"What am I cheering for?” asked the eminent talmid chochom who happened to be a Mets fan on Opening Day of 1992: “Let’s say they didn’t do what they’re accused of doing,” he continued, alluding to charges against three important players: “What they’ve admitted is shameful enough.” When idolized athletes reveal their feet of clay, many Torah educators react, not in self-critical embarrassment, like my colleague the fan, but with a sense of exultation and triumph. For them, immoral behavior, vulgarity, dishonesty and avarice in the sports cathedrals is precisely the ammunition they want to demonstrate the worthlessness of sports as a physical activity and even more as the source of spectator enjoyment.
Students whose inclination to waste precious time is not nipped in the bud by witticisms like “Football? Twenty two idiots running after a ball!” may yet take alarm at tales of fornication, domestic violence, boorishness, gambling and steroids. What are we to make of their argument and what are we to make of their invective? Let’s run through the usual defenses made by the pro-sports crowd. Yes, sports promote physical fitness, coordination and vigor, and following the professionals adds zest to our own activities. To which your self righteous health lishmah types retort that non-competitive calisthenics are better and more efficient medicine than standing around waiting for the ball to be hit to you, straining your arm in the unnatural motion of pitching, or ambling around a golf course. And can these meager benefits offset hundreds of hours on the couch watching other people engage in these activities, or the junk food consumed while doing so?
Though debating the achievements of professional athletes and analyzing their statistics encourages many children to accelerate their mastery of arithmetic, tasting the waters of long division years before the age set by the educational establishment, in its didactic wisdom, for their initiation into its mysteries, this benefit too is limited and soon outgrown.
It is claimed that playing sports promotes teamwork and talking about sports solidifies social bonds. In particular, involvement in sports enables committed Orthodox Jews, a small minority in the United States, and a minority even in Israel, to converse with individuals less committed, who cannot navigate the sea of Talmud or comprehend the passion for God. It provides a neutral topic that lubricates social intercourse and often alleviates tension and conflict. Though some would aver that Orthodox confrontation with the world outside our four cubits should be marked by discomfort and palpable alienation, in reality we recognize that such an atmosphere is neither livable nor morally desirable.
Politicians get mileage out of talking sports: When President Nixon visited a delegation of antiwar students gathered to protest before dawn at the Washington Monument, he earnestly, though a bit incongruously, praised the Syracuse University football team. Not everyone is Nixon, of course. Many other subjects can serve for mixed conversation and pleasant interaction. Many Orthodox Jews, totally illiterate in sports, manage to find common language with others. Good will, good character and sensitive social skills are more important than the ability to make chitchat about inherently frivolous matters. People who have experienced sports, actively or passively, should put their experience to positive social use, but that is quite different from investing time and energy for the sake of eventual utility. The most powerful of common apologia for the sports aficionado is also the simplest. Thus Samuel Johnson defended commerce. He said: “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” The innocent exertion of the sportsman and the innocent recreation of the spectator are among those few ways. For the lonely and the preoccupied, there is nothing like the daily ballgame to ease the burden of the self or merely to provide an island of peace and recreation in a difficult world.
In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, one of the things that left an abiding impression on several of my talmidim is her depiction of the widowed clergyman reading and thinking in the Iowa twilight against the relaxed background of the baseball broadcast. The aforementioned Richard Nixon, his presidency ruined, fortified his diminished seder ha-yom by scheduling a nightly pilgrimage to Yankee Stadium and other parks. Why even my mother, late in her long life, was grateful to have been introduced to the culture of baseball, so that she could enjoy the televised gracefulness of the athletes and the quiet dignity with which Joe Torre coped with his boss.
