As I sit listening to George Frideric Handel’s Messiah on CBC Radio, I am aware that I am not the only Jewish listener using Christmas as a moment of reflection. I do not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, yet I cannot say it has ever felt entirely foreign. It lives in the culture, in the music, in memory, and in the strange emotional atmosphere that settles over public life at the end of December.
This year, my thoughts returned to the long history binding Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and to the unusual way Christmas still touches even those of us who stand outside it religiously.
My meditation this year grew out of several different but related sources:
- a lecture by Helen Fry on the birth of Jesus as understood through historical sources
- an episode of Honestly with Bari Weiss, “The Birth of Christianity,” featuring Paula Fredriksen, one of the world’s leading scholars of early Christianity
- lectures on Jesus and Muhammad by Tzvi Ben-Dor Benite through Lockdown University
- a lecture by David Peimar on “Christmas in the Popular Imagination,” also through Lockdown University
- CBC Radio Ideas: “Apocalypse for Christmas: Thomas Merton and the Inn”
None of this gave me clear answers. Instead, it brought me back to the questions I have carried for decades. How did Jewish messianic hope lead to Christianity, and later Islam? How did these religions emerge from the same belief in one God? And why does Christmas still hold such power, even for those of us who do not belong to it in a religious sense?
Living Between Two Worlds
I was born into a traditional Hungarian Jewish family in Montreal. By day, I went to a Protestant school in the English system. Four afternoons a week, plus Sundays, I went to Talmud Torah on Fairmount Street. My life moved between two worlds.
I grew up with the rhythm of Jewish life: Shabbat, Chanukah, Torah readings, synagogue, and a home deeply shaped by Jewish tradition. At the same time, I was immersed in the wider culture: Christmas and New Year’s, Quebec’s civic holidays, the music in the stores, the decorations in the streets, and that unmistakable feeling that the year was coming to a close.
I know the Christmas carols by heart. I know the films too, and the rituals that mark the end of one year and the beginning of the next. For me, Christmas has always been both outside my life and somehow inside it as well.
Islam entered my world differently. The first time I heard about it was not through school or television, but from my grade two Hebrew teacher, a Polish Holocaust survivor. Some days, instead of teaching us the aleph-bet, he would drift into memory and tell us what he had lived through.
He once said that before the Second World War, Jews in Poland could not imagine Germany turning on them with such brutality. Many thought of Germany as a place of culture, learning, and order. Some remembered German soldiers from the First World War and found it hard to reconcile that image with what came later.
Then he said something that stayed with me:
“Ultimately, all three religions believe in One God. We are all alike in that sense!”
He said it with genuine puzzlement. I have never forgotten it. It sounds simple enough on the surface. But that shared belief did not prevent centuries of division, misunderstanding, and cruelty. I still come back to his words.
Jesus in His Jewish World
Helen Fry’s lecture reminded me that Jesus belonged fully to the Jewish world of the late Second Temple period.
That point may sound obvious, yet history has a way of burying what once would have been self-evident. Jesus was not standing outside Judaism, looking in. He was a Jew living in a Jewish world already full of tension.
Drawing on historical sources and comparisons across the Gospels, Fry argues that Jesus was probably born not in Bethlehem but in Nazareth, in Galilee, the region where he grew up. Most historians place the historical Jesus roughly between 4 BCE and 30 to 36 CE, at a time when Jewish life was under pressure from both Greek culture and Roman power.
Within a generation, Jewish sovereignty centred on the Temple in Jerusalem came to an end. In 70 CE, the Romans destroyed the Temple, which had been the spiritual and political center of Judea. After the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, Rome crushed Jewish life once again, enslaved many Jews, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina.
Jesus lived in a time of hope and fear, and of real political danger. Messianic expectation was never only spiritual. It could quickly take on political meaning. Hearing that reminded me that the story of Jesus begins not somewhere outside Jewish life, but deep within it.
Bethlehem, Messiah, and Prophecy
What fascinates me is not only what happened, but how stories take shape and why certain versions endure.
In Jewish tradition, the Messiah, the Mashiach, is not divine. He is a human king, a descendant of the House of David, destined to restore justice, bring Jews back to God and homeland, and usher in an era of peace.
King David was born in Bethlehem. So if Jesus is to be seen as the Messiah in Jewish terms, Bethlehem becomes important.
That helped me understand something I had felt for a long time but had never put into words. The Christmas story is not only about history. It is also about interpretation, memory, and the need to connect a life to prophecy.
And yet some of the Christmas details most familiar to us, no room at the inn, the shepherds, the Magi, do not appear in two of the four Gospels. Why do they appear in the others? Why did these images, of all things, become the emotional center of the story retold every December? What is it about those scenes that people across centuries have needed to keep close?
I keep coming back to these questions because they are about both history and the way stories are told. They show that people tell stories not just to say what happened, but to understand it.
Revelation, Not Disaster
I found the original meaning of the word apocalypse especially interesting. We hear it now and think of catastrophe. But in Greek, it means revelation, an uncovering.
That feels important. In Jewish tradition, apocalypse is not simply about destruction. It is about truth being revealed, when hidden things come into the open, and history has to answer for itself.
That was the world Jesus and Paul lived in.
So when early Christian writers connected Jesus to Bethlehem, the city of David, they were not inventing details at random. They were trying to show that he fit Jewish ideas about the Messiah.
