Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal. December 5, 2021
People often talk about this time of year as a celebration of light, as if Chanukah, the Solstice and Christmas were simply different facets of the same story. Yes, there’s an abundance of light in these traditions, and we really do need light at this time of year. Sundown at 4:00 p.m. is pretty soul-crushing.
I have always struggled with the Chanukah and Christmas holiday stories. Chanukah is a story of reclaiming religious freedom, but it’s also a war story, combined with a miracle story that was added in much later. Christmas is about the birth of Christ, a story that calls for peace on earth and good will to all, but it’s also the foundation of a long, unjust and bloody history that condemns all who do not see Christ as their saviour. (This, of course. was exactly the interpretation of Christianity that our Universalist ancestors rejected.)
So, yes, I often find it hard to sing the more triumphant Chanukah songs about winning battles — especially in light of all that has happened in Israel and Palestine this past year. And I understand why we avoid the more triumphant Christmas carols here.
God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan's pow’r
When we have gone astray
I love the tune, but I cringe at the words.
So maybe it’s easier to retreat into the Solstice, with its pure celebration of the return of the sun. But I confess, as much as I love the Winter Solstice, it’s not what I grew up with. Instead, each year, as this winter holiday season begins, I grapple with the traditions of my own past, and I feel called to share these stories with you.
My parents were not religious, like many Jews of their generation. Their connection to Judaism was purely cultural. Their religious traditions had been lost a generation earlier, when my grandparents came to this continent, fleeing the pogroms in Poland after the First World War. Life in the new world didn’t fit with religious practices. Yet each generation continued to maintain its ethnic connection to Judaism. It had nothing to do with religious faith. It had to do with the family into which we were born, the culture that set us apart from others.
Although my parents were atheists, they wanted to make sure that my brother and I were raised with a Jewish identity. So I was sent to temple, until the age of eight. There I found God, the Spirit of Life, Mystery, All That Is Beyond What Is Here and Present, in the beautiful sounds of prayers sung in Hebrew.
At home, holidays were not about God. Our practices were diluted. We didn’t observe the Sabbath, nor did we attend services for the High Holy Days. Chanukah took on a greater significance than it ever deserved because we were growing up in a predominantly Christian community. Living in the midwestern United States, I encountered children who had never known a Jew before they met me. I learned the meaning of antisemitism firsthand.
At Christmas time, we were overwhelmed. Christianity was all around us: on the television, in the stores, in our neighbours’ homes. We were outsiders, looking in on a world we didn’t understand. Chanukah became a way for us to reassert who we were in a world where we didn’t really fit in. Lighting the menorah each night was not a matter of recognizing God’s miracle. It was a matter of reconnecting to our past.
Like many of my generation of Jews, I married a non-Jew. In our early years of marriage, our interfaith union was a big adjustment for me. We often joked that both my husband and his sister had married Jews so that there would never be a question of where to spend Christmas. It was the culmination of the year for my mother-in-law, who would start planning the next year’s Christmas meal on December 26.
Truth be told, my mother-in-law and I fought our first battles over the holidays. I felt hurt that she couldn’t understand why Christmas was such a touchy subject for me. She felt hurt that I couldn’t understand why the Christmas tradition meant everything to her.
Before David and I had children, I didn’t think much about Chanukah. It was, after all, a minor Jewish holiday. I missed my mother’s potato pancakes; I missed the community we built during my childhood, when we introduced our Catholic and Protestant neighbours to the joys of latkes with sour cream and applesauce. But in my mid-twenties it didn’t seem that important.
Only later, when we had our first child, did my early Judaism begin to creep up on me. It surfaced in the strangest places. David, a former Episcopalian, was relentless in his desire to belong to a religious community. He just kept dragging me to Unitarian churches in hopes that I might eventually understand why church was so important to him.
One Sunday, I found myself in the sanctuary of a Unitarian church crying. My faith had been lost so long ago, and here was this doorway back into the sacred. It didn’t matter that the words I heard were not those of my childhood. There was something about being back in a loving community, a community that opened its arms to me and my children. I had finally found a safe place where I could weave together a new faith that let me hold on to my roots and still embrace the new.
Ever so slowly, I found myself being transformed – and, yes, on the path toward ministry. I found myself ministering to Unitarian Universalist communities where, despite all their claims to be anything but Christian, Christmas Eve services were still the most crowded of the year. I had to take my ambivalence and somehow set it aside. Over the years, I softened and I changed. What once was a struggle, a crisis of faith, became a joy because it was connected to communities I loved. I set aside the troubling theology, and the jarring language, and let myself rejoice on behalf
of others.
When our children were young, we did it all. (Now we do it for our grandchildren.) We decorated the tree, we strung the brightest and most colourful – really tacky – Christmas lights we could find.
