To Tree Or Not To Tree
Marilee, here. Matt’s wife. I’m doing a little Jewish Road Blog takeover today.
This holiday season, our twelve-year-old daughter has asked multiple times for a Christmas tree (If you know our daughter, then you know that she NEVER asks for anything just once. Especially if the first answer is no). My answer to her (numerous times) has been something along the lines of, “Well, we don’t do Christmas trees in our family because we are Jewish.” Or, “In our house, Dad and I have decided that we aren’t going to do a tree.” To which she responds, “Well, we are only HALF Jewish, so I think we should be able to get one!”
And she has a valid point. I’ve realized that a more thoughtful answer is required, and I thought perhaps some of you might be interested in our reasoning as well.
Our kids are half Jewish (by bloodline/heritage) and half Gentile. But to make it even MORE complicated, as a family, we don’t fully fit into any “mainstream” category. Though Matt’s side of the family is ethnically Jewish, we don’t ascribe to Rabbinic Judaism. Most Jewish people would reject our family and faith because our belief in Jesus makes us “other” in their eyes.
Though I am a Gentile and have followed Jesus from a young age, we don’t incorporate a lot of “Christian” practices in our family (such as celebrating Christmas and Easter traditionally, as most Christians would).
Christians often look at us with confusion (and even question our salvation or think we belong to some weird cult) because the way we live out our faith looks different than mainstream Christianity (especially here in the west).
Matt and I (and Ron and Kay) describe our faith as a Biblical one. Meaning, we try to live according to God’s commandments and follow closely in the footsteps of our Messiah, and model our lives and practices after the early church. Which, by the way, was very Jewish.
But I digress. Back to the issue of the Christmas tree.
Twenty-plus years ago, a young college woman (me) sat on a plane as its wheels lifted off of Israeli land and headed back to the US. I cried. God had opened my eyes that summer to the Jewishness of the Bible and had given me a love for Israel and the Jewish people, and the trajectory, course, and purpose of my life were forever changed.
I downloaded from the Spirit two things that day. One, He reassured me I would return to Israel (and I did, pregnant with our Noah about 5 years later), and two, I understood that if I was to marry one day, I’d marry a Christian man that loved Israel, or a Jewish man who loved Jesus.
I met Matt several months later. And the rest is history. ;-)
Because my eyes were open and my heart was tender to Jewish things, I knew that I wanted to raise our kids to know and connect with the Jewish/Biblical side of their heritage. Matt and I agreed that our kids’ understanding and connection to their Jewish heritage were paramount.
For me, the more I learned about the depth and richness and the Messianic fulfillment of the “prescribed by God” Jewish holidays, the more Christmas and Easter began to feel man-made and hollow.
It’s also undeniable that the origins of the Christmas tree (or bringing evergreen branches into the home) are pagan through and through. This practice goes as far back as Egyptian worship of the sun god, Ra, as well as its connections to the pagan festival/ritual of Winter Solstice. The celebration with evergreen was in place because these were the “gods” of fertility and agriculture. Ritual with evergreens was part of imploring and appeasing them to bring about “fertility” and harvest in the spring.
If there is anything we can learn from a study of the Old Testament, it’s that Israel, as God’s Chosen people, was to be set apart from all pagan practices.
This would have also been true of the early church. And as we read in the New Testament, new Gentile believers were NOT required to become Jewish (and how could they, really? They were Gentiles!), but they WERE ABSOLUTELY admonished to put off their old pagan practices and walk in the way of Godliness!
I think that this is worth noting.
The calling of Israel from the beginning has been to be set apart. To NOT assimilate. And no other people group in the history of the world has had to work so hard to maintain their identity. Practically wiped out as people group multiple times in history, persecuted, made to abandon all Jewish practices or face death - the COST of maintaining a Jewish identity and sticking true to the calling of being set apart has come at a terrible price.
As a Messianic Jewish (and Gentile) family, not having a tree is just one way that we choose to identify with the Jewish people and honor a heritage and culture that has been hard fought for. As believers, we shy away from pagan and worldly traditions (no matter how whitewashed or “Christianized” they’ve become over the years).
Is God upset that Christians worship around Christmas trees every year? I don’t know. That’s for Him to deal with. But for my family and me, because we know differently, we do differently.
So, this conversation is timely with our girl. She is twelve. And on her thirteenth birthday, she will celebrate her Bat Mitzvah. She’s been learning Hebrew. She will stand in front of her family and peers and read her Torah portion and give her first sermon. She will profess her faith in Jesus AND identify with her Jewish people. This year for her is full of learning what it means to be a Jewish girl who loves Jesus. The Christmas tree conversation is just one of many important conversations to be had.
It’s sometimes a strange and lonely space that our family exists in. But there is beauty in it.
And we wouldn't have it any other way.
