It has often occurred to me - as it will of course have occurred to smarter people such as yourself long before the thought struck me - that it is very odd that down the millenia of history Jews have denied the authority of the teachings of the greatest of their number.
By which I mean, to be a little less opaque, that it is surely at least a little strange that Judaism should have survived into the Third Millenium with no place in its world for the message of Jesus.
But, watching a BBC programme last night about the rise of Nazism, I also wondered if it is any less odd that so many Christians down the years - including, one assumes, every supporter of the Nazis who also thought of her- or himself as a Christian - have managed to overlook, ignore or suppress the fact that the founder of their faith was himself a Jew. As one person interviewed in the programme said, "I was in the SA, but lots of members of the SA had Jewish girlfriends. How we were supposed to know where this was all going?" (Another elderly German, who initialy supported Hitler, said: "In 1934 we couldn't tell whether Nazism was something basically good, with some bad points, or something fundamentally evil, with a few good points. It was simply impossible to say.")
And while I was thinking about this I remembered the old - explicitly anti-semitic - saw which goes:
How odd of God
To choose the Jews
I find from Wikipedia that this doggerel was the work of an English journalist named Lewer. Given that he died as recently as 1976, we can assume that he had the fullest possible opportunity over his life to see where this kind of thinking can lead to.
One of the responses to Lewer captures the second thought I have referred to above:
But not so odd
As those who choose
A Jewish God
Yet spurn the Jews.
which is sometimes attributed to Ogden Nash.
I suppose it is obvious to all, and therefore hardly worth stating, that Judaism - at least, as practiced by most political and religious leaders in Israel today - could do with an immediate injection of some of the thinking of its greatest son, just as Christianity down the ages would have greatly benefited from an acknowledgement of its debt to the older faith and proper respect for the other People of the Book.
How trite this all sounds, but I suppose that is always going to be the problem with things which are glaringly obvious to all but those who will not see.
Eyeless in Gaza, 2010:
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