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I am going to offer you two stories this morning. They are both, if you will permit it, about soccer. But not really. They are actually about Israel. And about life. And about Torah. And about me. And other than for a few nerdy soccer friends and perhaps my wife, I’m not sure I’ve ever really told either story before. And until perhaps this past week, I’d never truly contemplated the fact they are wholly intertwined one to another.
The first story is sort of the story of how I became a soccer fan. In 2003, as a 3rd year rabbinic student abroad in Israel, I participated in a big-brother-little-brother program. I don’t remember how I was recruited, but the program was for big brothers to mentor a little brother from a family affected by terrorism. This was 2003, mind you, in the middle of the second intifada, and I was living in Jerusalem. Suffice it to say there were many, many families that were affected by terrorism.
I was paired with a 12 year old boy from a mizrachi family named Re’em. Re’em’s older sister had been killed in a terror attack when he was just a baby. His middle sister was a survivor of not one but two terror attacks. She was a border guard, a unit called magav, and the border guards in this time period were frequent attack targets because they were simply more accessible to terrorists. My job was to take Re’em out and do stuff - throw a baseball and kick a soccer ball and see a movie and get shwarma, stuff like that. It was fun. It was a break - for him from a family that could sometimes be shrouded in sadness, and for me from the incessant pressure of learning talmud and midrash and commentaries on tehillim for 8 hours a day. One week, Re’em’s older brother asks if I want to go with him and Reem to a soccer game - to go see their favorite team, Beitar Yerushalayim. I say yes. Saturday night after Shabbat, we go. We get seats and sit in the stands behind one of the goals, the cheap seats.
As the game is about to begin, high over the center of the pitch, a huge block of fans decked out in the home yellow kit of Beitar starts chanting something loudly, which I can’t quite make out. I ask Re’ems brother what they are saying. He says (accent) ‘you don’t want to know.’ Apparently, they were shouting something not so nice about Arabs.
Beitar Jerusalem the soccer team originated from Beitar - the youth group. Back in the formative days before the creation of the Jewish state, in the 1920s and 30s in what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine, political groups had their own youth groups, and those youth groups would often start basketball teams and soccer clubs. A group of Zionists known as revisionists founded a club and named it in honor of Zionist hero Joseph Trumpeldor. The long name was beit yosef trumpeldor, or as an acronym, Beitar for short. Early members included Zeev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, all famous political figures in Israel. The soccer club always had this loose political lineage in its past, but as Jerusalem’s only top division soccer club, it was also quite simply the local team. You don’t ask questions about the political lineage and origin story of the Lakers or the Pirates or the Cowboys. If you live in LA or Pittsburgh or Dallas, you root for the home team. So too, Beitar. And because of Re’em, I rooted for Beitar. I bought the yellow kit and I Reem gave me a yellow scarf.
As the years went on though, Beitar’s ultras - that block in yellow I mentioned before - became more and more radical. They chanted awful things, more frequently, and no amount of cajoling or sanctioning from the club or the league would stop them. In 2012 they rioted at the mall across from the stadium while chanting ‘death to arabs.’ In 2013 the new owner signed two Muslim players who were born in Chechniya and fans burned the teams offices to the ground - offices that had all the teams trophies in them. The team played behind closed doors with zero fans in attendance for several weeks. At season’s end, the owner unloaded the team on someone else. If you’re interested, there’s a documentary about this all called ‘forever pure’ which came out in 2017.
But by that time, I had long given up my affinity for the team. I remember there was a day sometime around 2009 when I took my beitar scarf and shirt out of a drawer and put it in a box in the basement. I said ‘I haven’t given up on this team, but I can’t wear this now, and I don’t know when I ever will again. This shirt stands for hate, and violence, and intolerance.’ I threw myself into the local team in Colorado, the Rapids, sometime around 2013, and also a team in England, and another in Germany. And I thought ‘I give up on Israeli soccer.’
