LShe still looks like a little girl, her pale face marked by recent childbirth. He is slightly older. With them, wrapped in a blanket, the baby born on the journey, in that confused moment when the people move for the census. On the back of a mule they faced the four days necessary to descend from Galilee towards the south, crossing places that we now know almost with familiarity, to reach his land, in Judea.
The child was born there, in Bethlehem, which today is in the West Bank. There a voice, in the night, had woken them up, ordering them to flee, even further south, towards Egypt. It is too dangerous to keep a baby where tragedy is upon us and for the little ones it is certain death. Away, away, again, even if still exhausted and dazed, too many nights of vigil behind us, too many uncertainties about the future. They will make it, they will pass into Egypt and they will return only when Herod the Great with his ferocious paranoia no longer reigns over Judea.
I followed the path of Christmas on one of the many geographical maps published in this period, which today resonates more tragically close. And here it doesn’t matter whether it is history or legend, whether the story is collected only in the Gospel of Matthew, whether Flavius Josephus, the historian of Jewish events, doesn’t even talk about the massacre of the Innocents.
Danda Santini director of “iO Donna” (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
If it was performed in Bethlehem, which was only a small village, and therefore it was likely neglected, as historians explain today. Whether it was the Magi, priests of Persian origin and wise astrologers, who said that the messianic prophecy was coming true in Bethlehema great king was being born, thus unleashing the fury of Herod, terrified that his throne would be usurped to the point of wanting all male children under two years of age dead.
And it doesn’t even matter religious or territorial affiliation. What matters here is that there was a child, on the run and in danger. The similarities between the recent history of the conflict in Israel are strikingwhich we have reviewed in these weeks of new war, and the history of two thousand years ago which already tells of tribes, of disputed lands, of prophets, rebels and religions and of a heated spirituality, incomprehensible to the pragmatic Romans.
The similarities between the story of the nativity and the recent history of the conflict in Israel are striking (illustration by Cinzia Zenocchini).
It is striking that the escape route is always Egypt, then a friendly land because it was a Roman province. It is striking how much fighting took place right in the cradle of the great monotheistic religions, where the sacred books intersected, faithful against infidels, dividing Jerusalem into segments, a holy city for all, each in the name of his own reasons and belonging.
In the middle, the victims, innocent on all sides: women, children, common people. Driven by events, deprived of everything, always on the run. May the Christmas star, birth star, star of children, save the little ones in danger in the world. May he save them from the fury of men. That he can impose a truce, lasting until peace, on the warring fronts. Yes, that would be a truly merry Christmas for everyone.
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