Line upon Line

When I first read “The Christmas Menorah” right after it was published so many years ago, my first thought was about the Savior’s plea on His last night as a mortal at the conclusion of the Last Supper:

34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.  35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.^[1]

This challenge has as much meaning today as it had in Mark’s parents’ upper room that night. Further, as people of faith we are all faced with a cultural push to marginalize our values. Our challenge is, therefore, to recognize what we have in common, and joy therein. “The Christmas Menorah” does just that.

It, therefore, is my Christmas offering to the readers of Meridian Magazine. Merry Christmas.

The Christmas Menorah

By Joan Wester Anderson

Ladies’ Home Journal

December 1997

How Two Women Took Action When A Neighbor Became The Victim Of A Hate Crime.

During the wee hours of Sunday morning, December 8, 1996, after the third night of Chanukah, someone took a baseball bat and broke the front window of a house in Newtown, Pennsylvania. It was the only house on the street with a lighted menorah in the window, and the criminals reached through the shattered glass and smashed the menorah.

The menorah is used to celebrate the eight-day Jewish festival of Lights, also known as Chanukah, which occurs around the same time as Christmas. As a Nativity scene reminds Christians of their heritage and faith, so does a menorah for Jews.

The woman who lived in the vandalized house was no stranger to prejudice. As a child, she had come with her mother, a Holocaust survivor, and her father to the United States to escape persecution in the Soviet Union. Now, as she viewed the smashed menorah, the familiar fear returned.

Lisa Keeling, a young mother who lived down the street, heard about the incident on returning from Mass with her family. She was appalled. Newtown has about fifteen hundred families, representing many cultures and religions; Lisa had never heard of anyone being singled out because of faith or ethnicity. How would she feel if someone desecrated a crche on her lawn? She wondered. Unless everyone were free to practice religious beliefs, no one could be free.

Lisa had an idea. She said to her husband, “I’d like to put a menorah in our front window, so that family will know they are not going through this alone. If the vandals come back, they’ll have o target us, too. What do you think?”

Lisa’s husband didn’t hesitate. “Go for it,” he said.

Lisa soon ran into another neighbor, Margie Alexander, who had been as horrified as Lisa when she heard the news and was also eager to act.

Margie started driving from store to store, looking for menorahs, with Lisa calling all the likely sources and relaying the information to Margie on her car phone. Word got around, and several Christian neighbors dropped by, asking where to purchase a menorah. Margie and Lisa bought up all they could and distributed them just before sundown – time to light the next candle.

Then Lisa took down the Christmas lights in one of her windows and put the menorah there, all by itself. “I didn’t want there to be any doubt about the statement we were making,” she recalls.

That night, when the Jewish woman turned onto her street, she stopped in amazement. Greeting her was a sea of orange menorah lights, shining in silent solidarity from the windows of all eighteen Christian households on her block. Blinking back tears, she went home, replaced the broken bulbs in her own menorah and put it back in the window.

Margie and Lisa are hanging menorahs again this Christmas. “It’s become the most cherished part of my Christmas,” Margie says, “and it taught me a wonderful lesson: Just one little step in the right direction can make life better for everyone.”