Interfaith Community: Why it Matters

 

For the second week in a row, it looks like our interfaith community is going to be snowed out on Sunday. While getting up on Sunday mornings sometimes feels like a sacrifice, now I find myself pining to return, and frustrated about the cancellations. I often describe myself as an interfaith zealot. Why? I grew up on the margins of Jewish life: always a little different, a little suspect, because of my Christian mother. But in our interfaith community, all families are on equal footing, all parents have equal standing, all children are equally welcome. Everyone takes part in our rituals. This radical inclusivity is powerfully seductive for me, after a lifetime of feeling like a religious outsider.

The interfaith families in our community range across a spectrum in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual-orientation, ideology. We are atheists and God-lovers, liberals and conservatives. But our common bond–the shared condition of having created an interfaith family, the desire to build something joyous out of our differences, the determination to see dual religious heritage as something positive and enriching rather than simply as a problem–this bond thrills me.

When we do not meet, I think of all we are missing. Last week, my seventh-grader was supposed to lead our Tu Bishvat gathering with his “Coming of Age prep” class. This week, we were supposed to hear from our Rabbi and Minister about the trip they just took to Israel with their friend, Imam Yaya Hendi, and students from Georgetown. My husband, who once lived in a seminary in Haiti, was supposed to say the Lord’s Prayer in Haitian Creole for us. And the children were supposed to file up to drop smooth stones into the bowl of concerns as we think of the people of Haiti. My teenage daughter was supposed to work, as she does each week, reading stories and helping with crafts in the kindergarten classroom. And we were supposed to schmooze and eat bagels together, and sing together to our rocking house band.

So I’m hoping the deep snow melts soon, and I can return quickly to my community, to my beloved motley crew of non-joiners, reluctant religionists, visionaries, brilliantly cynical secularists, and passionate mystics. We call ourselves the Interfaith Families Project because we are building the community as we go along, never sure exactly where we are going to all end up. All I can tell you is that wherever we are going, that is where I want to go.

Salinger, and Zinn: Interfaith Connections

 

Two American cultural icons died this week–author J.D. Salinger and historian and social activist Howard Zinn–and both of them had interfaith connections. Salinger perches near the top of any list of prominent “half-Jewish” writers–along with Marcel Proust, Gabriela Mistral, Dorothy Parker, Adrienne Rich and Mary Gordon. The fictional Glass family depicted in many of Salinger’s works, including Franny and Zooey, mirrored his own family: a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother. Salinger created what may have been the first important fictional treatment of an interfaith family: the theme of half-Jewishness was clearly resonant for him, if also troubling.

Zinn, on the other hand, was culturally Jewish, though his work for peace and justice put him in the vanguard of those working across religious boundaries, starting in the Civil Rights era. “I find inspiration in Jewish stories of hope, also in the Christian pacifism of the Berrigans, also in Taoism and Buddhism,” Zinn told Tikkun magazine.

Zinn had an important connection to two prominent black/Jewish interfaith families. Author of the essential People’s History of the United States, Zinn spent most of his career as a history professor at Boston University. But from 1956 to 1963, he taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, where he mentored both Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman, both of whom went on to marry Jewish men.

Alice Walker called Zinn “the best teacher I ever had.” Her later marriage to a Jewish lawyer was brief, but her daughter Rebecca Walker has written an important memoir on being a biracial, interfaith child. Marian Wright Edelman has had a long and happy marriage to law professor Peter Edelman. In her book Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, Edelman wrote about the profound effect Zinn had on her, an impression that I cannot help but think opened her mind to the eventual possibility of interfaith marriage. “Howie not only lived what he taught in history class by breaching Atlanta’s segregated boundaries, but stretched my religious tolerance beyond childhood limits,”  wrote Edelman, a minister’s daughter. “I felt shock and confusion when he announced in class that he did not believe in Jesus Christ. There were few Jewish citizens in my small South Carolina hometown. Through him I began to discern that goodness comes in many faiths and forms which must be respected and honored.”

The admiration was mutual. In 2006, when asked to assess the possible candidates for President, Zinn described Barack Obama as “cautious.” His suggested candidate, he said, would be Marian Wright Edelman.

