I didn’t know why. They lived in the back of their small grocery store at the corner of 23rd and L streets NW. All I knew was that the Colodnys were White people who never seemed to have the Christmas spirit.
Sometime later, I learned they were Jewish. Even if I had known back then, I’m not sure it would have meant anything, since my ethnic universe in the 1940s consisted of White and “Colored” people, neighborhood Chinese laundry workers, the accented Cisco Kid and his sidekick Pancho on radio, vanquished Japanese soldiers and Germans who were White, too, but because of World War II were in a class all to themselves. That was about it.
The only thing I knew about Jews came from Sunday school. I think they were called Israelites. Jesus was one. That was my childhood worldview.
A baby lying in a manger in a town called Bethlehem was my vision. “O, Little Town of Bethlehem” was my song.
At Stevens Elementary School, where each day began with the recitation of Bible verses, and the Liberty Baptist Church’s Sunday school, the Christmas season heard us singing our little hearts out with: “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.” I didn’t quite know what that meant or where Israel was. But we had the Christmas spirit and a place in mind called the Holy Land.
Nothing in my childhood, or in ensuing Christmases, prepared me for this year.
Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem, the Palestinian town in which Jesus was born, have been canceled.
The festive lights and the Christmas tree in Manger Square will be missing. So, too, crowds of visitors from around the world.
Bethlehem is in the shadow of war. Church leaders and the small congregations in the West Bank, where Bethlehem is located, will meet and pray at midnight. But there will be no marching bands or fireworks.
War, in the bloodiest and most destructive means possible, has descended. But its shadow has fallen not just over the Gaza Strip, which is home to more than 2 million Palestinians.
It’s a war that got started while Christians everywhere were preparing for Advent and the Incarnation.
The conflagration was touched off Oct. 7, when the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel, indiscriminatingly shooting, launching rockets, burning homes and committing unspeakable atrocities that left more than 1,200 dead, thousands wounded and savaged, and more than 200 hostages spirited to Gaza.
Celebrate Christmas with children living and dying under rubble? With people desperate for food and mercy?
Dare we now sing the carol “The Holy City”? “As the shadow of a cross arose upon a lonely hill. Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Hark! How the angels sing, Hosanna in the highest, Hosanna to your King! … Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Lift up your gates and sing” with the apocalypse descending on Gaza? Can it be that Israel has actually dropped some 29,000 bombs on Gaza?
Celebrate the arrival of the Prince of Peace?
The consequences of hate spread beyond the battlefield.
Since Hamas’s attack, the Anti-Defamation League has registered the highest number of antisemitic incidents during any two-month period since it began tracking them in 1979.
The ADL is not referring to criticism of Israeli government policies. It cites the presence of antisemitic rhetoric, open expressions of support for terrorism against the state of Israel and refusal by some people to accept the notion that Jews have a historic or spiritual connection to the land of Israel and deserve a state of their own. So, too, by all that’s right and fair, Palestinians.
By that measure, there is an ugliness afoot in our country. As in the Holy Land.
You don’t have to be a Middle East expert to know that the 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, most of which is under full Israeli control, are treated like dirt by many of the Israeli settlers.
The White House knows it, Congress knows it, the international community knows it. And many Christians know it, too.
And while we’re at it, during this season of “Peace on Earth and goodwill toward men,” let’s face another reality: Muslims, who are not all of one race, ethnicity, skin tone or language, also get short shrift or worse because they don’t believe Jesus is the sole pathway to God.
Which gets me back to the Colodny family and our Christmases.
My goodness. What must it have been like for them?
Our public schools would have made their son, Irving, feel unwelcome and inferior because he wasn’t a Christian.
Our Christmas carols and Easter songs would have told him we thought our religion was better than his. Racially segregated though we were, we weren’t Jews, and our Christianity put us among the majority.
Which meant diddly squat. I read somewhere that God’s eternal promise of Christmas is a closeness with humanity, forgiveness of sins and a radical, unconditional love for all. We ain’t there yet.
Despite it all, this Christmas, that’s what I’m praying for.
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