Whites-only basketball?

Honest folks, I couldn't make this stuff up if I wanted to.


http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2010/01/19/nba_563760.shtml


This is coming out of Augusta, Georgia. If I'm not mistaken, that town is (or, I hope, was) home to a whites-only golf club. Some imbecile came up with an idea for a whites-only basketball league. It would be open only to natural-born American citizens, no talented Irishmen or Brits need apply. And they would have to have two Caucasian parents. It will feature "fundamental basketball, which [white people] like." Not "street-ball," as played by "people of color." And the imbecile says the proposal is not racist. Well, I wonder if I would qualify. My skin is rather light, but my father wasn't white enough for the brownshirted thugs that prowled the streets of Vienna between the wars, nor were I and my friends white enough for the Irish and Italian ruffians that cruised our neighborhood in the '60s. That's why we took up martial arts. I kind of doubt if a racially exclusive basketball league would even be legal. Remember the Civil Rights Act of 1964? People of good will of every conceivable skin tone fought long and hard for that one. But let's assume it is legal, and let's take this buffoonery at face value. Fundamental basketball? I suppose by that they mean that below-the-rim, boring game (even if it was dominated by Jewish players) that passed for hoops before African-Americans took over the game. No seven-footers slamming it through the hole. The kind of hoops that you might see today in a good WNBA game. No, thanks. I like my high-flying slam-dunking hard-hitting roundball. I even like to see the elbows flying, especially when they belong to Shaquille O'Neal.











Houston, you're having a problem. Your superstar's face just bumped into my elbow.










Guns in the locker room? It's against the law, so let the law deal with it. Obscene gestures and crotch-grabbing? That's what fines and suspensions are for. The game has deteriorated enough with all those wimpy East Europeans David Stern brought in. Don't you dare take away my high-spirited above-the-rim roundball! By the way, we have some good streetball on West 4th Street here in New York every summer. No charge for admission. Try it; you might like it.

Gam Zu L'Tova (This too is for the good) – 2

Seemingly overnight, we find ourselves in the throes of the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch – how have the mighty fallen? Foreclosures abound, as do bankruptcies. Gasoline prices through the roof – along with all commodities that depend on gasoline, or jet fuel, to get to us.

I am not directly affected by the price of gasoline since I never owned a car. When you can get to work by train in half an hour, who needs the hassles of a car? As a runner, I do a lot of my getting around on foot, and I see the streets the way automobile drivers do not. And what I see is many more bicycles on the street. A newly sympathetic city administration, goaded by the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, is painting bicycle lanes on neighborhood streets, despite complaints from automobile drivers. Some of those lanes are even physically separated from automobile traffic. This is a welcome development that augurs well for the health of the city. Unless you live in a cave, you know that we have an "epidemic of obesity." Orthodox Jews seem to have more than their share, and the sight of pregnant men in shul is becoming more and more repulsive as time goes by. I put the phrase in quotes because it is not a true epidemic the way physicians and scientists usually define the word. You don't catch it like the common cold or cancer. Obesity and its dreadful sequelae, hypertension, diabetes and such, is almost always the results of a lifestyle choice. And its not so much that we eat too much, the weight loss industry notwithstanding. The problem is we move too little. Sorry folks, evolution occurred and our species is genetically programmed for a high caloric throughput – eat a lot and burn a lot. Enter all the modern conveniences that make housework easy (sorry ladies – your great-grandmothers had it much harder than you), the automobile, and computers and video games replacing outdoor play, continue to eat the way we're programmed to do, and the equation goes out of balance. Keep at it and you get fat. Stay fat and you get clogged arteries in your penis. Viva Viagra – until the arteries in your heart get clogged and you go on nitrates, or your heart simply can't supply enough oxygen for sex or anything else you enjoy. If you're lucky you can get Type 2 diabetes, go blind and have your legs amputated. And we are seeing Type 2 diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) and hyperlipidemia (elevated cholesterol) in children as young as ten. A well-known pediatrician in the Orthodox neighborhood of Borough Park has been known to give patients prescriptions that read "play basketball." But too many yeshivot are indifferent or even hostile to physical activity. Their students are encouraged to sit at a desk all day and get fat - like their teachers. All of us need to move more, and parents should be urging their children to move more. If we really care about our children's health, we will do more than urge. We will refuse to drive our kids to school and let them walk a mile or so instead, or ride a bicycle.

