Tatiana (assumed name) is a foreign student who had an appointment in my office to review the latest details of her doctoral thesis. Eager to read it, she suggested the day and time, despite the fact that she was about to give birth. My forecasts came true: hours before the interview, she writes to me: "My daughter decided to go ahead and was born today." This day something more important than a doctoral thesis was born.
Now comes Christmas, a word that indicates birth. Jesus of Nazareth – in his family, Yeshua – was born in Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem. He was born and that was a double miracle. Because coming into the world is and because that child was saved from a good one: being beheaded, like the rest of the children, by order of Herod. Christians add a third miracle, that of being that child the son of God. I say that he was saved from a good one, but not from being the victim at the end of another evil one, Judas, the friend who betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver.
That surviving child in Bethlehem was born to the same thing that everyone is born: to life and love, but also to the risk of dying and the lack of love. We are all going to find one thing and the other. That person who helped us now gives us aside, and the one we loved so much and gave away for Christmas we have abandoned. Being born is the first political act (Hannah Arendt).
In daily life we meet good and bad people. Already from birth we should be prepared to face it and not wait to discover it after many years of disappointments. These days some high school students collect food donations at the door of the supermarkets. They tell me that some customers respond with sympathy while others evade them and even scowl at them. That is what these young people will find in life. Human kindness and dedication are unlimited, just like stupidity and bad shadow, and one thing should not make us forget the other. Ethics would have to start from this recognition of human ambivalence, but be characterized by defending, as Albert Camus said, that "in men there are more things worthy of admiration than of contempt."