Naturally this approach cannot appeal to the hard core Musarnik. From his or her perspective, innocence is no excuse. What does not make me stronger spiritually is a waste of time and thus destructive. The ideal ben Torah is one for whom innocent activities have no place because he or she is totally taken up with the aspiration to excellence. The innocent pastime is the servant of mediocrity and the enemy of proper utilization of time. At which the Johnsonian need do no more than to remind us that passing the time innocently is no easy thing. How much of the profound moral evil in this world, to say nothing of mere misery, is due to boredom and restlessness, masquerading as a quest for greatness and self-transcendence? Is there more, or is there less, gratuitous ill will and slander where harmless everyday pleasures are rejected for an insatiable craving to fi ll life with hollow, grandiose achievement and attention? The debate between these idealistic and realistic impulses is more crucial for our self-understanding and for the lives we lead than many of us think. Can we aspire to excellence without abandoning ourselves to self-deluded spiritual arrogance? Perhaps we will discuss these dilemmas some other time.
II
For now I would like to consider the vehemence and contempt many of our preachers bestow upon the innocent, sometimes silly activities that give so many people enjoyment. Sports enthusiasts are not the only targets of such rhetoric: the same kind of invective is often deployed against other forms of amusement. I prefer to speak of what I know, and of activities I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy. The previous paragraphs sketch the range of anti-sports argument. As we have seen the criticisms of playing and watching sports are not without merit. Whatever the positive goals to which involvement in sports culture can be applied—physical, social, or recreational, it is hard to make the argument that the sports culture ought to be an important part of our education and an essential leisure activity. It seems clear that investing huge quantities of time and attention to following sports, purchasing expensive paraphernalia and articles of clothing and footwear because they are marketed using the name and image of a famed and charismatic athlete, agonizing over the fortunes of favorite teams and players as if these were earthshaking events in our own lives, is foolish and invites satire.
It would be amazing and incomprehensible if effective advocates of traditional Torah education foreswore humorous remarks about the foibles of youth culture. I don’t know how to measure the short-range effects of these discourses. Do they increase the amount of time spent in commendable activities, or dissuade young people from emulating the vices of notorious athletes? Do they deter their audience from buying designer items? Do they lead their hearers to focus their prayers on health, growth in Torah, the peace and welfare of society as opposed to the success of one’s team? Dissertations on the subject can, and probably have been produced at our graduate schools of education. Uninitiated in the guild, I surmise that pejorative remarks by Rabbis on the sports culture are neither more nor less effective than attacks on other features of modern secular culture.
What about the long-range consequences? Soon enough life exerts its gravitational force. The pressing needs of this world become ubiquitous— getting and spending money claims our time and attention. As we grow older, the imperatives of the next world cannot be evaded; they too demand our time and attention. Our trivial youthful pastimes cannot rival the unrelenting pursuit of self-interest or, for the religiously minded, the pursuit of life in the presence of God. With a brief glance at the box score and a snatch of conversation, with the sportscaster’s voice softly accompanying our sober grown up activities, in the beautiful green summer diamonds or schoolyard basketball games we linger on in passing, the carefree loose-limbed ghosts of our youth return like a vanished dream. In our maturity we may still be glad to have been them, but their time has gone. In the long run, reality accomplishes what Musar generally does not. What remains, for most of us who grew up loving sports, is the memory of our own modest athletic competence and the vision of true mastery by the elite. The athlete, however gifted, achieves this mastery only through years of incessant training, rehearsing the same set of physical moves and responses for thousands of hours until they become second nature, all the while anticipating the stage of actual performance when he, or she, must confront a new situation, similar but not quite the same as those encountered in practice or previous experience, and meet that challenge, under pressure, with skill and grace. Except for the requirement of grace under pressure, this description uncannily recalls the intellectual combination of constant learning, review and creativity without which one cannot become a serious talmid hakham. Nor is the element of pressure absent when we must bring our Torah education to bear in the immediacy of the personal encounter, often at moments of crisis. What survives into adulthood, in a word, is gratefulness for what athletes, in their genuine or affected humility, call their “God-given talent,” together with a heartfelt admiration for the persistence and discipline that translates rare gifts of strength and coordination into the magnifi cence of performance under competitive conditions. Perhaps because athletic excellence, like most manifestations of beauty, is neither necessary for temporal success nor essential to our moral and spiritual existence, and because the attainments of professionals are so incontrovertibly beyond our aspirations or capabilities, our admiration tends to be pure, uncontaminated by the envy or jealousy that so often poison our attitudes towards those superior to us in some department.
