Actually, there were two priests and a rabbi in the pub, but the rabbi more than held his own. Technically, there was one pastor, Barak Pauls from Hillsong Bondi, one rabbi, Rafi Kaiserblueth from Emanuel Synagogue, and a Uniting church minister, Peter Chapman from church in the Marketplace.
The bar was upstairs at the Golden Sheaf in Double Bay, in Eastern Sydney, which meant we had a mix of Christians and Jews, and some people who would say they are both. The upper room was packed.
Was Christmas really Christian? And why is Hanukkah not in the Hebrew scriptures? were part of the mysteries explored on the night.
Minister Peter: “I need to be honest with you and say we’re never actually told to celebrate the birth of Christ that so two of the four gospels don’t even bother to mention the birth of Christ. So you’ll find that count of the birth of Christ in Matthew and in Luke’s Gospel. Mark and John don’t mention it at all. We’re never actually told to remember the birth of Christ. So I do sort of slowly just remind my congregation every Christmas, this is a bit of a cultural celebration, an Aussie summer fest that increasingly has very little to do with the birthday prize. What annoys me is that every year it feels like it’s starting earlier and earlier.”
Rabbi Rafi: “I thought it was something I left behind in the States. It would be Thanksgiving at the end of November, and then, okay, you get about a month or so of decorations, and the music would get saturated on the radio, whatever. And then it was Halloween, and then [Christmas starts]. Now we finish Yom Kippur, which is in October, September timeframe, and the last time I was in the States, and they’re already playing the Christmas music and this and that, whatever. So, we’ll get to Hanukkah in a second. But as a Jew … what is Christmas actually supposed to be about, not what it is.
Pastor Barak gets to the point, (eventually) “Christmas starts at my house about the end of August. And I also have a 5-year-old daughter who loves singing any song that can be repeated easily, which means I’ve been listening to Christmas carols from my 5-year-old daughter for about two months already, which I’m getting used to, but hopefully looking forward to it being over. But what is Christmas really about?
“Well, Christians celebrate what we would call the incarnation, which is the birth of Jesus. … I think the theological concept of the incarnation is absolutely essential to what we’ve seen about God in Christ when Jesus came.
“The fact that he came at all as the Son of God, as we believe, the second person of the Trinity, is profound or speaks profoundly about who God is and what’s going on in the world in the first Christmas.. So it is a fairly it very important holiday for the Christians. … I’m definitely part of a church that has adopted the cultural norms as a bit of a messenger [to] get our message into all the Christmas and the celebrations and Christmas carols and all that. But the purpose behind that really is to communicate the message of the incarnation, which is that Emmanuel, God, has come to be with us.”
Rabbi Rafi, with a grin: “I’m curious about the tree legend.”
Minister Peter: “Legend has it, Martin Luther, through the black forest night, saw the twinkling of the stars, and he went home and he put some lights on. I think that’s traditionally where … Christmas trees come from. Yada Yada Yada.”
Peter Again: “I think the same as Barak, but I use the Aussie summer fest called Christmas as a stepping off point to talk about incarnation, God in skin. The scandal that God, who made the cosmos, came down and lived as one of us.
” So I go to [talking about] scandal, and Christmas is still worth celebrating, despite my cynicism about the presents and the lights and Rudof and his friends.”
Rabbi Rafi: “Okay, I get that… I detect the note of frustration because it seems, correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a lot of this cultural or commercialisation that sort of detracts or waters down the theological imports of what that day’s supposed to be. So if you can sum it up, which I think you did, the incarnation of Christ in this world, that’s what it’s supposed to be about. What is interesting is I think you said only two of the four gospels write [about the day of the the] birth. Actually, I’m trying to think of any of the characters in the Bible. Did any of them actually tell us the day they were born?”
Minister Peter: “Yeah, we’re not only not told to celebrate the birth of Christ, we don’t really know when it was. If anything, the fact that shepherds were out keeping watch at night, maybe indicates that it might’ve been northern hemisphere summer, perhaps. So was it December 25th?
Pastor Barak: “Some of you would be aware, if you’ve been in church, of controversies of how much this started as a pagan festival and how much of it is a Christian festival. Because, although I’m certainly not an expert in history, maybe some of you are more, it certainly did start as the winter solstice festival, which was a really popular festival all the way back to the Roman Empire, and Christians seem to have sort of infiltrated and taken it over. But the imagery of the shortest day and then looking forward to the ever-increasing light of the days works really well because the incarnation isn’t just about the incarnation. The incarnation is ultimately about hope. So the light is coming. So that worked really well.”
Minister Peter: “On YouTube, there’s a Christian, Wes Huff, who goes into this, that sort of debunks, all of your Christian festivities are just simply, you took them over from the pagans, that’s not really what happened.”
Rabbi Rafi: “Like the festival we had not long ago, where we shake the lulav and the etrog. There’s probably the Roman fertility bouquet. A giant palm frond (the lulav) and the etrog (citron fruit).
“So it’s interesting, we have this too, when you are trying to understand where a tradition comes from, and then you have lots of different understandings. But lots of meanings behind it probably mean we don’t know where it actually came from.
