Thursday, December 25, 2014

Jesus is Here


This Advent season found me in a muddle: disorganized, foolish. The Savior is coming, I told myself, but how will this happen, how can this be? Nothing was under the usual control. And while the old answers still made sense, I couldn’t understand them any more.

Christmas did come to me, though, in a strange way: a dream that I was teaching Jews.

The dream Rabbi wasn’t happy with this strange shiksa; he walked out of his own study; while I in Sunday School mode was explaining the Exodus to Jews and how to let their children know: "You are free!"

I had a right to be there in my own mind. As a Christian, I worship the God of Israel and not only that: my first husband, Alan, has the blood of the Covenant in his veins, the DNA of Abraham in his cells. He is one of the descendants Abraham was promised, circumcized on the 8th day et cetera. Therefore, my own children sparkle as Abraham’s sons.

It’s about belonging, I was going to tell that small minyan of Jews; it’s about this STORY. It’s about being a people--once no-people, now a people--called into being by Adonai.

So: SHMA! 

Well, it was a new approach from a Moabitess of a shiksa. Like Ruth, I married a Jew and like Ruth, I fell in love with Adonai. So, shmah! Shma! You are free!

When I woke up, I realized that was my Christmas: Jesus is born a JEW. 
The blood of Abraham pumped in his veins.  Son of the Covenant with Abraham, Jesus carried the DNA of his forefather David. Circumcized on the eighth day, he would know the Scriptures well enough to be wiser than all his teachers.
 “Salvation,” he would tell the Samaritan woman at the well, “comes from the Jews.”

Well, Hallelujah! Christ is born, son of David, son of Jesse, descended from Abraham and from that Moabitess Ruth, that shiksa, Jesse’s grandmother.

12/25/14

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