This week, as Christendom celebrated what it dearly believed to be the 1,943rd anniversary of the birth of Jesus, the Jews of the world still awaited their promised Messiah, and the ingathering of them, the chosen people, in Palestine. Yet in the U. S., perhaps half of the Jews gave their friends Christmas presents, told their children about Santa Claus; some even put Christmas trees in their living rooms and wreaths in their windows. So widespread is their celebration — purely social — of the Christian feast, that few rabbis bother any more to inveigh against it. Indeed, one rabbi last fortnight ardently defended Christmas-for-Jews, in the influential Protestant Christian Century. He was Louis Witt of Dayton, Ohio, leader in the Central Conference of American Rabbis, chief Reform Jewish body. Said Rabbi Witt:
"For years I, as a rabbi, like all rabbis, denounced with all the oratorical fervor and fury at my command this celebration of Christmas by my own people. . . . 'Christmas,' I pleaded, 'is for the Christian — for him it is a happy, beautiful, holy day. It is not for the Jew — for him it is at best alien, at worst fraught with bloody memories and immemorial terrors!' . . .
"Wandering through many lands, touched by many cultures, facing an ever new 'spirit of the age' in his duration through the ages, the Jew has survived in part by virtue of the force and logic of syncretism.* Judaism is an amalgam of countless creeds and cultures held together by the cement of its own native genius.
. . . The rabbi, in opposing the Christmas-Jew, may be opposing not him but a vast tide of psychic coercion, a veritable Zeitgeist, that flows through him and that renders all pleading and thundering . . . futile. . . .
"Christmas in liberal America is no longer the dogmatic, denominational, ecclesiastical institution it used to be and, alas, still is in many lands that are drenched with bigotry and blood. An amazing and increasing number of Christians no longer believe in the supernaturalness of Jesus' birth or in the divinity of his person. ... I say then, as a rabbi, thank God for Christmas ! . . . A Jew celebrating Christmas! Who knows what is back of it, what will come of it? ... Is it neither treason of Jew nor triumph of Christian but partnership of Jew and Christian in the making of a better world . . .?"
Passionately Rabbi Witt was answered in last week's Christian Century by another rabbi, Edward L. Israel of Baltimore. Said he: