1 Family, 2 Faiths: Reconciling Traditions

The height of the Christmas season and the eight days of Hanukkah overlap this year. Here’s how Patricia Murray and Howard Gould deal with what many such interfaith couples call the “December Dilemma”:

They put a 10-foot Christmas tree, glittering with colored lights and ornaments, in one room of their Pacific Palisades home. They put a menorah, a Star of David candle and a “Happy Hanukkah” wall hanging in another. And they throw a holiday bash that celebrates both traditions--featuring potato latkes, tree trimming, holiday songs and gifts.

“We run counter to what most rabbis suggest, which is to pick one faith or the other,” said Gould, an attorney, at the family’s annual Christmas-Hanukkah party earlier this week. “But we didn’t see a way that would suit either of us personally without doing both.”

The festival of Hanukkah, which celebrates a military victory of liberation, begins relatively late in the Christian calendar this year--next Thursday evening. That makes gift-shopping more convenient for interfaith couples, but it also intensifies the challenge they perennially face: Whose holiday to celebrate when, where and how.

Do you observe both? Neither? Ban the Christmas tree or bring one in and call it a Hanukkah bush? Do you decorate with red and green or silver and blue?

The myriad small questions mask deep and difficult issues, experts say.

“It isn’t about Christmas and Hanukkah,” said Rabbi Steven Z. Leder of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. “It’s about worldviews, in-laws and parents, childhood memories and what constitutes wants, comfort and meaning.”

The emotional turbulence the holidays can spark noticeably surfaces over the Christmas tree. For many, the tree has become a highly seductive symbol of Christmas: the beauty of twinkling lights and dazzling ornaments, the heady scent of pine, the nostalgic memories and cherished traditions of family tree-trimming nights.

Murray, for instance, decorates her tree entirely with ornaments of storybook characters collected since college; passing them out to children to hang on the tree is one of the Christmas-Hanukkah party’s staunchest traditions.

But for many Jews, the tree provokes discomfort and conflicting opinions. On interfaith family Web sites, “December Dilemma” postings are dominated by debates over the tree--including accounts of how people weaned themselves from one.

Some Jews are firmly opposed to a tree in their home, seeing it as a preeminent symbol of Christmas whose wood signifies the cross. Alan Blumenfeld, a Culver City actor who describes himself as a Jewish “spiritual humanist,” accepts a tree in his interfaith home, in part because it originated not in Christianity, but in pagan solstice celebrations as a symbol of life amid winter’s darkness.

Still others, such as interfaith expert Ellen Jaffe-Gill, believe Jewish homes should exclude trees but are relaxed about those that don’t. Jaffe-Gill accepted a tree in her home before her husband converted from Christianity to Judaism.

“It’s almost always a cultural thing, not a religious thing--an ‘I just want what I grew up with,’ kind of thing,” said Jaffe-Gill, author of “Embracing the Stranger,” a book on intermarriage. “Until I see Christians walking down the street with Christmas trees around their necks, I won’t worry about it.”

Jaffe-Gill echoes the mainstream rabbinical belief that parents should raise their children in one faith or the other to avoid confusing them. During the holidays, she said, a popular solution is to observe Hanukkah in the home if the children are being raised Jewish, and Christmas with relatives or friends in their homes.

But consensus is hard to come by. The Rev. Steven E. Berry of First Congregational Church of Los Angeles cautioned that excluding one tradition from the home “can cause resentment later.”

Mary Rosenbaum, the Catholic executive director of the Dovetail Institute for Interfaith Family Resources in Kentucky, said she believes both parents’ traditions should be acknowledged “as a matter of affection and respect.”

Rabbi Leder said people raised with two traditions have come to him in counseling, feeling disconnected from both faiths and resentful that their parents failed to make a choice. Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben of Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades hears a different story: “Most interfaith children will tell you they get the best of both worlds.”

“In a real world, religious consistency encourages emotional stability in kids,” Reuben said. “But two religions can teach a different set of values in the home--tolerance, caring, respect.”

In the end, interfaith families chart their own courses, creating their solutions, rituals and practices.

The Gould-Murray family had to reconcile his Midwestern Jewish background with her Irish Catholic tradition--and convince their respective parents to do the same. Deeply connected to the church, her father worked at Loyola University in Chicago and her mother worked for Catholic Cemeteries. No one could conceive of a Murray’s marrying outside the faith--until she fell in love with Gould in a UCLA sailing class 18 years ago.

Gould was raised in an Orthodox synagogue in Omaha, although he now attends Kehillat Israel, where intermarried families compose about a third of the congregation. His mother immediately liked Murray--she thought she had sechel, Yiddish for good judgment and common sense. But marriage was something else. At their first meeting, both mothers were uncharacteristically silent, “united in their misery,” as Murray put it.

Eventually, that changed. But before the couple married, they talked incessantly about the religion question and concluded that “neither of us could conceive of ourselves being anything other than what we are,” Murray said.

“Easy for you guys to say,” the couple’s son, Kevin, 10, piped up. “We’re the ones who have to go to the religious schools.”

He and his sister Genny, 13, attended Sunday school until their First Holy Eucharist and Confession, then began Hebrew school. The requirements of two religious schools are demanding, the children say.

“It’s so much extra time,” Kevin said. “You want to play with your friends and can’t.”

Added Genny: “It’s confusing. You learn one thing and then you learn another. You take the two and mush them together.”

But the joint holiday celebrations, they love. In fact, when their parents talked about forgoing the Christmas-Hanukkah party this year, Genny immediately vetoed the idea.

How could they not gather with family and friends to light the menorah, calling to mind the miraculous oil that burned eight days? How could they not get up and sing Hanukkah blessings and comic renditions of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”? Can you imagine not seeing a roomful of children line up, eager to hang the family’s charming ornaments--from Humpty Dumpty to the Cat in the Hat, Mulan to the Teletubbies?

“An advantage of doing both is that you learn a new culture--not a culture of a different country, but religion,” Murray said. “In the end, if we’re really trying to get people together, we really need to do more of this.

“Although,” she added with a laugh, “it’s really hard to do.”