In honor of July 4 weekend, I dedicated my Shabbat remarks last week to that great American game of baseball—more pointedly—to A. Bartlett Giamatti’s wonderful essay “Self Knowledge” wherein he compares playing games and watching games to paradise, “All play aspires to the condition of paradise.” Giamatti invokes Milton as he so beautifully demonstrates that games are a momentary taste of what the Gods once offered us and what the imagined life of the Gods actually is.
When we enter a ballpark on a summer’s eve and first see the green field glowing under the lights, many of us know that this is where we are meant to be—even for a moment.
In my remarks last Shabbat, I compared Giamatti’s brief taste of paradise in the moment of the game with Peter Berger’s “sacred canopy” in his description of what religion offers. Religion invites the faithful into a sacred canopy to taste of a finite province of a different reality—an alternative world where life can be sacred, beliefs are noble, the good life counts for something lasting and the way we live really matters.
After services some one that was following my remarks closely asked about how we extend the sacred canopy and make it more durable—more than just a finite province. That is the challenge that modernity brings and that is the worthy goal of struggling to create sacred community. I will continue with these thoughts this coming Shabbat.
I like this connection a great deal. It brings to mind also the Hashkiveinu, particularly "ufros aleinu sukat shlomecha"--spread over us Your sukkah of peace, an explicit Jewish recognition of our need for a kind of sacred canopy. The repetition of this phrase on Shabbat, in particular, resonates for me with the idea that Shabbat provides a small taste of paradise. In short, I think it's in our best interest as Jews to make time for a friendly pick-up game on a sunny shabbat afternoon.
ReplyDeleteGiamatti also had a nice riff on the parallel narrative structures of baseball and human life in A Great And Glorious Game - how we strive to set out and explore precisely in order that we may return home.
ReplyDeleteAnd see Kolbrener's baseball essay in Open-Minded Torah, in which he likens the long season of baseball (i.e., don't get too wrought up over any one game) to the long game of life and, indeed, eternity.