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September 16, 2014

Baseball is a Jewish sport. You start at home; you go out into the infield; and the whole purpose of the game is to come home again. It’s Zionism 101. It’s also the game that the soul plays on the High Holy Days.

Football? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

But I have been doing a lot of learning about football recently. And this is what I now know.

  • The Ravens’ Ray Rice, suspended from playing football because he was seen on video in a violent act against his then fiance/now wife. By the way, the suspension was not because of what Ray Rice did; it was because of what Ray Rice was seen doing, and in a very public way.
  • 49ers lineman Ray McDonald, who was arrested last month on suspicions of domestic violence, and is being allowed to continue to play – this, despite the numerous calls, including from California’s lieutenant governor, to bench him.
  • Panthers’ defensive end Greg Hardy – found guilty of assaulting his girlfriend, and then he went on to play in the season opener.
  • And, of course, and most tragically — Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, who was indicted on charges of abusing his four year old son. Peterson had also been accused of abusing another son in 2013.

First of all, we Jews don’t take too well to beating up your kids. (Jewish parents don’t hit their kids; they register disappointment).

Two weeks ago, in Deuteronomy, we read the infamous passage about the rebellious son who is a drunkard and a glutton, and how the parents can take him out to a public place in the town and the townspeople can stone him to death. Scholars say that this represented a real reform over what was going on in the ancient Near East. Back in those days, they said, parents could kill their kids in private; now, they had to bring it out into the open. It takes a village and all that. But the ancient sages said that the Torah’s case of the rebellious kid never really happened. The Torah just includes this as an, ahem, object lesson to kids who didn’t tow the line. Uh-huh. 

And wife beating? 

Consider the words of the Shulchan Aruch, the classic sixteenth century code of Jewish law:

A man who strikes his wife commits a sin, just as if he were to strike anyone else. If he does this often, the court may punish him, excommunicate him, and flog him using every manner of punishment and force, because it is not the way of Jews to strike their wives…[emphasis mine – JKS] (Shulchan Aruch, Even Ha Ezer, 154:3).

Really? Then consider the words of an Orthodox women, talking about her husband:

He hit me before we married – chased me around the room when I refused to marry him. After we married it was much worse. He drank a lot and took drugs. He became even more violent when he was drinking. He was two different people. In public he was the famous doctor, holier than God, loved by all. In private he was a monster. He absolutely controlled everything.

Because, you see, it's not as if there are no “Ray Rices” in the Jewish community. It would be very handy, and wrong, for us to displace all of our concerns about domestic violence upon him. He justifiably feels terrible about what happened. May the Ray Rice story jump start a very loud and vocal conversation about domestic violence – especially in the Jewish community.

But the bigger issue is this: we tend to excuse these actions, or overlook them — until they jump up and bite us. 

On the CBS pregame show The NFL Today, NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley defended Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice: “I’m from the South. Whipping — we do that all the time. Every black parent in the south is going to be in jail under those circumstances. We have to be careful letting people dictate how…” 

To which interviewer Jim Rome responded: “It doesn’t matter where you’re from: Right is right and wrong is wrong.”

Thanks, Jim Rome, for standing up to regional moral relativism. What’s bad somewhere has got to be bad everywhere.

The real god in America is professional sports. As was the case with the molestation scandals at Penn State a few years ago, all too many people are willing to avert their gazes, or to make excuses, or to hem and haw about the violent proclivities of certain players. 

Because, after all, what do we call these players? Sports idols.

No, thanks. The Jewish people began when young Abraham shattered his father’s false gods. With that deft and swift move, he not only invented the mission of the Jewish people. He also invented iconoclasm, Judaism’s greatest gift to civilization.

Isn't it long past time for us to start a national conversation on the real meaning of sports and the real lives of those who play them professionally? We have already begun to talk about the potential risks of injury — long-term injury — that comes with certain sports. Can we broaden the conversation and talk about the ethics of sports — that while, in the game, winning is the most important thing, in life there are other considerations. 

Look: certain sports, like football, are excellent ways of taming aggression (read: the yetzer ha-ra). 

What happens when that aggression moves off the field?

To raise the question: it is the very least that we can do. 

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