What’s Most Jewish: Red Sox or Yankees? (Part 1)

Posted 06/13/2011 by Most Jewish Team

Last week, the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees faced off, adding another chapter to their storied rivalry. While the Red Sox lead the season series thus far, the Yankees no doubt hold the historical advantage. But off the field, a bigger question emerged—bigger to us, that is: Which team is Most Jewish?

We posed this question to two of our rabbis: pinstripe-sporting, Yankee-loving Joshua Boettiger, RRC '06; and Fenway fan boy (that is, Red Sox nut) Benjamin Weiner, RRC '08. What followed was an email exchange that made the '03 and '04 postseasons look like T-Ball. This was a moment that could only have been achieved after years of rabbinical training.

Without any further adieu: Rabbis, PLAY BALL.

1st Inning: The Opening Salvo

2nd Inning: The Cities and the Players

RABBI JOSHUA (Yankees): Lenny Bruce famously said, "If you're from New York and you're Catholic, you're still Jewish." In a way, I feel making a case for the Yankees here is like shooting fish in a barrel. But besides the geographic/cultural argument, I'm ready with more.

For starters: Elliott Maddox was a smooth-fielding outfielder who, in 1974, converted to Judaism and was traded to the Yankees. He proceeded to have his best season to date, placing eighth in the American League MVP balloting. It was the same year that Israel and Syria signed a historic disengagement plan regarding the Golan Heights. Coincidence?

Ron "Boomer" Blomberg was the Yankees #1 pick in the 1967 draft (the same year as the Six Day War) and became the major league's first designated hitter. A hero to Jews and Yankee fans everywhere, Blomberg was reported to have said, "I've been a DH all my life—Designated Hebrew," and "Being a Jewish ballplayer in New York is the ultimate of ultimates."

It is only at Yankee Stadium that one can find regular minkhah services during games.

But more compelling than the historical or attitudinal is the poetic sensibility the Yankees embody—and Judaism is a culture of poetry if nothing else. What God-fearing Jew hasn't felt a shimmer of awe watching Robinson Cano smile, Graig Nettles spear a rocket at third, or Bernie Williams prance like a gazelle after a shot to center? To go back to Bruce's lingo, Ted Williams is goyishe, Joe DiMaggio is Jewish.

RABBI BENJAMIN (Red Sox): Well, Boettiger, I see you opened with a sucker punch, trying to catch me off guard with a Lenny Bruce reference—the type of thing I can seldom resist. But now that I've regained my balance, let's see what I can do to disentangle the web of disinformation you've spun.

I'll admit that New York City is no doubt the Jerusalem of the United States, the proud capital of American Jewry. But when you think about it, over 3,000 years of organized Judaism it has seldom been a quintessential Jewish experience actually to reside in a proud capital city.

"Next year in Jerusalem" is something we still say, even though getting to Jerusalem, in our moment, is simply a matter of hopping on the next El Al flight and taking a sherut to Jerusalem (along with that nice older couple from Teaneck who are going to Har Nof or Bayit v'Gan for the bris of their 23rd grandson). So why do we still say it? Because the proud capital city is, more than anything else, a figment of Jewish fantasy, just as the American Jewish capital is a chimera of bluster and overstuffed knishes.

No, my friend, to truly discover the Jewish experience we must journey to the hinterlands, the second cities, the Diaspora, the dirty-water Beantowns—whether we're talking about Afula, Kovno or the city on the Charles.

And what do we find there? None of your smooth talking Blombergs or brazen minkhahs, but moments of clandestine grandeur when you suddenly look up from your watered down Fenway beer and huddle of Irishmen to discover that Adam Stern, Gabe Kapler, and, yes, the king of all Hellenstic Hebrews himself, Kevin Youkilis, have taken the field all at the same time, forming the circumcised fraction of one third the defensive players on the field.

This is a land where, after hearing Trot Nixon in '03 thank "the Lord for letting me honor him" with a walk-off home run in the Division series against the A's, you can only dream of a similar shot from Kapler. Say, one of the subtler Hebrew hammers, to be followed by a, "Barukh Hashem, we should have the simkhah of many homeruns, now and in the days of Moshiakh, may He come bimheira biyameinu..." And what is more Jewish than that dream in that context?

Or rather, what was more Jewish—because, as we all know, the terms have changed... and the Red Sox, the most Jewish team in Major League Baseball, have changed right along with them.