Seen that way, the Christmas story is more than a sentimental tradition. It becomes part of the human search for meaning.
When the Story Split
As Paula Fredriksen explains, the earliest followers of Jesus did not believe they were founding a new religion. They believed they were living at the edge of the End of Days, inside the final chapter of Jewish history.
That idea stayed with me because it made the split between Judaism and Christianity seem less clear-cut than people often assume.
Paul, also known as Saul of Tarsus, was a Pharisaic Jew and a Roman citizen. He did not think he was abandoning Judaism. He believed he was bringing non-Jews into the Jewish tradition while easing some of its traditional demands, such as circumcision and full observance of the mitzvot.
In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for the split between Judaism and Christianity. What began as an argument within Judaism slowly became something else, a growing separation that, over time, hardened into bitterness.
This matters to me because anti-Judaism in Christianity did not come from nowhere. It developed gradually, as religion became entangled with politics and power. We are still living with the consequences. Many Christians do not really know what Judaism teaches, and many Jews do not truly understand Christianity from the inside. In that gap, misunderstanding grows, and suspicion often takes hold on both sides.
The more I listen to these scholars, the more I feel that history is not only something to be studied. We are still living with it.
Islam as a Continuation
Tzvi Ben-Dor Benite’s lectures changed the way I think about Islam. Instead of feeling entirely separate or foreign, it began to feel like another chapter in the same long story of belief in one God.
Benite describes Muhammad as living in Mecca among tribes that worshipped many different gods. Muhammad preached belief in one God and called for moral change. He saw himself as part of a long line of prophets, calling people back to righteousness and accountability.
Some accepted his message; others rejected it. And from that early mixture of refusal and belief, Islam took shape: its own scripture, its own vision, its own political world, yet still deeply connected to Jewish sources, language, and ideas.
What changed for me was not that the differences disappeared. They did not. But Islam began to seem less like a world apart and more like another response to the same ancient human struggle: how to live before one God, how to act justly, and how to place moral demands above power.
And that brought me back, once again, to my old Hebrew teacher’s puzzled remark. All three religions believe in one God. Yet that shared belief has not prevented rivalry, violence, or division. That remains one of the saddest and most lasting facts of religious history.
What Jews Mean by Messiah
I have often found that many people assume Jews and Christians mean the same thing when they say “Messiah.” We do not, and the difference matters.
In Jewish tradition, the Messiah is not God, not half-God, and not someone who dies for the sins of the world. He is a fully human leader who brings justice, restores peace, and helps redeem the world.
He is meant to usher in an era of peace: no more war, oppression, or chaos. The world remains the world. Life continues. But it is repaired.
Within tradition, the Messiah is expected to be a descendant of the House of David. He will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and restore its role in the worship of the one God. He will gather Jewish exiles back to the Land of Israel. He will establish justice and Torah values at home and beyond, as people choose to live better lives.
Tikkun olam, repairing the world, is not a fantasy. It is something to strive toward.
Perhaps that is one reason the Jewish understanding of Messiah still speaks to me so strongly. It keeps redemption grounded in this world. Not as an escape from history, but as an effort to repair it. Not as something perfect coming down from above, but as human beings taking responsibility for what is broken.
I also came across a documentary trailer that lays out this traditional Jewish view clearly:
So What, Then, Is Christmas?
David Peimar raises a simple but important question: is Christmas now mainly a global marketing event, or does it still offer something deeper?
I suspect the answer is both.
He suggests that Christmas acts like a pause, a moment when wonder breaks through the heaviness of daily life. Yuval Harari would probably say that makes sense, since he argues that human beings live by the stories we share.
That idea feels true to me. Christmas may matter less for historical accuracy than for the story it tells, and for the hope it keeps alive during dark times.
I do not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. But I still live with its music, its images, and the feeling it carries. Every year, I find myself returning to the same questions, not because I expect final answers, but because the season opens a space for reflection that ordinary life does not always allow.
And I am not alone. This Christmas Eve, CBC Radio Ideas was thinking along similar lines, airing “Apocalypse for Christmas: Thomas Merton and the Inn,” a contemporary reflection on revelation, redemption, and transformation.
Thomas Merton saw faith in a quieter and more thoughtful way during a troubled century. His view of Christmas is not the usual sentimental one. It is more serious, more reflective, and more honest about what faith asks of us.
That also speaks to me. Not because I share his theology, but because I understand the impulse to use a familiar story as a way to think about deeper things.
How did one Jewish life, rooted in Jewish hope, interpreted through Christian faith, and echoed within Islam, come to shape the spiritual imagination of billions?
Perhaps Christmas endures because it invites us, however briefly, to remember something simple: beneath our divisions lies a shared human impulse to believe that goodness is real, that kindness matters, and that our world can still be redeemed.
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Selected Sources & References
- Paula Fredriksen, interviewed by Bari Weiss: “The Birth of Christianity”
- Helen Fry, lecture on the birth of Jesus (Lockdown University)
- David Peimar, “Christmas in the Popular Imagination” (Lockdown University)
- Tzvi Ben-Dor Benite, lectures on Jesus and Muhammad (Lockdown University)
- CBC Radio Ideas: “Apocalypse for Christmas: Thomas Merton and the Inn”
