Shots Heard 'Round the World:

Basketball and Judaism

Rabbi Michael Feshbach

Temple Beth Am

Williamsville, New York

Despite being traumatized and affected for years to come by the departure of my home town team as a tender youth, and, indeed, despite my unswerving attachment to the real America's team in a completely different sport (that's the Washington Redskins, folks, for anyone under the mistaken impression that Dallas has anything to do with the rest of the country), I had always thought that it was baseball that provided the best material for sermons and other spiritual commentary. After all, in baseball, almost unique among sports, that the game is truly not over until it is over. The valuable lesson of never giving up simply does not apply to a 66-3 football blowout entering the fourth quarter. Start the car, avoid the crowd, switch to Star Trek on another station. Stick a fork in your team, they're done. But in baseball, until the last out is called, no matter the deficit, there is always hope. And it is in baseball that teaches, as a former commissioner of the game once said, that one in three is greatness. And that errors are part of the game.

Never giving up. Not succeding each and every attempt. Accepting imperfection. These are amongst the most powerful spiritual lessons any sport -- or any sermon -- can hope to teach. They are lessons that come from baseball.

But move over, America's national pasttime. For this past month, lessons are coming fast and furious from another field. No, not Japan. From the court of play to the court of law, to the court of public opinion. This month the lessons come from that monotonous dribble of sameness, that track meet masked as competition: basketball.

Item: University of Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma arranges for his star player, Nykesha Sales, injured the previous week and supposedly out for the season despite being a single point shy of breaking her school's single season scoring record, to take an uncontested shot, a staged basket, at the start of her team's last regular season game. She made the shot. She broke the record. Or did she?

Item: A thug disguised as a professional basketball player, one Latrell Sprewell, assaults his coach, chokes him, and returns after one physical encounter to initiate another and, reportedly, threaten to kill the man as well. His team terminates his contract and the league suspends the player from the league for an entire year. It does not press criminal charges. But Sprewell, apparantly unmollified by the fact that he was not facing jail time, challenges the suspension. An arbitrator supports the challenge, orders Sprewell's suspension shortened, and most of his back pay reinstated. Score: National Basketball Player's Association: 1, Human Decency, Responsibility and Accountability: 0.

I am truly torn by the first incident. My initial reaction was that I didn't have an immediate opinion on the subject. (Those who know me know how rare that is.) Or, rather, I had two opinions. It was kind, it was compassionate, it was a human moment in the midst of cutthroat competition. It was ridiculous and inappropriate, it makes records meaningless, it can't really count.

The second incident is more serious. Such behavior off a court really would land one in jail or, for a first offense, at least facing criminal charges. Overturning the league's ruling makes a laughing stock of discipline, and sends a message that violence is tolerated if you have enough talent to consistently place a rubber object inside a metal circle. As NBA Commissioner David Stern said, "the answer is now well established: you cannot choke your boss and hold your job unless you play in the NBA..."

But these two basketball-related incidents have something in common with each other. A sport is an invention, a game, with rules and expectations and, when you enter into its world, a suspension of disbelief, an embrace of the generally accepted parameters that define its borders. The Sales and Sprewell incidents, in different ways and for different reasons, nonetheless both break that suspension of disbelief. They both invade the border of a world, they both cross lines between the world of a game and what we think of as the "real" world. Injuries are part of the game, a factor for individual players and for coaches weighing the balance and depth of their team; they cannot be wished away. Deliberate violence, on the other hand, is not part of the game. It cannot be condoned, tolerated or excused. With Sales and Sprewell, "inside" and "outside," "game" and "world," "constructed reality A," and, if we are honest with ourselves, "constructed reality B" that we think of as the everyday world collide. And when worlds collide, we need to "'Nupe it." But it's not just our joints that ache.

So what does this have to do with religion? Why is a rabbi writing about sports? It's because I know what that headache is like, when worlds collide. As Jews in a modern world, we know all about the crashing together of inside and outside, the dissonant overlap between Reality One and Reality Two. Reconstructionist Jews phrase it differently, but mean the same thing: they know that we stand at a crash-prone intersection on the highway of two civilizations.

You see, I believe that religions are, like sports, constructed realities. I believe that all religions, including the one to which I adhere and to which I have pledged my soul, my sweat, and my career, are artificial inventions of human beings. Inspired by a reality, an impulse, a holy voice beyond ourselves, yes; but the details, the parameters, the specific rules, the particular pathways to Eternity... the material may be ordered from above, we have to pave the paths ourselves. All religions, including Judaism, are meaning, systems made with our minds and shaped by human hands. They are, in this way, like entering into a game. There are rules. There are expectations. And there is a moment when we enter into another world, with its own borders, its own realities. We train, we study, we learn about the world. But to enter it fully there is a moment when the training becomes merely prelude, when it has brought us so far but can go no further, when we must take the next step ourselves. To enter into a world with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. It takes a leap of faith. A leap towards heaven. A jump shot sent towards the sky.. on the wings of a prayer.

Inside. And outside. And sometimes I wonder if all of the conflicts and controversy going on in the Jewish world at the moment have to do with different ideas about where the borders are. About what is on the inside, and what is on the outside. Or who.

To play a game you have to, as the saying goes, "play by the rules." To live in, to experience a religious tradition you have to immerse yourself in the assumptions and claims of another world. To say that one day a week is different from others, it is not just Friday night, but Erev Shabbat. To say that one place is different from other places, it is a Promised Land, a sacred part of a people's story. To see a pair of candles or a six pointed star or tasteless flat bread or "backwards" black letters on an unrolled scroll and feel a part of the picture, a connection with the props, a string pulled in your own heart. It is your uniform. Your field. Your home team.

And the tensions on the team? One player says it counts for more if you throw the ball from here. Another says it doesn't. One player says that one line is out of bounds. Another says the field should be repainted, to extend the boundaries, to include new places, to include new people. One player says the coach has to approve you to be on the team. Another says that anyone who wants to wear your uniform can come and take a shot.

Conversion. Intermarriage. Outreach and Inclusion. Acceptance of each other. Recognition of rabbis. The role of women. Changing tradition. The length of holidays. Peace with others. Peace amongst ourselves. All these things are disagreements about rules, about boundaries, about how to play a game or form a team. About whose shots count, and who hits coaches. About the assumptions we should share to make a world work.

It is not just a game. It is life. The essence of community, of a people, of a faith is that we share a certain number of assumptions about the universe, that we look at the world, to some critical degree, in the same way. When we don't share some necessary level of commonality, we aren't part of the same team anymore. We can't be.

Am Echad, we Jews call ourselves. "One People." But are we? Only to the degree we are moving in the same direction, sharing the same goals, working towards the same ends. Only when we are able to function... as players on a field, and members of a team.

Maybe, on some issues, the different denominations of Judaism see things so differently that we are not all on the same team. If that is the case, then perhaps we can at least try to remember that we can, I hope, agree on enough, to be in the same league. And to play the same game.