Sharing the Seasons

"When we got married we decided our family would be Jewish," said Barbie Greer. She was raised Jewish, and her husband Bill was raised a Christian. Their children celebrate Christmas each year with his mother, but the Greer home is Jewish, with multiple Menorahs lighted in the house.

"Some years, I ask Bill if he wants to have a tree," Barbie Greer said. "His reply is, 'We're Jewish.'"

Other interfaith families celebrate both holidays in their homes, with lightings of both Menorahs and Christmas trees.

Jews celebrate the eighth and last day of Hanukkah -- also known as the Festival of Lights or Feast of the Dedication -- on Wednesday, while their Christian friends gather that evening in churches to celebrate the birth of Jesus and the coming of their Savior in the holiday known as Christmas.

Seven Festivals

The origins of the celebrations of both Christmas and Hanukkah are hard to pinpoint.

"Hanukkah came very late in Jewish practice -- especially compared to Yom Kippur, Passover and Pentecost," said the Rev. Lowell Grisham, rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville.

"God set seven festivals," said Cynthia Douthit, rabbi of the Berit Olam Messianic Fellowship in Springdale.

The festivals and their seasons were commanded from Mount Sinai during the exodus of Israelites from Egypt and recorded in Leviticus, appearing both in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible. Those observances include Passover or Pesache; the Feast of the Unleavened Bread or Chag Hamotzi; Feast of the First Fruits or Yom Habikkurim; Pentecost or Shavu'ot; the Day of Judgement or Rosh Hashanah; the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur; and the Feast of the Tabernacles or Sukkot. Hanukkah and Purim were adopted later.

"Sacrifice is the major feature of the feasts and knowledge of them enhances a Jew's faith," according to the website hebrew4christians.com.

The Lord said to Moses, "Speak to the Israelites and say to them: 'These are my appointed feasts, the appointed feasts of the Lord, which you are to proclaim as sacred assemblies.'"

-- Leviticus 23: 1-2

"The Jewish festivals are retained (also) in the gospels," said Lynda Coon, director of the department of religious studies at the University of Arkansas. "John lists the Dedication of the Temple, Sukkot -- known to Christians as as the Feast of the Tabernacles -- and Passover, a central feature of the Easter story. They were part of the tradition."

"History makes everything more difficult," Coon continued. Hanukkah arose in a period beyond the Bible -- even the New Testament, she said.

Hanukkah -- celebrating a historic event in the Jewish faith -- became more widely celebrated beginning in the 1970s, when Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson called for public awareness of the festival and encouraged the lighting of public menorahs -- the first in 1974 at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, according to a Tuesday article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"It is a minor holiday, but it became major with commercialism and the season," Lennick said. "Gift-giving is a modern adaptation to the season." The custom evolved for Jews by giving chocolate coins -- or gelt -- to children to encourage them to study the Torah, "to build a relationship with the Torah in a real-life way."

In the Greer family, eight nightly gifts remain minimal -- "socks and underwear," Greer said. But their Jewish grandmother gives one big gift for Hanukkah.

"We try not to imitate Christmas," said Rabbi Rob Lennick of Congregation Etz Chaim in Bentonville. "But we like to remind the kids it's a wonderful season, with joy and celebration, and light in the dark months of the year."

The similarities of Hanukkah and Christmas lie mostly in the time of year -- "although they both celebrate light as a theme," Grisham said. Other celebrations of the two faiths share similar timing throughout the year.

He pointed out both Christmas and Hanukkah are timed to roughly coincide with the Winter Solstice (which was Sunday).

"The solstice is a sacred time to all humans," Grisham said. "It's a wonderful and mysterious time, when days stop getting shorter and the darkness is overcome. Light returns to the Northern Hemisphere."

Grisham said he thinks scholars related the original Christmas celebrations to one of the most compelling Roman celebrations: Saturnalia, the Feast of the Invincible Sun, celebrating the agricultural deity Saturn.

"I don't know which came first," Grisham said. "It's very possible the Christians picked up the birth of the 'Invincible Son.'

"Nobody knows when Jesus was born," he continued. "Dec. 25 is not his historical birthday."

Many of today's Christian traditions did descend from the Jewish feasts, Grisham said.

Jesus celebrated the Passover just days before his death -- commemorating Israelites' escape from slavery in Europe. He joined his disciples for a Seder meal, which marks the steps from slavery to freedom for Jews.

"Jesus washed his disciple's feet," Grisham said. "He took bread and wine and identified it with his presence, his body, his life. He asked his disciples to do the same with bread and wine, and 'Do this in remembrance of me.'

"We evolved the Seder, the Last Supper, to the sacrament of communion or Holy Eucharist," Grisham continued. Passover usually falls in the early spring, corresponding with Easter as Hanukkah does with Christmas.

