Many of you know, I’m not much of a sports fan. But I’ve always had a soft spot for baseball. Going to Braves games with my Dad are some of my most cherished memories from growing up.
So when I had kids of my own, I naturally wanted to offer them similar experiences and bless them with similar fond memories. I took Lilah to her first game we were still living in Philadelphia, and one city, two more kids, and about a decade later, I have made it a point every season to take the kids to at least one game, whether it be at The Diamond, or to make pilgrimages to major league parks in cities we visit. I know I am incredibly blessed to have these opportunities with my kids, and I cherish the time we spend together.
But if I’m being honest, it doesn’t always feel that my kids appreciate them as much, or in the ways, I had hoped they would. Are they going to look back on these experiences with the same fondness and wistfulness that I have when I recall the games my Dad took me to as a kid? How could they, when literally all they do for as long as we’re in the stadium is ask for snacks, stand in line at the concession stand, eat snacks, ask for souvenirs, shop for souvenirs, ask to use the potty, stand in line for the potty, ask for more snacks, stand in line for more snacks, eat more snacks, ask to find Nutzy, hunt around the whole ballpark for Nutzy, realize when we finally find him that they are too scared to say hi, ask for more snacks, get upset when the answer is no, and then demand to go home? I swear – in the decade or so I’ve been taking my kids to baseball games, we’ve cumulatively watched maybe a whole inning of actual baseball.
Of course, some of this is just the distorting effect of nostalgia. I was sharing about these experiences with my Dad recently, and he responded by saying that they were virtually identical to his experiences taking me and my siblings to games when we were little. It turns out my fond memories might be less about enjoying the sport itself and more about the excitement of being at the ballpark and the warmth of spending quality time with my father.
But this spring, something significant changed. Last April, I took the kids to DC to see the Braves play the Nationals on opening weekend. The Braves took a tough loss that day, but it didn’t matter. The sun was shining. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The temperature was in the high 60’s. There was a kosher hot dog stand. And, amazingly, my kids actually watched the game. The flood of requests and demands for snacks, souvenirs, and potty breaks slowed to a trickle, merely periodically punctuating long stretches of witnessing actual baseball. Strikeouts and double-plays were met with cheers. Cracks of bats prompted motion to the edge of seats. Solid swats elicited excited leaps and high-fives. Questions were asked about rules and strategy, and answers were actually listened to. It was miraculous, I tell you.
Were my kids just a year older, and a year more mature? Had they developed longer attention spans, or a greater appreciation for the subtleties of the game, or a diminished interest in treats and toys?
I think if you’ve had any interaction with my kids over the past year, you would know that our extraordinary experience at the ballpark this spring could in no way be attributed to these explanations. So what changed?
The answer is deceptively simple: Baseball. Baseball changed. This season, Major League Baseball instituted some radical rule changes designed to stimulate offense, encourage more aggressive baserunning, and, above all, make the game move faster. Perhaps the most significant of these changes was instituting a pitch clock, giving pitchers 15 seconds to begin their motion to throw the ball, and hitters just 8 seconds to be set in the batter’s box.
The changes worked. All of a sudden, the game took on an exciting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality. Without the half-hearted pickoff attempts making at-bats take forever, innings seem interminable, and games feel utterly endless, the pace of play became brisk and breezy, getting my kids into the game, keeping their interest, holding their attention, and dare I say, transforming them into actual baseball fans – well, at least Shemaya; the others I would now at least call baseball tolerators, if not appreciators.
It turned out that my kids’ seeming inability to watch and enjoy a baseball game without constant whining and interruption wasn’t due to them being broken, or my bad parenting. Rather, baseball itself was to blame. Over the course of my lifetime, the average length of baseball games had ballooned by nearly an hour. And all that extra time was mostly filled with things like player and equipment readjustments. Who wants to watch that?
