A Most Influential Man and More

 

I have written several Christmas blogs including last year’s Changing Christmases, https://jgforb.blogspot.com/2022/12/. That was written in a period of mourning and loss. I must now admit that things have changed again.  I have a new friend and she has given me hope and a chance for a more inclusive Christmas.  For the first time ever, I am hosting an open house for my neighbours and friends.

Below, I have updated and reprinted a Christmas blog from several years ago.  I hope it means something to you.

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Approximately two thousand and twenty-five years ago a baby was born.  He would be named Jesus, although people have since called him Christ, The Messiah, The Saviour, the Redeemer, the Holy One or The King.  This baby must now be considered the most influential man in the history of Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, and large swaths of Africa.  His influence has directed the laws and customs of all of these places. But what about that famous birth?

In that time, old age was much younger than we are used to.  Disease, infection, and injury without modern medication meant that the average death mostly came in the 40s and even younger.  A man was middle aged when he was 25. 

It is important to remember the conditions when Jesus was born. Judea was a province of Rome and was ruled by a Roman ruler; at the time it was Herod.  However, to the Jewish people, local administration was carried out by the Jewish leaders.  There were two antagonistic groups of such leaders: The Liberals and . . . er, the Republicans and . . . er, the Pharisees and Sadducees.  They had been vying for power for over a hundred years and this caused considerable turmoil among the Jews of Judea and to the Jewish religion.  It is interesting to note that the time of Jesus’ birth, the Jewish people were a dispersed group.  As traders, emigrants, refugees, and administrators, they were prevalent in most of the known world.  It has been estimated that less than twenty-five percent of Jews actually lived in Judea. This is the world that Jesus entered.

Let’s start with his parents.  Joseph, his father, we are told was a carpenter in the town of Nazareth.  As a carpenter, he would have been a respected member of his community and well known.  His trade would have made him what we would call today, middle class.  He was neither a poor nor a rich man.  We are told that he traced his ancestry to King David.  We are also told that he was older than Mary.  Mary is described as a young virgin.  In that time, that would put her age at about thirteen to fifteen.  That was the age that people got married.  We can get some idea that she was that young by noting that thirty-three years later, when Jesus was crucified, she was still with him.  If she had been in her twenties when Jesus was born, she would have been very old and perhaps deceased; unlikely to have followed Jesus to Jerusalem. 

The well-known story of the conditions at Jesus’ birth, how he was born in a stable and slept in a manger are quite plausible. The family had travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem to “be taxed”. It was actually a form of census taking. This was a Roman decree that applied to all of the Roman Empire.  This was long before the days of Holiday Inns and Best Westerns, and Expedia advanced reservations. When you travelled, you took your chances that there would be someplace where you could get a meal and a place to sleep at night.  Bethlehem was not a large town, perhaps only a few hundred people, and the places available to rest would be very limited; perhaps one or two inns.  There was no Bethlehem Hilton. But with the taxation decree forcing many people to travel to their family home, any town would have been sorely tested to accommodate everyone that needed a place to stay.  Jesus’ family were probably not the only ones that night to stay in places like stables, barns and even in the open.  Some later accounts state that the “stable” may, in fact, have been a cave, perhaps used to house animals or to store grain and animal feed.

Jesus had a mission.  He started that mission when he was about thirty years old, certainly not a young man for those times.  He became preacher or teacher (rabbi in Hebrew) in his country of Judea where he preached to his fellow Jews.  His mission seems to be to reform Judaism from the turmoil and strictures it was saddled with at that time.  Perhaps he hoped to put a more human face on the religion.  Jesus was born a Jew, and he died a Jew, condemned ironically enough by his own people.  Why?  Probably because Jesus was not the Messiah that the Jewish people wanted. They would have wanted a warrior king, like David, to rid them of the Romans and their other adversaries.  Jesus did not envision Christianity.  That was done by Paul.  Based on the fact that Jesus was Jewish, you have to wonder how so many Christians are anti-Semitic.

Anti-

Anti-

There is a lot of talk these days about anti-semitism and anti-Muslim feelings as a result of the current Israeli-Hamas “war” (as Israel refers to it).  There are also strong feelings among those that are anti-Black, anti-indigenous, anti-Asian or anti-everything.  I wonder if there isn’t an anti-white movement.

