Merry Guess-Who-Was-A-Jew-Mas

Your yearly reminder.

I am a Jewish man, raised with traditional, oppressive Orthodox Judaism, and I’ve yet always loved Christmas, ever since I was a little boy.

It’s strange. I’ve never observed it, after all, and I hate the songs. But every year as Christmas arrives, I feel a certain tension leaving my body, my shoulders easing, and a sense of calm settles over me like winter’s earliest snow, a sense of being safe, if only for a few precious days of the year. I’ve long wondered why. Why should a Christian holiday have such a calming effect on a Jew?

This year, as anti-Semitism rises in the US, Europe, the Middle East and just about everywhere else, I figured it out.

You see, like anyone else alive today who seeks to live a remotely happy life, I try to avoid the news. Alas, it creeps in. And so as it has lately - news of bomb threats to synagogues, of swastikas painted on walls, of the far right, of the far left, of Ivy League presidents and university students. And I wondered the thing I often wonder when I hear of Christian anti-Semitism:

“Wait, isn’t their God a fucking Jew (or the son of their God, I could never get that math straight)?” If any part of the story is true, it’s that one:

He was a me.

His father was a Jew, his mother was a Jew, his friends were Jews. All those folks in the manger in your front yard next to the inflatable reindeer? Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. Hell, that reindeer is probably a Jew, too. That would explain the horns.

“For I myself am an Israelite,” said Paul, “a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.”

Romans 11:1.

That’s your book, mein fuhrer, not mine.

Jesus was descended from King David - he’s not just a Jew, he’s the King of the Jews. And that’s the reason I like Christmas so much. It makes me feel momentarily safe. Because once a year, every year, Christmas reminds Christians around the world - White Nationalist Christians, Klan Christians, Neo-Nazi Christians, Christian teenagers with crucifixes hanging from their necks and swastika tattoos on their arms - that their God was a Jew (or the son of their God, I could never get that math straight).

So back off.

So watch it.

“Shit on Jews,” Christmas reminds you, “and you shit on Jesus.”

It won’t stop hate, it never has, but it might just give one or two anti-Semites pause.

“Say Billy?”

“Yeah, Curtis?”

“Does it seem weird to you that we hate Jews? I mean, given that God’s a Jew?”

“God’s not a Jew, Curtis, his son was.”

“But Jesus’s mother was a Jew.”

“But his father wasn’t.”

“His father was.”

“Not that father,” says Billy. “The other father.”

“What other father?”

“The heavenly father, y’dickhead.”

“So Jesus was a different religion than his father?”

“Just set the damn synagogue on fire, Curtis.”

Frankly, if an alien came down from outer space, he would assume that Jews made this whole “Christmas” thing up. Because a little reminder can’t hurt.

“Remember,” Jesus says later in Romans 11, speaking to gentiles about the Jews, “it is not you the branch who support the root, but the root that supports you the branch.”

So go ahead, celebrate Guess-Who-Was-a-Jew-Mas. Have sales and presents and trees and lights. Hang signs up all around town, calling for peace and love and forgiveness (just don’t tear down the “Kidnapped By Hamas” posters to do it).

And remember. Remember that Jesus was a Jew. Remember that we Jews are the root, not the branch. And remember most of all that one day you’re going to die too, and you’re going to walk down that long white hallway of clouds and angels towards those pearly white gates, gates which will open for you like the arms of the Lord Himself, and you will enter Heaven at last, and there you will meet your God.

And he’s going to be wearing a yarmulka.

Awkward.

 “But why do humans hate so?” the visiting alien will ask.

“Well,” I will answer, “because every now and then, in the course of our history, life gets so lonely and difficult and hopeless, so filled with darkness and so empty of light, that humans begin to look for someone to blame.”

“Like who?”

“Like me.”

And then the alien would climb into his spaceship and fly away, and he would go back to his planet at the farthest edge of the universe, and there he would be summoned to the Alien Leader’s palace, and he would kneel before the Alien Leader, and the Alien Leader would call him to his feet and demand, “Well?” and the alien would say, “Yeah, it’s all the Jews fault there, too.”

Merry Christmas.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.