Making peace with Christmas

I come from one of these modern American Jewish families that face the December Dilemma. My parents divorced when I was 7 and my brother David was 5, and my father remarried a Christian woman whose religion and customs came to our family.

Soon I found myself torn between my Jewish self and the Christian world of my new family. The more religious I became, the more distant I felt from my father's choices.

Time has passed. Today I am a rabbi and comfortable with my Judaism. But my relationship with my dad and his family is not so easily defined. When my brother David and I decided to re-embrace our Jewish faith. Christmas became a time for division in our family.

Life is not shades of black and white, but rather shades of gray. I now celebrate Christmas with my father, not to embrace the religion of the holiday, but to spend the short time I have with him and my family. I decided it was better to embrace my father and just view the holiday as window dressing to his life.

I am married this year and, for the first time, I believe I understand better my father's choices in life. Sometimes we evolve in directions we never expect. We need to learn to accept this and embrace the person before us. I do not like my father leaving Judaism, but I love my father and his family - and that is more important.

This season I am heading home, but it's not to look at my father's tree. Rather it is to unveil the stone for my brother David. On Jan. 3, David was killed in a skiing accident in Aspen and, for the first time in our families' lives, both my Jewish family and our non-Jewish family will be looking at the Hebrew letters that say my brother's name. We will all say the Kaddish prayer on Christmas.

As I look back on my life with David, I remember many important moments of joy. He stood with me a year ago when I was married and kissed me and said, "Make every moment count." Now that he is gone, I wonder how many times we shared great moments together under this strange Christmas tree. I wonder if there are still some moments of joy that I and my new wife can experience as we come together under the tree. The irony that she never had Christmas as a child and now, married to a rabbi, she gets it for the first time in her life leaves a sense of wonder to God's plan in the universe.

This holiday season, many are facing the same dilemma of how to embrace a family that contradicts our understanding of Judaism. My belief is that to embrace members of our family that have a different religious expression does not contradict our passion for our faith. We need to find a way to look at the realities of the world, love our Judaism, and still love those other family members.

I have sat with many families dealing with the last days of a father or mother. The discussion we have is often about accepting that the time we have with our parents is short and that that time is now ending forever. Before it is gone, we need to embrace the time we have - even if it is under the tinsel of a Christmas tree.

A Phoenix native, Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz is the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Sholom in Chula Vista, Calif.

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