And then a funny thing happened. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person in Jerusalem who thought that it was a travesty that the only local team in town was a space for hate and racism. There were hundreds - thousands - of yerushalmim, of jerusalemites - who thought that their local soccer team should be a beacon of light in the world and not a cauldron of anger. And so they put their money together, 960 shekels a piece for a share of a new soccer club, called originally Hapoel Katamon, named for one of the neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Because of the way soccer works, they had to start in the lowest division on the soccer pyramid and play their way up by winning the league and getting promoted. And after doing that, they’d have to do it again, and again. For an annotated bibliography on this practice called promotion and relegation, I submit to you two really great TV shows ‘Ted Lasso’ and ‘Welcome to Wrexham’. Hapoel Katamon started in 2009 in the fifth division of Israeli soccer, an amateur league filled with pot bellied 40 year old men named Moti jogging across the pitch at half speed. They won the league in 2010, and won promotion again in 2011, and won promotion again in 2013. In 2021, they were finally promoted to the first division, under the new name Hapoel Yerushalayim.
Hapoel Jerusalem are the categorical opposite of Beitar Jerusalem. From the beginning, they created youth soccer teams made up of both Jewish and Arab kids from the neighborhoods around the city. They were intentional in creating and supporting soccer for women and girls with the same effort and promotion as with men’s soccer. Every year at Pride week, they celebrated LGBTQ equality openly and publically in the stadium, and even replaced the corner flags with rainbow flags, against the regulations of the Israeli league. Hapoel believes that soccer is for everyone, that Israel is for everyone, and that success comes through love, acceptance, uplift, and positivity.
And I have been with them the whole way. Every time I’ve been in Israel the past decade and Hapoel were playing, I went to see them. In 2015 I spent four hours on buses to see them at a decrepit condemned stadium on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. My son’s first soccer kit was a Lionel Messi Argentina kit. His second kit was a Hapoel Jerusalem. Among the many soccer scarves that hang in my office, I am most proud of my Hapoel Yerushalayim scarf.
Around the time I was becoming a Hapoel fan, a nine year old boy was also becoming a fan. His family made aliyah from Richmond Virginia in 2008, and the boy started going to soccer games. In time, he became a fixture at Teddy Kolleck stadium and with the Hapoel supporters group that sang and chanted every match. I probably sat a few rows from him several times, but didn’t even know it. His name is Hersh Goldberg Polin. And as you probably know, he was abducted by Hamas on October 7. 217 days later, he is still a hostage in Gaza, waiting for his release.
You probably know Hersh because of his mother, Rachel Goldberg Polin, who has been tirelessly appearing on videos and with reporters and at rallies speaking eloquently and thoughtfully and painfully about the effort to bring Hersh home. And I think we all identify with her; because she is a parent fighting for her child, and because she looks like us, and sounds like us.
But before I’d ever heard of Rachel Goldberg Polin, I knew of Hersh, and that he had been abducted. I knew on October 8, just one day after Hamas attacked Israel, because Hapoel Jerusalem and its supporters posted about it on social media, and just knowing that another fan of my team was a captive caused me to burst into an ugly fit of tears. As is often the case, we find it very hard to identify with a tragedy when we utilize numbers of casualties or captives. But when we reduce it down to one person, one story, and we can see ourselves or our friends or family in them, it becomes much more intense, much more personal. Hersh loves soccer. I love soccer. I am Hersh. He is me. He is all of my friends at the tailgate; he is the one jumping next to me yelling mishelo kofetz tzahov’ - if you aren’t jumping, you’re for the yellow team. And of course, his fellow Hapoel supporters feel the same way. Being a fan of any sports team makes you part of a community that transcends race and language and nationality in a way that is hard to explain, and for soccer supporters groups, it is that but more so, because of the singing and the chanting and the pre-game tailgating and more. As one of the supporters eloquently said in a recent episode of the ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ documentary, ‘The club is a way of knowing I belong to something.
Ever since Hersh was taken hostage, at every soccer game and every gathering and every political demostration, you’ll find hundreds of men and women decked out in hapoel’s colors of black and red, carrying banners demanding that Israel do everything in its power to bring all the hostages home, and especially Hersh. This past week they posted a picture of Hersh with the words ‘od mischak biladecha. Nekaveh sheAcharon.’ ‘Another game without you. We hope it is the last. Apparently according to reports, this past week Israel and Hamas were close to a cease fire and a hostage deal. However, it looks like that has fallen apart.
Israels soccer league is a microcosm of Israel itself. The top leagues are a mix of teams from different cities with players of many different backgrounds. Maccabi Haifa’s midfield includes Arab Israeli Mahmoud Jaber and Palestinian American Kenny Saif. Before his recent retirement, Israel’s best player was Bibras Natcho, a Circassian Christian. Bnei Sakhnin is a team from an Arab town in the Galil with both Arab players and Jewish players. They’ve played in the Israeli top division for two decades, and they’ve never had a problem, except, of course, when they’ve faced Beitar.
