Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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More Weird Religious Visions from Jersey

By Daniel Brenner

Now that party goers have honked in the “baby” of the New Year, and the symbolic promise that 2001 brings, I’m drawn to the classic scenes of loss marking December’s farewell.

Have you ever mourned, for a moment, as discarded wreaths wait by the road for the public works truck that will mulch them into their next incarnation? I do this every year. But this year, as I walked by one such pile of wreaths and other evergreens, I saw a sign. Literally, a sign. Tied to a tree. “Help Yourself,” it read.

Help yourself? Who would want them? I asked myself. Now that they have lost their fragrance, what can they be? Do they make good kindling? Aren’t they smoky?

In a state of confusion over the sign, and running late for my train, I went talmudic, and flipped the sign’s meaning in my head. “Help yourself” I read as a general statement of good advice—i.e., self-help. Then I thought of those wreaths lying there abandoned, and I saw this as a profound metaphor of warning of what happens when you are detached from the “tree.” “Tree” meaning your family, your community and, ultimately, your roots.

And then I reached into the recesses of my internal metaphor generator and went further. I know that some Christians have creatively interpreted the wreaths to have a connection to Jesus’ crown of thorns (politely overlooking the historic evidence that wreaths were a 19th century English fad). That being the case, I understood these discarded wreaths to have an ever more complex, “Jewish” meaning. The message was this: crowns of thorns, the mantle of scorn and reward for suffering, must be discarded in this era of “help yourself.” If so, this will surely affect my rabbinate, as religious leaders, Christian or Jewish, who use images of suffering to justify their beliefs will find themselves discarded.

But then I thought -- maybe the message was: “To help yourself, put on a discarded crown of thorns!” Just as the Talmudic rabbis taught us that we are to be “a nation of priests,” perhaps the message here was: “Be a nation of messiahs.” This thought shocked me – perhaps this display is the greatest irony of all-time, a disposal of the material cultural artifacts of Christmas that actually cuts to the heart of the Christmas message!

Were this trash and homemade sign more than just that? Was it a vision intended to confirm my Jewish sentiment or shake it?

I’m still not sure what this all means, but it has taught me once again that this chaotic, random world, like a thousand monkeys on typewriters, is sending me messages.

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