The answer, of course, is fewer and fewer people every year. Over the past few decades, attendance at Major League Baseball games and TV viewership have been steadily declining, a trend that correlated perfectly with games becoming longer, slower, and quieter. Unless it did something to expand its appeal to new and younger cohorts of fans, Major League Baseball faced the very real threat of eventually withering and even dying.
Faced with the challenge of reversing these worrying trends and saving baseball, league brass arrived at a deceptively simple and somewhat paradoxical idea: the cure for what ailed baseball was more baseball. They asked, in effect, “What if we restored baseball to its most basic self, if we returned baseball to being just baseball? If we built that – would the people come?” And it turned out the answer was a resounding and definitive “yes.”
So what does that have to do with us?
Just like Major League Baseball, American synagogues have experienced a marked decline over the past forty years or so. Today, only about a third of American Jews belong to a synagogue. This decay has precipitated a drying up of infrastructure and resources, which in turn further facilitates disaffiliation.
How do we account for this decline? And what can those of us who believe that synagogues remain essential centers for Jewish spiritual life in America do to turn things around?
It was in the 1990’s that American Jewish leaders first began to truly notice these troubling trend lines. Rabbi Michael Lerner, in an attempt to figure out what was going on, surveyed hundreds of Jewish Americans who had abandoned organized Jewish life. What he found was that these Jews had not lost their religion. Rather, they were leaving synagogues because they believed their synagogues had left Judaism. They had been taught – correctly, I think – that the heart and soul of the Jewish tradition is the imperative to pursue a loving, just, and peaceful society. Yet from their perspective, their synagogues weren’t embodying and nurturing that spirit. Rather, they focused primarily on things like the importance of Jewish identity, communal engagement, and ritual observances as ends to themselves. Therefore, Lerner concluded, the way to revitalize organized Jewish life in America was to embrace, center, and emphasize the moral mission that Jews correctly understood to be our tradition’s essence and purpose (see Lerner, Jewish Renewal). The cure for what ails Judaism is Judaism itself; not transformation, but return (see Heschel, The Prophets; cf. Hosea 14:2, Isaiah 44:22; Jeremiah 3:14).
Reconciling Jewish people and its institutions with the essence of Jewish faith, bringing individuals and organizations back into alignment with what Judaism was always supposed to be, and what we are fundamentally called to do was the main project of the biblical prophets. Often misunderstood and mischaracterized, the biblical prophets, known to us through their writings in the Hebrew Bible, were not fortune-tellers or radicals trying to remake Jewish religion. On the contrary, they saw their mission as attempting to bring their people back to the essence of Jewish faith. The primary prophetic directive, echoed in today’s haftarah portion from the book of Jeremiah, as well as countless places in the other prophetic books of the biblical canon, is not shinah, change, or halaf, transform, but, rather, shuv – return.
What did the prophets believe was the essential faith from which their people had strayed, and to which they must return? That the God of Israel is also the One God of all humanity; that this great, mighty, and awesome God Most High loves kindness and detests injustice; and that, above all, God desires a world rooted in equality and sustained through justice – a radically inclusive, thoroughly just, and perfectly peaceful social order.
Moreover, the prophets emphasized that God relies on human action, calling upon us to act as God’s partners in the tasks of lifting up the downtrodden and repairing the brokenness of our world. To this end, we are called to care for those in need – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, and providing shelter to the unhoused – and also to pursue justice on the broader social level – advancing policies and systems that ensure a society where all have sufficient food, clothing, healthcare, and housing in the first place.
It’s important to note what is not on that prophetic list of God’s priorities: Jewish identity, communal engagement, and ritual observances, at least not as ends to themselves. According to the prophets, the God of the Torah couldn’t care less about what you profess to believe, or who you are, or what tribe you belong to, or what your social calendar looks like, or what or how or when you pray, if those pursuits don’t lead you more fully into the moral mission of building the world that God desires for us.
That message is echoed in today’s haftarah portion, taken from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. After the reign of King Solomon, the kingdom of Israel split into two: a kingdom in the north called Israel, and a kingdom in the south called Judah. Those two separate and independent nations existed side-by-side for nearly two centuries until the Assyrian empire invaded in 722 BCE and destroyed the northern kingdom.