Fela: On Being Yoruba, Christian, Muslim

Our family saw “Fela” on Broadway last weekend: a remarkable musical that depicts the life of Nigerian political dissident and Afro-Beat musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. With ears acutely tuned to interfaith themes by now, my 15 and 12-year-old children remarked on a climactic scene in which Fela evokes many gods, or God by many names, including Allah, and the Yoruba spirits such as Shango. “It was interesting, Mom, because he wasn’t just being politically correct by naming them all, he lived with them all,” one of the kids remarked.

The idea of “being both” has a long tradition in Africa, where Christianity and Islam joined but never completely supplanted original African religions. Fela, the son and grandson of Protestant ministers, wrote blistering critiques of the imported religions of the colonial oppressors.  As South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”  Fela grew up in a Nigeria wracked by war between Christians and Muslims in the state of Biafra; violence between Christians and Muslims continues in Nigeria today. Fela would sneak out of his parents’ middle-class Christian home to attend traditional Yoruba ceremonies, and he reclaimed and reformulated this African religion for himself, filtering it through his experiences with the American black pride movement, and then transmitting it to the world in his music.

Listening to the powerful evocations of Shango, Egungun and Yemeja in the Broadway show, it was hard to keep my mind off of Haiti, since these Yoruba spirits also live on, fused with Catholic saints, in Haitian Vodou. At the end of the play, Fela delivers his mother’s coffin to the Nigerian military to protest their attack on his compound, and the cast members file on stage carrying small coffins. It was my children who noticed that one coffin, presumably in the last two weeks since the earthquake, had been marked “Haiti.”

Haitian Spirits

 My mother-in-law has a sequined Vodou flag hanging above her fireplace in Connecticut. When people inquire, she explains that it depicts the ship Imamou transporting the Haitian dead to the land of the spirits. Visitors tend to go quiet as she delves into the belief system of Vodou, the national religion of Haiti.

This week, Imamou groans through the waves, tragically overloaded with tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of passengers–Haitian earthquake victims. As the horrific news and images swirl around us, I wait to hear whether my husband’s skills as a Creole-speaker and relief worker will mean he gets on a plane. I know he wants to go: of all the countries he has worked in around the world, Haiti is his first love, never forgotten.

In 1983, I went to visit him while he was working in a home for street boys in Petionville. In preparation, I read Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, a seminal work on Vodou written by a filmmaker in the 1950s. Then I read Robert Farris Thompson’s influential Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, a book describing how West and Central Africans brought their religions to the New World and preserved them by interweaving them with Catholicism in places including Haiti, New Orleans, and Brazil.
I arrived in Haiti during the week when the Christian holidays of All Souls, All Saints and the Day of the Dead converge with the most important Vodou celebrations. In the night, we heard drumming, and got out of bed to walk until we saw a circle of dancing Haitians dressed in white. An eager journalist, I wanted to approach the circle. My husband, with healthy respect for the culture in which he was living, convinced me that we should return to bed, and not intrude.

Somehow, our lives have continued to circle the Atlantic in a mysterious pattern echoing the slave trade. We lived for three years in West Africa, including trips to Benin, Togo and the Yoruba centers that so informed the religion of Africans in the Americas. Later, we found ourselves living in northeastern Brazil, where African religions absorbed Catholic saints and symbols to become Candomble.

So why write about all this on my interfaith blog? A lot of folks (Pat Robertson, David Brooks) are making ignorant comments this week about ”voodoo” (a Hollywood construct) and Haiti. For those who want a deeper understanding, I recommend the two books above–both are authoritative, deep yet lively. Joseph Campbell wrote the introduction to Deren’s book.

In my own interfaith journey, Haiti provided the first thrilling encounter with complex, compelling and obviously syncretic religious practice. Later, I came to see all religions as syncretic: evolving together, influencing each other, intertwining and swapping information like strands of DNA. In Haiti and Brazil and Africa, adhering to more than one religious worldview simultaneously is often central, not marginal. In my quest for interfaith acceptance, I take inspiration from my time in these rich and deeply spiritual cultures.