“So some would say, ‘well, that’s not accurate, so we just shouldn’t do it.’ Where I come from, it is to say, ‘No, we should still do it, meaning, we can discuss where the original framing comes from, and we will reinterpret it.’ But for me as a Jew, the doing is what’s really most important. And I will continue to do these things as I do them, I’ll understand that.
“But if I’m going to wait to try and figure out why I do it, I’ll never get there. And then I’ve lost something from my community, and we are no longer committed because we’re not doing anything together.
“So yes, I get a little bit annoyed and frustrated about the Christmas music. There are some of the carols that I really love. By the way, one of my most sublime experiences ever was when I was a rabbi in London, just outside London in St. Albans, a mate of mine was the deacon or the dean or whatever it was at the cathedral there. He gave me his seat in the cathedral a couple of days before Christmas at the Carol service. And so you have the incredible acoustics in his cathedral. It’s one of the oldest in the UK, and they’re playing, and then someone looks and there’s a rabbi, he’s sitting in the dean’s chair.”
“But these are not like jingle bells. These are like the proper, beautiful Christmas carols. And it was an amazing experience. So I think that’s something that we should be really publicising a bit more. That beautiful majesty happened, the theatre, the theology, that the message of what Christmas really is, instead of the commercial…”
Pastor Barak: “You haven’t been to the Hillsong Bondi Carols yet. You just wait for them. I’ll give you the chair…”
Minister Peter: “I do get a little bit frustrated with the commercialisation part of it. So, in our church, we encourage people to buy a goat for someone else via Tearfunds’ Really Useful Gift Catalogue. The idea is instead of just buying crap for your cousin and nephew, that’s going to end up in landfill in a few weeks, you give a really useful gift for someone else on the other side of the world that you’ll never meet.”
And then Minister Peter discusses Christmas food, mentioning pork and prawns, then realises he’s lost half the audience. So it was time for Rabbi Rafi to explain Hanukkah. “How do you spell it? Once in the seminary, I was writing a paper on Hanukkah. I spelt it six or seven different ways. I didn’t get marked off for that – It’s a transliteration of a Hebrew word.
“It actually means ‘rededication.’ The story that we’re taught is that not the Greeks, the Assyrians, the Assyrian Greeks, which is not the same thing, they came and they ran roughshod and they did a mess of whatever and they desecrated the temple.
That was, roughly, you would call about 165 give or take before the common era or as you would go, before Christ, but I wouldn’t say it that way.” He explains the Maccabees, a group of Jewish rebel warriors, “chased out the baddies.”
“After militarily defeating the Assyrian Greeks Antiochus the fourth, they rededicated the temple. But one of the things, one of the rituals they did in the temple, aside from offerings and incense and bread and all that other stuff, was the candelabra, the menorah. If you’ll notice, the one we use on Hanukkah has eight branches, and one in the middle, so technically nine, but really eight. And so the story goes that they needed, and you need to have, purified, consecrated oil, olive oil, and it takes how long to make that? Eight days. There you go. And they only had one vial that was only supposed to last one day. So the miracle is they lit this thing, and they started the process, and it lasted, actually, not one day, but eight days. Voila. We have Hannukkah now.”
“So the challenge that we have is there’s actually, if you read a lot about the history here, there are some of the facts that don’t quite line up. And certain things have been exaggerated and certain things that have been deemphasised, right? So one of the things is we don’t really celebrate the military victories here. Really, the whole point for us is the lights, the Hanukkah, the menorah, the miracle of the light. That’s really what it becomes about. What’s fascinating for us is that this is the only festival that we have that is actually not in the Jewish Bible. Not at all in the Bible.
“When is it? Hanukkah is the 25th day of the Jewish month that we’re in right now, Kislev. And so it floats around a little bit. This year, it’s going to start on the evening of December 14th. I will be on an aeroplane heading to the States, lighting my candles on the aeroplane. No, I’m not lighting a fire on a plane. I’m joking. Joking. We’re not going to do that. I’ll land in the States, it’ll still be December 14th, and we will light candles and celebrate my dad’s idea of birthday. Same day. “
“So, the tradition is you have one candle, the shamash, the helper candle, and it lights on the first night, one candle, second night, two candles, third night, three candles. You get to eight candles. Which is weird because if you think about it, if you’re recreating the miracle, what should you be doing? One night, eight candles and then the second night, seven candles. Because it would’ve decreased. And that’s the logical way to do it. But the teaching says no, we don’t do that because we’re supposed to increase the, we’re supposed to increase the holiness, not decrease it.”
“So that is the only ritual that we are told to do on Hanukkah. The only thing is that it’s not just lighting the candles, it’s to light them in a public space. But in the pantheon of our holidays, Hanukkah is a very minor festival. It’s only in the last, oh, I don’t know, 70 or so years that it has become a much bigger deal. Probably, not probably, definitely, because of the rise of the commercialisation at Christmas.” Of course, there’s the food as well. Oily stuff and potatoes. And presents, in some families, because of Christmas.
I learned one thing in particular in the upper room with a Rabbi, a Pastor and a Minister: Christmas is to blame for Hanukkah.
Image: Barak, Rafi and Peter in the bar. Image Credit: Peter Chapman Facebook.