I found a very brief article on the internet which pretty much stated 90% of the issue as far as I can see it.
From thehorizonsun.com
The Jewish Point of View of Christmas
Sometimes it feels like everyone celebrates Christmas, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
From Nadav Golden
It was a very short piece that ended up to be number one on the Google algorithm for my question. It just happens to be that my columnist is 14 years old. Go figure.
Although most people in the U.S. love and enjoy it, there are people that don’t realize there are a large number of people who don’t celebrate Christmas at all. As a Jewish person, I look at the Christmas season in a very different way.
To begin, there is a feeling of being left out, especially in not having enough representation in TV shows, movies, or holiday concerts. During the holiday season, stores usually decorate with Christmas decor with few to no Hanukkah decorations at all. If there even are any, they’re tucked in a corner or the back of the store.
Additionally, many people have a hard time addressing Jewish people during the holiday season. This stems from people not recognizing that there are other holidays besides Christmas. There are three typical ways communication goes wrong during the holidays:
Saying “Merry Christmas” no matter who you are talking to.
Wishing a Jewish person “Happy Hanukkah” on Christmas (this year, Hanukkah ends almost three weeks before Christmas). If you forgot to say “Happy Hanukkah” during the holiday, you don’t get a free pass on Christmas.
Saying nothing at all to their Jewish friends and acquaintances during the holiday season.
It is also very common to see Hanukkah clothes or decorations that have nothing to do with the holiday. For example, according to The New York Times, a company was selling a shirt saying “Matzo Ball Man.” Matzo is a food eaten during Passover and has no correlation to Hanukkah. Examples like that show that the companies that make the apparel know nothing of the holiday and are not doing simple research to learn. Seeing these irrelevant “Hanukkah” things makes me feel very sad, since companies don’t feel the need to respect my religion and traditions. When we see the correct and accurate representations of our religion in popular culture, we feel included and acknowledged.
All I ask is that people do a better job embracing those who celebrate Hanukkah during the Christmas season. Maybe you can ask them questions about their traditions; I personally love answering peoples questions, but everyone is different. Even the quickest “Happy Hanukkah” during Hanukkah might brighten someone’s day.
There is a generic term that you can use here but it’s hollow. I have made it clear to the people around me that I’m Jewish. I have done everything humanly possible to let people know that I take my religion seriously and that there’s no other way about it, I am not joining them. And we need to be very specific about this. If we’re talking about a dialogue with Christians with non-Christians You have to understand that they are absolutely evangelical. There is no greater thrill, sexual or otherwise, to the possibility of converting one to the fold. Men who have been completely impotent for 10 years suddenly feel the sexual rush of power: they got someone to turn over.
I could go on about how corruption and the basic premise of paying your taxes so that the government can do whatever they want with you without you having even the slightest reasonable vote as being an absurd idea for something connected to godliness. One would find it hard to imagine that the greatness of God, omnipotence if you’d like to study what a word means, and he should care about whether we agree to something or not. Because they will hurt you if you don’t agree. You may see a soft hand but there’s punishment if you don’t agree. Never forget this. They may offer you pleasure but there is a guarantee of punishment along the way both for doing your job well and failing.
But then I allow myself a moment to believe in my own lack of corruption. I’m corrupt. I don’t know how other people judge corrupt people. Especially Christians and more especially Jews. And don’t get me started on Arabs or Germans or Australians for that matter. I’m just being facetious here. If you’re talking about corruption, and you’re talking about trying desperately to spread religion that no one understands anything about except that they are a part of it, you have an automatic desire for failure. Obviously if someone’s going well they don’t need to listen to you. But catch him on their bad days. That’s when you really have leverage. Get someone when they’re down and you can get them to eat out of your hand.
I remember having a conversation with a millionaire. I was teaching and he was something like student thing but really he liked to complain about how difficult it was ruling over other people. He believed people were shit. The more machines the better. Get me the least amount of people and I’ll show you reasonable profitability. That’s what he said. And he meant it. He just wanted to count the dollars at the end of the day. And really, who of us want to do anything else?
What can I say? Marx was Jewish. The problem is in how much the religion requires of you personally? I’m talking about being Jewish. That’s the whole thing really in a nutshell: we’re supposed to be nice to the people around us because we’re worrying about ourselves and our own deals. TlYou see how that works? Being Jewish as a basic technical matter is about having the ability to read. You’re not obligated to give your opinion about it. I am much the usual outsider for my efforts in this regard. But you have to be able to read it or memorize it. And then you know it.
