Being Different

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Christmas music is playing in the stores and our neighbors have put up their Christmas lights. Advertising is all about Christmas shopping and red and green are everywhere. Unless you live an extremely sheltered life, as a Jew in America, this season is inescapable.

Over the years I have seen people react to this barrage in a variety of ways.

Some attempt to escape as much as possible. I remember one family who each year took their family vacation in mid December. Their children were in an elementary school where Christmas was part of every art project, even every math homework. They figured their children weren’t missing much in academic content at that time of year but that their Jewish identities were being assailed by the presumption that everyone celebrated Christmas.

For some, Christmas leads to feelings of exclusion. As Jews, they feel singled out in their difference. Every “Rudolph the Red Nosed Rain Deer” seems to be saying, you are not one of us. Being different is an unwelcome burden, something they resent. Sometimes Jewish partners in our interfaith couples group will talk about these feelings, as their emotional associations with this holiday season, which are negative and event painful, are so different from their partners.

Others respond in very different ways. The son of a friend of mine was a great example of this. As a preschooler and elementary school student he was very forthcoming about his Judaism. At this time of year when the grocery clerks would ask him, and “what is Santa bringing you this year?” or when the salespeople in the mall would wish him a Merry Christmas, his response was to explain that he didn’t celebrate Christmas because he was Jewish and then to offer forth several paragraphs about Jewish holidays and customs. Being different was something he glorified in, and even later as a high school and college student, he was not uncomfortable on occasion to be a Jewish spokesman. He explained that being Jewish made him different and distinct in some contexts but that he was glad to be special in this way.

Why is being different, experienced by some as an asset and enrichment of their identity, and by others as exclusion, almost a disability?

I was thinking of this in relation to the three terms used for being Jewish in the Biblical period.

Abraham is referred to as the Hebrew, ivri, a word that Joseph and Moses will also use. Scholars think this word comes from the ancient term HABIRU which is found on Egyptian hieroglyphs referring to a Western Semitic nomad people from which our ancestors emerged. The rabbis of the Talmud didn’t have access to Egyptian hieroglyphics so they derived the term in another way. They understood the word ivri to come from the Hebrew root laavor, to cross over. Abraham had crossed over from the belief in many gods to the belief in one God. He stood, as it were on one bank of a river, while the whole world of his time, stood on the other. The terms ivri stresses Jewish identity as being not something else. I think many Jews today are still ivrim, in that if you ask them about being Jewish it is much easier for them to tell you what they do not believe- ie they are not Christians, than to tell you what they do believe.

The second term the Bible uses for being Jewish is B’nai yisrael, the children of Israel, that is our patriarch Jacob. This term focuses on the family and people-hood aspects of being Jewish. It is not so much, Abraham singled out by God and standing against the entire world, but being part of a community. For many Jews today, this is the primary Jewish identity. Being Jewish is an ethnicity, it is their family and being part of a tribe. Even when they don’t have a strong theology, with many positive role models among family and friends, they have a way of experiencing being Jewish as a positive aspect of their lives.

Finally, in the post exilic period the Bible talks about Judeans, what eventually became the modern word Jew. Being different is still a part of this identity as is being part of a community, but here being Jewish is a culture and civilization. Being Jewish has come to mean treasuring the Torah and holding fast to certain values and ethics. One’s difference is not merely an opposition to something else, nor is it just something one happens to be born into. Being Jewish has become a positive contentful part of one’s identify, one that provides guidance and meaning.

Being different whether being Jewish in a primarily Christian country, or being Sephadi in a Jewish community that is mostly Ashkenazi, or even being a girl on the football team or a boy in the ballet class, can be experienced many ways, some positive and some negative. Having positive content to one’s difference and role models who share that experience with you, can make all the difference in that experience being, not isolating and hurtful, but positive and enriching.