Sorting through our photos from Haiti, trying to choose one for this post, I found many images of the street boys who taught my husband Creole. They should be men now in their prime, and it is very hard to think about their fates this week. As others have pointed out, death is always close in Haiti, and the dead remain an intimate part of the family. After the spirit Agwe ferries Imamou through the waters, their souls are home again in Ginen (Guinea), the land of the ancestors. The idea provides comfort, much like the consoling Judeo-Christian idea of heaven as green pasture. So I chose a photo of a bit of green in Haiti’s mountains, remnants of farmland and trees, in an attempt to envision a peaceful place for all of these souls, and a remnant of hope for a future of ecological and agricultural renewal in Haiti.

Five Quirky Picks: Interfaith Religion Books of 2009

My touchstone topics on this blog:  interfaith identity, spirituality, ritual, music, nature, culture, family, community. Two topics I don’t mention very often: God, and the Bible.

I am not very comfortable with either one. I am open to the idea that some sort of energy infuses the world, and that human brains subconsciously tap into this energy or spirit, but I don’t refer to it as a “higher power” or believe that this spirit listens or responds to us. My problem with calling this energy “God” is that the word has been so abused by fanatical, narrow-minded, exclusivist clergy and followers that it still makes me squirm a little. And the Bible? I find it often delightfully inscrutable, resonant with the rich imagery of my Jewish and Christian cultures. But also: filled with nonsense and anachronisms which have inspired hatred and violence. So mention of the Bible often makes me squirm as well.

But I’m pushing myself outside my own box a little bit here in picking five books from the past year, all of which mention God or the Bible in their titles. None of these books is fanatical, narrow-minded or exclusivist. In fact, they are iconoclastic, open-minded and daring, and each has some connection to the interfaith world.

It’s Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim, Atheist, Jewish Christian (Samir Selmanovic). When my husband met the author at an interfaith conference this year and came home with this book, I was tremendously excited by the title. I was a little bit disappointed to discover that Selmanovic is now, in fact, a passionately Christian minister—the other religions are indeed adjectival, describing phases of his life and influences as much as they represent a true multifaith identity. But as I read on, I was seduced by this book—the story of his journey from an atheist Muslim Croatian family (with some Christian roots) to becoming the founder of Faith House, a unique New York City meeting place where Jews, Christians and Muslims talk and mingle. This funny and revealing book has helped me towards appreciating that not all Christian clergy are out to convert or condemn me. Selmanovic is a mensch of the first order, with an extraordinary desire to “embrace the other.”

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb (R. Crumb). The text here is straight Bible, the words of Genesis without commentary or midrash, and so I guess this is the most traditional book on this list. Except that it is, if we concede that the Bible is fiction, a graphic novel, created by the provocative hippie-era comics artist Robert Crumb. For me, his devotion to this huge project is even more interesting because of his long, creatively fertile interfaith marriage to Aline Kominsky. Crumb grew up Catholic, Kominsky has a very strong Jewish cultural identity but has called herself a pagan. This book confirms my theory that interfaith marriages sometimes produce great artistic and intellectual engagement with religion, even among people who straddle religious categories.

The Woman Who Named God: Abraham’s Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths (Charlotte Gordon). I stumbled on Gordon and her book because she has written a blog post on her marvelously personal  and readable blog about being a “half-Jew.” We share paternal Jewish status, and of course I like to believe that her interfaithness (though she is now a practicing Jew) led her to the marvelous idea of bringing to life the story shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam: the story of Abraham and his two partners: Sarah (the mother of Isaac, and thus Judaism) and Hagar (the mother of Ishmael, and thus Islam).  Drawing on sources from all three religions, this is non-fiction that reads at times with the pace and poetry of fiction.

Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible (David Plotz) Written by a secular Jew (and Slate editor), this book is, to borrow a phrase, “bizarre, hilarious, disturbing, marvelous and inspiring.” I’ve been slogging through some heavy prose by theologians this year in my quest to understand what the heck I’m talking about on this blog. Plotz’s book is an antidote to all that: a refreshingly and frankly disbelieving reader gives his cynical spin on the jumble of tall-tales, non-sequiturs and poetry he encounters.

The Case for God (Karen Armstrong). Armstrong is the interfaith goddess: a prolific, compelling and deep writer who has chronicled each phase of her own journey from Catholic nun to atheist to ardent intellectual engagement with religion, as well as illuminating the history of all of the world’s religions, and the way they have evolved from and influenced each other. In this book, she explains why the term “God” makes me and a lot of other people squirm, and she makes the case for both God and religion, at a time when atheism appears to be gaining momentum. Even if you really don’t want to hear the case for God, you will find Armstrong’s nimble arguments and vast knowledge of Eastern and Western spirituality worth the read.

