Friday, Nov. 5 sermon
At Temple Beth Abraham, Oakland
(ALSO READ: Andy Altman-Ohr’s column about the Giants’ world championship)
No less than the great Rabbi Solomon Schechter, former head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, world-renowned scholar, and probably the most influential thinker of Conservative Judaism ever once said to a young rabbinical student named Louis Finkelstein, who himself would one day become the Chancellor of the JTS Rabbinical School: “Unless you know baseball, you will never get to be a rabbi in America.”
If that sounds like the ultimate rationalization for the fact that I’m going to talk about baseball for the next 15m maybe even 20 minutes or so, well, it is. There’s my authority for spending your time talking about the San Francisco Giants and the World Series.
I want to tell you another, more personal story about why it is Kosher to talk about baseball in synagogue. At my first student congregation in Great Falls, Montana, we were about to sit down to a Passover Seder, but some of the people wanted to wait to start until the basketball game on television was ended. This happened to be the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four, and it was the year the Chris Weber led Michigan team was in the Final Four. For college basketball buffs, this was the very game Weber called his infamous timeout when his team had none, resulting in a technical foul and the eventual loss of the game. Anyway, one of the people there said to me: “Rabbi, is there a prayer we can say for the University of Michigan?”
I replied: “Honestly, if you think God cares about something as trivial as a basketball game, maybe we need to talk about theology and what really matters in the Jewish tradition and in life. Baseball, yes, that’s deeply important to God, but basketball, never!”
In my family there is no clear line between baseball and religion, to paraphrase a line from A River Runs Through It. I believe baseball is a sacred, holy game. So, despite the fact that many of you are not baseball fans, and some of you are not Giants fans, today we are going to talk about the Torah of baseball. Is it because the Giants won, they are sort of the hometown team here in Oakland, and they have been my favorite team since I was old enough to follow them at five years old in 1971? Yes, of course. But you should know that talking about it at all in synagogue is part of an age-old debate. Listen to these two similar letters written about a century apart.
The first is from the Yiddish Daily Forward in the early 1900’s and appeared in the column “A Bintele Brief.” One of the readers wrote:
It makes sense to teach a child to play dominoes or chess. But what is the point of a crazy game like baseball? The children can get crippled. When I was a boy we played rabbit, chasing each other, hide and seek. Later we stopped. If a grown man played rabbit in Russia they would think he had lost his mind. Here in educated America adults play baseball. They run after a leather ball like children. I want my boy to grow up to be a mensch, not a wild American runner.
Here is the editor’s reply:
Half the parents in the Jewish quarter have the same problem. Let your boys play baseball and play it well as long as it does not interfere with their education or let them into bad company…Bring them up to be educated, ethical and decent, but also to be physically strong so they should not feel inferior. Let us not so raise the children that they should grow up foreigners in their own birthplace.
A century later, this letter came from a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle named Fan from San Bruno.:
My Monday night was interrupted by the sound of horns honking and the explosion of fireworks, and people yelling in the street. I thought certainly the wars had ended and our troops were coming home, or Bush and Cheney and their cabal of war criminals were finally being held to answer for war crimes, or there was finally peace in Palestine (we call it Israel around here, but that’s another sermon entirely). So I hurried to turn on the news, only to find out that a bunch of man-children had won a baseball game.
The poor lady needs a hug or a rebuke from Bill Murray’s character in the movie Stripes. “Lighten up, Francis.”
OK, so it’s not world peace and it’s not even our “real” lives, but do you really have to be so angry about it? On the other hand. she brings up a valid question. Why do we care so much about the Giants and about baseball in general? Why do we care as people? Why do we care as a Jewish community?
There have been many essays and books written about this subject. The most comprehensive is a book called From Ellis Island to Ebbets Field written by Professor Peter Levine. We could be here all day discussing some of the theories in depth, but let me summarize a few of them.
1. Baseball is an integral part of the Jewish immigrant experience. Most of our ancestors came over from Eastern Europe in the early 1900’s, and they grew up along with the game. It was baseball’s golden age, and it was part of their way of assimilating into American culture, part of their transformation from “Yid to Yankee.” Or at least Yid to Giant or Dodger.
