I can feel it

When Jews would come to Zalman all itchy and uncomfortable about Christmas, he would say, "What, do you think G-d was asleep at the wheel when that baby was born?"

When I lived in Jerusalem, I could feel the subtle change in the atmosphere during the Jewish sabbath and holidays; it was palpable.  So was Christmas in the Old City, and in Bethlehem, and in Nazareth.
So is Christmas here.
The annual Christmas Eve in Boulder's Jewish Community Center is a concert of klezmer music preceded by Chinese food.  It has been a joyous celebration each year, and the music is always splendid.  
And---I can feel other layers beneath it, of a much deeper and more universal event.  

Long ago I acquired an immunity to the commercialization of Christmas.  But the beauty of light and color in the midst of winter---that was another story.  It is somehow encouraging:  those sparks in the darkest and coldest time are a promise that Light will return.  My very Jewish grandmother, born in the Ukraine, would walk me through her middle-to-upper-working-class neighborhood at night to see her neighbors' lights and creches.  There was something irresistable in  those scenes of exotic, royal grownups suspending their own importance to bewonder a baby in a barn, surrounded by animals.

Many years ago, Zalman and I joined with priest Ed Zogby, z'l, to conduct a Christmas Seder.  We asked the participants, ¿what are the items you would put on the seder table to stimulate the questions that would evoke the story?  I remember a few:  a bowl of salt water for the amniotic fluid the baby had floated in for nine months; feathers and fur from a barnyard, some hay, some chicken feed; a cloth diaper; a clear crystal; a bowl of warm milk.  A peace symbol.
We asked:  ¿what newness from the Source of all life wants to be born now, this year, in the dark of winter,  in our hearts, for each of us to nurture and grow?
¿What astonishing spark of holy light is poised to emerge from the deep dark of this very time?

Good night; let us dream.