As a Jewish child growing up on Long Island in the 1980s, I was entranced by Christmas. I loved riding the train into Manhattan and gazing at the shop windows on Fifth Avenue that were filled with robot-like mechanical figures raising glasses of egg nog, stuffing Santa's bag or decorating Christmas trees. And I enjoyed going to lavish holiday parties at the upstate home of my aunt and uncle, who belonged to that renegade category of Jews Who Celebrate Christmas, and whose tree, for sheer size and amount of tinsel, could not be surpassed by anyone in their neighborhood.
Little did I know that just a few decades later, the tables would be turned, and my own Jewish rituals would become just as attractive to Christians as their customs had been to me and to so many other Jews of my generation.
Jewish rituals used to seem arcane, mysterious, even impenetrable to those who were not MOTs ("Members of the Tribe"). Conducted in Hebrew and Aramaic, accompanied by odd gestures and movements, using unfamiliar ritual items and bizarre-tasting foods--Judaism was not for the uninitiated. But nowadays, there are no Jewish customs that have not been adopted by non-Jews. Non-Jews are holding Passover seders in thousands of churches, blowing shofars (rams' horns) at funerals and other public gatherings, getting married under chuppot (Jewish wedding canopies), giving bar and bat mitzvahs for their children, studying Kabbalah--the list goes on.
By the end of this century, it seems quite conceivable that the vast majority of those practicing Judaism will not be Jewish, but will be drawn to particular Jewish customs either as a nod to their Jewish ancestors or because connecting to Judaism--and to the rituals that they imagine, with or without historical justification, that Jesus must have performed--strengthens their faith in Christianity.
Much of the phenomenal growth of Jewish customs among Christians these days is due to intermarriage; hundreds of thousands of Christian parents lit Chanukah menorahs with their children this year--married to Jewish partners, these non-Jews are helping to perpetuate Judaism in their families for the sake of their spouses and in-laws. Jews have gone, in an astonishingly short time, from being a reviled outsider group to a model minority, perhaps the most admired group in America.
With the decline of anti-Semitism, partly because it was untenable after the Holocaust, and partly as a result of the landmark 1960s "Nostra Aetate" ruling of the Catholic Church that formally repudiated the charge of deicide against the Jews, interest in Judaism has grown apace. For Christians who view the Last Supper of Jesus as a Passover seder (with which historians of religion disagree, given that the seder developed centuries after the death of Jesus), re-enacting the rituals of that dinner--reinterpreted, of course, according to Christian theology--is tremendously meaningful as a way of transmitting the basic tenets of Christianity.
Ironically, this surge of interest in Passover among Christians comes at a time when many Jewish Americans are forsaking the ritual (which used to be almost universally celebrated, even among secular Jews), along with so much else of their religious inheritance. So rituals like the seder are kind of floating around, available to be picked up by non-Jews and transformed in their own image. Why would a Christian couple not want to be married with a ketubah (traditional Jewish wedding contract), with references to Jesus included in the text? Why not nail a mezuzah (small case that contains Biblical verses in Hebrew) on one's doorpost? Why not wear Jewish synagogue garb like a tallit (prayer shawl) and kipah (skullcap)? Wouldn't Jesus have done all of these things?
Then again, non-Jews are drawn to Judaism for a wide range of motivations. From college students of all faiths who take courses on the Holocaust because they have experienced trauma in their own lives and want to read the literature of survival, to Korean-Americans who study the Talmud because they believe that it holds the secrets to Jewish economic success (after all, almost 12 percent of the world's billionaires are Jewish, even though Jews make up only a fifth of one-percent of the world's population) to African-American parents who throw their teenagers "black mitzvahs" so that they won't feel left out of what their Jewish friends are doing--Judaism serves a plethora of different purposes.
As the now-classic ads in the New York City subway proclaimed in the 1960s, "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's Real Jewish Rye."
Nowadays, you don't have to be Christian to love Judaism either. But it certainly doesn't hurt.