the same as it has been in every age: to move toward solidarity, love, and justice — whatever that looks like in each new present moment.
We need one another as companions — as midwives — on our journey through this life to remind us of all that is possible if we work together. In the words of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — words he learned from the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker — it may be true that the “moral arc of the universe bends toward justice,” but there is no guarantee that the arc will bend on its own. It needs our help if we are to evolve toward greater solidarity, love, and justice — the alternative is to devolve into isolation, hate, and inequality. Together we can accomplish far more than any of us could alone.
The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a certified spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).
Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles
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