This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."
The rabbi who is said to have laid that guilt trip on his followers all those years ago knew something about being the least of someone.
At least according to the story that might still be found under all this season's excess consumerism, the original Nativity was a poor refugee family of Middle Eastern origin, forced to move one day to obey the tax collector and flee the next to avoid the blood vengeance of the local warlord.
So, of course, his reproach to those who failed to render aid to the hungry, the sick, the cold and the imprisoned can be dismissed as mere "identity politics." A sort of Black Lives Matter for the Jews who struggled against the oppression of the Roman Empire.
Now we live in a country that is spending all its time, money, light bulbs and radio bandwidth celebrating the birthday of the radical who preached that we should treat others as we would be treated. And honoring little of what he said.
A country where a Jewish family in Lancaster, Penn., has been attacked (but did not flee into Egypt), because of a totally fake news report that an elementary school had canceled its annual production of "A Christmas Carol" because the non-Christians had objected. A country where someone launched a hate campaign against some Jewish families in Montana, resulting in death threats and other season's greetings.
Odd that the alt-right is defending "A Christmas Carol," clearly having no clue what the ubiquitous Charles Dickens story is about. But, then, they are devoid of knowledge as to what the namesake of Christianity was telling us, so it figures.
The story of Scrooge and the Cratchits, the story of Jesus, the point of most good literature, art, theater, film, history — and, yes, journalism — is to give the reader, the viewer, the listener, the audience some small inkling of what it is like to be someone else.
To cause a spark of the empathy that is at the core of what it is to be human and necessary for each of us to live, individually and collectively, lives that are no more nasty, brutish and short than they have to be.
That is what some of us are failing to see when they react with threats and anger to plans for some new homeless resource centers in Salt Lake City.
That was Harvey Milk's message to the gay rights movement when he told them that the key to their success was to come out and make people see them as people.
That's what happened when several women came forward to tell stories of how they were sexually assaulted at Brigham Young University and Utah State University and saw their cases swept under the rug or, in the case of BYU, were re-victimized by the school's honor code.
Those women, and The Salt Lake Tribune's brave and sensitive coverage of the issue, took a theoretical concept and made it real. And made things better.
The nearly platonic ideal of this is still Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." It moves the reader into the mind and heart of one character, the orphan white boy Huck, who is at that moment moving into the mind and heart of another character, the escaped black slave Jim.
It comes through in the passage where Huck resolves to turn Jim in, because it is the right thing to do in the eyes of polite, Christian society, then changes his mind and resigns himself to eternal damnation because he cannot betray a friend. A friend who, Huck has discovered, is not the two-legged animal he has been taught to see black people as, but a real human being with hopes and dreams and deep, deep feelings.
Those few paragraphs ought to be posted on schoolhouse walls across America, alongside that other Declaration of Independence. Except they are peppered throughout with the N-word. So you will have to go read it for yourself.
No, it doesn't work to take the word out, or change it to something less offensive. No more than it makes sense for those folks who market cleaned-up movies to say they have not eviscerated that movie about Jackie Robinson by taking out that same word.
And don't ask me to read it to you, because I start to cry just thinking about it.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, also chokes up at the end of the first "Captain America" movie.