"Covering Your Bases"
It was a Thursday night of a very long week, and everyone at the event was slightly familiar — a dozen women named Rachel, minyanim of men named David; people resembled each other and entries in my mental rolodex. We had something in common — we were Jewish and supported Israel — but I felt out of my element. The language they spoke sounded familiar, but its meaning was unintelligible. The participants gripped their fancy phones in greedy, distractible hands, ready for the mildest good vibration, flipping open clamshells or sliding open their keyboards, and texting each other as if the Messiah had suddenly arrived. But in this case, it wasn’t the Messiah who was en route to the Holy Land — it was baseball.
Sponsored by birthright israel, the David Project, Heeb Magazine, Cornell Hillel and other organizations, the Israel Baseball League’s player draft marked a dream-come-true for the players and managers. For sports fans, the existence of a sports-centered Jewish gathering was itself an event; and for alumni of birthright-israel and Cornell, it was an opportunity to reunite and bond over their union of interests in American Jewish and Israeli culture. I was there to learn about the initiative, which would bring American baseball to six towns in Israel for league play.
Of all televised sports, baseball is the one I know the best. I played it in camp, even earning an embarrassing nickname for my occasional home runs (I’ll spare you), and in the yeshiva league, I was pretty happy with my performance on the field until we played a public school and were completely slaughtered. But could I write about sports? What would a draft be like? Would I drift into metaphor? (The answers, in order, are: “sort of”; “really long,” and “indubitably.”)
To read the rest of the column, click here. Shabbat shalom!
My Israeli parents never bothered to teach me baseball. It was a strange American ritual that they couldn't comprehend as being 'fun'.
More so than water, demographics, or katyushas, this development is the most sinister threat to the Zionist Entity we all know & love.
Posted by: Oyster | May 06, 2007 at 08:26 AM