What Is At The Core Of The Allegiance To One’s Country?

First of all, I am not attempting to make a general statement that fits all. We are all different, made diverse by our creator who is the source of everything we are and what we have. This being said, one cannot help to see certain patterns for one’s own life. May it be experience, things we say or do, or anything else that bears influence on our intellect. Just ask three eye witnesses about the same event and each and everyone comes with a slightly or all together different angle. This being said, one cannot escape the things that do happen to us. With this in mind I will continue writing on it.

As many of you know, I invested the last twelve years of my life in Israel, Judaism and Islam. The differences are stark. While Judaism celebrates and honors life, Islam worships death. So, the question arises why does the World condemn the Jewish state just for doing what any other nation in this world would be doing – fighting for its life when threatened.
The last two months I was watching three mini series. “The Holocaust,” “Winds of War,” and War of Remembrance” which is the sequel to the second one. Also, I am reading slowly but surely Saul Friedlaender’s “The Years of Extermination” also author of “Nazi Germany And The Jews, 1933-1939.” Last night I finally finished the last episode of “War of Remembrance,” episode number 12. Byron Henry, the husband of Natalie Henry, an American Jewess who, with their son Lewis, got caught in the dragnet of the Holocaust and ultimately in Auschwitz. After war’s end, as Byron searches for his son in every orphanage from Czechoslovakia to England, he finally finds him at a place where they keep the youngest children. His son was found, buried under a group of Czech and Jewish partisans who got shot by the Germans as they were retreating from the front, saved only by his uncle who threw himself in his death throws on the boy to protect him. One of the orphanage staff tells him that they were the luckiest ones. At the end, the Germans often didn’t bother with gassing anymore, instead, they threw the children alive into the burning ovens.
Now, who knows if this truly happened except for eye witness accounts. But who is to say it didn’t. There were so many unspeakable horrors committed by the SS and the Wehrmacht that it does not make any difference. One cruelty may outdo another, but they are cruelties on humanity nonetheless.
Some of you might say “Andy why are you getting so deep into this subject.” Well for one, I am German. Though, I am not certain about my background because of being adopted, there may be a remote chance of having Jewish DNA. Not that it is something that I am hoping for, neither would it change anything except having a sense of identity beyond national culture and background, but as a Christian, I do feel very comfortable with a number of Jewish customs. In fact, I think they are quite beautiful and God centered unlike some of our celebration of pagan origin. Yes, the Jews to this day do not see Jesus Christ as the Messiah they have been waiting for millennia.
But Jews and Christians do worship the one creator whose son is Yeshua (Jesus). The Jewish, Feasts like Passover and Chanukkah as well as Sukkoth (Feast of the Tabernacles) and many others help my faith to become deeper, realizing that Christ taught in that same context.
I have been coming a long way in my personal journey. First I believed that the Holocaust had nothing to do with me. And technically it doesn’t. I was born fifteen years after the war. So what is it to me? Then, through the influence of a friend who was many years my elder (boyfriend of my mother’s youth), I went into a stage of denial. Today I know that my friend was a Nazi. Our friendship even then, did not last long since he was obsessed with his beliefs and ideas.
Today, I am a Jew at heart. But in many ways it feels like I had to redeem myself. Not that I am redeemed already through the blood of Christ. It is a redemption that is more personal, more specific, outside of salvation. I read a Christian book that talked about reconciliation between groups of people where one wronged the other as is the case with the injustice of White people done to the Native Americans. As of late the thought flashed through my mind that it just may be my feeble attempt as a German to redeem my people.
The more I know about the Holocaust, the less I feel empathetic about Germany. Not that there are no nice and good people. They do exist. Germany is also the country of my birth and where I spent the first thirty years of my life, quite happy years, before I immigrated to America. Yet, the very same people, highly cultured, advanced in every field imaginable, the arts, science, quality of workmanship, under the guidance of Nazi leadership became the perpetrators of the Final Solution. I am not saying that every person knew what was happening to the Jews, at least not till some years into the war. Even then they may have not known the full extent. But the soldiers who were writing home, fed by propaganda movies like “Jew Suess” or “The Eternal Jew,” left no doubt about their repugnance of the Jews that they helped to deport or at worst – annihilate.
All those years, my hopes were that Anti-Semitism was something spread by the Nazis. People were beguiled in believing that Jews faired well in the camps. That live was good and at least they could be amongst themselves. However. My grandmother and my mom, who had no racist bones in them, realized only in the later part of the war that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, that something definitely wrong was going on.
Nonetheless, Anti-Semitism was prevalent to a larger or lesser degree. There were already sentiments against the Jews because they were believed for a failed war in 1918. Many were disenfranchised and faulted the bankers and other people in key positions, Jews amongst them, as the scapegoats. And even before Hitler’s full fledged race policies people would complain if they shared the same cemetery with Jews unless they were in their own corner or preferably their own place all together. Complaints were also made when a Jew was given preferential treatment over an Arian for no other reason than that he was a Jew. When the yellow star was introduced, pity towards them by some were only temporary and maybe more a sentiment of embarrassment rather than righteous outcry.
With this all in mind, where does that leave us Germans. Did years of “re-education” really do enough to see the wrongs of our actions? Maybe we wouldn’t want to have a repeat of it. But does it truly mean that we got rid of our sentiments or do we harbor them to this day despite of all that happened?
Already now, voices can be heard that complain about the German government giving money to the state of Israel. As if monetary compensation ever can repair the millions of lives destroyed, families shattered, hearts and minds broken and illnesses that some deal with to this very day because of the effects of torture and malnutrition.
Just recently I became friends with another German on Facebook. We share the same opinions, beliefs and sentiments in many ways. Him and I are Christians. We love Israel and the Jewish people and recognize Genesis 12:3 (CJB) as one of our guidelines, when God spoke to Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, but I will curse anyone who curses you, and by you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” As we Skyped one day I asked my friend how others feel about Israel. His answer was that most true Christians share the same thoughts to a larger or lesser degree. But outside of this circle many see Israel as the evil occupier who victimizes the freedom loving Palestinians (italics mine).
Another friend who is a blogger and translates “MediaBackspin” from English into German known as “Honest Reporting,” reports many a times how the Catholic and Lutheran church spread their anti-Semitism to this day. One of his blog posts reported about the protests going on in Augsburg, Germany against the invasion of Gaza by Israel after being barraged with over 8,000 rockets launched from Gaza to cities like Sderot, Ashkelon through the years and even as far Beersheba today. Slogans were heard like “Jews to the Gas,” “Hitler hasn’t killed enough of them,” and many more. When I asked him how could this be he told me that the Muslim population of Augsburg today is
20 %. But never mind the strong presence of Muslims as long as you got “freedom” loving German liberals shouting at the top of their voices right along with their Islamic co-brethren. Where will it go? Where will it end?
Germany, however, wasn’t the only country rallying against the Jews. Once other countries got occupied by the Nazis, they followed suit quite happily, the Ukrainian one amongst the worse committing whole sale slaughter, putting Jews on meat hooks and pinning papers labeled “kosher meat” on their bodies. The Croatians had their own concentration camp, which was widely feared amongst Balkan Jews. On the other hand the Serbs that have been decried so much as evil doers and genosists in the late Yugoslavian civil war just 20 years ago, stood side by side with their Jewish country men, defending them, protecting them. About 40,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of Serbs died in the camps as a result of it. With this rare exception where does that leave us?

