By a quirk of fate, I’ve found myself tangled up in the question of Santa Claus. Happily, some learned rabbis had once helped me sort it out.
The latest uproar came after Fox News’ Megyn Kelly responded to blogger Aisha Harris, who’d written a Slate.com piece suggesting that — as the headline put it — “Santa Clause Should Not Be a White Man Anymore.”
Harris wrote about how, as a child, she used to ask her father whether Santa was brown, like her family, or “was he really a white guy.” Her father told her that “jolly old St. Nicholas magically turned into the likeness of the family that lived there.” She went on to suggest that Santa be replaced with a penguin.
Kelly wasn’t buying it. Santa “just is white,” she broadcast, “Santa is what he is.” She evinced a respectful sympathy for the discomfort Aisha Harris had written about experiencing as a child. But “just because it makes you feel uncomfortable,” Kelly declared, “doesn’t mean it has to change.”
The DC-based Politico promptly interviewed a professor named Laura Nasrallah, who teaches New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. She floored the site’s readers by declaring “the question over Santa Claus being white” to be “a really odd claim because Santa doesn’t exist.”
At this point, The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto e-mailed me to suggest that The New York Sun, which I edit, “weigh in.”
The Sun had standing here because it originally broke the news that Santa Claus exists. It did so in the most famous newspaper editorial ever issued.
It ran in 1897 under the headline “Is There a Santa Claus?” Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, who lived on West 95th Street, had written to the paper to say that some of her “little friends say there is no Santa Claus.” She asked the paper to tell her the truth.
“Virginia,” the Sun told her, “your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.”
“All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little,” the Sun said. “In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”
And then the famous sentences: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. . . ”
“Not believe in Santa Claus!” the Sun exclaimed. “You might as well not believe in fairies!”
The Sun’s answer to Miss O’Hanlon became a great classic. Yet when the Sun passed into the hands of an editor who is Jewish, I wondered what to do about it. Readers kept asking for an annual reprint, but I was as flummoxed as Aisha Harris.
So a few years ago I did what I often do in such cases. I took the question to a rabbi. Several of them, in fact.
And not just any rabbis but genuine Torah sages of a rank and degree of Orthodoxy that would be unquestioned in any yeshiva. I sent them the whole editorial of more than a century before — including the part where the Sun agreed, in effect, with Aisha Harris’ father.
“You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus,” the Sun told Virginia, “but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”
The rabbis were unanimous. They found it delightful, a joyous articulation of faith: “Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.”
So on the question of Santa, the Sun is standing by its story. And to readers of The Post, Merry Christmas.