Riding a bicycle to and from work or school goes a long way to restoring the balance. The energy for movement comes from food instead of fossil fuels. You're burning what you're eating, maybe a little more, and the fat comes off and stays off. The economic downturn is making us do what we all should be doing anyway – get around on our own steam. And we will all be happier and healthier for it.

The ghost of summers past

So here we are in my favorite time of year - summer! Long days to enjoy the outdoors. No need to bundle up. Just bask in God's own heat, brought to you free of charge courtesy of the sun. Wherever you go children are playing. On the courts at West 4 Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan you always see teenagers engaged in spirited games of basketball. They haven't learned yet to pamper themselves and stay inside with the air conditioner going full blast. Being in my fifties, I sometimes think back on the summers we enjoyed a generation ago. And the key word was "enjoyed." There was a lot less uptightness then than now. Summer was a time to let our hair down. We would walk around and play ball in short pants, and listen to baseball games on "transistor radios" that operated on boxy nine-volt batteries. Air conditioning was still a luxury that only the wealthy could afford, and few of us were wealthy, so we boys stripped down at home to short pants and sleeveless undershirts. We had fans going (a whole lot cheaper to run than air conditioners, and more comfortable too) and windows wide open to let in the breezes. We'd sprinkle ourselves with baby powder (it absorbs sweat), and above all we drank like fish. The women (and I'm writing about Orthodox people here) actually wore sleeveless dresses; they called them "shifts." We boys went to shul and to Bnei Akiva meetings without jackets or ties. To be sure, there was a minority dressed in heavy black clothing, but they were few in number. We called them khnyocks (can anybody tell me the origin of that Yiddish word?) and they didn't dare tell us what to do. And - imagine this - we went mixed swimming at public beaches! My father a"h would close his store Sundays in July and August and, weather permitting, we packed a picnic lunch and went as a family to Manhattan Beach. Other Orthodox families were also there, without a trace of guilt or self-consciousness. I don't know what the books say, but I do remember the praxis. As we got older, Bnei Akiva boys and girls would go on outings to the beach. We met one another. We talked. Physical attraction led to deeper attraction, and no one ever heard of a "shidduch crisis." The incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and venereal disease in our community was as close to zero as such things ever get, which is a good indication that there was little if any illicit (i.e. premarital) sex going on.

And now, some 40 years later? I'm a fit, strong, lean athlete barukh Hashem, and I tolerate the heat just fine, thank you. I have no need for artificial cooling, other than what fans provide. Fat is an insulator; it traps heat. Fat people shipwrecked in cold water are more likely to survive than similarly situated lean people, because they are less likely to become hypothermic. I go to shul without a jacket, except when I know that the air conditioner will be set too high. And if I get cold, I get up and leave. Bad enough I'm cold in winter; I refuse to be cold in summer (see my previous post). I sprinkle myself with baby powder on hot mornings, I drink like a fish and I run around in short pants and a sleeveless top. Once in a while a khnyock will give me the hairy eyeball; I couldn't care less. And I hear people complaining. Mostly fat people; what do they expect? I bring a thermometer to shul on Shabbat, and sometimes the temperature hovers around 70 degrees. What with electricity so expensive, all the guidebooks are telling us to set the thermostat no lower than 78, but our buildings still run the air conditioner as if electricity was free. On Shavu'ot my shul made a Yizkor appeal for the summer upkeep of the shul, i.e. for running the air conditioner. My Yizkor contribution went elsewhere.
Ah, summer. The heat, the sun, the fun. I only wish that it could last forever.

