Art Buchwald, the renowned writer/humorist, once remarked, “Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.”
How true. Time rolls over us like a runaway train, and here we are again: another Rosh Hashanah, another Yom Kippur – and (lehavdil) another end of the Major League baseball season.
While certainly not in the same category as our High Holy Days, the World Series is an event with universal implications of its own. One year, they intersected in a meaningful way. I can’t help but recall Sandy Koufax and what he meant to American Jews as the baseball player who never forgot his faith. During Game One of the classic 1965 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers, Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, spent his scheduled turn on the mound not on a baseball diamond but in a synagogue seat.
To Dodger fans, it seemed as if the fate of all humanity rested on the lefty slants of Sandy Koufax pitching in this game. And while our community honored Sandy’s faith and Jewish commitment, hardcore baseball fans in some circles did not. Even a certain famous cleric, in his anti-Sandy diatribe, denounced the great pitcher’s decision to worship rather than hurl pitches past Yankee batters. Despite the tsunami of outrage, however, Koufax said, simply, “I don’t pitch on Yom Kippur.”
Why the storm? Likely, it is because, in any sequence of games, a pitcher of Sandy’s once-in-a-generation skills becomes the X-factor you can count on. If Sandy started two of the games in a four-of-seven series, you could almost guarantee that the Dodgers would be halfway to a world championship. He was so good that, over a five- or six-season stretch, he was practically unbeatable.
Time slips away, but the memory of Sandy each year at our holiday time does not – at least not for me. The older you get in approaching life’s “finish line,” the more mercurial the speed with which the precious years seem to race away; it’s all but unfathomable. And you find yourself tracing and retracing the highlights of your past, all the way back to the beginning.
I am constantly asking why there is no section somewhere in our spiritual lexicon where one can insert a special prayer to our Celestial Timekeeper and justify it with a substantive and reasoned argument that we have so much more to do. Might He please allow for an added allotment?
Sports have overtimes and extra innings – baseball and basketball anyway – and football has “sudden death.” (No pun intended, although maybe one is intended in this context!) Einstein, blessed with his own brand of humanity, once reminded us that “time is relative.” Lots of things are relative; few are absolute. Time is one of them. Indeed, there can be no argument that time is a valuable commodity. You cannot save it, bank it, or have any of it back at the end of any given day. How you spend it is how you are measured at the end of your life here.
Sandy, you were the brightest star in baseball, and then you were gone. You chose not to continue pitching rather than sustain permanent injury to your arm, and you left in your late twenties – too early. You have maintained and guarded your privacy ever since, unlike other athletes, who craved to rekindle their lost accolades.
Beyond your principled act on that Yom Kippur, it can be argued that, in terms of baseball, you were the most gifted left-handed pitcher ever – Lefty Grove, Randy Johnson, Warren Spahn, and a few scant others notwithstanding. You were the youngest player ever to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and set all manner of records, including an unheard-of four no-hitters in four years. In your autobiography, you mentioned your Jewish-American experience, and challenged the importance of the game by not playing on the holiday. “There was never any decision to make because there was never any possibility I’d play on Yom Kippur. The club knows I don’t work that day,” he wrote. In my time, in our generation, we considered Sandy Koufax one of the most important and influential Jewish people in America.
It was a time, not long after the War, when many Jews still felt it was more beneficial for them to maintain a low profile when it came to their Jewish identity. They even changed their last names to something less obviously Jewish. Sandy gave many Jews the courage to display their religiosity outwardly and with more pride. You could suggest that Sandy was our quintessential “mensch.”
Today, Jews are prominent throughout American society, and even frum Jews are more visible. Sandy’s life and times are a singular example of the wonder we feel in being part of our Jewish history, tradition, and culture – a truly magnificent way of living our lives, a faith unmatched for all it brings us. The High Holy Days are a time to show the gratitude we feel, always, for the riches the Almighty has given us.
Dr. Shavrick is former Director of Education, Maryland State Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He can be contacted at asshavrick@gmail.com.