Celebrating Martin Luther King: Multiracial, Multifaith in the 21st Century

This week, hundreds of communities across America will celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday with interfaith services featuring pastors, rabbis, imams. But for our community of interfaith families, this national holiday has an even deeper significance. Dr. King spoke about the day when “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands.” In our community, we go beyond joining hands, we create families together. We now have several member families composed of Christian African-Americans married to Jews. Of course, intermarriage between Jews and blacks isn’t new—the first significant wave of marriages occurred when these two groups worked side by side during the civil rights movement. But in the 21^st century, the good news is that neither the Christian African-American partner, nor the Jewish partner, has to give up their religion in order to be together. They can give their children roots in both dynamic religious traditions.

On Sunday, our community had our own celebration of Dr. King, featuring Sombarkin, a powerful a cappella gospel trio (Karen Somerville, Lester Barrett Jr. and Jerome McKinney). In our discussion group afterwards, our rabbi, Rabbi Harold White, talked about meeting Dr. King in the 60s. Rabbi White was a student of Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched alongside Dr. King in Selma and had a deep relationship of mutual respect and engagement with him.

Then, Rabbi White and Karen Somerville, an African-American museum director and historian, talked about their own close friendship, and the ups and downs of the history of the relationship between Jews and African-Americans.  They pointed out that African-Americans recognized and celebrated Jesus as a Jew, long before white Protestant churches began to see Jesus in this way. And of course, there’s the solidarity that comes with the knowledge of having been slaves, however attenuated that knowledge is now for Jews. And the shared sense of survival in the wake of tragedy (American slavery, the European Holocaust). And the shared sense of being a repressed minority in America (increasingly rare for Jews).  But none of this is new.

Here’s what is new: an African-American father, married to a Jewish mother, standing up at our celebration to lead the responsive reading excerpted from the “I Have a Dream” speech. As this father read of the day when, in Dr. King’s words, “with this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together,” the interfaith and biracial children in our community have implicit permission to fully appreciate King as a minister, as a man of deep Christian faith. They could listen to those words knowing that both of their parents belong equally in our interfaith community. Neither one is a guest or visitor. Neither one must compromise their religious identity. And in our community, these children will learn the history and rituals and ideas of Christianity, as well as the history and rituals and ideas of Judaism. These children can grow up listening to gospel songs of freedom, based on the Exodus story so dear to both Judaism and African-American Christanity, and so often sung at interfaith Shabbats and Seders. But they are also free to explore the gospel songs that mention Jesus, and perhaps even to download Sombarkin’s sublime version of “I Want to Walk and Talk With Jesus” (the only Sombarkin song available as a ringtone!) — a song that probably isn’t played at any Shabbat or Seder.

Tiger Woods: Buddhist, Interfaith, Deeply Flawed

On Sunday, talking head Brit Hume suggested that disgraced golfer Tiger Woods, “said to be a Buddhist,” turn to  Christianity to achieve redemption.  On Monday, Jon Stewart ran a hilarious sendup of Hume by a panel of faux “religion experts” on the Daily Show. Today, a convoluted Washington Post column asserted Hume’s right to proselytize. And all week, I tried to resist piling on–I don’t care about sports, and there were already too many bloggers on board. Then I began to feel the familiar itch to out a national figure as an interfaith child.

I realize this is a bizarre moment to “claim” Woods as part of my motley crew. But I never said that every interfaith child has a true moral compass, any more than every Jew or Christian does.

What interests me, as usual, is our need to pigeonhole Woods as a Buddhist, or Christian. As if you can’t be both. As if labels are necessary–Tiger himself resists them, as many interfaith and multiracial children do. Tiger’s mother is a Thai Buddhist. His father apparently comes from a Christian cultural background. Woods is an interfaith child, with all the rights of self-definition that term implies.

