c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and started deporting Dutch Jews to the death camps, many Jews in the city of Haarlem sought refuge in the home of a devout Christian family named ten Boom. The ten Booms had always showed great love for their Jewish neighbors and counted many of them as friends.

When Jews started showing up at their door, the ten Booms simply couldn’t turn them away. Instead, they created hiding places, secured ration cards, enlisted friends, and created an underground railroad that eventually ferried more than 700 Jews to safety in the countryside.

The ten Booms paid the ultimate price for their heroism. Following their arrest by the Nazis in 1944, four ten Booms died in custody or shortly thereafter from the brutality they sustained. The story was immortalized in Corrie ten Boom’s book, “The Hiding Place.”

Freeze the frame. Would the Jewish people have been better off with more families like the ten Booms or fewer?

There’s a lesson here for contemporary Jewish-Christian relations.

Before answering, consider a couple of facts. The ten Booms’ Christian reverence for human life was probably so profound that it extended not only to the Jews but also likely to the unborn; the ten Booms were probably opposed to abortion.

Let’s further stipulate that the ten Booms’ embrace of the traditional family structure was probably so strong that they would have opposed efforts to expand the definition of marriage to incorporate new paradigms; the ten Booms would likely have opposed gay marriage had such unions been contemplated in their day.

So would the world have been better off with more families like the ten Booms? If you have even the slightest grip on reality, your answer will be a resounding “yes.”

The ten Booms were among the highest strata of righteous human beings, people who so loved humanity that they were willing to give their own lives in its service. Of course we would be better off with more such people in the world. The context of the Holocaust makes this answer obvious.

During a time of existential threat, lesser differences shrink in importance. But something deeper than perspective is also at work here. Once we have seen people capable of such sublime acts of selflessness, we appreciate them and their moral code. Rather than view their position on social issues as indicia of closed or hate-filled minds, we instead see these positions as extensions of a worldview that is capable of inspiring amazing acts of loving kindness. Even people who do not agree with these views can, in this context, disagree with profound respect.

The ten Booms risked _ and lost _ their lives to save Jews because of their Christian faith, not despite it. Luckily for the Jews of Holland, the humanitarian and philo-Semitic theology that motivated the ten Booms was not limited to one family or even to one country. This theology had a number of pockets of influence in Europe.

More significantly, this theology crossed the Atlantic in the late 1800s and was embraced by the nascent fundamentalist movement. While World War II was raging in Europe, this theology was being spread throughout American churches as the fundamentalist movement grew. The evangelical Christians who so strongly stand with Israel today are the product of this theology. These Christians are nothing less than the theological heirs of the ten Booms and other religious righteous gentiles like them.

The emergence of these latter-day righteous gentiles onto the political scene could not have come at a more important juncture. Storm clouds are gathering again. Only the truly myopic can fail to see them on the horizon.

The parallels between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler are stark:

_ Like Hitler, Ahmadinejad has made explicit his desire to commit genocide against the Jewish people, repeatedly threatening to “wipe Israel off the map.”

_ Like Hitler, Ahmadinejad is rapidly assembling the military might with which to carry out his genocidal threat _ in his case a nuclear arsenal.

_ And like Hitler, Ahmadinejad is rapidly consolidating his once limited power over his nation _ “in a way never before seen in the 27-year history of the Islamic Republic,” according to a recent article in The New York Times.

As the Jewish people face this new threat, they find standing beside them the theological progeny of the ten Booms. Across America, millions of Christians are opening their doors, not to hide Jews within, but to step out and join with the Jewish community in sounding the alarm about the threat posed by Iran and other radical Muslims.

While Jews and Christians continue to differ on religious doctrine and public policy, these differences shrink in significance when compared to the vast gulf that separates both Jews and Christians from the radical Muslims who seek our destruction.

As they stand side-by-side in defense of Israel, the United States and Judeo-Christian civilization, Jews and Christians who sometimes disagree on many things will turn toward one another and realize that what separates them is very small indeed.

(David Brog is the author of “Standing With Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State,” published recently by Frontline.)

KRE/PH END BROG

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