Surely one may live a religious life without any conception of athletic excellence. However, one cannot live a religious life without the habit of reverence and love for the exhibition of excellence. Life, where that natural admiration for what is innocently graceful and impressive is extinguished or undeveloped, becomes an impoverished, embittered, egotistic, self-interested affair. We grudge our fellow human beings their relative superiority to us, and we cannot whole-heartedly worship our Creator as the source and paradigm of all that is admirable and impressive in this world. In such a world, envy is no longer a vice; it may even be regarded as an expression of an egalitarian agenda. It is not shocking that those who cultivate such a world are tone deaf to the prayer of praise and gratitude. To the extent that we fail to nurture the sense of pleasure and thanksgiving for beauty and grace that are not self-centered and self interested, we make ourselves cripples, religiously speaking.
What remains of the Musar? Sometimes it appears as if, for many adults, the high aspirations and mantras of their early Torah education vanish along with the other apparitions of childhood. All the talk from the front of the classroom about a life suffused by fear and love of God, the evenings of intense and vehement discourse in the Bet Midrash, the ideals lifted high in the air, belong to a different world than the one inhabited by the adult self. What is still discernible in the adult sometimes is not the content of the Musar but the tone.
You recognize the “yeshiva man,” not by his refined middot or by his perpetual consciousness of God, but by his cynical demeanor, a reflexive tendency to disparage and denigrate everything and everyone, not passing over the characteristic ideals of Torah, its leading personalities and the yeshiva culture itself. So familiar is this phenomenon to the yeshiva world that we have a distinctive, hard to translate term for it: bittul. To be mevattel a person or idea is not only to disparage him or her or it, or even to display a facile contempt. It is to mock out of habit, compulsively, formulaically, as if any other attitude were beneath the hard pretentious defensive dignity of the person who delivers himself of the derisive judgment. The cynicism of bittul is incompatible with genuine admiration or reverence for anything or anyone; it leaves no room for love of anything superior to oneself. When educators sneer and jeer at the silliness, and worse, they perceive around them, they do not deliberately seek to propagate a culture of bittul. Least of all do they imagine their astringency refashioned into an absolute outlook and turned sharply even against their own persons and their favorite doctrines. In their minds they are upholding good and deriding evil. If leitsanus (derision) is prohibited, yet leitsanusa d’avoda zara (derision of idolatry or of vice in general) is commendable. How can such justified invective lead to destructive outcomes?
R. Hutner devoted the first discourse of Pachad Yitzchak on Purim to the ethos of leitsanus. His point is that leitsanus, by its very nature, is destructive. It expresses the desire to negate, to deny significance; it cheapens the world. In permissible leitsanus, the destructive element is secondary to the creative impulse; negation and denial of significance are in the service of affirmation. Value is enhanced. R. Hutner’s remarks force us to consider how we are to know when derision is secondary to a positive goal and thus useful in enhancing that goal and when derision and disparagement become primary and are to be shunned. It seems that one-sided denigration, in its failure to appreciate what is valuable and admirable in the object satirized, is liable to become an end in itself and thus is essentially destructive of meaning.
As I hinted earlier, many in our Orthodox society resemble, and sometimes outdo secular society in their cynicism and constitutional inability to appreciate and revere. In our generation, if we are to nurture the fundamental religious impulses of praise and gratitude and sheer appreciation of innocent human achievement, we must be especially anxious to avoid feeding a culture of bittul.
When Caliban, the savage in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who has become an emblem of the baleful effects of colonialism, turns against the veneer of civilization to which he has been subjected, he accuses his would be mentor, the magician Prospero: “You taught me language, and my profi t on ‘t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” We who would benefit the younger generation with our wisdom and gestures, we who would instruct them about the society in which we are embedded, and lead them on the path to reverence and love for the good, should beware of cheering ourselves too uncritically, lest one day the message will be fl ung in our face: “You taught me Musar, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to sneer!”.
Divrei Shalom 66-71