A couple of years ago I wrote a short story about discrimination that I would like to share with you here.  It might be a bit of a lesson on where we might be.

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I’m Not Prejudiced

Sam Turnbull was not prejudiced.  If you asked him, he would have said, “I am not prejudiced against any colour or religious group.”  And Sam believed it.  But nonetheless Sam was very proud of his own heritage.

Samuel Josiah Turnbull, to give him his full name was proud of the fact that his ancestry in Canada went back to the pioneering days.  The first Josiah Turnbull had immigrated to Canada as a young man in 1820 and had worked for Colonel John By as a surveyor during the building of the Rideau Canal.  He married the daughter of one of the canal builders and had a family of seven children, one of whom formed the family line of Sam Turnbull.   Sam took his ancestry quite seriously and had traced his lineage right back to Josiah Turnbull’s parents.  Sam’s wife, Karen, said she sometimes felt like an unwelcome newcomer since her family had only immigrated to Canada in 1921 in the aftermath of World War One.  Sam made sure that his two children knew of their heritage in every detail.  He also frequently admonished them to avoid prejudice of any type.

A couple of years earlier, a new neighbour, a recent immigrant from Britain had move into the house across the street from Sam.  Their names were Charles and Penelope Beckwith.  Sam was ecstatic about the new neighbours both because the couple seemed to be real English gentlepeople and because they brought wonderful stories of Britain.  Sam and the new neighbour became very good friends.

Sam worked for the federal government as a middle manager.  He hoped one day get into the executive SX category.  But the going was slow.  One day a new person came into the same department as Sam.  Bobby Hall seemed a very nice and hard-working man of about mid-thirties, but Sam found it hard to tell the age of Afro-Canadians, which Bobby and his wife were.  Sam had barely spoken to Bobby, but one day he came up to Bobby and asked, “Are you one of those Somali’s that have been flooding the city recently?”  Bobby was taken aback and wasn’t sure how to answer this.  Finally, he collected his thoughts and answered, “My parents are Canadian as am I.  In fact, my family came to Canada in the late 1700s as slaves in Nova Scotia.  When they were freed, they stayed in Nova Scotia.  In fact, my great-great-great grandfather was one of the first Canadian born winners of the Victoria Cross when he was a gunner in the Royal Navy[1].  I came to Ottawa to go to Ottawa University and stayed after I got my master’s degree.”  Sam was somewhat taken aback himself, particularly the fact that Bobby Hall’s family had been in Canada longer than his.

The house next door to Sam’s went up for sale.  Sam and Karen paid very close attention to people who came to view the house.  A couple from the Indian sub-continent seemed to be very interested in the house.  They had a number of children.  Sam could envision a strong smell of curry and spices permeating the neighbourhood. Charles seemed excited at the thought of Indian cooking saying it was a favourite in England where you could always find good food in Indian restaurants.  Sam wasn’t too sure.  As it transpired the couple did not buy the house and Sam was relieved.  But he reminded himself, he was not prejudiced.

The couple who did buy the house next door turned out to be full-blooded Algonquin aboriginals, Vic, and Tina Proudfoot.  Vic had lived off the reserve since he was a child.  Tina had spent most of her life on a reserve in northern Ontario until she came south to go to Carleton University where she met Vic.  They were married right after they both graduated.  Sam was uncomfortable because all the stories he had heard about conditions on these reserves: run down houses; a large number of big dogs; guns and drugs; and dirty water.  He wondered if this was the way aboriginal people lived in the city.  He wasn’t prejudiced, he told himself, just concerned about his property value.  Vic and Tina turned out to be model neighbours.  Vic did a lot to fix up his house and garden and Tina kept her house spotless.  Sam had nothing to worry about.  Vic and Tina turned out to be very sociable and soon a significant friendship grew up between the two couples.

Sam wasn’t prejudiced but he was starting to think that there were a lot of new immigrants showing up everywhere.  He didn’t know how the country was going to be able to handles them all.  Were there enough jobs and were these people qualified for them?  Where would they live?  These immigrants were also different.  They weren’t from Europe anymore.  There was a new political party being talked about and Sam became interested.  He liked the things the party was saying about the dangers of too many immigrants.  But Sam found out the leader of the party was a French-Canadian and Sam couldn’t put up with that. 

