Moses and the Superbowl

Rabbi Melanie Aron

January 27, 2001

I really wanted to talk about the Superbowl this morning. After all it is my duty as an American to get caught up in this annual pageant.

Actually I didn't realize how much Superbowl partying is an element of Americanization until I got a call last week from David Aboujudom, a participant in our Arab Jewish dialogue group, which had a meeting scheduled for this Sunday. He asked me whether I didn't think we should reschedule, as all the Arab-American men would be watching the Superbowl. Tom Friedman writes that countries that have a McDonald's have never gone to war with each other. I wonder what he would say about dialogue group whose participants watch the same football games.

This Hanukah I received a present, that encourages me to talk about sports more often- the book Pray Ball: The Spiritual Insights of a Jewish Sports Fan. Written by a Conservative Rabbi who is an avid sports fan, the book gets its title from a program they had at his synagogue to increase attendance at daily minyan by giving out free baseball tickets to those who came at least nine times.

Writing about football, Rabbi Gordon speaks about the Value of a Positive Self Image and about Maccabees, Miracles and Wildcats. He notes that with regard to the Superbowl, it is not the game itself so much as what it takes to get there.

More interesting to me was the chapter on Cal Ripken and perseverance. Breaking a 58 year old major league record, Ripken appeared in 2,632 consecutive major league games, breaking Lou Gehrig's record. What a passion he had for baseball ! How many of us have never missed a day of work in 13 years?

This image of perseverance and persistence seemed to me related to our weekly Torah portion. Jason talked about how Pharaoh kept getting these extra chances to repent and save Egypt from destruction. That was fine from his perspective, but lets look at it from Moses' point of view. Nine times he seemed on the verge of success and nine times Pharaoh changed his mind and prevented the people from leaving. By the seventh or eighth time Moses went before Pharaoh, it must have seemed like a pointless exercise.

We read these Torah portions about the struggle leading up to the Exodus over a four week period each year, so it seems to go by pretty fast. One day Moses sees a burning bush and before you know it the Israelites are standing at the edge of the sea. The Torah doesn't give us any dates. But the rabbis claim, based on other information about chronology that Moses was 40 years old when he first encountered God's call and 80 years old at the time of the crossing of the sea of reeds. (The Torah tells us that Moses was 120 at the time of his death and that the Israelites had wandered in the desert for 40 years.)

This means that Moses pursued his unheard of idealistic mission of winning freedom for a bunch of foreign slaves for 40 years. Can you imagine? The Egyptians thought he was crazy, even the other Israelites thought he was crazy. I can bet that he was discouraged but he kept at it nonetheless.

I participate in an interfaith council that has worked on issues of social justice like housing, immigrant rights and living wage. At our last meeting we went around the room and people talked about the first issue of social justice they had been involved in. For some it was something fairly recently, but there was also a minister who had been the Chaplain at Stanford and had been in Selma with Martin Luther King, a lay person who had gotten involved in fair housing in the 1960's and a priest who was present when Ceasar Chavez first began his work with the migrant farm workers. These people have persisted in their struggles to make the world a better place for 40 years, and they have certainly experienced setbacks and disappointments. Cal Ripken was at least getting paid well, but these idealists persist year in year out, with a lot less encouragement.

Woody Allen, a fallen hero of mine, once commented that 80% of success is just showing up. How much the more so when the task demands showing up over and over again, like Moses in Pharaoh's court, or my social action friends at City Hall, without necessarily being sure of what you have accomplished. It is in these cases that we look to Pirke Avot for encouragement: It is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither can you desist from it.