Jewish Quarterly » Sport

On Debt

Rabbi Savage — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:34:05 +0000

The bible, we often hear, has little relevance to modern, metropolitan life. It records the myths and rituals of primitive men, who lived a hand-to-mouth existence and knew nothing of the Universe. Why should we live our lives according to the fantasies of Neolithic shepherds? In these days of factory farms and cloned sheep, they have a point. But perhaps not all the green Arcadia of the mind is yet concreted over. In the space of a few recent days, two of the biggest bosses in football have issued important dairy-related statements. First it was Rafa Benitez, denouncing the changes made at Liverpool since his departure:

We have a saying in Spanish: ‘White liquid in a bottle has to be milk.’ What does this mean?

Note the classic midrashic style: ‘We have a saying’, replicating the traditional ‘As it is said’; then a quotation; then a rhetorical question. And after that came the meandering exegesis, seemingly unconnected to the opening. Rafa described the way the owners had set about changing the structure of the club and replacing the personnel – including him. He then returned, somewhat cryptically, to his proverb, concluding, ‘So, white liquid in a bottle: milk. You will know who is to blame.’

His arch-rival Alex Ferguson lost no time responding in kind. Addressing Wayne Rooney’s complaints about United’s lack of big signings, he gave us a pastoral parable of his own:

Sometimes you look in a field and you see a cow and you think it’s a better cow than you’ve got in your own field… and it never really works out that way. It’s probably the same cow, or not as good as your own cow. How to interpret these remarks? The obvious allusions are, in the first case, to the midrash Shir HaShirim Rabbah I:19, which likens the unique truth of the Torah to the purity of milk; and in the second case to Genesis 41.1, where we find the grass-isn’t-greener cow-next-door of Fergie’s fancy cropping up in Pharaoh’s dreams. In his sleep, the Egyptian monarch sees seven beautiful cows grazing on the bank of the Nile, whereupon seven ugly cows turn up and eat them alive. Joseph interprets this as an omen: seven years of plenty will be followed by seven of drought, and Pharaoh had better hoard his grain while he can. The theme of financial prudence reminds us of the common thread linking the staff changes at Liverpool with the lack of world-class signings at United: debt. For the travails of both clubs result from leveraged buyouts, in which businessmen used the clubs themselves as collateral for loans to buy them with — and now the monstrous interest payments are swallowing their transfer budgets whole. To find out more about the psychology of debt, let’s scroll a few pages back, to another tale of seven-year sentences: Genesis 29-32, where we find Joseph’s father, Jacob, tending his flocks. Or, rather, tending his uncle Laban’s flocks. Jacob has spent the best years of his life labouring for this gonif Laban, who’s not the only Jewish crook in history, but is surely the only one to carry a crook. And as far as his nephew’s concerned, he really puts the ewes in ‘usury’. Every morning, when the other shepherds get to work, Jacob’s already in his uncle’s field; every evening, he’s still shearing away when they’re back home tucking into a nice fleshpot. And the amazing thing is, he’s not even getting paid for it. No, Jacob’s working off a debt. He put in seven long years for the hand of Laban’s daughter, curvaceous Rachel, but got scammed into taking her sister, Leah with the lazy eye. That got his goat, alright. But when he complained, his uncle told him to stop bleating and put in another seven years for Rachel. And Jake, that romantic — that fanatic — said yes! Only this time, he asked for the girl up front. So fourteen years and twelve kids down the line, here he is, still shvitzing in the sun under the iron yoke of debt.

You might say he’s a madman, and maybe you’d be right. But then, you don’t know Rachel. Ah, what a woman. Fourteen years haven’t touched her, three kids neither (though it does help when you can delegate a couple of them to your maidservant). But it’s not just about beauty. Working to win Rachel defines stole his brother’s birthright. She gives him an identity, a history to be proud of. And anyway, what is time, what is toil, when you’re already in heaven? For each seven years ‘seemed to him but a few days, such was his love for her’.

If you’re a fan of United or (until their apparent rescue) Liverpool, you can probably sympathise with Jacob. You pay a fortune for transport, ticket, a scrap of red polyester or a Plasticine pie, but little of your hard-earned cash will be invested in players: it’s all just servicing debt. To the owners, the club is a cash cow, there to be milked for all it’s worth. And yet, for the most part, you can’t stop going, can’t stop caring. Too much of that history and identity, you see. Love-sick fool, you know you’re getting stiffed, but the lure is too powerful. Perhaps, like Jacob, deep down you enjoy the exploitation. After all, what better way to prove your love than to suffer for it?

