Adventures in Judaism

In an attempt to re-start my Adventures in Judaism blog, I’ve decided to start a sort of FAQ series called (drumroll please) Questions Nobody Asked. In other words, questions I’ve been wrestling with that I thought others might be interested in my answers to. (Isn’t that how FAQ lists get generated anyway?) The first question I’d like to tackle is a timely topic: “what’s the deal with Jews and Christmas?” Why has this question been coming up for me lately, you might ask? Well, if you feel the need to ask then I suppose you haven’t been living in America for the past month and a half. There has been the pervasive saturation of the auditory atmosphere with Christmas music that started the day after Halloween. There have been the people wondering out loud on all sorts of social media whether “Merry Christmas” is okay to say as a generic salutation this time of the year. There has been my department’s “Christmas Potluck” that was decorated thoroughly in red and green, tables scattered with

Yesterday we marked the celebration of two holidays, two birthdays even. In a rare coincidence, the American national observance of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday fell on the same day as the Jewish observance of “the birthday of the trees,” otherwise known as Tu B’Shevat.  Martin Luther King, Jr, or MLK as he is often known, was rightly famous for many things, not the least of which was his ability as an orator. And his most famous speech was the one in which he told us that he had a dream, a dream that someday his black grandchildren would play side by side with my white children in a world where people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.  This speech was delivered in the summer of 1963, 55 and a half years ago. And that dream has come tantalizingly close to reality – my children have indeed played side-by-side with children of diverse skin colors, ethnic backgrounds, and religious upbringings in their various schoolyards and day care