Posted on 06/07/2002 9:20:51 PM PDT by WaterDragon
I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish enclave in New York and have spent most of my life here. Over the better part of the past decade, however, my work has brought me away from New York and, very often, into the company of devout Christians. If my New York accent didn't mark me as an outsider in the Bible Belt, then my yarmulke certainly did. But the people I've met there -- and of whom, quite candidly, my environment had prepared me to be wary -- have overwhelmingly been warm, appreciative, and disarmingly respectful of my commitment to my own faith. I did not expect to find these friends, but it has been a blessing.
A child and grandchild of survivors, I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Jackbooted Nazis populated my childhood nightmares and, to be honest, I still can't hear German spoken without feeling an inchoate sense of unease. This is not a judgement about today's Germany, it is a personal confession of how deeply the genocide of my parents' generation continues to haunt me.
But I also feel, and at the same profound level, a sense of gratitude for the good Christians of that dark time. While virtually my entire family was killed, my mother was rescued by a Christian family, who raised her from infancy until the age of 5.
Recently the ADL ran a national ad campaign reprinting the text of a Los Angeles Times op-ed by Ralph Reed, formerly executive director of the Christian Coalition. The piece is a moving personal testament of kinship and empathy with the Jews who are today frightened by the reemergence of anti-Semitism on a global scale.
Reed's recollections of his own formative lessons of the Holocaust are remarkable for their simplicity and nobility. Pondering his words, I was struck by one line in particular which -- while certainly unintended as such by Reed -- appear to me to pose a moral challenge to American Jews. From his mother's stories of those Christians who resisted Hitler, he writes, he absorbed the lesson "that standing up for my faith meant defending the right of Jews to practice their own.
In the post-Holocaust world, American Jewish communal institutions have sought to defend against the tyrannies of majoritarian religion. But vigilance in preventing the establishment of an official state religion has calcified into an unpleasant extremism, and an intolerance of public expressions of the private faith that is shared by a majority of Americans. Have American Jews erred for too long on the side of suppressing the faith of good people? Were the words "God Bless America" -- posted on September 12 on the marquee of a public school, and immediately the target of a legal challenge -- truly the least bit threatening to Jewish survival? In the struggle for our own freedoms, have we diminished those of others?....(snip)
Please read the complete article found HERE
There is an anti-Christian bias that is growing, too. 45 Million Christians have died since 1920-genocide on a major scale and is continuing unabated. The last Holocaust will be against both Christian and Jew.
Which environment is Mr. Ballabon referring to here – his New York environment or his Jewish environment. Just what, exactly, taught him to be wary of Christians?
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