So how has he defined himself? With the complex language often used by adult interfaith children. Woods told Sports Illustrated in 1996: “I believe in Buddhism. Not every aspect, but most of it. So I take bits and pieces. I don’t believe that human beings can achieve ultimate enlightenment, because humans have flaws.” Little surprise here: Woods is very much a flawed human being. Ironically, that Sports Illustrated profile revolved around predicting whether or not fame would destroy the young golfer.

I realize that those who are uncomfortable with my dedication to “being both” could use the spectacular moral failure of Tiger Woods as an example of the failure of the “take bits and pieces” approach to religion. But Tiger’s mess could just as easily be chalked up to an early midlife rebellion by a man who has been relentlessly pushed and primed for one role since toddlerhood.  Or, even more likely, he was simply seduced by the intoxicating mix of wealth, fame and power that has led to the downfall of many an important man before him–whether Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or all or none of the above.

Interfaith Epiphany: On the Magi

As an interfaith child growing up as a Reform Jew, I always had a thing for the Three Kings. I identified with these magicians or astrologers as the outsiders in the story. Perhaps this is because depictions of the Holy Family in Massachusetts in the 1960s inevitably featured blue eyes and blond hair (WASP coloration) whereas the Magi were always swarthy, with my own dark curls and exotic brown eyes. (The idea that Jesus and Mary and Joseph were Jews themselves was not much mentioned in the New England of my youth.)

As a Jewish child, straining on my metaphorical tiptoes to peak at the forbidden baby Jesus, I felt kinship with the three strangers who appeared out of nowhere into this story to glimpse Jesus, deliver mysterious gifts, and then quietly disappear once again. Presumably, they were changed by their encounter, but the Bible does not describe how they felt after returning home. For all I knew, they remained sceptics like me, with affection and appreciation for baby Jesus but without necessarily forsaking their own religions. In fact, we know nothing about their religions, though the term Magi used in Matthew (the only gospel to mention them) originally referred to Persian Zoroastrians. Matthew specifies only that they came “from the east”: some believe they were Yemeni Jews. We do know for sure that they did not instantly become Christians–we don’t know if they ever met Paul or his followers as they began to build the  church many decades later, long after the death of Jesus.

So this week, in honor of the feast that celebrates the Three Kings in many countries around the world, I claim the Magi as fellow interfaith beings. Perhaps they were not beings at all, but  only literary devices created by a Christian storyteller who wanted to tie the birth of Jesus back to prophesies in the Torah about a messiah worshiped by kings.  But in any case, through my interfaith lens, I cannot help seeing them as Zoroastrians who opened themselves up to strangers in Bethlehem, expanding their spiritual worlds with a mysterious and poetic encounter with the “other.” I imagine how their lives were enriched by straddling their “eastern” culture and religion, whatever it was, and this new experience.

But then, I get to thinking about how all of the early followers of Jesus were Jews, struggling with each other and with themselves over how to integrate the Jewish and the proto-Christian perspectives. In a sense, they were all interfaith children. It was only later, through dark conflict and with tragic consequences, that folks were forced to check off box A or box B or box C: to confine themselves to the Jewish, or Christian, or Zoroastrian label.

Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote of the spiritual significance of entering into an  “I and Thou” relationship with the other, with the stranger.  Ever since Rabbi Harold White introduced me to Buber’s thinking, this idea has woven through all of my thoughts on interfaith identity. It is interesting to note that Buber married a non-Jew (though Paula Winkler did convert to Orthodox Judaism), and that he advocated strenuously for a two-state solution in Palestine even before the founding of Israel, and continued to advocate for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel and for interreligious communication.  As I embrace these three Magi strangers, I wonder what Buber would have thought of my insistence on viewing the world through my interfaith lens, and on viewing religious history as a continuous evolution formed by encounters with the other.

Schlepping into the Interfaith New Year

As the decade drew to a close yesterday, we dragged through the final hours of our annual odyssey through six states: an epic quest to make sure our children get to see their three grandparents, ten aunts and uncles, and assorted cousins during winter vacation. We travel by ancient minivan, praying that it holds together as we push the battered contraption past 107,000 miles. (I’m waiting for a hybrid minivan, which does not yet exist in this country, though they’ve had them in Japan for a decade.)