As we’ve found out of late, though, it’s not just our football clubs that are in danger of being ruined by debt. After a feast of borrowing that lasted — as it happens — seven years, a fiscal famine is upon us all. Such indignities may be shocking in the West, but terminally indebted governments are nothing new elsewhere. And when the country’s broke, you realize that modern civilisation has not moved as far from the farm as it seemed. One winter in Soviet Moscow, the rumour went round that a meat delivery had arrived from the collective farm. Real sausage! Within minutes, a vast queue wound round Peshkov the butcher’s, like an anaconda round a cow. But after an hour, the manager came out and announced, ‘Comrades, there is less meat than we thought. Can all the Jews leave.’ Out go the Jews. Two hours later, the manager faces the crowd again: ‘I’m afraid there’s even less than we thought — only enough for Party members.’ Half the crowd shuffles off. An hour later: ‘There really is very little meat. Anyone who didn’t fight in the October Revolution must go.’ Now just two old men are left. Three hours later, as darkness falls, the manager emerges:

‘Comrades, there will be no sausage after all today.’ ‘You see,’ says one old man to the other, ‘The Jews get the best deal.’

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Having spent twenty-one years as a rabbi in his native Morecambe, and a brief spell as inside-right for Preston North End, Rabbi Savage is now a free-lance Talmudic Scholar.

Communal Singing

Rabbi Savage — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:48:19 +0000

These days, when only the mentally ill, the professionally hired and the irrepressibly Welsh have the nerve to do it, it’s easy to forget there was a time when public singing was as much a part of daily life as public drinking and public moaning about public transport. Students crooned the anthem of their academy, factory workers lullaby’d their shift away, pubs rattled to the rafters with cryptic lyrics involving sailors (I am basing this largely on Ken Loach films: although of the right age to remember such things, I’m also Jewish, with about as much experience of singing in pubs as I have of abseiling down the Alps). My wife’s grandfather serenaded her grandmother beneath her window through the cruel Transylvanian winter. And while not everyone could be a nightingale, even the croakiest crow knew whether he was tenor, alto or baritone. But say serenade or baritone to my teenage Zak, and he’d assume it was new medication for his attention-deficit disorder.

So what’s happened? Have we got so carried away with portable music players that we’ve lost our own voices? A clue lies, perhaps, in the only areas where it is still deemed acceptable to seek choral pleasure in public: places of worship and football matches (to be succinct, then: places of worship). Is it any surprise that song still embraces us where we are closest to collective transport, to the merging of many minds into one transpersonal being? It is significant that both Jews and football fans took to singing in response to a constraint: in the case of Jews, the prohibition against use of instruments, in the case of fans, the prohibition against physically smashing each others’ heads in.
So what can the music of synagogue and stadium learn from each other? Certainly, some football chants have felt the influence of religious hymns. Some of you may remember the awed, haunting paean to George Best that used to drift around Old Trafford like a mist: Geeooooor-giiieeeee. Anfield today resounds with a similarly dirge like: Liiiii-verpuuule. Liiiii-verpuuule. On the chirpier side, fans all over the country regale their rivals with a delightful ode to the rumoured complications in their family relationships: ‘Yer mum’s yer dad, yer dad’s yer mum, you interbred [insert regional name here] scum.’ Though the tune has been mistakenly ascribed to the Addams Family theme, the alert ear will pick up the clear influence of Adon Olam — in tune, if perhaps not lyrical content.
What, then, of influence in the other direction? Although the hymns of the siddur are replete with the yearning, the mourning, the passion and the joy familiar from the terraces, it could be argued that they are lacking the element of bile. For instance, though we rabbis are regarded merely as teachers, not holy men — eminent, perhaps, but eminently human — congregations tend to treat us with a respect out of proportion to our station. Yet some of the irreverence meted upon football referees might be healthy. We would become more assiduous in our scholarship, as well as less prone to hubris, if, for example, the incorrect pronunciation of a rare Aramaic word was met by rowdy chants of ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’ or ‘What a load of rabbis’.
Beyond this, the obvious place for the injection of banter lies in ethnic and denominational rivalry. For instance, Ashkenazis could hang around outside Sephardi shuls, chanting things like, ‘Down with the Armada, you’re going down with the Armada.’ The Sephardim might respond with: ‘You’re supposed to be at Heim.’ Liberal and Reform Jews would adapt the perennial ‘You’re so sh*t it’s unbelievable’ to taunt the Orthodox: ‘Your whole scripture’s unbelievable!’ The frummers, meanwhile, would respond by turning up mob-handed on Yom Kippur, when synagogues swell with once-a-year day-trippers, chanting, ‘Where were you, where were you, where were you on Tu Bishvat?’
Still, the Torah reminds us that it is the aesthetic quality of song, not its lyrical content, that God is really interested in. ‘Lord of deeds, who chooses songs of song,’ we say every morning in the Pesukei Dezimra, the daily prayers. Many commentators have been struck by the phrase translated ‘songs of songs’. Why use the two words — shirei and zimrah? Avery Lehtflagg, in his always stimulating Mayel Zof Sa’id, points out that shirayim is also the popular pronunciation of sh’yarim — crumbs, remains, leftovers. The shirayim from a rebbe’s meal were prized symbols of sanctity, eaten with relish by his disciples. What, then, are the shirayim zimrah — the ‘crumbs of song’? Perhaps, Lehtflagg argues, they are the song’s aftertaste, the reverberations that remain in your head when the communal singing ends, the shadow of the transpersonal self you shared for a while with your fellow-worshippers. Good to know they are still in there somewhere, always part of us… aside perhaps from the sociopath with the gold tooth and the passionate views on immigration who sat next to me at Walsall-Swindon the other week. I like to think I left my commonality with him at the turnstile.
To close, a chant for a High Holy Day, to the tune, appropriately enough, of ‘Any Dream Will Do’, from Joseph:

The Ner Tamid (the Ner Tamid)
Shines above the bimah
(whoa-oh)
But it’s getting dimmer (whoa-oh)
Everlasting? Sure…And turnout’s
low (and turnout’s low)
In my opinion (whoa-oh)
Call that a minyan? (whoa-oh)
I make it four…
The rabbi’s lost. (The rabbi’s lost)
His strange oration (whoa-oh)
Bears no relation (whoa-oh)
To the siddur…
And Tekiah (and Tekiah)
Is proving quite a struggle
(whoa-oh)
I’ll never get my kugel (whoa-oh)
This Yom Kippur.

Having spent twenty-one years as a rabbi in his native Morecambe, and a brief spell as inside-right for Preston North End, Rabbi Savage is now a freelance Talmudic Scholar.

Commentary

Rabbi Savage — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:16:04 +0000

Last Saturday, while watching Preston North End hammer Bristol City, I was struck not for the first time by the sight of my fellow fans sporting headphones. Now, it’s possible that some were listening to music. Perhaps the spectacle of Stephen Elliott bludgeoning the visiting defence is further enhanced by St Matthew’s Passion or Girls Aloud belting into your eardrums. But I’d wager that the majority was listening to the local radio commentary of the very game they were watching. And this got me wondering: why is commentary so important to us? Why does the thing itself, unfolding unmediated before our eyes, not quite satisfy us? Whether our temple be church, mosque, synagogue or Deepdale Stadium, can we not worship silently and without guidance?
Commentary has, of course, been around a lot longer than the football league. Ever since Moses brought the Law to the people, the letter of it has been up for discussion. Like the biblical version, football commentary falls into two main categories, oral and written. But it was not until comparatively late in the live television age that football commentary became truly Talmudic in character. Watch an old Pathé news broadcast and, the odd rhetorical flourish aside, you will hear a clear summary of the key moments in the match. Early live commentaries were even simpler, with the commentator often just intoning the name of the player on the ball. Such transparent reportage was a world apart from its more complicated Talmudic counterpart.
Of course, the Talmud is a tool of elucidation and enlightenment. And yet, paradoxically, it relies on obscurity to generate its insights. For since God is — if we overlook the design of camels and the Jewish cornea — infallible, it follows that not only the obvious meaning of His Word, but any possible meaning is both intentional and true. The task of the scholar, then, is to willfully misread the Torah in order to find new meanings, however outlandish, latent within the text. From the soil of this misreading then springs the tangled garden of interpretation, argument and storytelling that constitutes the Midrash.
Of course, the task of misreading is made infinitely easier by the foibles of ancient Hebrew writing. Lacking characters for vowels, it presents a feast of potential ambiguity in virtually every sentence. To see why, imagine written English bereft of its vowels. I take a sentence at random – in this case drawn from the climactic love scene of my favourite Gothic romance The Castle of Ferebranco. Here the eponymous hero surprises his long-lost Imogen just as she is about to do herself in with an ornamental hairpin: Ferebranco? Of all men – you!
