By DONALD DeMARCO
There was a particularly inspirational moment on January 18, 2019 at the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., when Benjamin Shapiro, a member of the Jewish faith, spoke to the throng of pro-lifers.
Responding to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claim that pro-lifers are “not in line with where we are as a government and quite frankly where we are as a society,” Shapiro retorted by saying: “Maybe we today are not in line with the rest of society. To which I say, ‘good.’ So were the abolitionists. So were the civil rights marchers. So were the martyrs in Rome and the Jews in Egypt. Righteousness doesn’t have to be popular; it just has to be righteous.”
The crowd responded to Shapiro’s words with thunderous applause.
“Righteousness” is a wonderfully Old Testamentary word. Shapiro’s words at that moment also symbolized the overcoming of whatever differences might linger between Jews and Christians. Religion in its most righteousness unites all people under a single God. Differences are dissolved, fellowship is affirmed. The two great traditions of Judaism and Christianity are one in its recognition of the sanctity of life.
What would the Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), to whom St. Thomas Aquinas respectfully referred to as “The Rabbi,” have said to the pro-life gathering if he could have been there? He might have repeated his own words:
“Every fool thinks that life is there for his sake alone, and as though nothing existed but he. And so when anything happens that opposes his wishes, he concludes that the whole universe is evil. But if a man would regard the whole universe itself and realize what an infinitesimal part he plays in it, the truth would be clear and apparent to him.”
Life is to give. And when there is a choice to be made, we should, as Bernard Mandelbaum titles his book: Choose Life.
Benjamin Aaron Shapiro is a person to be reckoned with and certainly not to be taken lightly. He is the author of seven books and at age 17 became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in America. He has a BA from UCLA (summa cum laude) and a law degree from Harvard (cum laude). He is an accomplished musician on the piano, flute, and violin. One can tune in to the Internet and listen to his flawless violin rendition of the music from Schindler’s List that he performed when he was 12 years of age.
He knows something about how incidental differences can become walls of opposition. He is, naturally, staunchly opposed to anti-Semitism. To brand him as merely a “conservative” does him a grave injustice.
The violin has had a special place in the history of the Jews. Consider just a few of the pre-eminent violinists that their history has produced: Jascha Heifetz, Itzhak Perlman, Mischa Elman, Pinchas Zukerman, Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein, Henryk Szeryng, Leopold Auer, David Oistrakh, and countless others. Yehudi Menuhin warrants special attention with regard to the notion of overcoming differences. His mother so named him because Yehudi, in Hebrew, means Jew. It was also a courageous affirmation of her religion in the face of the virulent anti-Semitism she experienced.
On the night of April 4, 1929 in Berlin, Germany, the Berlin Symphony, under the baton of Bruno Walter, accompanied Yehudi Menuhin, then also 12 years of age, when he performed violin concertos written by three Christian composers: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. To have played all three of these demanding works in a single night is nothing less than Herculean.
As duly reported in The New York Times, a fifty-year-old man with an extraordinary shock of white hair rushed from his seat in the audience to the dressing room. There, he lifted the young virtuoso, kissed him and said, “Today, Yehudi, you have once again proved to me that there is a God in Heaven.”
The enthusiastic music lover, an amateur violinist himself, was none other than the great physicist, Albert Einstein. Here, as on January 18, 2019, differences were overcome so that all could be united under one God and with the reassuring feeling of brotherhood.
Einstein had great respect for the Catholic Church. He is quoted in Time magazine (December 23, 1940), in opposing the Holocaust, by stating: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth….The Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.”
The sanctity of life, beauty, truth, and freedom are great unifiers. That was the tone expressed during the March for Life, one that has been echoed countless times through the corridors of history. St. John Paul II understood what he called “the duty to sanctify time.” Time is not a flat chronology but a richly textured drama. With the Incarnation, as John Paul stated, “eternity entered into time.”
There are moments in the life of a human being when something outside of time enters into the stream of time. When this occurs, the meaning of life becomes clearer. It has nothing to do with self-interest, but giving to others, making sacrifices, understanding the sanctity of God’s gift of life, and expressing our gratitude to God for sharing His Life with us.
In 2005 the State of Israel, for the first time in its history, depicted a Catholic Pope on one if its postage stamps. The stamp shows John Paul at the Wailing Wall and carries his own words to the Jewish people for whom he had great love: “May peace be God’s gift to the land he chose as his own! Shalom!”
The March for Life is about peace through unity, overcoming differences in the context of the larger meaning of life. This may help to explain why Ben Shapiro’s witness was of special import.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus of St. Jerome’s University and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest two books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com.)
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