Why am I telling you all this? Because, to quote a character from Ted Lasso, football is life. The Israeli league, the Israeli players, the supporters of the teams, they describe for us a vision of an Israel beyond the war and the suffering and the intolerance and inhumanity caused by those who believe that hate wins, that division and that separation will overcome cooperation and collaboration and love. Beitar Jerusalem has never had an Arab player on their team, and they also haven’t won a championship in 20 years, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. You cannot create a functional society or community and company built on strife and distrust and division.
This war will end. God willing, the hostages will come home. Most people in Israel and the West Bank want to build houses and tend gardens and go to work and raise their family. They’re just like you and me. Why am I telling you about two soccer teams, one that I used to root for, and one that I root for now - one team that believes in hate, and one that believes in love? Because Israel has a choice to make between Beitar and Hapoel, between strife and dissension or mutual coexistence. I don’t know the mechanics of the future or the final status political details, but ultimately it will only come when we recognize how to play nicely with each other, and how to include, not exclude.
Rabbi Hanoch Tzi HaCohen of Bendzin, who died in 1935, taught the following on this week’s parsha, kedoshim, regarding chapter 19, verse 18 - vahavta lereicha kmocha - love your neighbor as yourself.
There is a degree of contradiction in saying that one should love their neighbor as themselves, because it is very hard to do. And so Rashi emphasizes it in his comentary by bringing from the midrash the [famous line] ‘this is great principle of the Torah.’ Thus according to the path of humanity, to love your neighbor as yourself is a difficult thing. However, we can accomplish it, if only by the strength of the Torah, and this is why the parasha begins by saying ‘Kedoshim tihiyu’ – ‘You shall be holy’.
The rabbi’s comment ends here. As you can see, he connects the concept of loving your neighbor to the concept of being holy. I will add that the Torah tells us ‘kedoshim tihiyu’ in the plural, not kadosh tihiye, singular. In other words we are holy, because we belong to something, together. We create holiness and love by inviting more people to belong to that thing, without exclusion. We find holiness when we are together in community, and our community is with all of our re’im, our neighbors, and when our only real divisions and disagreements are over which color soccer jersey we are currently wearing. Shabbat shalom.
The first story is sort of the story of how I became a soccer fan. In 2003, as a 3rd year rabbinic student abroad in Israel, I participated in a big-brother-little-brother program. I don’t remember how I was recruited, but the program was for big brothers to mentor a little brother from a family affected by terrorism. This was 2003, mind you, in the middle of the second intifada, and I was living in Jerusalem. Suffice it to say there were many, many families that were affected by terrorism.
I was paired with a 12 year old boy from a mizrachi family named Re’em. Re’em’s older sister had been killed in a terror attack when he was just a baby. His middle sister was a survivor of not one but two terror attacks. She was a border guard, a unit called magav, and the border guards in this time period were frequent attack targets because they were simply more accessible to terrorists. My job was to take Re’em out and do stuff - throw a baseball and kick a soccer ball and see a movie and get shwarma, stuff like that. It was fun. It was a break - for him from a family that could sometimes be shrouded in sadness, and for me from the incessant pressure of learning talmud and midrash and commentaries on tehillim for 8 hours a day. One week, Re’em’s older brother asks if I want to go with him and Reem to a soccer game - to go see their favorite team, Beitar Yerushalayim. I say yes. Saturday night after Shabbat, we go. We get seats and sit in the stands behind one of the goals, the cheap seats.
As the game is about to begin, high over the center of the pitch, a huge block of fans decked out in the home yellow kit of Beitar starts chanting something loudly, which I can’t quite make out. I ask Re’ems brother what they are saying. He says (accent) ‘you don’t want to know.’ Apparently, they were shouting something not so nice about Arabs.
