Spirit and Story
Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. A new article will be posted here every other week.
To access the CLAL Spirit and Story Archive, click here.
Our authors are especially interested in hearing your responses to what they have written. So after reading, visit the Spirit and Story Discussion Forum where you can join in conversation with CLAL faculty and other readers.
Confessions of a Moderately Affiliated Soccer Fan
By Robert Rabinowitz
It’s been a great season and a wonderful few weeks to be a
Liverpool Football Club soccer fan. Following
close to 20 years of British dominance and European success, the team subsided into a
decade-long drought [during the 1990s], winning only one competition. This season, however, Liverpool F.C. won an
unprecedented treble of domestic and European trophies and qualified for the European
Super League. Three of these triumphs came in
eight hectic days, culminating in a victorious parade around Liverpool watched by a crowd
of 500,000, which is more than the city’s population.
I suppose it’s inevitable, given my work for CLAL, that I should
have begun to view my experience this season through the lenses of identity and religion. The parallels are not hard to make. I watched two of the cup finals in Irish pubs on
the East Side surrounded by fellow Liverpool fans. Just
before one of the matches, the pub’s large-screen TVs showed a lengthy commercial
advertising a collection of favorite religious hymns.
There were many guffaws from the soccer fans at the members of the
congregations shown singing joyfully with their arms in the air. (I guffawed, too, until I realized that the images
probably represented pretty accurately what I look like in my synagogue on a Friday
night.) And yet, as I dashed through the
throngs at the end of the matches, I left pubs full mostly of grown men facing the same TV
screens, swaying with their arms in the air and singing the Rodgers & Hammerstein
hymnlike number “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which is Liverpool F.C.’s
anthem.
I identify strongly with the emotions that led people to sing to the
TV screens. First, it fulfills a desire to
connect with home or community through the new opportunities provided by broadcast
technology. On the day of Liverpool’s
victory parade, I felt a little out-of-touch with who I was. After all, the parade traveled no more than 50
yards from the house, synagogue and school in which I grew up. I was missing out on the aliyat haregel (foot pilgimage) of “my
people.” I thought about the Talmudic
passage that evaluates different reasons for missing ancient Israel’s ultimate
expression of communal solidarity, the Passover sacrifice and feast. I was reassured that being away on a journey
is judged an acceptable excuse. The loyalty
one feels for one’s team is like loyalty to a people, place or religion. One is convinced about its specialness, even
though an objective evaluation of all the available options is besides the point.
My second reason for identifying with the singing fans was simply the
depth of the experiences we had shared. In
both games that I watched in the pubs, Liverpool had only triumphed after narrowly
avoiding defeat. The emotional intensity of
watching one’s team’s fate being fought out on the pitch is like nothing I have
ever experienced in a formal prayer service, and the impulse to sing with joy after
victory was very powerful. On the other hand,
as intense as the experience was, there was something unreal and disconnected about it in
that directly after both victories I ran straight to my next appointments.
As I have pondered the exact details of my “Liverpool F.C.”
identity, I have come to realize that I am what demographers might define as a
“moderately affiliated” fan. Writing
about the Jewish community, Steve Cohen and Arnie Eisen define the moderately affiliated
as “those who belong to a Jewish institution…but are not as involved, learned,
or pious as the most highly engaged” segment of American Jews (The Jew Within, Indiana University Press, 2000,
p.5). Like moderately affiliated Jews,
my performance of the normative behaviors of fanhood is somewhat idiosyncratic and
certainly sporadic, peaking at particular times of the year (although my wife thinks I am
pretty devoted). I have only watched a
grand total of five Liverpool matches this season out of a possible 65, but I do have a
Liverpool screen saver and mug in my office.
My soccer fan identity also displays the puzzling combination of
inalienability and chosenness that Cohen and Eisen highlight. It is my right not to “buy into” the
whole package of expected fans’ behaviors, and I will acknowledge the superior
commitment of others. Nevertheless, I regard
my “Liverpool-ness” as inalienable and so I am as genuine in my fanhood as
anyone else. I think this accounts for a
peculiar discomfort I experienced watching the matches in the pub. On the one hand, I felt like a stranger. I was not wearing a replica shirt, scarf or any of
the other traditional paraphernalia; I did not have a strong regional (i.e., working
class) accent; and there were certainly no other Orthodox Jews to be seen. And yet, I was actually a native Liverpudlian
among predominantly Irish fans. They were
more highly engaged, but I was still the real thing.
I was almost waiting to have my credentials challenged. And I have witnessed this sort of defensiveness on
the part of moderately affiliated Jews thrust into an environment dominated by highly
engaged Jews.
As a highly engaged Jew, thinking about myself as moderately
affiliated to a form of life in which other people are highly engaged has been very
revealing. It has also given me more sympathy
with the views of people who fret about the disappearance of Jews and Judaism. After all, one cannot build a thriving soccer
scene on the back of someone who only watches the occasional big match and whose
“fanhood” is mixed in with large globs of nostalgia that some may argue has
nothing to do with the essence of the game itself.
Ultimately, however, I think that the application of the categories
“moderately affiliated” and “highly engaged” to Jewish identity has
only limited validity. The only way I can
explain it is through the concept of idolatry. I
think that the concept of idolatry boils down to the claim that no aspect of human
existence is of absolute value. All aspects
of existence – social institutions, systems of thought – can be turned into
idols that blind us to the other aspects of life that are worthy of value. The concept of idolatry has a special position in
Judaism, for it can call into question any and all other aspects of Jewish life and
thought. It is this concept, for me, that
underpins the claims made by CLAL that Judaism can change profoundly in nature. When the social reality within which we live is
transforming, perpetuation of age-old rules and ideas can itself be a form of idolatry
that can blind us to new opportunities that are worthy of value.
I do not believe that there is any such powerful source of self-criticism within the fairly fixed and limited repertoire of behaviors and concerns that comprise soccer fanhood. And that is why the categories “moderately affiliated” and “highly engaged” may be of value in measuring it, for they assume a hierarchy of value that is essentially fixed. Bill Shankly, the famed Liverpool manager of the seventies, once said with great irony and humor: “Football is not a matter of life and death. It’s more important than that.” Once we can accept that this sentiment is actually true of Judaism, we may be able to stop trying to reduce it to a fixed set of behaviors and institutions, and begin the more important conversations about the meaning and purpose of our Jewishness.
