How my love of sports became a Jewish Value

I have been an avid sports fan my entire life, not necessarily of playing any particular one, but rather of following the action on the field. Especially during baseball season when school was out for the summer, I would locate the sports section of the newspaper delivered to my house each day and find a quiet space where I would be undisturbed for at least an hour so I could practice my labor of love of tracking at bats, runs, hits, and runs batted in. More than watching any sport, I enjoyed reading about the action as it appeared in box score form. I loved the precise details of which players helped their team to win or caused their team to lose. A box score offered no congratulations to these winners and no consolation to these losers. It simply reported what a player did or did not do on a given day in a specific sport and quantified his performance into a sequence of numbers.


Nothing was able to diminish my love for sports as I grew away from my scrawny childhood and into my turbulent teenage years. By this point however, distractions such as family dysfunction, making friends crazy, chasing girls, and ditching school were stealing almost all of time away from watching sports. I no longer sat transfixed in front of a television and watched historic moments such as Joe Montana passing to Dwight Clark in the end zone in the final minute of what proved to be a huge dagger in the heart of my beloved Cowboys for years to come. I was too out of breath throughout my teen years to sit down and enjoy watching sports on TV.

This situation though of not having the mental capacity to enjoy sports began to change in Israel of all places. It was while living in the Holyland that I would stay up through the wee hours of the night and enjoy a sporting event such as the Super Bowl and the World Series. It was also in Israel that I began another passion: teaching. I spent six years studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and began working with kids in classrooms in 2000. Truthfully, I first got into the profession because I wanted something practical to do after completing my college degree in Jewish History and English Literature. It would take 10 years for me to fully appreciate the impact my teaching could have on kids, and it came through nothing in particular I did in the classroom, but rather something that happened on the football field.

Part of my duties with my previous employer was to supervise the combined fourth and fifth grade class during the last hour they were in school on Thursday afternoons. Usually by this point, they were restless and wanted to go outside for extra recess. I was just as restless as they were to leave the classroom at this stage of the day, so I was always in search of interactive and educational activities. In was on such a day that this brilliant idea flashed in my mind: teach the kids how to get along and have fun together through playing football.

The students were of course excited to go outside and I gave them the choice of either playing basketball or football. They were not allowed to bask in the glowing sun, so they needed to choose one of these options. About half the class chose football, which meant that we would have a game of five on five. To make the game fair, I picked the teams, having the students count off, "one, two, one, two'" until each was assigned a team. I also decided to be the quarterback for both teams, thinking this would be the best way to make the teams more even, since I unintentionally put the best athletes on the field on the same team.

The game was predictably a chaotic disaster from the opening kickoff. It was officially two hand touch football, but this did not prevent kids from flying around and tackling each other. There was either an injury or a hurt feeling after each play. The losing team was upset that their counterparts kept scoring each time they touched the ball while they were unable to catch any pass to them, no matter how perfectly thrown. By the time the game was over, most of the children were angry at me for allowing such a travesty to substitute for quality teaching. Four children needed to make a detour to the nurse's office on the way back to class and I was politely asked by my superiors to make a detour into the principal's office. All agreed it was not a wise idea to teach Jewish Values through a hastily organized football game, except for one student.

A special award is given at the 5th grade graduation ceremony to the student who best exemplified living by Jewish values while studying at the school of my previous employment. It is a prestigious honor bestowed on the child who most consistently demonstrated character traits such as getting along with others, acting with dignity, and showing a deep conviction of faith. Before the award is presented, each of the 5th grade students graduating reads a short prepared speech in which they describe some of their most memorable moments at the school. The girl who would later win this award gave a touching speech that I will always carry with me as a badge of honor. I sat in the audience among the rest of the school community with a strong sense of pride and even a touch of vindication when she gave me a special thanks for being her Jewish Studies teacher, specifically mentioning that football game her classed played that Thursday afternoon. She reaffirmed my belief that a hastily organized game of touch football could indeed be a powerful vessel through which to teach the Jewish values I wanted to teach her class that day.