Beitar Jerusalem the soccer team originated from Beitar - the youth group. Back in the formative days before the creation of the Jewish state, in the 1920s and 30s in what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine, political groups had their own youth groups, and those youth groups would often start basketball teams and soccer clubs. A group of Zionists known as revisionists founded a club and named it in honor of Zionist hero Joseph Trumpeldor. The long name was beit yosef trumpeldor, or as an acronym, Beitar for short. Early members included Zeev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, all famous political figures in Israel. The soccer club always had this loose political lineage in its past, but as Jerusalem’s only top division soccer club, it was also quite simply the local team. You don’t ask questions about the political lineage and origin story of the Lakers or the Pirates or the Cowboys. If you live in LA or Pittsburgh or Dallas, you root for the home team. So too, Beitar. And because of Re’em, I rooted for Beitar. I bought the yellow kit and I Reem gave me a yellow scarf.
As the years went on though, Beitar’s ultras - that block in yellow I mentioned before - became more and more radical. They chanted awful things, more frequently, and no amount of cajoling or sanctioning from the club or the league would stop them. In 2012 they rioted at the mall across from the stadium while chanting ‘death to arabs.’ In 2013 the new owner signed two Muslim players who were born in Chechniya and fans burned the teams offices to the ground - offices that had all the teams trophies in them. The team played behind closed doors with zero fans in attendance for several weeks. At season’s end, the owner unloaded the team on someone else. If you’re interested, there’s a documentary about this all called ‘forever pure’ which came out in 2017.
But by that time, I had long given up my affinity for the team. I remember there was a day sometime around 2009 when I took my beitar scarf and shirt out of a drawer and put it in a box in the basement. I said ‘I haven’t given up on this team, but I can’t wear this now, and I don’t know when I ever will again. This shirt stands for hate, and violence, and intolerance.’ I threw myself into the local team in Colorado, the Rapids, sometime around 2013, and also a team in England, and another in Germany. And I thought ‘I give up on Israeli soccer.’
And then a funny thing happened. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person in Jerusalem who thought that it was a travesty that the only local team in town was a space for hate and racism. There were hundreds - thousands - of yerushalmim, of jerusalemites - who thought that their local soccer team should be a beacon of light in the world and not a cauldron of anger. And so they put their money together, 960 shekels a piece for a share of a new soccer club, called originally Hapoel Katamon, named for one of the neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Because of the way soccer works, they had to start in the lowest division on the soccer pyramid and play their way up by winning the league and getting promoted. And after doing that, they’d have to do it again, and again. For an annotated bibliography on this practice called promotion and relegation, I submit to you two really great TV shows ‘Ted Lasso’ and ‘Welcome to Wrexham’. Hapoel Katamon started in 2009 in the fifth division of Israeli soccer, an amateur league filled with pot bellied 40 year old men named Moti jogging across the pitch at half speed. They won the league in 2010, and won promotion again in 2011, and won promotion again in 2013. In 2021, they were finally promoted to the first division, under the new name Hapoel Yerushalayim.
Hapoel Jerusalem are the categorical opposite of Beitar Jerusalem. From the beginning, they created youth soccer teams made up of both Jewish and Arab kids from the neighborhoods around the city. They were intentional in creating and supporting soccer for women and girls with the same effort and promotion as with men’s soccer. Every year at Pride week, they celebrated LGBTQ equality openly and publically in the stadium, and even replaced the corner flags with rainbow flags, against the regulations of the Israeli league. Hapoel believes that soccer is for everyone, that Israel is for everyone, and that success comes through love, acceptance, uplift, and positivity.
And I have been with them the whole way. Every time I’ve been in Israel the past decade and Hapoel were playing, I went to see them. In 2015 I spent four hours on buses to see them at a decrepit condemned stadium on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. My son’s first soccer kit was a Lionel Messi Argentina kit. His second kit was a Hapoel Jerusalem. Among the many soccer scarves that hang in my office, I am most proud of my Hapoel Yerushalayim scarf.
Around the time I was becoming a Hapoel fan, a nine year old boy was also becoming a fan. His family made aliyah from Richmond Virginia in 2008, and the boy started going to soccer games. In time, he became a fixture at Teddy Kolleck stadium and with the Hapoel supporters group that sang and chanted every match. I probably sat a few rows from him several times, but didn’t even know it. His name is Hersh Goldberg Polin. And as you probably know, he was abducted by Hamas on October 7. 217 days later, he is still a hostage in Gaza, waiting for his release.
You probably know Hersh because of his mother, Rachel Goldberg Polin, who has been tirelessly appearing on videos and with reporters and at rallies speaking eloquently and thoughtfully and painfully about the effort to bring Hersh home. And I think we all identify with her; because she is a parent fighting for her child, and because she looks like us, and sounds like us.