The prophets, for their part, had been warning of this impending doom for years. Prophets like Amos repeatedly confronted the people of Israel for inviting destruction by abandoning God. But the people didn’t listen to the prophets. They responded, “What are you talking about?! We haven’t lost our religion! Look! We still go to temple! We still observe the rituals by the book! We contribute to the building fund” The prophets, however, argued that, to God, the people’s behavior outside their sanctuaries spoke louder than the words they uttered inside them. Actively and passively, they had abided the creation of a “culture of affluence and ease for the rich and poverty and oppression for the poor…where those at the top lived in luxury and those at the bottom in abject poverty and despair,” all while believing that “comfortable ritual divorced from God’s demands for justice” would be enough to protect them from internal decay and external danger (Letty M. Russell, Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference, 108-109).
The prophets railed against this mindset, arguing that God detests worship decoupled from moral action; that regardless of how frequently or fervently the people prayed, regardless of what they professed to believe, they had broken faith with God and each other through establishing and tolerating systemic inequities, alienating God and courting disaster.
After the fall of the northern kingdom, the prophets turned to the people of Judah with the same message: change your ways, champion the cause of the poor and the oppressed, build a society rooted in human dignity and strengthened through justice. In other words, get back to Jewish faith and practice as it was intended – or else you will end up sharing the same fate that befell your kinsmen.
Yet despite witnessing the calamity that happened to their fellow Israelites, the people of Judah remained relatively unfazed, for they too thought that so long as the Temple stood in Jerusalem, they would be safe. Even as the Babylonians conquered the Assyrians and stood menacingly on their northern border, the people of Judah continued to reason that as long as they offered sacrifices properly, prayed dutifully, and maintained this one building fastidiously, that all would be well.
Jeremiah calls this out as a dangerous delusion. “Do you consider this House, which bears [God’s] name, to be a den of thieves?” he asks (7:11). Do you think God cares only about proper worship but not the proper behavior of the worshiper? Of course not, Jeremiah insists, reminding his people of the Torah’s warning that God will only “let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors,” if “you execute justice between one another…if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow; if you do not shed the blood of the innocent” (7:5-7). The God of the Torah, Jeremiah warned, ultimately does not care about “burnt offerings or sacrifice” but, rather, that we listen to God’s call and follow God’s ways (7:22-23). All other paths lead to destruction.
The people of Judah, of course, do not heed Jeremiah’s warning. In 586 BCE, the Babylonians invaded Judah, sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and sent the leaders into exile in Babylon.
To this community of exiles, Jeremiah could have gloated. He could have said “I told you so.” But that’s not what Jeremiah did. Instead, he offered words of hope. All is not lost, he said. You may be broken and scattered, defeated and desperate, but you need not despair. Restoration and revitalization is possible. But the only way to secure it is through return: “aharei shuvi, nihamti,” which I would translate as “[we] will be restored when [we] return.”
The path to healing and moving forward in wholeness and vitality is through going back – returning to fidelity to a God who detests cruelty and oppression, a God who delights in love and equity, a God who wants our service more than songs, a God who calls for our partnership in building a world of inclusion, justice, and peace. Jeremiah teaches that the only thing that can fix the brokenness of his Jewish community is to go back, reconciling and realigning with essential Jewish faith. So Jeremiah calls upon his people to pray, “hashiveni v’ashuvah, ki atah Adonai Elohai / allow me to return and I will return, for You The Infinite are my God,” I acknowledge that I went astray and I sincerely commit to returning to the right path of fidelity to a God of love and justice.
The power of Jeremiah’s message, and one of the reasons we read it today, is because this kind of return, which our tradition calls teshuvah – a term usually translated as repentance, but which, stemming from the Hebrew root shuv, more literally means to turn – is the essence of the Days of Awe. These solemn days are dedicated to inviting us to recognize how we have gone astray and get back on the right path.
