{"id":26642,"date":"2010-12-16T09:48:40","date_gmt":"2010-12-16T17:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=26642"},"modified":"2010-12-16T09:48:40","modified_gmt":"2010-12-16T17:48:40","slug":"how-does-a-yeshiva-boy-miss-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=26642","title":{"rendered":"How Does A Yeshiva Boy Miss Christmas?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dennis Prager writes for the Jewish Journal<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When I was 20, I spent my junior year in college in England. When classes let out for the last two weeks of December, I traveled to Morocco, where something life-changing occurred.<\/p>\n

What happened was that I felt a longing, even an emptiness, I had never before experienced. Something was missing from my life, but I could not at first identify it. I knew it was not about being without friends or family \u2014 after all, I hadn\u2019t been with family or friends in England for the previous three months. And it wasn\u2019t about being alone \u2014 I had gotten used to traveling by myself.<\/p>\n

This sense of missing something kept gnawing at me, until one day I realized what it was: I missed the Christmas season. I missed that time of year in America.<\/p>\n

At first I denied it. Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home and in yeshivas, I had obviously never celebrated Christmas. How could I miss something that I never had? And being so Jewish, how could I miss the quintessential Christian holiday? It seemed religiously wrong, maybe even sinful.<\/p>\n

But I could not conjure up any other explanation: I was in a non-Christian country, and therefore I heard no Christmas songs, saw no Christmas decorations, and Dec. 25 was just another day.<\/p>\n

I subsequently spent a lot of time reflecting on this. It made little sense to me: Why would a yeshiva boy miss the Christmas season?<\/p>\n

I came to two life-changing realizations. First, though my yeshiva world did everything possible to deny the existence of Christmas \u2014 for example, we had school on Christmas Day, and \u201cmidwinter vacation,\u201d as it was called, was at the end of January, not at the end of December \u2014 this yeshiva boy really liked the Christmas season.<\/p>\n

And, second, this Jew, whose yeshiva upbringing taught him to think of himself only as a Jew, was in fact an American as well.<\/p>\n

Though it took more than a few years to fully realize just how deeply American I was and how much I appreciated American Christianity, it was Christmas in Morocco in 1968 that first opened my eyes. And I was never the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dennis Prager writes for the Jewish Journal: When I was 20, I spent my junior year in college in England. When classes let out for the last two weeks of December, I traveled to Morocco, where something life-changing occurred. What … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[24581,24583,24582,29761,24580,24579],"class_list":["post-26642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dennis-prager","tag-celebrated-christmas","tag-christmas-season","tag-college-in-england","tag-dennis-prager","tag-miss-christmas","tag-yeshiva-boy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t