2. Baseball and Judaism are both filled with elaborate rituals. Watch a batter’s elaborate pre at-bat ritual. All the things he does with his hands and body look remarkably similar to a person putting on tefilin. A batter waiting for a pitch looks like a person swaying as they daven. Fielders, pitchers, managers, and fans have their own elaborate pre-game and in-game rituals and superstitions, most of which resonate with the rituals of Judaism.
3. Baseball, like Jewish texts such as the Talmud, lend themselves to discussion and argument. Two rabbinic sages can look at the same text of Torah and come to radically different conclusions. So they developed an art they call pilpul, which literally means pepper, but refers to the back and forth of discussion and debate over law and lore. In baseball, we love to argue as well-about statistics, about who is a better player, about which team is the greatest of all time. We compare players and statistics across different eras, and we argue as if it’s about life and death. Similar to Talmudic pilpul, two people can look at the same set of statistics and come to completely different conclusions about their meaning. Baseball, like Torah study, is a dialectic.
4. Baseball has led to all kinds of bonding between parents and children, most traditionally between fathers and sons. This is not just a Jewish thing, of course, for baseball is something that families have done together for generations. Who can forget the closing scene of Field of Dreams, where all Kevin Costner wants to do is have a catch with his Dad? Baseball is full of these teaching moments, these bonding moments, l’dor vador, generation to generation.
5. Jewish baseball players feel like part of our extended Jewish family. Jewish baseball players have been our heroes, both on and off the field, for more than a century. Whether we’re talking about Lipman Pike, the first Jewish player who played back in the 1890’s or Hall of Famers like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, we take pride in the accomplishments of our fellow members of the tribe. And it’s not just their exploits on the field, but off as well. There was Moe Berg, the Catcher who became a spy for the U.S. Government and was considered the most intelligent player in the game during his time. Ivy League educated Craig Breslow, a Jewish pitcher for our own A’s, wears that mantle today, by the way. Every Jewish child knows that Sandy Koufax refused to pitch on Yom Kippur, though, actually, he was following the example of Hank Greenberg, who made the same refusal a couple of decades earlier. Shawn Green, by the way, made the same choice just a few years ago, and it was still a subject of controversy. Today’s Jewish baseball heroes include Ryan Braun and Ian Kinsler (more on him in a moment) and Ike Davis, cousin of our own Carole Robinson. The Giants’ most recent Jewish player was Brian Horwitz, who was nicknamed “the Rabbi.” The Single A San Jose Giants have a backup Jewish catcher named Aaron Lowenstein, who my boys and I had the privilege of meeting during a Fanfest. I asked him if he had a Bar Mitzvah, and, with pride, he beamed, “of course.” I gave him my card and told him to call if he needed anything. A few weeks later, at a game, an usher handed my younger son Jonah a broken bat after the game while he was outside waiting for an autograph. Lowenstein eventually came out of the clubhouse, and Jonah asked for his autograph. He said: “that’s my bat you have, kid.” Jonah said: “well, you’re one of my favorite players.” I would imagine my two boys are the only kids who have ever even heard of Aaron Lowenstein, backup minor league catcher, but there was that Jewish baseball connection at work once again.
6. Finally, important baseball games are almost always connected with Yom Kippur, literally and mystically. The playoffs or World Series almost always coincide with this most important of Jewish holidays, and almost everyone has a story connecting the two. Our own 94 year old Sam Bercovich often shares a story about sneaking across the street as a child and listening to the games on his transistor radio. I myself remember intimately sneaking out to the car in 1989 and turning on my Sony Watchman to watch Will Clark single up the middle against the Cubs to win the pennant that year.
Clearly, baseball and Judaism are inextricably tied together, but now let us move on to some of the lessons we can we learn from this year, this World Series, and our world champion San Francisco Giants. Here are a few of the things we can learn.
1. Everybody loves an underdog. Certainly, the Giants are one of those long-suffering teams. No one, certainly myself included, thought they could or would do it. There had just been too many instances in the past of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So when they finally did it, it was hard to root against them.
2. Everybody loves an “Eruv Rav,” which means refers to the mixed multitude that the Book of Exodus tells us left Egypt along with the Israelites during the exodus. These Giants had castoffs that nobody else wanted like Pat Burrell and Cody Ross. These Giants had characters like Brian Wilson with his beard and Tim Lincecum with his hair. These Giants had clean cut Southern boys like Buster Posey, Matt Cain, and Madison Bumgarner, young men who do their jobs without a lot of fanfare. These Giants had Edgar Renteria, who did nothing for two years and 16 million dollars but became the MVP of the World Series. These Giants had Aubrey Huff, who was only here because Nick Johnson and Adam LaRoche, their first two choices, were not interested. I especially identified with this one, since I became the rabbi here only because your first choice, Rabbi Jerry Danzig, decided not to take the job. Yet here I am, nine and a half years later, still reveling in our successes together.
