We were sitting on our third-floor terrace on a warm Shabbat afternoon. It was one of the perfect Jerusalem days — not uncomfortably hot, not borderline cold, the air just lapping lightly at your skin with no unwelcome humidity to mar the moment.
My wife, Jody, and I were reading the paper, our 8-year-old, Aviv, was kicking a ball around in the courtyard downstairs, and the older kids were playing the card game Set.
Then I heard it: an amplified sound that echoed off the buildings incoherently in a language I didn’t immediately recognize. Imagine the “blah-blah-blah” voice of the adults in the old Charlie Brown cartoons — that’s pretty much what I was listening to.
My first thought was it was an emergency announcement, a policeman on a blow horn warning people to stay away from some area where a suspected terrorist was loose. But there were no sirens and the voice sounded more enthusiastic than stern.
Maybe it was from one of the local muezzins — the loudspeakers that sit astride area mosques and call the faithful to prayer five times a day. Depending on where you live in the city (and your religious preference), this call can be quite inspiring — or rather jarring, especially the one that goes out across the eastern part of the city before dawn.
But now the amplified voice began to take shape — it was clearly Hebrew. And I began to discern other sounds in the background: crowd sounds, cheering.
The light bulb went off over my head: The audio reverberating all through southern Jerusalem on this sunny Shabbat afternoon must be coming from far away Teddy Stadium, where a local soccer match was being played. The excited voice I heard was probably the announcer introducing the players as they strode onto the field.
Soccer on Shabbat … it’s as American as apple pie. But this is not America, it’s Israel, and instead of apples, here it’s a political hot potato.
Shabbat afternoon soccer is a desecration of the holy day, say some. It’s a perfect way to spend the day following synagogue and a family meal, say others.
For immigrants from the United States, the debate is mostly moot; we didn’t grow up in a rabid soccer-playing culture like our Israeli fellow citizens, or for that matter like our English-speaking cousins from the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. So we look on, like the bemused outsiders we so often are, as proposals make their way to the Knesset that go so far as to ban Shabbat soccer or, alternatively, to move Israel’s weekend to accommodate Israelis of all religious persuasions.
Shifting the weekend to a more Western-standard Saturday-Sunday (vs. Israel’s current Friday-Saturday) would not only solve the soccer dilemma, but the shopping one too. Soccer and shopping could be concentrated on the newly created Sunday day off.
It sounds attractive, though I’m not holding my breath. Given the importance of Shabbat to so many Israelis, most people would probably take off early on Friday afternoons to get home before sundown. That would leave us with a four-and-a-half day workweek, making Israel the productive equivalent of, well, France (not exactly a model of hardworking inspiration).
As I sat on my terrace and debated the trade-offs between work and play, it occurred to me that all these discussions were missing the point. Because for at least one neurotic oleh, the booming narrator and the amplified crowd were doing only one thing really well: disturbing my relaxing Shabbat afternoon of leisure.
I tried to ignore the uninvited surround-sound, but some underused part of my brain was doing laughable Hebrew-to-English translations.
I just about was ready to head inside and shut the door on a beautiful day when, suddenly, the loudspeakers began to blare a new tune. Someone was singing now. My universal translator stepped up to the plate.
I can name that tune … it was “Hatikvah.” Bouncing off the rooftops were the proud words and melody of the national anthem.
As the music ended and cheering erupting from far away, I realized I had unintentionally stood up to face the direction of Teddy Stadium. So then, this time very consciously, I turned slowly, nearly 180 degrees, to orient myself in the direction of the Western Wall at the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem.
Yes, the sounds from the stadium had certainly been annoying. But where else in the world can these inspirational words envelop an entire city? A Shabbat afternoon “Hatikvah” might not have been the exact reason we moved to Israel in the first place, but it was a pretty good reason to stay.
To all around the world who recently celebrated Israel’s Independence Day and Jerusalem Day, I hope you had a chag sameach. And next year in Jerusalem, with me and Teddy!
Brian Blum writes the syndicated column “This Normal Life” at www.ThisNormalLife.com.