A Chanukah Carol: In one moment of silence, my Jewish identity was born

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Reprinted from Aish.com
by Chana Jenny Weisberg

In fourth grade I transferred from an almost all-Jewish public school to a Quaker prep school.

I have made other big transitions since then. But that move to Mrs. Mitchell’s classroom at the Friends School of Baltimore was by far the most traumatic transition of them all.

I was painfully shy, sincere, and insecure, a toxic combination for the new eight-year-old on the block. I kept on failing the tests on Greek history, which was the focus of the 4th grade curriculum, so day after day I was forced to stay inside during recess in order to study. This was actually a relief, though, since I was also failing in the playground. One day, the daughter of a judge with an alligator on her shirt came up to me with a group of snickering friends and asked, “Did you get your clothing from a junkyard?”

Music class was the worst. In earlier grades, my new classmates had learned a complex system of hand gestures that represented the notes of the songs we sang, but I had never learned these hand gestures in public school. I was always looking at the person next to me, trying to do what everyone else did, trying desperately to just fit in.

And then there were the preparations for the annual Christmas concert.

I was the only student who did not know the Christmas carols. I also found the words confusing. During a rehearsal of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” I asked our teacher, “Excuse me, Ms. Vidor, what does the word ‘Christ’ mean?”

Ms. Vidor, a devoted member of her church choir, lit up. “Excellent question! The word ‘Christ’ means the ‘the Lord.'”

I smiled, “Then why do we sing “Christ, the Lord”? It’s silly to say “The Lord, the Lord!”

Ms. Vidor gave me a sour look, and did not respond. I was embarrassed.

I had been a bad girl.

MAKING WAVES

Things started looking up when I began junior high school. I had learned, more or less, to dress like my classmates, to talk like them, to act like them. I was beginning to fit in at long last. It was a dream come true.

One snowy December day while waiting for the city bus to the Jewish area of Baltimore, my classmate, Erin, asked me “So, what do you do during the Christmas carols?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean when they sing ‘Jesus’ and stuff. We’re Jews, we can’t say that.”

For all those years, I had never thought about it. It had never occurred to me that I should do anything different than our Christian classmates.

But I admired Erin, who later became our student-body president and an Off-Broadway director. The last thing I wanted to do was make waves. But I knew that she was right.

So during that year’s Christmas concert, when we got to the chorus of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” I looked towards the alto section and I followed Erin’s lead. Right after we sang “Oh come let us adore him” Erin clamped her mouth shut and did not sing “Christ, the Lord.” With a racing heart I did the same.

For the six years from that concert until my high school graduation, I clamped my mouth shut year after year and never discussed it with anyone.

But it was significant.

In fact, looking back, I realize that this was probably the most important annual event of my childhood.

It was my own small way of declaring in front of my favorite teachers and my dearest friends, “Look, I don’t know much about being a Jew. I pretty much only know that it means that I should not sing these words. But with this moment of silence I am telling you that somewhere deep down I know that being a Jew is something important. Deep down I know that it means that somehow I am different…

“And I really hope that doesn’t mean that I’m a bad girl.”

MY DAUGHTER

I am a person who cries a lot. I cry when I listen to Country and Western songs, when I read the Weddings section in the Sunday Times, when I hear the Israeli national anthem, when I read Aish.com.

But nothing makes me cry like my daughter’s annual Chanukah play.

This year, for the fifth Chanukah in a row, I will watch one of my daughters perform in the Chanukah play at nursery school. This year, my Ma’ayan will stand with all the other four and five-year-olds, wearing a crown shaped like a flame, and singing the same song that they sing every year about driving away the darkness. Then Ma’ayan will hold a doll and a prayer book and sing the same song that they sing every year about hiding from the Greeks in the caves in order to live as Jews.

I will look around me at the other mothers with their dry eyes and their digital video cameras, and I’ll know that when these mothers were children, they were singing these very same songs at their own Chanukah plays.

And I will cry because I will remember that Ma’ayan in her crown like a flame is the child of that same girl who was standing on those bleachers singing “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.”

I will cry because my heart cannot contain the disbelief mixed with thankfulness that I feel when I remember that that girl with her moment of silence became the mother of children who fill the family’s Shabbat table with stories from the weekly Torah portion, whose favorite song is “Jerusalem of Gold,” who have no idea that Chanukah is not the only holiday that comes in December.

But more than anything else, when I see Ma’ayan singing these Chanukah songs at the top of her lungs, I cry because I realize that I am raising a daughter who will never ever have to worry that by being a good Jew she is being a bad girl.

2 comments

  1. Hadassah Aber

    That is beautiful! lots of nachas from all your daughters.

  2. One day you have to pull our your memoirs together into a book. All those vignettes you’ve written bit by bit… That would be one great read.

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