I also genuinely think the word community itself has become quite bastardized. I think the original concept of community has to do with communal living. People living in the same place helping each other to get by. This is general life affirmation if you want to look at it that way. Putting together a group of people to further a like-minded idea, political religious or otherwise is not community. It is a popularity contest and a need to create armies. There’s a big difference between getting a bunch of people to agree with your thinking then with everyone actually depending on each other for their lives and livelihoods. That’s the difference between what used to be considered a community and what modern national think has to do with it now.
Can I talk about the Jewish community? You would actually have to talk about any community. At this point any discussion of community basically consists of how many actual friends you can count on to help out in a pinch. This would be your only genuine community because people just don’t live in semicollective villages anymore. Some people live with daily interactions with the outside world but basically the world has moved indoors and online and that’s the end of the village. The moment the human contact gets questioned, the concept of community disappears rapidly.
I moved to Belarus for very specific reasons and so I have a way of looking at the world because this was my landscape for the last 24 years. What we started with with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the place for a very brief moment was literally independent. They had to figure it out for themselves all. And what did they figure out? They figured out that if everybody went to work and did their job and stayed together and we’re good to each other that they would probably be okay. And this is what they had when I showed up. It’s the essence of it. They were independence itself and had to figure out the problems DIY. And then the Russians came back. They needed money. And then we had to figure out how to lie to people while maintaining a government that had no intention of ever leaving or allowing anyone to speak against it until finally even the Russians became impatient and wanted everybody to know it was them. The Russians control the vig* and that’s all there is to it. And all of this happened mostly through media but also through placement of businesses and extreme practices to make sure you have no competition. And of course the internet. The Russians control the internet.
I can bitch about my own success as a writer. I have the pleasure of reading with a friend right now and it’s not just getting compliments. It’s about that some of the books are really well written and some of the parts of them are kind of exciting and interesting to read. I like this. Meant I worked with skill. But the truth is that the Americans refuse to respect me for any reason and the Russians simply blocked me. To this day, I get different readings from my own hometown by using a VPN. And I promise you, native Russian speakers don’t bother with VPNs. They just listen to what the Russians have to say.
But then again I am an opposition voice. Minimalism as a political ideology? Just simply wanting to represent or be an advocate for the environment? Why not? Why do we need to spend all our resources? What’s so wonderful about spending money? When you have a lot of money you feel good. I’m rich. I can do all the things rich people can do. And then you spend your money and you don’t have it anymore. Back to work? Of course. Of course of course of course. And what else does your religion require of you?
Would you like to say that Jews are greedy? If you want to say that any professional businessman is greedy, Jews are greedy. Would you like to question the greed of Christians? Because I do not remember anyone ever from the Christian side looking at me without seeing me as potential for a handout. That’s money. That’s money or time or professional services. And when they were paying fairly for services, I was charging fairly and knowing how to problem. Let the market know who you are. I worked hard and I worked many hours. I think this means my price point was correct for my marketplace. You want to argue this? Be a better businessman. Or, try working with a group of people who suddenly demand to think we.
Before I get into this bitch, and of course, I am not the only one who knows this, thinks this, sees this and is extremely tired of this, It is not logical to assume other people’s actions on your part. I’m not talking about incidental help because people are generally doing the same thing. I’m talking about literally people who will mobilize to help you. And I’m not even talking about this scream at the Jew fun fest my idiot neighbors had for the first couple years I lived here. That was purely play time. They had someone to fuck with and they enjoyed doing it to the extreme. They had nothing else to do and really, they were women playing with a single man. Why do you think they were doing it? What I’m saying is, other than potentially a small group, if you are not a true gangster, you do not have people who have your back.
But here’s the problem. I don’t believe in it. They never let me do it. Other than the business I came in with, I have never believed in a single business proposition that I could be a part of publicly that would be successful here. The reason is the simple prejudice. They would never support me because they would enjoy the opportunity of participating as a group. This would literally be a thing that makes them feel a part of the group. They could do something that the group is doing even though it serves no decent purpose whatsoever except to cause harm. I say this because all independent pinsk businesses have failed. If I count how many people actually paid to open businesses here, either in the marketplace or working abroad, forget 50%. They all failed one way or another. It doesn’t work and nobody had the capital to be capitalist to start with. They just stole the money so they can spend it on crap because that’s what they were told to do.