For David, it was a way to connect to his mother’s past. In the war-torn Italy of her youth, it was the one bright and magical moment of the year. Each year my mother-in-law’s father would shoo her outside to wait, until the living room doors were opened. And there it would be: a towering Christmas tree decorated with a hundred real live burning candles. After a life of seeing too much death and destruction, this was what she desperately wanted to give to her children and grandchildren. It took me a long time to appreciate why the stakes were so high, why she fussed and fretted each Christmas, trying to reproduce that magic.
In contrast, I longed to give my children the simplicity of Chanukah. Each night we would light the candles in the menorah and sing the blessing that my mother taught me with an Ashkenazi Yiddish pronunciation.
Baruch ata Adonai Eloheynu Melech Ha-olam asher kid’shanu bemitzvotav vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Hannukah.
You Abound in Blessings, Adonai Our Lord, You make us holy with commandments and call us to light the Chanukah lights.
These are the words I had been singing for as long as I could remember. Over time, the translation ceased to matter. Singing the blessing had become the miracle for me.
Seventeen years ago, in December of 2004, Chanukah came early, as it has this year. My mother was home in hospice care, at the very end of her long battle with cancer. She had slipped into a long and deep sleep, and my father and I knew that it was only a matter of hours or days before she would be gone. Still, my dad insisted that we should light the menorah and make potato pancakes. It was the first night of Chanukah, after all, and it would have mattered to my mother that we didn’t forget to celebrate.
I remember how carefully I carried the ceramic menorah into my mother’s bedroom. The house was filled with the smell of frying oil and sweet onions giving off their pungent perfume. I lit the shamash, the server candle, and my father and I began to sing as I lit the first candle for the first night.
Baruch ata Adonai Eloheynu Melech Ha-olam asher kid’shanu bemitzvotav…
We both stopped and began to sob, unable to continue to sing the words of the blessing. Then out of nowhere, out of the tiny, frail body that was my mother, came this soft sweet voice: “It’s vitzivanu,” she said. “It’s vitzivanu.” And then she slipped back into her deep sleep. I don’t think my mother realized that we were crying. Perhaps she thought we had forgotten the next words in the blessing. I know she didn’t even know what that one word meant. Vitzivanu – the moment in
the blessing when we say we are called to light the candles.
My sometimes atheist, sometimes agnostic, secular Jewish mother, was calling from the depths of her being, reminding me that I was called to light the candles. In that brief, unbelievable moment, she had cemented herself to the words of the blessing forever, reminding me that the Spirit of Life, God, Adonai, was still present in my life. It was a thin thread passed on by my mother from her ancestors, from generation to generation, that somehow attached itself to me. It was her last message to me, really the last words she said, before she died the next day.
A few weeks later, still deeply grieving, we went to spend Christmas with David’s family. My mother-in-law was radiant as always – she was a beautiful and elegant woman – but it had only been a few months since she was diagnosed with lung cancer (such an unjust sentence for a woman who hadn’t smoked a cigarette in nearly forty years). Underneath her brave veneer, I could see how weak she had become. For years we had battled over which church to attend on Christmas Eve. But this year, she surprised us all. She said she was too tired to even consider the options.
So, being the minister in the family, I put together a simple service of carols and readings from the Gospel. We all gathered in the living room, and my mother-in-law reveled as the family matriarch for one last holiday. Her eyes shined with tears, and with a simple glance of recognition and concession, she and I knew that we had found both love and forgiveness in those beautiful, ancient words. Those words of the Gospel, that had always felt so alien to me, were now ours to share and to cherish. I didn’t see her again until four months later, in April, on her last day of life. At her memorial service, her best friend told me that before she died, my mother-in-law had said that in all her years, that last Christmas Eve service was her favourite.
I could struggle with words, theology, and translations. I could take it all and tear it apart. But I have been blessed by the abundance of light from two amazing women. They each taught me that there is something beyond myself, bigger than me: a faith worth having, a faith that goes beyond words, that is simply felt in the welling of tears and the opening of a heart. I am called to light the Chanukah candles and to read the Christmas Gospels. I am called to be a Unitarian Universalist, seeking to create sacred space where each of our stories can be heard.
We must try to forge our faith out of the stories that connect us to the past, the present and the future. It is work that we never complete. We look into the flames of the chalice, the menorah, the Yule log and the Christmas candles, and we know that there is something there that challenges us and heals us. We close our eyes and know it is still there, even if we have not yet found the right words.
Whatever it is that gives you hope this year, whatever true gifts you are able to give or receive, hold onto that flame of faith. Let its abundance warm you and brighten your path wherever you go.