By Kathryn Jean Lopez
Monday, November 03, 2025
If you’re walking in the Old City of Jerusalem at 4:00 a.m.,
you are likely a Christian, Jew, or Muslim on the way to prayer.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built where we believe
Christ was crucified, is one of the most beautiful churches in the world. There,
a priest and friend celebrated Mass for another friend of mine, Andrew
Breitbart, the morning after Andrew had died unexpectedly from a heart attack, in
2012. We prayed for his eternal soul and for the consolation of his family.
When
Andrew died, I was on my first pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I had the
opportunity to go again, not too long ago. I went to the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre at an early hour. I wasn’t going to; I was tempted to hit snooze. But
I heard the Muslim call to prayer, and I was reminded that the most important
thing we can do in our lives is to pray. It’s the best that we’ve got.
During
that most recent trip, I was having some health issues, so during our tour of
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I found a spot to sit, right below where
Christ had been crucified. This trip was sponsored by the Philos Project, which
wanted to convey what was important about the land to people of various
Abrahamic religions. Jonathan Silver, editor of the online magazine Mosaic,
published by the Tikvah Fund, was with us. He found me at my spot and joined
me. We are both New Yorkers. I run into him now and again in the Amtrak station
named after Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (Moynihan, the Democratic senator who
would be succeeded by Hillary Clinton, spoke out against partial-birth
abortion, reminding us that we do not have to live in ideological silos.)
During
our time under Calvary, I remembered a Good Friday past, in New York. That Palm
Sunday, there had been an attack on a Coptic church in Egypt. In an act of
prayerful solidarity, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan went to a Coptic church
in Manhattan with an ecumenical crowd. Rabbi Joseph Potasnick talked about how
he was afraid to go outdoors on Good Friday when he was young, because it was
believed that Christians would retaliate against Jews for the death of Jesus.
But that’s the thing. Jewish men and women are not the enemy. Sin, instead, is
in our own hearts. That’s why Christians are Christians. We are imperfect
sinners in need of a savior. And antisemitism is evil.
We can’t tolerate those who excuse or deny the Holocaust.
We often hear people talk about foreign policy in the Middle East with regard
to Israel, but we should be able to recognize whenever such talk devolves to
little more than an expression of hatred of Jews. We can have opinions about
certain policy positions taken by State of Israel, but we must always stand
with our Jewish brothers and sisters against hatred. Adopt love for others. It
is what matters most.
No comments:
Post a Comment