Don’t like that angle? You dealing with a collective audience that genuinely only believes what they know through hearsay. They don’t know the celebrity. They don’t live with them. They are not a part of the celebrities community. The public only hears about this through a controlled media machine and what they know only comes through this gossip. We’re talking about a completely different thing because unfortunately, the celebrity does not get to be a simple human being anymore exactly because of how discussed. Same as true for celebrity politics. Same is true for celebrity everything.
The killing point though is that they don’t know you. They only know things about you but they’ve never lived with you and so they don’t know what you really like day in and day out as a human being, only as a celebrity. Therefore the promise is not only limited but impossible. If they really don’t know you, they can’t give you anything but junk.
And really, I did not ask my local community to stigmatize me. I did not ask the people who live around me to isolate me. But that’s what they did. It’s the flip side of not joining the church. Do you think they’ve ever had a moment in their lives to listen to me say something and believe my words at point blank. They can’t. They don’t believe it’s there. They don’t understand a clear declarative sentence. They believe there’s something else there that they cannot see and that’s enough for them. They don’t know this unseen thing, they just know it’s there and that it’s very bad because it’s something those people do. That’s why they don’t understand it. That’s why they’re afraid of it. That’s why they stay huddled together.
But that’s also why you couldn’t get a load of fertilizer to save your life once they decided collectively not to work with you. It’s unnerving never to have a conversation with someone who suddenly tells you you pay poorly. I didn’t know that I paid poorly. I didn’t even know that anybody knew what I paid. I thought I discussed the money before we got into any contract. And that was the whole point. I wasn’t using slavery. I didn’t demand that this thing happened. I asked about the wages before we went in. Everybody had an opportunity to argue. I was doing business deals, I was not a full-time employer. I guess the hearsay got to them and that was enough. They didn’t need to know anymore. It’s also true for medical care by the way in case you think this is some poverty/wealth business. It’s not. They are all the same.
Now, let’s go back to the 19th century and I’m pretty much living in the same place or something similar to it with the difference being the lack of antibiotics. And now you really are taking care of your farm or you’re not eating. Now you really have to do all the work to get a meal on the table. Now you really are physically working at your life 24/7 and yes, you’re depending on your community to get you what you need. We had community. We live together and talk to each other and helped each other just like people here used to do before they got broken up and sent to the supermarkets instead of the farmers markets and into their cars and onto the internet instead of out to the park to meet with friends.
Did I ever tell you the story of deciding I needed some cleaning help? It was a logical business decision. I was running a school out of an apartment. I had people coming in and going out all day. I needed someone to help keep it clean. Made sense to me. Put the ad in the local paper. This was before the internet. 279 people called me. Literally 279 women and three men. That’s mobilization.
And really, when I got here people identified themselves by the clothing they wore. Women reach the period of their lives where they became grandmothers. They literally wore the same clothes as all the other grandmothers. And of course it was very logical to address them by calling them a grandmother. They would never argue. Look at me. You can see I’m a grandmother. Of course it dressed me by calling me grandmother respectfully. Everyone was respected. I guess that’s another thing that’s changed.
So people assimilate. In the old days the Christians were very good about this: You believe in the scripture. You believe in Christ. Say it. Say it like you mean it. Make me believe it. Don’t make me feel like you’re lying to me just because what I’m asking you to believe in with all of your heart and all of your soul is impossible to believe in.
It does not allow a test and this in and of itself is the test. I’m not talking about all day testing. I’m not talking about testing something over a hundred years. I’m just asking to test the structure of this thing you say you believe in. Because if you truly believe in something, whether you are a Jew or a Christian in our modern world, your answer is going to be that you believe in something. You’re sure there is a God out there but you just don’t understand it and so you don’t worry about it too much. Where the hell do you think you got that answer from because everyone says the same thing!
That, in and of itself, is simply called in empty belief. There is nothing there to believe in except believe itself. It’s as if they created a word and destroyed the meaning. Listen, my friend said that she would be here about noon. Sure enough, she showed up at noon and I perfectly believe that she would be there. I do not have the same belief for every human being that if they tell me they will be somewhere at noon that they will be there. It is my common understanding and believe that most people in the world unless they are being paid will not show up. Think about that. Think about that and forget your concept of friendship forever. That’s belief. If I’m riding my bicycle and the tire goes flat, there’s nothing about my personality, my history or my belief system that makes a damn bit a difference. And what is more, that tire has got a hole in it and you can believe in that no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. And you also better believe that you’re going to fix it or it’s not going to get fixed. That’s belief. That is called understanding something that is not directly in front of your eyes but knowing the truth nonetheless.
