It didn't even occur to me that Santa Claus didn't exist. "He doesn't come to our house," my mother had explained. "We're Jewish." What she had forgotten to tell me was that he didn't exist.
That aside, Christmas was never much of an issue for me, nor did it come up (as far as I can remember) in my religious day school. We were supposed to abstain from Halloween (I didn't), watch appropriate television only (sports-related television was generally kosher, Dumbo the movie was widely approved of) and in general strive to be observantly Jewish.
I didn't feel a lot of conflict about Christmas. I hated it when I started at the local junior high and I got interrogated: Why didn't our front door have a wreath?
"You could get one with Hanukkah colors," asserted the girl who had started the whole discussion, throwing me a rope from across the school bus aisle.
"Hanukkah colors?" I questioned.
"Yellow and blue, right?" she posited knowledgeably.
"Uh ... I don't think so."
Daily issues ground away at my religion. When I moved back out of the city in seventh grade, I had to give up dancing at the Jewish Community Center and join a dance school that featured a Christian dance company. If I wanted to be in the show titled "Remember the Children," about Jewish children before, during and after the Holocaust, I would have to attend several Saturday rehearsals. I simply couldn't, and my next-door neighbor relayed the judgment of my peers in somber tones, sitting on the floor of one of our bedrooms. "Some people don't understand why you don't just come. You don't have to go to synagogue every Saturday. I don't understand."
I didn't understand either.
Why did everything have to be in conflict? I wore down the company director in the stairwell leading to the studio, probably because I was crying. It was with mixed results, inevitably, that my somewhat-taken-aback parents watched a famous guest company perform to a rendition of "Jesus is a-coming" after our lyrical dancers suffered dramatically while representing the dying children of Terezin.
The same year, somebody had thrown a rock through a windowpane in a nearby development house, blanketing a menorah in shattered glass.
I first heard about the incident from the psychologist who was testing me for mentally gifted placement. I still wonder if he passed me only because I was Jewish and because I was someone with whom he, as a Jew, could discuss the incident. I got into the gifted program with the lowest possible score.
The older I got, the more distanced I felt from my religion.
I had grown up watching those same movies that belong to every American: It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. That's not where the conflict was. I was adept at blending the mixed messages the world sent me. My grandmother, a retired public school teacher, showed me illustrations of Darwin's theory of evolution while I sat with her on her chair. I went to school and learned that the world was created in seven days. But time is a tricky thing, in that it is very relative, and for children especially, it can be agonizingly slow.
I believed it all.
What hurts us as humans is not the diversity of our beliefs, the overlapping and contrasts of ideals and histories, but our great failures to respect the cultural treasures of others.
When some drunk stole the mezuzah from my doorpost in the Quad (or maybe it was multiple drunks -- the age-old question of how many drunks it takes to make off with a mezuzah), the faculty advisor who lived next door seemed surprised that I deemed it necessary to file a police report. The officer, mild and genial, arrived promptly at my door only to become quickly confused.
"So it was a cult object?"
"It was a ..." I tried to think of how to explain. I couldn't believe the guy worked at Penn and hadn't heard of a mezuzah.
"It was a Jewish religious object," I tried again.
He walked off with his pen and pad of paper, and when I sank down onto my bed I felt like I was losing my identity.
I think college is a time of both growing and shedding, of abandoning and becoming. But this was about something being stolen.
Hanukkah, which begins tonight, is about fighting for and treasuring what little light you have, hoping that it will grow. Holidays and religion in America are somewhat strange. There are so many customs I am not aware of, and there are so many missed opportunities in our country's cultural dialogue. At Penn we have people from all over the world, and yet what ignorance most of us have about each other's cultures and beliefs!
My high school had a multicultural club, week and literary magazine. Penn is so large and so diverse. We have so many cultural organizations. But they so rarely interact. We should spend more time sharing what little light this world has.
Danielle Nagelberg is a junior International Relations major from Philadelphia. Schuylkill Punch appears on Tuesdays.