3rd Inning: Counterpoint

RABBI JOSHUA: What was Jewish has indeed changed, and I'll get to that, but first I trust you won't mind if I pop your little Gabe Kapler bubble. Kapler not only played on Yom Kippur, but when asked about the Shawn Green "situation" (the then-Dodger slugger who was debating about whether or not to sit out the holiday), Kapler responded, "I don't know what the big fuss is all about."

I wonder if ol' Gabe Kapler has even heard of Sandy Koufax. The aforementioned Blomberg on the other hand once met Koufax at Yankee Stadium on Old Timers Day. Blomberg said Koufax told him, "to always wear my mezuzah around my neck with respect" and, Blomberg added, "That's what I did." When he was a child, Kapler was probably too busy eating pulled-pork sandwiches, wearing different kinds of forbidden fabrics, and mistreating the widow and the orphan to have learned about Yom Kippur or Sandy Koufax.

I'm glad you didn't take the tired route of saying the Yankees are all about the money and that the Red Sox are lovable underdogs. We both know times have changed. You guys no longer have the claim on the exilic, heartbreak-kid persona. Nor do the Jews these days. The Yankees and Red Sox, like the Jewish people in America, have done all right for themselves.

What's important is what we do with the power and the responsibility, and whether or not we still represent where we come from. Maybe it's a question of Jewish values: Think of Lou Gehrig fighting back tears, saying he was "the luckiest man on the face of the earth." Think of Mariano Rivera, who once said, "I think the Good Lord is a Yankee." Incidentally, if you were looking to cast someone as Avraham Avinu (and if Ben Kingsley wasn't available), someone gentle but fierce, someone who would do anything for his people, someone who could make love like Sting and battle like Moshe Dayan, might you not cast Rivera over Youkilis, despite the latter's Hebrew bonafides?

I know in the circles you and I run in, it is not fashionable to speak of am segula (treasured people), but if chosenness does exist, don't you think the most successful sports franchise ever would have some claim on being God's chosen people?

RABBI BEN: Oh Boettiger, far from popping my bubble, you've fallen right into my trap!

Does pulled pork, a lack of proper feeling for the Day of Atonement, and a probable tendency to wear garments of blended linen and wool disqualify Gabriel Kapler from being a standard-bearer of the Jewish experience? I would suggest instead that it marks him as the quintessential American Jewish lost child in the Promised Land. But I digress...

I don't know if it was the fact of growing up Jewish that cultivated my mind to see the world in binaries of "us" and "them," or if this is just hardwired into most human brains, but it was definitely the case. And it didn't stop at Jew and gentile. There was also Coke and Pepsi (Coke), and Atari and Intellivision (Intellivision—yes, that's right, I'm over 35). One special year of elementary school it was Michael Jackson vs. Lionel Richie (Lionel Richie, a choice I still regret). And then there was Red Sox vs. Yankees, which did map for us quite easily as Jew vs. gentile, for the reasons you alluded to.

The Yankees were power, prestige and all that—but most of all, victory and dominance. The Red Sox made the World Series once a decade (about as often as the State of Israel fought wars, and more than once in the same year) and lost in spectacular fashion—the most memorable involving a routine grounder to first and the bowlegs of Bill Buckner. (As for pre-Series playoffs, I could mention Bucky Bleeping Dent and Aaron Boone.)

To be a Red Sox fan was to take up your place in a multi-generational tradition of failure and fatalism with a familiar Semitic refrain: "Why do these things always happen to us?" It was to be forever Moses on the mountain, looking into the Promised Land, knowing it was promised to somebody else—someone who wore pinstripes and sat smugly on an inviolate throne. A Yankees fan once called WEEI, Boston's sports radio station, and said, "I don't understand why they call it the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry. That's like saying there's a rivalry between a hammer and a nail." (You can work out the hammer-and-nail associations for yourself.)

But then there was 2004. That was one of the few moments in my life when I have actually felt the tremble in the cosmos as it reapportions karma, and I'm not even talking about the sweep of the Cardinals in the Series, but the epic four-game comeback against the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. Bearing in mind that sports are only a pantomime of human warfare—blessed in that they have no real body count—it was a mirror of what I have been told about 1967, when Jews were suddenly powerful. And, as Jews and Red Sox fans, we have been coping with the repercussions of that ascendancy.

But that's what makes the Red Sox so Jewish. We are on the same heady and confounding journey. If you want to look for a parallel for the Yankees, you'd have to reach for the "fall from grace", and that just ain't our story...

Read Part 2 of the 3-part conversation here.