So we have our meaningful ceremonies. Ceremonies are good. Jews have ceremonies. Hanukkah has ceremonies. We like candles. I like that. The actual Hanukkah business is extra candles few extra prayers and we try to be good to each other. You spend some time in the synagogue and you know, maybe you do some good deeds for people and help out where you can. But it’s a light holiday. It’s a light holiday for the darkness. In the darkest days of the year, when it starts to get dark, we’re lighting candles. That’s the whole show.
I don’t know. Is it necessary to kill a tree? I wonder about ecology so much, I honestly believe in all my heart that the Christians are dead set in destroying the planet. I believe in all my heart that this wonderful sexual conversion thing is nothing more than the complete destruction of a human being. In order to get them to agree to Christianity, they must be completely broken. And I think if you’re going to base religion on people being completely broken before they enter, even this logically makes it difficult for something to believe in other than perpetuating torture. But then again, the symbol is a guy nailed to a cross and being allowed to suffer the last moments of his life. It’s wonderful how much they love life, isn’t it? And the deeper you scratch and the more questions you ask the more corrupt it is and the less beautiful everything becomes with the inclusion of it.
Is being Jewish the answer to the question? I don’t believe so. I really don’t believe reading scripture to the exclusion of all secular material is correct. I read all of Jack London growing up and it obviously had an effect on my life. I lived something like Jack London’s life or at least as much as a Jew could. But he was popular fiction. I just believed in the stories. I believed adventure was physically possible. Oh well. Maybe I should have been reading Bible stories. And what would that have prepared me for? Not adventure. It probably would have prepared me being a part of the Jewish community.
I think the answer to the question is that people wish to have community. Go online and listen to the endless bloggers and shapers and influencers trying to get those views and subscribers and keeping their income up from all of the videos they make, they love the word community. Apparently I’m a part of the vegan community. I don’t feel any connection to anyone individually because I’m a vegan and truthfully, I’m so tired of having non-vegans look at me and think something that has nothing to do with the reality of not eating animals. You could try to say it as a simple exclusionary diet. And exclusionary diet is where you take something out because it doesn’t agree with you and you leave everything else. I didn’t find meat was a benefit for anything except mind control. The only thing is good for is breaking us down. We think we are having that deep satisfying relaxing. We are. We are destroying ourselves.
Christian work ethic. Got to keep it going. Got to feed the monkey. Got to get the dragon. We need the drugs. We need the social position. We need that job. We need that attention. We need that meeting. We need to get paid. We need the money. We got to go go go. You can’t not make money. Not only is there nothing else to do but you really can’t talk to anybody unless you’re talking about money. It’s all anybody wants. It’s another abstract. We believe in it. We believe money will solve our problems. It doesn’t. It can’t. It’s not it’s job.
And boys and girls, it is something that is controlled from above and that’s the whole problem. It’s called corruption. There is no natural marketplace. If there were, ecology would be a bigger part of it than scripture or politics. If there were a general natural marketplace with no interference or pushes and fools or rich people monopolizing it, it would include ecology because self-preservation is a part of every living things way of living. I’m sure human beings are the only beings in the world or at least among a very small community who specifically poison themselves just because they like what it feels like.
So what? I don’t know. I don’t like presents. I want to tell you something right now and I want you to listen to what I have to say. I don’t like presents. I don’t like people sending me shit. I don’t like having to store shit that people send me and I don’t like having to throw it out or find other people to take it away from me. I don’t like having my life changed by having my inventory changed unexpectedly. If you need something and you get it, this is great. I love people who help out when I need something. I just can’t stand people who help out when I don’t need something. And I really think most of us should need a hell of a lot less than we think we do.
Why is this true? The word is depreciation. It’s the vig of all the stuff we build. Built-in obsolescence. It fails. You bought it, it does something and then it breaks and it’s garbage or the object of a lot more money being spent on it. And we rely on this because we believe in it? I’m sorry. I’m an ecologist. I’m an economist. I’m a minimalist. I’m a vegan. I’m a clear thinker. I am the opposition. I’m questioning what we are spending our money on. I’m a Jew. I’m not a gentile. I’m the guy who made gentiles gentiles because they couldn’t be me. And with great irony this is what my Russian friends tried to do with me. I wasn’t good enough to join them. They never got it through their heads that joining them was the only thing I didn’t want to do. Would never do. Couldn’t do even if I tried. Good thing I didn’t live in 1600. They would have had my eyes out for sure. Now they just block internet access about me or what information is available. Oh well.