Yom Ha-bikkurim

We are about to celebrate Shavu'ot, and many of us will stay up all night learning Torah. Tomorrow we will hear the Ten Commandments in shul, and refer to the holiday in the Amida as "z'man mattan torateinu" - the time of the giving of the Torah. But if we look in the Torah shebikhtav, there is no mention of Shavu'ot as commemorating the giving of the Torah. Torah was supposed to be as fresh and new every day as the day it was given. And indeed, Shavu'ot is the only holiday that does not have a fixed date on the calendar. It is celebrated seven weeks after the second day of Pesah. Before the adoption of a fixed calendar in the fourth century C.E., each month had either 29 or 30 days depending on when witnesses saw the new moon in Jerusalem; one never knew in advance how many days a month would have. Depending on whether Nisan and Iyar had 29 or 30 days, Shavu'ot could come on the fifth, sixth or seventh of Sivan. The seventh is the day of Mattan Torah only according to R. Yosi, and the fifth is not the day according to anybody!
The holiday is charcacterized in Torah shebikhtav two ways: Shavu'ot, since it occurs seven weeks after Pesah, and Yom Ha-bikkurim, the day when the first of the wheat crop was brought up to the Beit Ha-mikdash and given to the Kohanim. The Mattan Torah angle apparently is post-exilic, a cultural accretion that developed when we no longer had a Beit Mikdash and therefore could not bring Bikkurim.
Shavu'ot is also referred to in the Mishna is Atzeret, a conclusion. Just as Sh'mini Atzeret is the conclusion of Sukkot, Shavu'ot is a conclusion of Pesah. We've all heard, and most of us will hear again tomorrow or the day after, drashot explaining that the purpose of yetzi'at Mitzraim was fulfilled with Mattan Torah seven weeks later. Freedom without law is not freedom but chaos. Without detracting from this explanation, I would like to offer an additional one. As slaves our lives were not our own; we did what our masters told us to do when they told us to do it. Even our food was dictated by our masters, who set a pot of food in front of us the way one would feed animals (see the commentaries on sir ha-basar, the fleshpots of Egypt). The fruits of our labor belonged not to us but to our oppressors. As free men, our lives would be very different. We would have our own country, work its soil, and enjoy its produce. The temptation to attribute our success to our own efforts - kohi v'otzem yadi (see Parshat Eikev) must have been strong. Therefore, we were commanded to take the first fruits of each year's crop, bring it up to the Beit Ha-mikdash, and recite a confession which became the basis of the Haggadah Shel Pesah [see the beginning of Parshat Ki-Tavo]. But the Haggadah stops in the middle, after the miraculous deliverance from Egypt. The remaining verses are not read at the Seder: And He brought us to this place, and He gave us this land flowing with milk and honey. And now I brought the first fruits of the land that You, Hashem, gave me, and he [the one who brings the Bikkurim] shall leave it before Hashem your God and He shall bow down to Hashem your God. And he shall rejoice in all the good that Hashem your God gave you and your house. . . . Shavu'ot becomes the conclusion of Pesah, in that we confim our freedom by thanking Hashem for the privilege of working our soil and eating its produce, and acknowledge that our material success comes from Hashem! Is this the same people that developed a culture of parasitism where working for a living is denigrated and the ideal is to study Torah full time and live off the labor of others? If I had my druthers we would be reading Parshat Ha-bikkurim on Shavu'ot along with the Ten Commandments.

The Bikkurim were to be brought up in a basket, in Hebrew not the usual sal (as in kadursal, basketball), but a tene, a word that sounds Egyptian. A tene held things. It resembles a Latin root meaning "to hold," i.e. tenir in French. In English the word "tennis" originates from the racket that a tennis player holds in his hand, and Cold War defeatists told us that West Berlin was untenable, we couldn't hold onto it. I wonder if the Hebrew-Egyptian and Latin words are related, or if they simply resemble each other by accident. At any rate, in a good year the contents of a tene must have been heavy, and it had to be held in the hand at least the final few hundred meters to the Beit Ha-mikdash. Shavu'ot - Yom Ha-bikkurim was no holiday for Jewish weaklings!
Let us pray that we will soon celebrate Shavu'ot as we were commanded, as normal Jews in a normal country once did, with heavy baskets carried on strong Jewish shoulders to the rebuilt Beit Ha-mikdash, quickly and in our time.

Early Hannukah present

Maccabi Tel-Aviv will play an exhibition in New York against the Knicks on Thursday October 11, 2007. If the Knicks are laughing, they should check with the Toronto Raptors, whom Maccabi Tel-Aviv defeated previously. Maccabi also won the Euroleague championship five times, the latest being 2005. Proceeds will benefit Migdal Ohr, a youth village that works with disadvantaged and immigrant children. Tickets can be purchased through the N.Y. Knicks.

Comin' on strong

"Hammer of God" playing
Toronto Raptors

Editorial Comment: This is how Israel deals with poor, immigrant and refugee children. Our enemies teach theirs to be terrorists and suicide bombers.

Barukh ha-mavdil bein Yisrael
la-amim.