Dispatch Faith: Christmas and Hanukkah: Distinct Holidays With a Common Challenge, by Michael Reneau (The Dispatch) & Ephraim Radner (Wycliffe College, University of Toronto):
Michael Reneau: This year is unusual in that for only the fifth time in the last 100-plus years, the first night of Hanukkah falls on December 25. Christian theology professor Ephraim Radner thinks that’s a natural time to examine what makes each holiday distinct in order to resist both ill-fitting attempts to draw parallels between the two and a common enemy they share: over-commercialization. …
Ephraim Radner: I’m a fairly straightforward traditional Christian. An ordained Anglican priest, congregational pastor and theology teacher, I have followed my church’s religious customs pretty consistently and relatively strictly. But I also have a partly Jewish background, and have always been interested in Judaism’s religious commitments. Of late I’ve even become involved with a range of Jewish-Christian and Messianic Jewish disciples of Jesus. Take all of this together and the seasonal conjunction of Christmas and Hanukkah carries a certain challenge—coincidence or providence—especially as the first night of Hanukkah this year begins on Christmas Day. That conjunction appeals to more than a few religious folk, who would like somehow to bring these two festivals together if only for the sake of softening the distance between Christianity and Judaism.
Yet I have come to the conclusion that the two holidays have little to do with one another, and trying to make them somehow complementary probably does a disservice to their intrinsic meanings and thus to the commitments each community holds in their celebration. Simply presenting some background to each helps bring out these profound distinctions, and at the least permits a better perspective for relating one to the other. The effort to make them complementary has also encouraged one of the main problems besetting each holiday: over-commercialization. Keeping both holidays distinct can help ward off what today constitutes their chief enemy.
Understanding Hanukkah.
Let’s start with Hanukkah. The name simply refers to “dedication,” and in this case, the specific event, in the year 165/164 BCE, when the Jerusalem temple was somehow “rededicated” to the Lord, following its desecration by the Greek ruler of the time, Antiochus Epiphanes. The story is recounted in the first book of Maccabees. The Books of Maccabees (there are several) were originally part of the Jewish Bible and translated into Greek perhaps in the second century BCE. But they were never part of the Hebrew scriptures—the Tanakh, or larger Jewish scriptural canon that fits, mostly, with what Christians call the “Old Testament.” So only some Christians ever read about the events behind Hanukkah, and Jews themselves celebrate on the basis of a national memory, not of Scripture. …
[F]or all the attempts, real and imagined, at drawing Hanukkah into some kind of relationship with Christmas and apart from the central but general theme of God’s miraculous power and grace, the two festivals have almost nothing in common. Some of the often tortured theological fabrications to bring Hanukkah and Christmas together in religious terms include seeing Jesus as the light (like the light rekindled in the temple), or Jesus as the temple itself (using imagery from the Christian gospels). But to press these parallels is in fact to lose the very national, concretely Jewish, and politically fraught understandings that inform Hanukkah’s basic meaning. It is to de-Judaize Hanukkah and invent something else. …
Understanding Christmas.
So, let us turn to Christmas. Whatever the rationales behind its most remote origins, we can clearly see that, by the fourth century, the general celebration of Christ’s birth—the Nativity—was established, and usually held in late December. There were some complex calendrical disagreements that arose between Western and Eastern churches, but many (though not all!) Eastern churches now celebrate Christmas on the same day as in the West, on December 25. …
[T]he Christian claim that Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah of Israel, let alone the incarnate son of the living God, stands as an affront to the expectations of Jewish religious belief, and on a host of levels. Hanukkah’s purifying of the temple from idolatrous worship would, for most Jews, preclude any embrace of Christian claims about a trinity, a divine God-Man, and the abrogation in such a person’s life, death, and resurrection, of the law the God graciously gave to Israel. …
Resisting commercialization in both.
Whatever the differences in liturgical custom between Eastern and Western Christians, and between Catholics and Protestant, one development is clear, and in the West particularly: the takeover of Christmas by the “market.” Today, all Christian practice and worship has been engulfed by cultural and commercial interests. These began to assert themselves strongly by the later 19th century, but they are now the hovering umbrella of all December activities. These commercial forces are by now both recognized by all, and mostly acceded to by all. On this score, Jews and Christians have unwittingly come together. Hanukkah and Christmas both, that is, are festivals subject to challenges that are far broader, socially, than those associated with particular religious communities: Mammon!
Any effective resistance to this idol—money, greed, indulgence—will demand cooperation by Jews and Christians together in our society. And against such idolatry, the religious values of Hanukkah and Christmas, at least in their unalloyed essence, are perhaps necessarily deployed. After all, purity of covenantal devotion on the one hand, and divinely empowered humility of self-giving on the other, are powerful antidotes to the seductions of wealth.
Editor's Note: If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