Importantly, the teshuvah, the return, that the High Holy Days calls us towards is fundamentally about embracing our moral responsibility. The liturgy and rituals of these days call our attention to how we treat one another, not how well we perform religious rituals, reminding us that God judges us not for what we say or do not say in prayer, but rather for what we do, or fail to do, to build a just society The path to which we are being called back is not the path of private acts of piety but, rather, the path of public acts of love and justice.
It is striking to me that our ancestors who originally built this place decorated it with an extraordinary series of stained glass windows that depict imagery and ideas from the biblical prophets. Look at these magnificent works of art all around you. Through them, our ancestors were reminding us that time spent in our sanctuary is meant to be a foundation for what we must do outside of it: repairing the world by caring for those in need and advancing the cause of justice in our society.
How do we do this? How do we approach what happens in this place as a foundation for what we do outside? For starters, we can see prayer as preparation for service, regarding communal prayer as a means to cultivate awareness of and compassion for the oppression and suffering that breaks God’s heart, and to energize ourselves and each other to transform the world as it is into the world as it ought to be.
Similarly, we can utilize this space to cultivate community purposefully, creating a context for nurturing deep, involved, and supportive relationships “in which we come to learn about one another’s interests, obstacles, pain, and dreams” and “investing in the ongoing creation of one another’s lives” (Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, 211). This kind of intentional communal engagement can enable us to recognize God’s image in one another; learn that each and every person is infinitely valuable and equally worthy of dignity, concern, and care; understand our connection to and responsibility for others; and become inspired to perfect the world, not just for ourselves, but also for everyone.
And perhaps the best way we can honor this space is through how we observe Shabbat together. Our tradition refers to Shabbat as “m’ein olam ha-ba / a microcosm of the World-to-Come” (B. Shabbat 57b). On Shabbat, we cease the self-centered business of acquiring, consuming, and creating that dominates our daily lives, enabling us to envision a different reality and re-energize ourselves and each other for the work of pursuing it. And by dedicating a day to activities like study, prayer, and engaging with community – encountering the Divine within, the Divine beyond, and the Divine image reflected in the face of each other – we model and cultivate the inclusive, equitable, and peaceful world that ought to be.
We best honor this renewed and rededicated space by embracing, cultivating, and acting upon the prophetic call, highlighted by these windows, for teshuvah, returning to our primary purpose as Jews. As we complete our Building for the Next 90 renovation project and delight in returning to our beautifully remodeled and refurbished home; as we consider how to ensure that this space is cherished and utilized, and that our congregation – and indeed our people – remain vibrant and vital for generations to come, let us place our attention and energy on embodying and nurturing what our prophets taught, our congregation’s founders venerated, and our people continue to understand to be the authentic spirit of our tradition – the imperative to pursue a loving, just, and peaceful society. Let us approach our gatherings, holiday and lifecycle observances, study and worship not as ends to themselves, but rather as the means through which we might live more fully into our moral mission to repair the world. I want to challenge us especially to cultivate a more robust Shabbat community by placing renewed emphasis on celebrating Shabbat together, enabling the kind of communal engagement and spiritual nourishment that will galvanize us to embrace and rededicate ourselves to the work of social transformation, the essence of our Jewish calling.
We will flourish in the years to come through return, a return to our most essential selves, a return to what and who God calls us to be and do in the world. Hashiveni v’ashuvah – If we return to Judaism, I am convinced the Jews will return to us. And more importantly, if we return to who we are supposed to be, then we will advance a world suffused with God’s presence.
In today’s haftarah, the prophet Jeremiah assures us that teshuvah is always possible; we are never too far gone, we have never wandered too far astray. Wherever we go, there God is – calling us back, inviting us to return, to go back in order to move forward. How we respond to that call is up to us.
This year, may we respond to that call by turning toward the right path, the path we were and are always called to be on – the path of love, the path of justice, and the path of peace.
Comments