Stripped of its vowels, however, this becomes Frbrnc? f ll mn – y!— which can just as easily be read as a statement of the traditional Jewish attitude to stoicism in infirmity: Forbearance? If ill I moan – oy! Now, if we then remove capital letters and punctuation, and run the words together, the feast of possibilities becomes a banquet. Again, consider what would happen in English. The following sentence, gleaned from an old edition of the Scarborough Evening News — Boat jaunt to Whitby ends in tragedy — is now be rendered btjnttwhtbyndsntrgdy — which could be interpreted a dozen ways beside the Gazette’s version, including But Jeanette, what boy needs an etrog a day?
It was exactly this question, coincidentally, that I texted to my wife last week, as we fretted across the airwaves about our son worrying exotic citrus habit. And I’ve no doubt that, had I succumbed to SMS convention and eschewed my vowels, she’d have been halfway to Yorkshire in her black cloche hat and shades before you could say Olav Hashalom.
Which brings me, somewhat Aggadically, back to commentary, and the funereal tones of Barry Davies. What Hamlet brought to family get-togethers, Davies brought to football matches. While Brian Moore wittered and Clive Tyldesley chirped, Davies lamented, mourning every mislaid pass and mistimed tackle as a personal loss. Not since the destruction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth in 70 A.D. has a commentator sounded so relentlessly miserable, or, you suspected, enjoyed his misery so much.
But it was not until the arrival of John Motson that football commentary achieved a truly Talmudic character. Motson (or The RAMBLE, as scholars dub him) began his career in the traditional manner, of neutral description: ‘Channon to Keegan,’ might go a typical line of Motsonian commentary. With age, Motson has started to interpret events with increasing eccentricity. Say, for example, a player is tackled on the edge of the box, the ball runs out of play, the linesman points his flag and the referee signals a corner. These are the signs and symbols awaiting interpretation. Many a commentator will remark, perhaps, ‘Strong tackle from the full-back…and it’s gone out for a corner.’ Motson, however, alive as he is to the fruits of misreading, is liable to say something like, ‘Ooh! And that looked a bit…goodness me! He’s given a penalty! Well, would you believe it, Mark? He’s given a penalty.’ Mark Lawrenson, meanwhile, in the finest tradition of the rabbinical student, will gently put him right, ‘Erm, not sure about that, John. I think it might just be a corner.’ But by now it’s too late. ‘Well, then! A penalty it is,’ Mottie burbles on, ‘And, you know, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this, Mark, since Franny Lee against Huddersfield in 1967.’ And he’s off, on an epic, elliptical journey that takes in three recent, irrelevant games, the size of the crowd, the players’ strike of 1909, the various historical names the stadium, the weather, the dangers of asbestos, and, repeatedly, how this all effects England’s chances in the Euros (it doesn’t), before returning to the game at hand, and something else that isn’t happening in it. In true Talmudic style, what emerges is a magnificent edifice of words and ideas built upon an abyss of more or less total delusion.
Yet, as the Christian scholar Earl E. Bath points out, the kingdom of heaven too is built upon the void. I listened to Davies because his gloom made me giggle. I listen to Motty because his meandering stream of consciousness is a pleasure to hear flow by. So pass me my headphones, love – my own eyes aren’t quite enough.

