My Father’s Game

Judaism and baseball were my father’s long before they became mine.

When engaging in religious rituals, I often reach for a sports analogy, just as my father did before me. While some fellow Orthodox Jews might find the association irreverent, I cannot ignore the kinship between Judaism and baseball. This season, watching the Jewish-owned Mets struggle through another abysmal year, I am reminded of a larger history of Jewish endurance, a theme I find concentrated in two of my father’s most personal, contrasting objects.

Few things seem less intuitive than relating my father’s prayer shawl and his baseball mitt.

Like many Orthodox Jewish children of New York City, I was raised on religion and sports. Baseball was the preferred pleasure in our family and the New York Mets were our preferred team. We knew that to be a Mets fan is to be an underdog. Of course, Jews have a long history of playing against the odds.

Without compromising priorities, I shifted between the sacred and the mundane. I studied religious texts and traded baseball cards, felt at home in synagogue and at Shea Stadium. Most significantly, my father Ahron embodied these contrasting cultures. If my father could study Talmud and appreciate baseball, I could have eyes on heaven and feet on earth, too.

From a young age, I also studied Talmud, whose derivations felt like an amalgam of science and art. The Gezerah Shavah principle, which I encountered in middle school, is an argument by analogy that attaches to a word in one instance the sequence of ideas it bears in another. As a child, I spent many school hours deciphering adult texts and was encouraged to think imaginatively about our way of life.

I also learned, in time, to think creatively about baseball’s allegorical appeal. Profound truths are embedded in the oddities of our national pastime, my father showed me. The only sport whose goal is to return home is ripe with lessons about existence and the intricacies of faith. When Mookie Wilson battled through ten pitches during his heroic World Series Game 6 at-bat in 1986, I celebrated the potency of Jewish persistence.

Tradition, too, is transmitted through both the objects we handle and the ideas we embrace.

Upon marrying, Orthodox Jewish brides often gift grooms a woolen prayer shawl, called a tallit, ordinarily black-striped on a background of snow-white. Like a stiff leather baseball mitt, a tallit shapes itself to its owner over time. My father did not regularly launder his tallit like others in our congregation, but preferred it yellowed and worn. I tossed baseballs with my southpaw father on Sundays, and prayed beside him on the Sabbath and holidays, as perspiration residue marked the shawl as his.

Like his well-worn baseball mitt, my father’s tallit was passionately overused.

During certain holiday prayers, my father would extend his shawl over our heads with a flourish. The scent of his tallit perfumed our enclosure with a leathery musk. As the temperature rose, my siblings and I would jostle for positions. Our bodies squirmed while our father’s arms enveloped us. The closeness of our breath was reassuring. The air was reminiscent of a humid summer afternoon in Flushing, its brininess lingering as it did in the upper deck at Shea.

Beneath my father’s unwashed tallit, I experienced an olfactory Gezerah Shavah, attaching to the aroma in one instance the sequence of ideas it bore in another. My father’s tallit smelling like his baseball mitt makes me smile. Both items evoked history, dedication, and hard work. Everything I knew about my father was contained in that concentrated scent.

When a scent enters the nasal cavity, it travels through the olfactory nerve to the olfactory bulb, then to the olfactory cortex, and finally to the amygdala, the hub of memory and emotional experience. Smell stirs us as no other sense does. Today, beneath my pungent tallit, with my hands resting on the shoulders of my children and grandchildren, I am transported by association to another time and place. Looking down at my offspring, I can remember stooping beneath my father’s tallit and looking up to see his bearded face.

My amygdala associates my father’s well-used tallit and mitt with maturity. In my olfactory thesaurus, the two are synonymous with coming-of-age. My father’s tallit and mitt were infused with experience and were not dirty, their aromas pleasing for the associations they held.

Tradition, of course, is a sequence of experiences and associations. We might derive laws from textual arguments by analogy but we instill significance from emotional comparisons. Baseball can be frivolous and significant. A worn prayer shawl can be grimy and beloved.

I would like to believe my children appreciate my tallit. When extending the unwashed garment over them, the aroma arouses pleasing sensations, at least for me. I am reminded of Flushing Meadows, exertion, and tradition. As Talmudic principles inform my scholarship, emotional associations move my heart. I remember when my father’s hands rested on my shoulders and the air inside our haven was salty and warm.

Like the scent of his softened mitt on a long summer afternoon.