Each year
at this time, Jews read the story of Noah, of the terrible flood, and of the
miracle of the rainbow, which signified a better future for humanity.
On Wednesday night, an estimated 40
million people sat on couches, on bar stools, and on stadium seats, witnessing
the Chicago Cubs make history.
For Noah,
It rained for 40 days, and 40 nights.
For the Cubs, I did the math, and
turns out that if you count the days, their 108-season World-Series losing
streak amounts to just about 40 total years of baseball played.
For 40 years of day games and 40
years of night games, it rained on the Cubs.
Earlier this week, when the Cubs
were down 3 games to 1, it seemed like the deluge of despair wasn’t going to
end.
Noah
anticipated his salvation. He had hope, sending out a raven to search for dry
land.
The raven
never returned, but like the Cubs’ fans, Noah didn’t stop hoping.
Noah sent
out a dove who returned with an olive branch,
and the Cubs came back to tie up the
series 3-3.
Noah’s ark
finally came to rest on dry land after 7 months, on the 17th day of
the month.
And the Cubbies finally broke their
curse in the Game 7 of the world series, in their, wait for it, 17th
postseason game.
Coincidence?
Almost certainly. Creative mathematics? Maybe.
Or,
perhaps, a sign of the magic that baseball and Judaism share.
Wednesday
night was the stuff of legends, a game for the ages, baseball at its best—two
underdog teams battling it out in a fantastical, impossible journey to win it
all in the end.
Hearts
jumped in simpatico as we watched home runs, stolen bases, errors, and even… a
rain delay.
We were
attending, what the classic baseball movie, Bull Durham, poetically describes:
“the Church of Baseball.”
For as
long as I have been a Jew, I have been a baseball fan. I am not unique in this
respect. Much has been written about the love affair between baseball and the
Jews. This passion can be attributed to the history of an immigrant community
hungry to be a part of American culture.
But it is
more than just historical correlation. Rabbi Jonathan Cohen enumerates the
numerous parallels between baseball and Judaism: “both venerate tradition, both
emphasize community, both attach importance to special foods (think of ballpark
franks, and don’t forget the peanuts and Cracker Jacks). Both have their
rituals – e.g., the ceremonial throwing out of the first pitch, the
seventh-inning stretch. There are even baseball “holidays,” such as the
All-Star game and the World Series.”[1]
One of my
favorite jokes asserts that even God is a baseball fan. How do we know? Because
the Torah starts with “In the Big Inning…”
But the
most important commonalities have less to do with the superficial similarities
like traditional foods or dates on the calendar. The parallels exist on a more
spiritual plane. Love for a team, or a sport, like faith, can often seem
irrational. A pure rationalist might look at the outpouring of tears and
celebrations that took place on Wednesday night, or at today’s parade in
Chicago and deem them “silly.”
“It is
only a game,” they might say. “What’s all the fuss?”
My answer
to that would be, that, at their best, baseball and Judaism are about
experiencing the ineffable, about transcending the mundane. The religious or
spiritual resides [in a domain beyond words.] In an age of gigabytes and
picoseconds, we tend to live too quickly and to miss much that we might see.
Baseball, as it turns out, can help us develop the capacity to see through to
another, sacred space,” writes former NYU Chancellor, John Sexton, who taught a
yearly seminar entitled Baseball as a Road to God, which he later turned into a
book.[2]
Baseball
provides an opportunity “to transcend the mundane experience of everyday life…”[3]
Sexton writes. “While the teams and
players on the field may change each autumn, the game’s evocative power is
continuous. Opening Day in the spring and the World Series in the fall are the
bookends of baseball’s liturgical time, and within the rituals of each season, fans
are converted to believers…and events become part of a mythology, forever
remembered and repeated with the solemnity of the most beloved sacred stories.
And inevitably, each season brings its moments of heightened
awareness—divergent from ordinary time and place—in which some discover a
connection to something deeper than the ordinary. Such moments are remembered
not merely for what they literally were but for what they evoked in those who
experienced them.”[4]
If we just
changed a little bit of the vocabulary, I could make this very same statement
about Judaism.
Our team
is Judaism. The worship-ers and synagogues may change over time, but every
spring, Passover still arrives, and we still have Rosh Hashanah every fall, we
repeat the same stories over and over, and add our own stories to Judaism’s
sacred narrative. And from time to time, when it really works, we may
experience moments of heightened awareness, some kind of connection beyond our
ordinary experiences.
We need these rituals in order to experience
moments of ineffable power. As much as we may try, we cannot rationalize the
feeling of 100,000 people holding their breath as they wait to see if the wind
will carry the long fly ball into the stands for a home-run.
Nor can we
articulate the awesome power of hearing the blast of the shofar, or watching a
Bar or Bat mitzvah chant from the very same book that our ancestors read.
This world series brought joy, comfort, and
escape in a difficult time in our divided nation.
In his
famous speech in the film Field of Dreams, James Earl Jones’s character
declares the saliency of Baseball in our nation: “The one constant through all
the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of
steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.
But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past,
Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
I don’t
know what the outcome of Tuesday’s election will be. But I take comfort in the
fact that in 149 days, my beloved St. Louis Cardinals will repeat the sacred
cycle, and have another chance on opening day.
There will always be another year, more awe-filled moments, and a reason to hope.
[1]Sermon
by Cohen, Rabbi Jonathan. "Baseball and Jewish Values. http://www.mishkantorah.org/rabbi-jonathan-cohen/baseball-and-jewish-values.
[2]
Sexton, John, Thomas with Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz. Baseball As a Road to
God: Seeing Beyond the Game. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2013. p. 5.
[3]
Sexton, 9.
[4]
Sexton, 14.
