Two Faiths Celebrate in ‘Merry Mishmash’

Kathryn Michaels, a Christian, and her husband, Mark Zuckerman, a Jew, have celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah since they married in 1982. But the holidays usually came at different times.

“This year has thrown us a little,” Michaels said. Tonight, the Los Angeles couple will light the first candle on the Hanukkah menorah, then head to a Christmas party.

For the first time since 1959 and only the fourth time in nearly a century, Christmas and the start of Hanukkah fall on the same day. Hanukkah follows the Jewish calendar, which is tied to the moon’s cycles, so it can occur as early as Thanksgiving or as late as New Year’s Eve.

Because more than half of Jews marry outside their faith, many of those who marry Christians must juggle both holidays, each with its own unique customs and traditions. Indeed, a dual celebration could be confusing.

“This is the mother of all Chrismukkahs,” said Ron Gompertz, who with his Christian wife, Michelle, co-founded the website www.chrismukkah.com, defined as “a cross-cultural gumbo of cherished rituals and festivities shared by interfaith families.”

Or, more simply put, “a merry mishmash holiday.”

“It’s a completely natural by-product of this country’s history, whether it’s interfaith or interracial marriage,” said Gompertz, who took the name for his website from an episode of the Fox series “The O.C.”

But honoring the two holidays while respecting their religious differences can be a tough balancing act. The Christian holiday celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ and the eight-day Jewish festival of lights commemorates the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after occupiers were driven out.

Michaels and Zuckerman teach their two children a little of both faiths. “We try to go to church occasionally and we try to go to temple occasionally,” Michaels said.

“I have many friends who have married and decided to raise their children Jewish, but they had strong reasons for not wanting to continue their own religious background and I didn’t feel that way,” she said. “I was happy in my faith, but I’ve been happy in learning more about Judaism too.”

At Temple Israel of Hollywood, where a large portion of the couples are interfaith, Rabbi John Rosove holds annual “December dilemma” group discussions. He counsels couples to choose one faith and stick with it.

“The first question I ask them is how are you raising your children?” he said. “Often, couples answer as both, which I explain is impossible.”

Teaching both faiths to children dilutes them, Rosove said. “I have too much respect for Christianity as a tradition to trivialize it, and I wouldn’t want Judaism trivialized by combining them in any idiosyncratic manner. It does harm to the tradition down the road. They become meaningless other than family times, which has value, of course, but as religious traditions they don’t.”

Choosing Judaism is also a matter of Jewish continuity, he said.

Jewishness tends to disappear by the second generation in interfaith families when rituals are mingled, according to a study by Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College in New York.

Cohen found that 30% of children who grow up in an interfaith household consider themselves Jewish but that the figure drops to 12% by the next generation.

“All the evidence is that if Judaism is being shared with Christianity that the children are hardly likely to identify as Jews or to marry Jews when they grow up,” Cohen said in an interview last week. “The only reasonable chance that the children of a Jewish-Christian marriage will marry Jews is if they’re raised entirely as Jews with no other religious traditions in their home.”

At Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, the congregation has a significant number of Jews, said Carey Hardy, senior pastor. Their Jewishness is cultural and ethnic, however, not theological. Hardy agrees with Rosove: The faiths cannot be practiced simultaneously.

“I think it’s a misunderstanding about truth,” Hardy said. “Truth is exclusive by definition. It’s not like joining the Rotary, where you can also belong to other clubs.

“Christianity is making some bold, exclusive claims,” Hardy said. “Christ is saying, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.’ At the heart of Christianity is, do we believe that or not?”

If some Jews worry that mingling the faiths dilutes Jewishness and threatens Jewish continuity, some Christians are equally concerned about what they see as a watered-down version of Christmas that minimizes the birth of Jesus.

“I think a large population of Christians feel Christmas is being secularized,” said Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of the Liberty Council in Orlando, Fla. “That’s why we launched the Friend or Foe Christmas campaign.”

The Liberty Council publicizes a list of stores that do not use the word “Christmas” in holiday advertising and files suit when Christmas displays are inappropriately banned from public arenas. The confusion about the cultural, secular and religious nature of popular holiday symbols is widespread, Staver said.

The organization sued after the city of Neptune Beach, Fla. allowed a Christmas tree and menorah to be placed on public land but forbade a Nativity scene; the tree and menorah are not religious symbols, the city said, but the Nativity scene is. City officials changed their minds and the suit was dropped.

The group also is suing Jacksonville, Fla., on behalf of a rabbi who was refused permission to place a menorah on the grounds that it is a religious symbol.

Staver said he recognizes that Christmas and Hanukkah do not have religious meaning for many people, and he says that’s fine.

“I’d say to those people, certainly Christmas is for everyone,” Staver said. “But if you’re going to celebrate a holiday that has religious origins, don’t stop the religious celebrations of others. Don’t be offended when you hear ‘Silent Night.’ And if I am greeted with ‘Happy Hanukkah,’ I will answer with ‘Happy Hanukkah.’ ”

Elise Sandiford, who grew up Jewish, and her husband, who grew up Christian, see no conflict in honoring both holidays. They read books about both religions to their children but have focused more on the importance of being good citizens of the world than on strictly adhering to one religion, she said.

Sandiford was raised in a conservative Jewish family but began having doubts about God at an early age; she said the doubts have never been adequately answered.

“I do feel that there’s some sort of a loss,” she said. “I grew up with all this stuff, whether I liked it or not. I had more of a grounding than” her own children do. “But if they come home one day and say they want to be Buddhists, that’s fine with me.”

Today, the family will have neither latkes nor turkey nor brisket nor stuffing. Instead, it has adopted a new tradition more suitable to the ethnic influences of Los Angeles.

“What do we do? We make tamales,” she said.