I feel bad. Today was the last day of school before winter break, and there was an assembly for all the music programs. It really went well – Charles played his banjo with the jazz band, and the chorus sounded better than they ever have. The last thing they did was the Hallelujah Chorus, which was announced as “a sing-along.” We all stood up, and somebody put the lyrics on the slide projector so we could all read them. Most people tittered or just stood there, but some of us did actually sing with the chorus. I tried to remember the alto line, and Maura did her best at making up the soprano part. We all commented on the humorous repetition of “for-ev-er and ev-er, for-ev-er and ev-er,” on the projector, and we went off to lunch.

Which was all well and good until I saw Ben on the third floor. “Kostya walked out,” he was saying to Brian, and both were looking very grave. “I mean, he was crying. People were saying ‘Just get over it,’ but it’s not the same with him. He was persecuted - he could have been killed. You can’t tell him to get over it.”

I continued to the guidance office, Ben’s words big in my mind. I knew that Kostya was Jewish and from the Ukraine, and that he was fervent about keeping religion out of schools, but it hadn’t occurred to me before that the Hallelujah Chorus would seriously offend anyone. The words ran through my mind again: “The king-dom of this world is be-come the king-dom of our Lord, and of his Christ.” When I came out of the office, I met Kostya storming down the stairs with Ben and Brian at his heels.

I didn’t see him again until my literature class, when he was looking calmer, and even smiled when Charles and the teacher had a banjo-guitar jam to fill the empty class period. I wanted to say something to him to make things better, to tell him nobody wanted him to be hurt, but I didn’t know anything I could say that wouldn’t have sounded utterly stupid.

When I came home the house was empty, so I took out the Advent wreath and lit the candle I had forgotten to do Sunday. The whole thing took on such a different meaning, though, after seeing the look on Ben and Brian’s faces. My religious beliefs don’t really fit in with any one religion, but a lot of the traditions and ceremonies I like are Christian in origin. And I’d never thought of it as a an offensive or exclusive thing before, but today lighting the candles and singing the week’s verses of “O Come O Come Emmanuel”, it seemed somehow as if I were part of the oppressors, the persecutors.

I almost wish it had been a single racist statement made by some other people so I could say, “They shouldn’t have said that,” or somehow separate myself from it. Somehow it seems worse because it was the entire school doing it, all of us standing in the auditorium and me taking part.

And yet I can’t really find anything wrong in it. The choral director put it in the program, and it’s traditional to stand just because some king did. And I like singing, so I don’t think it was wrong to sing. And although I guess it goes against the spirit of the establishment clause, I don’t think performing Handel in school is really too much. It's just that the Chorus takes on a very different meaning if you’re from a place where they used to tell everybody to stand up and sing something and if you didn’t, you were possibly going to get shot. (We all know how friendly the USSR was to Jews.) I keep feeling that we were all responsible for that hurt, and I wish it hadn’t happened.

December 8
December 20