So where does my position lie? If you’re happy that the Christmas season is starting with Christmas Day, I hope you prepare a good day. If you took the trouble to kill turkeys and pigs and such just to make a big ceremonial dinner, I’m sure this is good for somebody’s economy but I think it was a waste of money. You can make something tasty without killing any animals and you can gather with friends without demanding that they eat this ridiculous food. Even if they believe in the high that they get from it. And make no mistake, you eat a holiday dinner, you are going to be stoned off your ass when you are done with it. And that’s pride in having to open your belt or not. You overindulge in over rich food specifically animal products and you are going to be Jackson Pollock splatter art by the end of it. Sorry. I know it feels good and I know you’ve been looking forward to letting yourself go. I’m just saying there’s nothing admirable about this. Not your social position, not how much money you have that you can afford it, not anything. I don’t find it worthy of respect.
This being said, the fundamental of the Jewish religion is Shabbos. The fundamental thing to believe in if you are Jewish is that you have a no work Saturday every week. Every week. Every Saturday. There are no Saturdays that are not holy. If she want to take away the 7-day work week and change everything, you do. But we don’t work Saturdays and we prepare for Saturdays on Friday and we come out of it on Sunday and that’s the way the world works. How about a regularly scheduled party every single week to take your rest? Sounds much fairer and much more satisfying. You don’t need anyone to tell us about a particular saint doing something wonderful and you don’t need to tell us about some military guy either killing too many people or getting killed too young. We don’t work on Saturdays and we get this every week rain or shine. I’m sorry, it works.
But here we are at the festival of lights beginning tonight. I hope I haven’t spoken for too long or said things that made no particular sense. I lit candles and I’m going to light more candles. I said three prayers and tomorrow I will say two prayers and then I will say these two prayers in addition to my shop as prayers on Friday night. Because that’s how you do Hanukkah. If you have children, you can give gifts if you can afford it. But the true spirit of it is that this week, we’re lighting candles. Why? Well we have a backstory but mostly it’s the darkest time of the year so we’re lighting more candles and having a little candle lighting every night for a week. Pretty difficult to understand? Sorry. But when you do Judaism like I do, there’s just not a lot of Christianity in it. Sorry. I did not completely buy into the Hasidic way, not by a long shot. But I did buy into the physical process of making Shabbos and for that, you couldn’t convert me from being a Jew for a million dollars in a house on the hill. Besides, I’ve already got what I need. I think that makes me the richest man in the world.
Hanukkah versus Judaism? Which is better? Well, if you want to talk about a popularity contest and people screaming as loud as they can and spending all the money they can and killing each other and themselves as quickly as possible, well I suppose you would think that Christmas is a real barn burner of a Christian holiday. A rock and roll backstory, everybody knows what you’re talking about and everybody knows you’re supposed to get drunk and get into a good mood. Or, maybe there’s some subtlety so lighting a few candles and saying a few prayers and being good to each other to make the best of an otherwise difficult situation. You want me to vote? Well, globalization and the internet has killed community globally. National politicians speak to individuals as if it actually makes sense. People don’t realize that Donald Trump speaks gibberish. There is no local ownership or vested interest and this is the way the corporations want it. I’m good. That’s been the answer ever since I realized I was being mostly manipulated. No thanks. There’s nothing in this for me. I don’t need Jesus Christ in my life because I don’t need to be saved and I don’t need the corporations selling me a bunch of shit because it’s not going to save me either. Sorry. I started taking Saturdays off and learn the truth. Now I know what I believe in. There’s nothing in it for me.
So, I get to be Jewish. And I want to tell you, it’s my own version of Judaism and I like it very much. It’s much more pleasurable than traditional Judaism. But what is identical forever is Shabbos is every week and it makes every other holiday generally superfluous. Every week is Shabbos and if you want to know what makes a Jew a Jew, we don’t spend money, drive cars or work on Shabbos. Try that and see if you start believing in something real for a change.
*The word vig in this article refers to vigorish, The interest payments that come with both Mafia loans and traditional gambling facility rules. It is that the house is there for the profit and not for the gamble. It’s the percentage that they automatically take. And it’s this Christian corporate vig that has killed all of us eventually.
