Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney debate theology as if they were running for seminary class president, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama make it seem easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than to clearly articulate what, if any, religious thinking shapes their approach to public policy.
There must be a better way to approach the role of religion in a world in which more people are dying in the name of God than any time since the Crusades, and with Christmas fast approaching, now is a good time to think about one such way.
I still remember my Jewish parents driving me and my siblings through neighborhoods in Chicago to see the Christmas light displays. But whenever we asked to put lights on our own house, the answer was always no. “We celebrate Hanukkah and those lights represent the celebration of Christmas,” my father told us.
Of course, our celebration of Hanukkah did not preclude visits to Marshall Fields department store, where we sat on Santa’s lap and asked for presents that, according to my older siblings, were delivered by Santa on each of the eight nights of Hanukkah. Why my parents were comfortable with Santa but not lighted trees is not so important.
What’s important was their willingness to juggle a deeply distinctive Jewish pride and the desire to help us appreciate the beauty of those practices in which they themselves chose not to participate. And I am sure that it is because of that lesson that I find myself making my regular annual trip to buy Christmas tree ornaments with my three daughters, who my wife and are raising as religious Jews.
No, we do not have a Christmas tree and I can not imagine under what circumstances I, as a traditionally observant Jew, would choose to. The ornaments we buy are not for us, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t benefit from them. The ability to make that distinction is critical at a moment when so many people are struggling with the power of religion to shape our lives.
We find ourselves living in a world that is increasingly divided, especially in matters of faith, between New Agers who believe that whatever they want to do is good as long as it makes them happy, and religious zealots who argue that unless a belief or custom is one which they embrace, it must be bad. What a sad and dangerous dichotomy. It is a false divide, overcome by our willingness to see the beauty in those places we cannot go and in the necessity of appreciating that there are more ways to capture that beauty than we may feel capable of doing.
My three girls, aged thirteen to six, buy ornaments that range from elegant to awful. And buying them is as much a practice for us as it is for those who will later hang them on their trees. Purchasing those ornaments and sharing them with friends every year is a ritual that reminds us that beauty is big and that wisdom can be found in many traditions precisely because no one tradition can hold all of the wisdom and beauty in the world.
If we look at the shining moments in the history of all the world’s faiths, we will find that it was precisely in those times when people managed to maintain the integrity of their own faith while remaining engaged with the ideas of others, that each profited the most. They understood that the richest religious spaces were those that fell between mushy syncretism and fear-driven exclusivity. And while there is no fixed point that assures any of us precisely where that is, our ability to share the joys and pains of other faith communities is a good place to start.
That is why I say that our shopping trips for ornaments are as much for us as they are for the friends on whose trees the ornaments will hang. I want my kids to remain proudly and distinctly Jewish, and I want them to appreciate first-hand the beauty of other traditions. I want them to be so in love with their own spiritual identities, that they have no fear of its dilution or diminution in the face of others.
Of course that’s the same quality we should be looking for in our presidential candidates. More than the particulars of their beliefs, we need to see that they can combine passion for those beliefs with genuine openness to the beliefs of others. When they or the rest of us do that, we will transform the American public square. What has become an ugly battlefield among those of different faiths will become a trading zone of ideas in which the integrity of each is respected and from each of which we could learn.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield is the author of "You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism" (Harmony, Dec. 31, 2007), and president of CLAL—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.