"The Christian Christmas is important to the community," Lennick said. "We teach our children to be happy for their non-Jewish friends. There's no need for them to feel left out. In a way, Hanukkah really supports all religions -- they all have special times and rely on freedom."

No Clean Break

Today's distinction between Christians, Jews and followers of other religions weren't always so clear, said Coon, the University of Arkansas religious studies chair.

"There was no big immediate break with Judaism for Christians," she said. "Religious identification was much more mixed."

Many religious cults existed during the years of the late Roman Empire, she said, listing Strictnine, Jewish, Christian among them. "Rome was a marketplace of religions, in which Christianity competed successfully.

"Even here, (religious identity) varies, with Christians attending to different practices," she said. "You could travel the state of Arkansas and ask all kinds of different groups the nature of the Trinity, and you'd get all kinds of different answers."

Archeological research supports this, Coon said. For example, in Dura Europos, a third century Syrian town, researchers uncovered multiple religious sites -- with synagogues and basilicas standing on the same block with similar architecture and similar artistic frescoes.

"There's evidence the early church fathers, the Christians were still going to synagogue," Coon said. "The line between these cults remained blurred."

Even Constantine's endorsement of Christianity in first-century Rome came at a time when multiple cults existed.

"Religious identity was contested and in flux in the sixth century," she said. "There certainly was no demarcation in the late first century."

Study and comparison between the Hebrew Bible and the Greek version required Christians to learn Hebrew from a rabbi in Egypt, Coon continued. "For a Christian to master Hebrew, he went to the synagogue, and related liturgy became Christian."

The earliest Christians in Palestine were all Jews who continued to practice Judaism, Grisham said. "They proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, he said. "When that claim was not accepted, it led to conflicts.

"It was pretty significant when the break happened, when the Christians were formally expelled from the synagogue," Grisham continued, proposing this happened at the Council of Jamnia, A.D. 90, when the canon of the Hebrew bible was finalized.

"Christianity and Christ became Christian -- not Jewish -- as Paul's movement gained momentum. Christ became more and more gentile," Grisham said.

Paul started the congregation at the synagogue first -- trying to convert Jews to the Messiah, but most were unconvinced.

"At the time, there were many 'God-fearers' among the gentiles, and they were attracted to Christianity," Grisham said. "There was no circumcision, and they didn't have to follow all the laws. The Christians incorporated in their religion the high ethic attractive to Judeans."

Paul was able to steal some of the synagogues best contributors -- "something most rabbis thought was wrong or heretical," Grisham said. Jews who adopted Jesus were expelled from the synagogue, and an evolution was underway as more and more gentiles joined the church. There were plenty of fights between the more observant Jews and the Christians. The gentiles were more liberal.

"But, remember, we're talking small numbers, really small numbers," Grisham pointed out. "There might have been 1,000 Christians. They met in house churches.

"But it wasn't a big deal to the synagogue. The Jews just wanted them to disappear."

While history does record conflict between the Jews and Christians in the first century, these outbreaks were more sporadic and localized, Coon said.

"To me, that's what makes these religions great: They talk to each other."

Jesus Was a Jew

"Jesus was a senator, a philosopher, a classic Roman," Coon pointed out. "The story of Jesus' life carries within it a very Jewish context."

"You must cross a bridge back to the time and culture to understand what it means," said Douthit. Her church follows Jewish law but believes Jesus was the Messiah.

"The apostles were religious, Orthodox Jews. But Peter would preach, and the people would hear it in their own language," Douthit said. "The church didn't call things by their Jewish names, but their Greek names.

"In the first century, Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah were still praying at the Temple Mount," Douthit continued. "Without the Torah, they would not know what God called sin. The rest is a history book to find out what went bad and what you shouldn't do.

"Jesus corrects man-made rules," she said. "The people were given the right instruction, but they weren't living it out."

"We know Jesus celebrated Hanukkah," Douthit said. "He said 'Follow me. Imitate me.' Friday is the Sabbath, and he kept his festivals. Hanukkah was not mentioned, but Jesus celebrated it. If it's good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for us."

The Berit Olam congregation does not celebrate Christmas, but keeps the Jewish festivals, which God taught Moses in exile, Douthit said. "When the people were brought out of Egypt, they were Jew and gentile, a mixed multitude. God gave the 10 Commandments not for just Jews, but all people. All the people heard, and will do. They followed God's instruction. The rules were not self-imposed."

Like others, she suspects the modern Christmas holiday descended from the Roman holiday Saturnalia.

Douthit celebrates the religious freedom found in Haunkkah and then spends Christmas Day with family because it's a convenient day off, she said.

"It's really freeing because you don't have to jump through all the hoops," she said. "You don't need to buy gifts. But if you go by the feasts God gives, you really get a whole lot more."