The trek up and down the interstate is grueling, the kids sleep on cots and couches and floors, and yet our itinerary is the same each year. We fantasize about skiing in Vermont, or going to the Caribbean, or just staying home and nesting as a nuclear family. But every year, we coax our cringing dog into the crate in the back of the van, and set off. The pull of family is stronger than the pull of adventure, or comfort, or convenience, or, really, rationality.

Why do we do this to ourselves? My husband and I both happen to hail from pathologically close families: we would rather be with our own siblings than with just about anyone else. But more to the point here, as an interfaith family committed to raising our children with two religions, we are barred by religious institutions from joining both a synagogue and a church.  And yet the urge to belong is powerful. So our primary allegiance is to an extended family bridging Judaism and Christianity, and family provides essential context and support. For my children to feel at home in either religion, they must see and hear and smell the familial connections to each religion. And that means being with family for as many of these holidays as we can muster.

Okay, so New Year’s Eve is not a religious holiday, per se. But in a year when Hanukkah fell during the school year, we stretched the Christmas trip to encompass a final gathering with my husband’s extended clan. We could have gone home earlier to celebrate New Year’s with friends, but instead we hooted at a marvelous slide show depicting four generations of the Miller clan, and joined three generations dancing to 70s music in a crowded family room.

My twelve-year-old does not remember any decade except the “oughts.” (When I made a remark to that effect last night, some middle-aged cut-up shouted that many of us don’t remember any decade except the “oughts.”) It was a tough decade–politically, environmentally, economically–and one that many of us are glad to see end.

But during this decade, we also saw a transition I have been waiting for all of my life: the arrival of the “both/and” zeitgeist. We have a biracial, interfaith President. We finally have a census that allows people to check more than one box for race. We have a tidal wave of interfaith children who will forge new religious pathways, new spiritual communities, new cultural hybrids. And we have an expanding network of family ties, as fine and strong as threads from a silkworm, weaving together more and more families from across the globe, from every race and religion.

So in this new decade, more and more of us will do the work of building and maintaining these family networks, across cultural lines and theological lines and state lines. I just hope this is also the decade when we get those hybrid minivans, so that we can schlep around, patching and strengthening our webs, without feeling so guilty about the mileage.

Conflicted at Christmas? Embracing the Interfaith Pathway

In today’s New York Times, an article described the sadness and longing that Jewish converts feel at Christmas. In many cases, the Jews-by-choice are spouses in interfaith marriages hoping to fix the religious asymmetry in their families through conversion.

Although Judaism generally eschews proselytizing, Jewish institutions apply considerable pressure on interfaith spouses to convert. The argument goes that conversion is better for the children, who will otherwise be confused. And yet, it can be confusing for children to grow up with parents prone to blues during “the holidays,” parents who feel disconnected from their own parents and siblings, parents who may resent or regret the sacrifices they have made for the sake of an effort to achieve religious coherence or unity in the family.

I fully acknowledge that conversion is right for some individuals, and that choosing one religion is right for some interfaith families. All I want (for Christmas) is acknowledgment that there are benefits and drawbacks to choosing one religion for an interfaith family, just as there are benefits and drawbacks to celebrating two religions. And there is virtually no objective, scientific research that weighs the benefits and drawbacks. Each interfaith family must make this decision, and every decision has its costs and rewards.

In our interfaith family, we celebrated Christmas this year with abandon, and without regrets. We drank champagne, sang carols, ate a standing rib roast, exchanged presents and cookies with family and friends. Many years we have gone to church on Christmas eve. One year, my son even played the Virgin Mary in the Christmas pageant at our interfaith Sunday School.

My husband hangs glowing stars on our porch–an external marker of the Christmas spirit inside our home. I know that Christmas lights are hard for some Jewish spouses in interfaith marriages–we never had them on our house when I was growing up Jewish. How do we weigh the sadness of a Christian spouse who longs for lights, against the sadness of a Jewish spouse who is not entirely comfortable with those same lights?

My mother, born Christian, now considers herself a “common law Jew.” But I know that Christmas–the heirloom ornaments, the bulging stockings, the communal meal, the descendants gathered from near and far–sustains my mother throughout the year, and sustains every member of our multi-generational and multi-religious family. For me, embracing Christmas seems ideologically consistent with our desire to fully educate our children about both religions. And for us, though not for everyone, celebrating Christmas also works to minimize sadness.