This is a happy day, today. My youngest daughter celebrates her 22 birthday and it is the day after the Giants have won the Super Bowl, the team that I have rooted for since around 1950. That brings up the whole matter of who I am. I should offer you that.
AS I have stated, I was born in New York. It was the end of World War II. The Battle of the Bulge was heading to a close, the death knell for the Nazi juggernaut. Though they would fight on for several more months, it would be pointless and cause the unnecessary deaths of thousands. My father ahd been sent to defend the Canal Zone from an attack that never came.
All my grandparents and my mother were born in Norway, as was my mother, though her father was already an American citizen, so she would be also, coming here at three months.
By the time I was six, I was living in a city housing project, not one for the poor, but one that was built for the lower middle class to make room for some of the many new families that the war and post-war had created, but private housing had not kept up with. My father was a carpenter, like my mother's father, doing the form carpentry that was necessary for building skyscrapers, roads and bridges.
As they were able, more and more of the Catholic and Protestant familes moved out and bought homes. But carpentry work was too uncertain for my father to get a mortgage from a New York bank and we were there for the long haul. Both of my parents would die while living at that apartment. So, we would live in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Further, seventy-five percent of the students in my high school were Jewish and eighty-five percent of the students that graduated the college I attended in the city.
It was much like living in another culture and my parents considered us to be like embassy employees abroad, where we were to always to show the best of what it meant to be Norwegian-Americans, Lutherans, Protestants, gentiles. They were not alone in this. People of other ethnic groups and most of the Jewish people we knew were involved in a similar enterprise. If a member of any ethnic or religious group behaved outrageously so that it was plain to all, the sense of shame was palpable. So, the needed ethnic peace was maintained.
With time, a trust relationship was built between my parents and the Jewish people who surrounded us. My mother was someone who a woman could share good news and also to vent without her words getting around. My father became someone who could be relied on for another opinion. Jewish men liked to have a variety of opinions to consider when making decisions. His strong opinions and advice were valued.
As he became older, and my brother and I were out of the home, he found himself giving fatherly counsel to a number of those Jewish people who had lost their fathers to an early death. I'm sure that it was not something he sought out, and I was unaware of it until after his death. When my father died, My mother could not cry because of a disease that prevented it, but several Jewish women came and wept for him, according to their custom for one another, and not only according to custom but from a sense of personal loss. Similarly, a number of Jewish men came to me in the months after his death, representing different groups of men he knew in ours and neighborhoods that surrounded us, telling me of how profoundly the men in their circles missed him - dozens and dozens of them, all tolled. I don't think he thought of himself as an ambassador, but, in the end, I think that was what he was.
In all this, we learned how complex a people the Jewish people are. Almost any stereotype you can devise excludes more than it includes. We also learned that people that have been persecuted for thousands of years can wear their pain very close beneath their skin. And that is understandable. Anti-semitism is not.
In recent years, we have beem menbers of churches and known many Jewish people who have come to a kowledge of Jesus as Messiah and Lord. They bring with them several different ways of seeing the New Testament, undrstanding things that could easily be missed by those who have no connect to the culture that Jesus was born into.
Next: about my spiritual journey from religion to faith.
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