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Rabbi Ben Kamin
Spiritual Life ExaminerBen Kamin's op-ed commentaries have appeared in The New York Times and a variety of other newspapers and magazines. Author of several books, and a scholar of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he is the founder of Reconciliation: The Synagogue Without Walls.
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The baseball season and the atonement season play ball
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by Rabbi Ben Kamin, Spiritual Life Examiner
Baseball and Bible run together well for this Jewish boy. On this final day of the regular season, it seems natural that the Jewish High Holy Days—the post-season of our faith—are also imminent. The connection, tender and titillating, runs deep for folks like me.
Late Septembers in Cincinnati, humid and historic, are iconographic for those of us who came of age by 1970. With the atonement season came the championship and World Series and the biblical “Big Red Machine” was invariably involved. The Cincinnati Reds won 102 games and the National League pennant in 1970 and were going to face off against a set of Philistines from the American League more commonly known as the Baltimore Orioles.
The Reds, led by the hustling and still pure Pete Rose, and the sturdy, flame-throwing catcher from Oklahoma named Johnny Bench, were not highly favored against the heavy-shouldered Orioles. They had Boog Powell at first, a man of cosmic biceps, the vacuum cleaner third baseman Brooks Robinson at third, the moody but brilliant Frank Robinson in left field (whom the Reds had ignominiously traded in 1966), and a handsome, smooth, mystical pitcher named Jim Palmer.
It was difficult to imagine which was the greater challenge for us boys: Atoning for our sins at Golf Manor Synagogue or the Reds standing up to the O’s? An even bigger challenge was how to listen to the games on the radio during the holiest days of the year.
We didn’t have cellular units, Blackberrys, or anything of the sort. Ah—but I had a prize: The battery-operated and revered Transistor Radio With the Ear Wire. We weren’t really comfortable trying to pull a fast one on our dear Rabbi Indich—a scholar and traditionalist with a heart as kind as heaven. But we were not comfortable, either, not knowing what Rose, Bench, Perez, and May were doing on the diamond.
The afternoon service, long and lugubrious, just wouldn’t end. So we boys slipped out the back door of the synagogue to the sanctuary of trees along the side of the building. I nervously put the wire in my ear and scoped the small transistor screen for 700 AM (FM was hardly even known yet and generally relegated to eggheads or potheads). The Game! The other boys gathered around me, some of them still donning their flourishing prayer shawls. We looked like a reverse pogrom seeking God in the static.
Then we realized we were not alone. The shadow of the rather tall, bearded, red-haired Rabbi Indich, his left leg crooked from diabetes, his blue eyes ablaze with fervor, made me realize that I was headed for a scriptural strikeout. The other boys couldn’t even run—they were frozen with fear. The wire popped out of my ear.
“Kamin, is that you listening to the game?”
I absolutely knew that my religious life was over.
“Yes, Rabbi.”
“Well, then, what’s the score?” The rabbi smiled and I knew that God is good. The Reds, incidentally, were not.
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