America, my long beloved country of my youth and ultimate fulfillment on the day of my emigration has long ceased to be the people that I knew 25 years ago. It’s culture changed so drastically that it hardly can be recognized. It’s moral vanguard seems to have slithered into oblivion. Students who attend public schools and colleges have no true grasp of its history anymore. All they are acquainted with are the evil acts committed through its history. But none of the heroism as in the Revolutionary war are being investigated. The greatest generation of WWII has no meaning to them anymore. At our universities we have the establishment of Middle Eastern departments, funded by Saudi petrodollars, filled with indoctrination against the Jews. The hatred becomes so vigorous that speakers who dared to speak against the evils of Islam had been escorted by security. People who stand up for Israel are decried as being racists and bigots. Truly, where are we going?

This brings me to my final point as already mentioned in the title of this treatise. As I look around in dismay, it seems like the whole world is falling apart, teetering towards an unending abyss. While the Jewish state fights for its survival not just now but since millennia as a people, and yet, almost every day, someone can read of all the discoveries and advancements coming from this little country for no other purpose than the betterment of mankind, still the world condemns it almost daily. It brings me to this final conclusion. What does allegiance to a country mean.
Do I pledge allegiance to a country, as a system, as a society no matter how good or bad it may be or do I pledge allegiance to something else? In times like this where evil becomes ever more present, I cannot in good conscience pledge my whole being to a country, neither Germany nor America nor any other. My allegiance is to God first and foremost, then to my family, my friends and that’s it.
As a Christian my allegiance is to those we care for, as our neighbors. In case of war, we do not fight for a country; we fight for our homes, our families, our friends, our neighbors, and our towns that we may love. Even the famous General Lee, when asked to take command of the Northern troops, politely declined. Not because he was in favor of slavery, not because he believed in the southern way of live, but solely based on the decision, which was soon to follow, if and when Virginia would do as the rest of the confederacy, whether to secede or not. Because, once the case, he would have the moral obligation to defend his home from whoever may choose to invade it. His home!
If we would be citizens of any country with no families and no friends, totally, entirely on our own, who, or what, would we give allegiance to? I have said many times, my birth country is Germany, my chosen home is America, but my home is in Israel where God put his name on the city of his choosing on Jerusalem, and because God made a covenant with his chosen people on Mount Sinai on the way to the promised land, we, as Christians, are called to stand by them and with them. Not that the Jews are any better, not that they follow Christ as of yet, not that they do not share many of the same problems as other nations and other people do, but because God said so!
And God’s promises to Israel, as well as to us for those who do believe, are not to be negated. They have to be reckoned with. As we do follow him, we do well to heed his word. As individuals as well as nations. Ultimately it is allegiance to him that counts. If we are true to that, everything else, family, friends, neighbors, country fall into that. But if we don’t, for those who do believe, is nothing else left than to get on our knees and pray for our leaders and for our countries and realize that the only one who can guide us and sustain us is Him and Him alone.