Raymond J. de Souza: Jews are the Chosen People, deal with it

The notion has always been offensive to non-Jews, but it shouldn't be

Published Dec 22, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

A bullet hole is seen in the entrance to the Young Israel of Montreal synagogue on May 30. Photo by Dave Sidaway/Montreal Gazette

The great Canadian scandal of 2024 is part of the great scandal of history, which we celebrate at Christmas.

“Scandal” here has two meanings. Both mean shocking, but one regrettable the other an occasion to marvel.

As to the latter, theologians call it the “scandal of particularity,”meaning that God does not promulgate a set of principles, like a global constitution or learned treatise. Rather, the Christian faith is a story, with particular characters acting in particular places at particular times. And God is the principal character, who acts in history even though He exists outside of time; who enters the created world even though He is its creator. It is the marvelous scandal of particularity.

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And that scandal is related to Canada’s shameful scandal of 2024, the ugliness of antisemitism in our streets.

Just this week, a Montreal synagogue was fire-bombed for the second time. In a year-end essay for 2023, Montreal was already described as the most dangerous North American city for Jews.

Earlier this month, our Terry Glavin published a 7000-word report, “The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada”. It is an immense sadness to read. What has happened to Canada?

‘Heartbreaking’ is a word that well describes the way Canadian Jews see their predicament these days,” writes Glavin. “In part, that’s because antisemitism is no longer just some protest culture eccentricity. It’s going mainstream, from the bottom to the top.”

“I have never seen in all my life such a thing, such expressions from people of all ages, such expressions of apprehension, of isolation, insecurity, foreboding, expressed in different ways,” Glavin quotes Irwin Cotler, 84, who now lives under 24-hour security protection due to threats on his life. In Montreal! In Canada!

“I see it when I meet with students; I see it when I meet with elderly people. I hear, ‘This is not the Canada I know,’ or ‘This is not the Canada I came to.’ Or ‘This is not the Canada I have ever experienced. This is something else,’ says Cotler about the dread that surrounds Canadian Jewry.

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How is the one scandal related to the other?

The greatest scandal of particularity is that God has a Chosen People. He created a people for Himself — a marginal people, hardly to be noticed amongst the empires of the ancient world. That is offensive to a certain aggressively egalitarian mindset.

“To be quite frank, we do not at all like the idea of a ‘chosen people’,” observed Christian writer C.S. Lewis. “Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree.”

The election of Abraham is already highly particular, and grows narrower still, and Israel is divided, as some of the tribes are lost, so that eventually, in the Christian understanding of things, “the process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear.”

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That spear, as Lewis writes, is a single child born in Bethlehem — itself a small town in a small nation — of the Virgin Mary. Christmas is the scandalous feast of particularity.

Secular fundamentalists and radical egalitarians and diversity absolutists — the Trudeau Liberal Party’s core coalition, if it can still be said to have one — do not like that scandal of particularity, particularly, one might say, that most particular of particularities, biblical religion. While the Liberal government would be horrified to think itself antisemitic, per se, it is completely flummoxed about what to do about antisemitism. Hence, it flourishes on our streets, as Glavin documents.

Thus we have a prime minister who, alone amongst western leaders, has not set foot in Israel since the Hamas massacre, refusing to make a solidarity visit to the most particular of lands, the land of Israel, the Promised Land, or — in a term that likely is like fingernails on a blackboard at Mélanie Joly’s global affairs department — the Holy Land.

Thus we have a government whose military response to the Hamas attacks has been to ban Canadian arms exports to … Israel.

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Thus we have hoodlums in the streets, and our police seem strangely incapable of offering a constructive response, aside from advising Jews in Montreal to appear less, well, Jewish. In Canada!

There is another offense taken to the scandal of particularity. It is not that God ought not choose the particular, but that the particular choice is rejected. That is the scourge of religiously-motivated hatred and violence, which we have also seen on Canadian streets. Throughout history it takes different forms — and Christian nations have not been immune to it.

Thirty years ago, in his interview book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, St. John Paul II reflected on life under the Nazi occupation in Poland; he grew up in a village not far from Auschwitz.

Calling antisemitism “a great sin against humanity,” he recalled telling an Israeli politician that “this extraordinary people continues to bear the signs of its divine election.”

The official agreed, but added, “If only it could cost less.”

Divine election costs. The Child born in Bethlehem would know that well; crucifixion would follow.

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The marvelous scandal of particularity is that a Jewish Child is born and that “salvation comes from the Jews” (John 4:22).

The shameful scandal of particular hatred endures; Jews are reviled on the streets of Canada.

The first scandal we celebrate at Christmas; the second scandal we lament at the end of this heavy year.

To all my readers – a happy and holy Christmas!

And this year to my Jewish friends, the words we Catholics proclaim at Mass on Christmas morning: How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings glad tidings, announcing peace, bearing good news, announcing salvation, and saying to Zion, “Your God is King!” (Isaiah 52:7)

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