Reform Reflections: Sportsmanship and cooperation

I love sports, but they are not so crazy about me. Highlights of my sporting career would have to include the indescribable sensation of the stud of a rugby boot being swiveled deliberately and attentively in my ear as I lay at the bottom of a scrummage (readers puzzled by these words were probably not born in a place ruled by the British after the 1770s), and the resonant crunch of my left ankle as it buckled under my considerable heft during an unwise foray into the world of middle-age soccer. But my love for sports remains undimmed by my obvious shortcomings.

This last week may seem like an inappropriate time in Israel's life to dwell on athletic prowess. Our brothers and sisters in Sderot and its surroundings have been paralyzed by a ceaseless rain of missiles; Gaza has been in flames; the relatives of hostages and fallen soldiers from the Second Lebanon War have been subjected to the most tortuous and perverse treatment at the hands of the great humanitarians at the head of Hizbullah. The integrity of the legal system is under threat; the roads continue to take their toll; the higher education system hangs by the flimsiest of threads. With all this going on, why talk about sports?

I was part of two sporting events last Friday, both of which deserve note even against the grim backdrop I have sketched here. In the first, I was active (although only in a very liberal interpretation of the word), and in the second only a spectator. Both events give me hope (and one has also given me a small dose of sciatica).

The High School at which our youngest child studies holds an annual event in memory of a former pupil, Moshe Moses, who fell decades ago in battle. Families of students are encouraged to enter teams in a volleyball competition, since this was one of his favorite pastimes. Every year families come up with pairs and trios of volleyball players, or in some cases folks who don't know one end of a volleyball from the other. (As for me, I was outraged that they put the net much too high for my liking.) The point is to bring together two things we do better than sporting excellence: family and memory.

Now both family and memory are under threat in contemporary Israel, as they are in many other places around the globe. But the sight of parents and children, brothers and sisters, dozens of unlikely and uneven combinations, coming together to spend a morning of perspiration and commemoration - it warmed my soul (and pulled my hamstring). It was a simple and poignant expression that being together is something we can do well, even when there is so much apathy and enmity threatening to pull us apart.

Team Marmur was so swept away by the general bonhomie that we decided to give every team we played against an exhilarating feeling still foreign to me - the joy of victory in a game of volleyball. But the sheer delight of coming together to relocate our bearings while working hard not to dislocate our shoulders made it all worthwhile. I can now confirm that cholent is not listed as a performance-enhancing drug in the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

From the Moses Family Volleyball Tournament I made my way to the Teddy Stadium, a sporting venue I tend to avoid like the plague. The reason for staying away is large and black and yellow: it's called Betar Jerusalem, a team currently topping the Premier League both for soccer and for intolerance. In the mists of time there was a political dimension to the sports teams in Jerusalem and around Israel, but these days the ethos of the Betar team has almost nothing to do with the liberal revisionism of the followers of Jabotinsly. Instead, it has become home to some of the worst expressions of bigotry and racial intolerance. After attending a game a couple of years ago I vowed not to do it again, because just by being there it seemed to me that I was complicit in the stupid ranting of the anti-Arab mob. I happen to know a number of Betar supporters who aren't like this at all, but something ugly happens when the hard core crazy supporters of that team get together, and I can't escape the sense of distaste by association.

The soccer game I was attending did not involve Betar, and it was four divisions down the soccer hierarchy. The team playing is known these days as Hapoel Katamon, and it was started recently by a group of supporters for whom Betar was unthinkable and the regular Hapoel Jerusalem team undesirable. So they got together, put some money on the table, made an alliance with teams from Mevasseret and Abu Ghosh, and they set the ball rolling.

In theory Hapoel is a socialist team: so were the Hapoel teams around Israel in the 1930s, and there are still quaint references to the Internationale in one or two of the team's chants. But it's not economic theory which characterizes the spirit of Hapoel Katamon games. Rather, it is a happy, tolerant and family-friendly atmosphere which gives one hope for a rational, calm and humorous Jerusalem population.

One or two of the chants are rude, but none of them is brutal. One even contains the remarkable suggestion that there are actually two peoples who live here in Israel, and that we have to find a way of getting on with each other. Apart from that, it was a Friday afternoon spent with Israelis of all stripes, brought together by a sense of fun and competition, and determined to foster a spirit of friendship and acceptance. I am cynical enough to suspect that these warm fuzzy feelings may evaporate if the team actually succeeds to earn promotion to higher divisions. But in the meantime, it's terrific.

I lowered myself into my chair at Kol Haneshama synagogue a little gingerly on Friday night; my muscles were rebelling against unusual exertion, and my stomach against a bar of chocolate guzzled during the tension of the soccer game (which by the way we won). All my muscles were worn out, after a day of memory and hilarity, soccer and solidarity. Only one muscle was significantly stronger as I thanked my Maker for another Shabbat in Jerusalem; my heart.