3. There were angels in the outfield. Pardon the idolatrous reference here, but this is something fans often refer to as the baseball gods. What were the odds that such eerie things would happen to all three opposing 2nd Basemen, Brooks Conrad of the Braves, Chase Utley of the Phillies, and Ian Kinsler of the Rangers? It was strange enough when Conrad and Utley made error after inexplicable error, but when Ian Kinsler hit a home run ball off the top of the wall that somehow bounced back onto the field for a double, even the most agnostic had to wonder what was going on. You need errors and bad calls and lucky bounces to win a World Series, but there were times we were all thinking that someone really must have wanted the Giants to win this one. You need all that plus really good starting pitching. The fact is they won based on a combination of skill, luck, and the unexplainable. Life is like that. You need good fortune, but you have to put yourself in position to take advantage of the good fortune that might come your way. This mixture was on full display in this World Series.
4. You have to appreciate the Shehecheyanu moments when they occur. The Shehecheyanu prayer is recited when we are thankful that we have reached a particular season or moment in time. It says: “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who has given us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season. After 52 years without a championship in this city and 56 for the franchise, all of us sensed the moment and hung on to the appreciation. I had season tickets in 1971 as a 5 year old, and I watched Bob Robertson hit three home runs in the playoffs to crush our hopes. As an adult I bought my own season tickets in 1989, and I was there at Candlestick Park when the earth shook. All too many of us remember 2002 when we were on the congregational retreat to Camp Newman, and the score was 5-0 Giants before we recited Havdalah ending Shabbat. I wished we could have extended Shabbat further, because immediately after Havdalah, Scott Spezio hit that 3 run home run which would prove to the opening blow to an historically crushing defeat. The “torture” breeds a more intense appreciation, so we, or at least I, can’t stop appreciating or going to parades or talking about everything that occurred. And if the Giants can win the World Series, who knows what else can happen? Why not Cal in the Rose Bowl? Why not the economy rebounding? Why not world peace? Why not the coming of the Messiah?
5. In all seriousness, though, the final lesson is that life goes on. Because I woke up the next morning to find a $900 car repair bill awaiting me. And my children had rough days at school. And long-time member Frank Weinberg died. Real life, sadly, goes on.
Baseball is metaphorical like that, isn’t it? We have these moments in our lives, the weddings, the Bar Mitzvah, the moments of intense spirituality when we sense God’s presence in our lives, and then we wake up the next day and realize that we still have to go back to our normal lives, which can be routine or tedious or tragic or, alternatively, safe and warm and wonderful, depending on the moment and the week and the year. So, in the end, I suppose the most important message is to appreciate the triumphant moments when we can.
So in the post Russ Hodges and the “Shot Heard Round the World” and Basket Catch era we have endured for 56 years without a championship as Giant fans, we say Kol Hakavod, all the honor and glory. We say it for our superstars in San Francisco who never got to experience that championship like Willie Mays and Willie McCovey and Juan Marichal and Will Clark and Robby Thompson and Matt Williams and Rick Reuschel and Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent and Jason Schmidt. We say it for goats like Johnnie LeMaster and Atlee Hammaker and Candy Maldonado and Salomon Torres. We say it for characters like John “the Count” Montefusco and Greg “Moon Man” Minton and Jeffrey “Hack Man” Leonard. And we say it for obscure players that only obsessed people like me have probably heard of like Ed Goodson and Marc Hill and William Van Landingham.
So while we probably shouldn’t say the actual Shehecheyanu, which expresses thanks “for giving us life, sustaining us, and enabling us to reach this season,” because it would be considered a prayer said for a vain purpose, for all of us life-long Giant fans, we do say kol hakavod, all the honor and glory. And we say a “Giant” thank you not for giving us life but for enriching our lives, not fur sustaining us but for entertaining us, and not for enabling us to reach this season, but for allowing us to appreciate this season. And let us let out a “Giant” Amen.