Crossed

San Diego take note: the only thing wrong with Montréal is its cross.

For two glorious years, I had the immense pleasure of living in the great Québec city. Weather permitting, I hiked each weekend in the Frederick Law Olmstead masterpiece of a park which is built around the mountain which centers the city and gives it its name. Given the challenge of designing a park whose geology permits of only two real directions, Olmstead conceived multiple pathways which went up and down.

In the end, the peak was everyone's destination. And for years, that's what it was - the highest point of your hike; the highest point of the city. And then someone had the great idea of installing a gigantic modern cross on the mountaintop.

It was huge.

It was unavoidable.

It was the difference between the United States and Canada.

It reminded me - in no uncertain terms - that I was a guest.

In the United States, I was a full member of society. My grandparents had come here because Jews were not second class citizens in America. They might not always be welcome - no immigrants always are - but by law no distinction could be made.

In America, there was complete separation of church and state.

Not so in Canada. In Canada (and, most certainly, in Québec), there is tolerance, which is a very different thing. Every time I looked up at that cross (huffing and puffing and irreverently swearing that I would get into better shape), I was reminded that this was a Christian city, that the cross was on the most public of lands, and that while, at the moment, Canada might be a far more tolerant place than the U.S., in the end, by law, Montréal schools were segregated by religion as well as language (French for the Catholic; English for the Protestants; Hebrew and Yiddish for the Jews). The same benevolent majority which now permitted my presence could easily turn against me (as, indeed, Montréal had done on more than one occasion).

In the U.S., the public might well become anti-Semitic (what else is new?), but the state was officially neutral. In Canada, the state was not neutral, no matter how benign the public might be. That cross was there to remind me of the difference.

This week, a Christian president signed a law (passed overwhelmingly) which shall transfer ownership of a San Diego "memorial" to the federal government. The purpose - to permit a cross to remain on public land.

In a week of terrorist threats, of Israel and Hezbollah, of the continuing carnage in Iraq, this seems like a small thing. What difference can it make? After all, there is a cross on private land unavoidably visible from the 101. What distinction does this "mom and apple pie" legislation really make?

None, I suppose, except for this: had Isabella and her confessor Torquemada not expelled the Jews and the Muslims from Spain, there would be no Zionism and there would be no radical Islamists. The travails of the 21st century stem directly from a Christian decision to impose itself on nonbelievers.

Those of us who once were "guests" in any number of countries cannot forget that such status can be easily (and violently) revoked. And that is what the San Diego cross makes all of us who are not Christian. Guests.

So perhaps it's not such a small thing after all.