But before I’d ever heard of Rachel Goldberg Polin, I knew of Hersh, and that he had been abducted. I knew on October 8, just one day after Hamas attacked Israel, because Hapoel Jerusalem and its supporters posted about it on social media, and just knowing that another fan of my team was a captive caused me to burst into an ugly fit of tears. As is often the case, we find it very hard to identify with a tragedy when we utilize numbers of casualties or captives. But when we reduce it down to one person, one story, and we can see ourselves or our friends or family in them, it becomes much more intense, much more personal. Hersh loves soccer. I love soccer. I am Hersh. He is me. He is all of my friends at the tailgate; he is the one jumping next to me yelling mishelo kofetz tzahov’ - if you aren’t jumping, you’re for the yellow team. And of course, his fellow Hapoel supporters feel the same way. Being a fan of any sports team makes you part of a community that transcends race and language and nationality in a way that is hard to explain, and for soccer supporters groups, it is that but more so, because of the singing and the chanting and the pre-game tailgating and more. As one of the supporters eloquently said in a recent episode of the ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ documentary, ‘The club is a way of knowing I belong to something.
Ever since Hersh was taken hostage, at every soccer game and every gathering and every political demostration, you’ll find hundreds of men and women decked out in hapoel’s colors of black and red, carrying banners demanding that Israel do everything in its power to bring all the hostages home, and especially Hersh. This past week they posted a picture of Hersh with the words ‘od mischak biladecha. Nekaveh sheAcharon.’ ‘Another game without you. We hope it is the last. Apparently according to reports, this past week Israel and Hamas were close to a cease fire and a hostage deal. However, it looks like that has fallen apart.
Israels soccer league is a microcosm of Israel itself. The top leagues are a mix of teams from different cities with players of many different backgrounds. Maccabi Haifa’s midfield includes Arab Israeli Mahmoud Jaber and Palestinian American Kenny Saif. Before his recent retirement, Israel’s best player was Bibras Natcho, a Circassian Christian. Bnei Sakhnin is a team from an Arab town in the Galil with both Arab players and Jewish players. They’ve played in the Israeli top division for two decades, and they’ve never had a problem, except, of course, when they’ve faced Beitar.
Why am I telling you all this? Because, to quote a character from Ted Lasso, football is life. The Israeli league, the Israeli players, the supporters of the teams, they describe for us a vision of an Israel beyond the war and the suffering and the intolerance and inhumanity caused by those who believe that hate wins, that division and that separation will overcome cooperation and collaboration and love. Beitar Jerusalem has never had an Arab player on their team, and they also haven’t won a championship in 20 years, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. You cannot create a functional society or community and company built on strife and distrust and division.
This war will end. God willing, the hostages will come home. Most people in Israel and the West Bank want to build houses and tend gardens and go to work and raise their family. They’re just like you and me. Why am I telling you about two soccer teams, one that I used to root for, and one that I root for now - one team that believes in hate, and one that believes in love? Because Israel has a choice to make between Beitar and Hapoel, between strife and dissension or mutual coexistence. I don’t know the mechanics of the future or the final status political details, but ultimately it will only come when we recognize how to play nicely with each other, and how to include, not exclude.
Rabbi Hanoch Tzi HaCohen of Bendzin, who died in 1935, taught the following on this week’s parsha, kedoshim, regarding chapter 19, verse 18 - vahavta lereicha kmocha - love your neighbor as yourself.
There is a degree of contradiction in saying that one should love their neighbor as themselves, because it is very hard to do. And so Rashi emphasizes it in his comentary by bringing from the midrash the [famous line] ‘this is great principle of the Torah.’ Thus according to the path of humanity, to love your neighbor as yourself is a difficult thing. However, we can accomplish it, if only by the strength of the Torah, and this is why the parasha begins by saying ‘Kedoshim tihiyu’ – ‘You shall be holy’.
The rabbi’s comment ends here. As you can see, he connects the concept of loving your neighbor to the concept of being holy. I will add that the Torah tells us ‘kedoshim tihiyu’ in the plural, not kadosh tihiye, singular. In other words we are holy, because we belong to something, together. We create holiness and love by inviting more people to belong to that thing, without exclusion. We find holiness when we are together in community, and our community is with all of our re’im, our neighbors, and when our only real divisions and disagreements are over which color soccer jersey we are currently wearing. Shabbat shalom.
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