Exclusion

Rabbi Savage — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:28:03 +0000

Of all the wounds that rend the human heart, what aches so keenly or heals so slowly as exclusion? The childhood gang we weren’t allowed to join; the lovers entwined, oblivious to our presence; the decision of Southport’s Reform Synagogue to dispense with our rabbinical services over a matter as trivial as a single Opal Fruit on Yom Kippur; each spurning smoulders on down the years like an Everlasting Light.
And so it has been for all England the last few weeks, as we sat through Euro 2008, envious onlookers at a sumptuous multinational feast. At such times, perhaps, Jews can offer some guidance to our fellow-countrymen. For when it comes to exclusion from the Community of Nations, we have a good millennium or two of experience. As pariahs, we’re unparalleled; as rejects, unqualified successes; as outcasts, way off on our own. So what’s to be done when you’re left without a nation to root for?
First, there is the option of assimilation. This is the one the BBC urged during the Euros, with its strap-line ‘Who will you support?’ If you saw the TV promos, you’ll know just how much the English have to learn about this assimilation business. ‘I’ll go for Romania,’ grinned a bearded skateboarder, ‘Why not? It’ll be funny!’ ‘Italy!’ exclaimed another fan, ‘Cos it’s shaped like a boot.’ Shaped like a boot? When Napoleon asked the Jews of France to define their loyalty to La Republique, they replied as follows: ‘The love of our country is a sentiment so natural, so powerful, and so in keeping with our religious views, that a French Jew feels among strangers in England even if he be among Jews.’ Had they followed the promo’s line, it would have been a very different story: ‘France? Ah oui, Empereur, we’re largely in favour. Excellent cheeses. Plus, “France”, it’s such a nice word! It rhymes with “dance” … er, and “lance”, which is coincidentally what you’re now hurling at us …”’
Indeed, when seeking the correct tone the Beeb could have done worse than glance at a Reform siddur: ‘May the Lord bless Our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth, and all the royal family … May He give His wisdom to the government of this country, to all who lead it and all who have responsibility for its safety and its welfare.’ You see? That’s how it’s done. Earnest, reverential, more or less entirely craven. Following this model, the skateboarder of the promo might restate his preference as follows: ‘I’m supporting Romania. Thank you so much, Romania, for not hurting me. I promise to be good.’
For those who balk at full national identification of this kind, there is a halfway house between patriotism and parochialism. That is to favour a country on the grounds that one of its players plays for your club side. When Liverpool fans support Spain for Fernando Torres’ sake, or United fans roar on Portugal for Ronaldo’s, they are following a venerable tradition of proxy glory-hunting. They remind me of my Aunt Sadie, a self-declared expert on ‘American Culture’ who knows little of Charlie Parker, Orson Welles or Herman Melville, but turns out to be mysteriously clued-up when it comes to Bob Dylan, Woody Allen and Philip Roth. She may be a bit hazy about what the Constitution is, but she’s pretty sure chicken soup is good for it.
So much for assimilation. Alternatively, you can simply exclude your excluders back — and by this alchemy transform exclusion into exclusivity. The knack lies in convincing yourself that no-one else exists: there is only the Nation — exiled, despised, but surviving. So next time England fails to qualify, its fans should ignore the distressing realities of the present and immerse themselves entirely in the past — specifically, the heady days of 1966. In tribute to the famous Russian linesman, they would dress entirely in black, and following the example of Bobby Charlton shave all their hair except for a single wrap-around strand. Changes to the Laws of the Game as they stood in 1966 would be considered abominations, with goalkeepers proudly handling back-passes as if to say, ‘I am a goalkeeper, and no heretical FIFA mandate will stop me using my hands within the area ordained for such practice by our fathers in days of old.’ Daily conversation would revolve entirely around the Third Goal, whether it crossed the line, the position of lines in general and the importance of determining what does and doesn’t cross them. The beauty of this system is that it allows you to exclude not only the supporters of other countries, but any of your fellow-fans who fail to observe the game with the same ritualistic purity as you. They in turn can look down on you for your anachronistic literal-mindedness, and punkt! — everybody’s happy.
Of course, you could, instead, put your efforts into restoring your place in the Community of Nations. For England, the next opportunity will be the World Cup 2010 qualifiers. Experience tells us, though, that it’s not as easy as it sounds. The men in charge are inept, or corrupt, or both. The tactics are crude and outdated. The press knows no middle ground between blind adulation and fevered hostility. And every time you think you’ve finally won recognition, a couple of years later you have to fight for it all over again.
If those childhood gangs taught us anything, perhaps, it’s that the best response in the face of exclusion is just to laugh it off. After all, the one field where the Jews and the English really do stand apart from the rest of the world is that of self-ridicule. None of that for me, mind. After all, I’m an England fan, a Man City fan and an unemployed rabbi: if there’s one person I’m not accepting ridicule from, it’s me.

Having spent twenty-one years as a rabbi in his native Morecambe, and a brief spell as inside-right for Preston North End, Rabbi Savage is now a freelance Talmudic Scholar.