The culmination came for Sam when a family of Syrian refugees bought the house two doors down the street from Sam’s house.  These were strangers who didn’t seem to know a word of English although they spoke a bit of French.  Sam didn’t know a thing about them, but he was upset at their arrival in his neighbourhood.  On the Saturday that the new folks were moving in, Sam was standing outside watching them.  Just then, Vic came up behind Sam and asked what was going on.  Sam used the occasion to launch into a tirade about these new neighbours and all of these immigrants that were pouring into the country.  Vic listened patiently until Sam had finished.  Vic then turned to Sam and said, “Now you know how my ancestors felt.”

* * *

As you can see, prejudice comes in many forms and at one point or another, we may all be guilty of it.  It isn’t always about terrorism and hatred.

 

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[1] William Hall, VC.  A Canadian gunner with the Royal Navy who fought in the Crimean War and the Indian Uprisings.

 

The Hamas – Israeli War

 

“It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.”

  - Malcolm Forbes

So, another tragic situation arises in the Middle East.  I’m not sure how to talk about this other than I see it as madness.

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

Jeannette Rankin

A new story, but also an old one. And one can sympathize with both sides.  One has to go back in history to see where the conflict lies.  Under Muslim rule, notably under the Ottoman Empire, in the Middle East, including Palestine/Israel, life was pretty benign.  Jews and Arabs lived in relative harmony.  Then came World War 1 and the demise of this empire and British control of Palestine.  Prime Minister Balfour promised the Jews a homeland. But this did not transpire right away.

World War 2 and the Holocaust changed things.  Sympathy for the Jewish plight led to more demands by the world for a safe place for the Jews to settle.  On 25 November 1947, the United Nations announced a Partition Plan for Palestine that envisioned a Palestinian State and a Jewish State.  The British Mandate for Palestine, which had existed since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire expired on 14 May 1948, the Israeli state was proclaimed.  On 15 May 1948, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria invaded the new country with the avowed purpose of destroying Israel and driving the Jews “into the sea”.  Israel survived that war as well as the 6 Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.  Skirmishes, raids, and rocket attacks were continued by Hamas, the PLO and Hezbollah up until this October 7th.  Israel has always had to fight for its existence despite efforts over the years to normalize relations with Arab states, starting with Egypt in 1978.  Israel has a right to be paranoid.  Many of you probably know this history, a bit of reminding doesn’t hurt.

The Palestinians, the poor Palestinians. In many ways they are the victims and pawns in this history. During the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, the Palestinians were encouraged by their Arab neighbours to temporarily leave the country with the promise that with victory they would have the country back, reaping the spoils of war. They became the victims.  But victory never came.  The now homeless Palestinians were not welcomed into their Arab neighbouring countries, but huddled into enclaves on the fringes of Israel, in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon. They became the pawns. Their populations grew and they had nowhere to expand.  And, in the West Bank, Israel started to encroach on their territory.  It could be said that in response to some of the skirmishes and rocket attacks, Israel overreacted with bombing and shelling of Palestinian territory.  Paranoia will do that to you sometimes. 

So, who is to blame for this current war?  There are a number of players who could be singled out.  The Arabs for one for encouraging the Palestinian diaspora in the first place, and for not attempting to absorb the Palestinians in the intervening years.  The Israelis in turn for overreacting to Palestinian attacks, and also for not dealing with the Palestinian authorities on trying to find a solution.  The United States and other allies for continually supporting Israel at the expense of other Arab states.  The United Nations Security Council members who veto UN attempts to broker a solution, preferring instead to try to keep the area in turmoil for their own geostrategic advantage.  So, it could be said that it is everyone’s problem but therefore nobody’s.

There will be no winners in this war.  It will solve nothing.  It will only mean the death of combatants and the innocent alike.  However, it may show several countries that a more permanent and equitable solution must be found for all of the victims, Israeli and Palestinians alike and therefore spur Arab and Western countries to action.

 “All war is absurd.  For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s a little strange when you think about it.”

Malcolm Gladwell, from his book The Bomber Mafia