by David Bedein
A common theme of Catholicism and Judaism involves the command to confess your sins.
While Catholics often confess their sins to their clerics, Jews confess their sins to the community at large.
With the news of the Phillies contending for the World Series reaching Jerusalem, the time has come for true confessions of a Phillies baseball fan from 1964, who may have wrought heavenly havoc on a team that was supposed to win the pennant that year, a scant 45 years ago.
Yes, the time has come to confess my sit, with my mitt and scorecard in hand, at the tender age of 14.
You see, I grew up in Philadelphia, a place where the Phillies never won. Prayers never helped.
1964 came, the year after my Bar Mitzvah, when our Rabbis taught us that it was now up to me to keep the commandments of God.
During that momentous year after my bar mitzvah, when our traditions have it that we pray as adults and that God listens intently to our prayers, the Phillies looked like they were going to win.
I put in a special prayer for the Phillies on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, 1964, reciting an incantation of the Phillies lineup and pitching rotation, adding special prayers for the Phillies bullpen when the Holy Ark was open for divine intercession.
It was on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, however, that I made a radical decision: to depart on a personal pilgrimage to Connie Mack Stadium.
The escape to the holy baseball grounds was well planned. Soon after I heard the Shofar Ram’s Horn being sounded to call for repentance, I quietly moved to the back of the schule, feigning a tummy ache to my little brother and sister.
I had five crisp one dollar bills that wouldn't jingle in my pocket, saved from my summer paper route, violating the Jewish tradition of not carrying money on the holiday.
I had thought of everything: My Phillies Hat was even in my Tallis Prayer shawl bag.
Like Moses who had just killed the Egyptian, I looked this way and that, and saw no one in my way from the men’s room exit, and left a place of worship to quietly ascend a PTC bus to 69th street and ascend even higher to the heights of the Market Street subway and then on to the Broad Street Subway.
Wearing my bar mitzvah suit, the destined arrival was Connie Mack Stadium, at 21st and Lehigh, in time great unreserved seats behind home plate.
I clutched my Machzor Rosh Hashanah prayer book together with my score card.
The Phillies were playing the hapless Mets.
In the Fifth inning, time of afternoon mincha prayers back at the synagogue, Frank Thomas, the Phillies much-needed right handed power whom they had recently acquired, was on first. Thomas suddenly sprinted to second base on an infield ground ball, sliding head first into second base, breaking his thumb. Sliding into second base? Hmm...That never happens...
The play by play by former Phillie Whiz Kid Center Fielder Richie Ashburn was very loud on a transistor radio near by. Richie announced that Thomas would be out for the season. Richie Ashburn was the Phillies star turned Phillies announcer who died in 1997. He had been a Whiz Kid in the last Phillies victory during the year of my birth in 1950 and seemed to represent the glorious past and promising present of the Phillies.
In the end, the Phillies lost that day. This was only a sign of things to come. On Yom Kippur, 12 games left in the left in the season. six and a half games ahead, the Phillies began a ten game losing streak and lost the pennant,
I made it back to synagogue for the concluding Maariv service at Overbrook Park Congregation... Or that is at least what I told my mother.
Everything that could go wrong in those ten days of judgement went wrong for the Phillies
Perhaps I had jinxed the Phillies, by leaving the synagogue the second day of Rosh Hashanah.
By Yom Kippur, there was no joy in Philly mudville.
I remember the great despondency when the Sukkot Feast of Tabernacles occurred in early October, when the Yankees of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford did not face our holy Phillies.
So I phoned a call in show on WCAU, then the CBS affiliate in Philly, to ask Richie Ashburn what had gone wrong.
Ashburn gave me an answer that I felt like a reproach for going to the ball game on second day Rosh Hashanah.
Richie said that a great lesson is never to be overconfident and not to do things that you shouldn't do.
He was referring to Phillie manager Gene Mauch overplaying his star pitchers, Jim Bunning and Chris Short, whom he played with only two days rest at the end of the season...
Yet, at age 14, coming into an age where I was supposed to observe God’s commandments, I thought that he was referring to my mistaken pilgrimage to Connie Mack stadium on a day that was supposed to be devoted to prayer.
Forgive me, dear Philly fans of yesteryear, if my shortsighted trek of 1964 may have angered God in some way.
Last year as dawn struck early in the morning of the new Hebrew month of Heshvan the holy city of Jerusalem, word came forth of a Phillies World Series Victory.
Phillie fanatics in the Holy Land promptly cited the traditional Hallel prayer of thanksgiving, that is reserved for the new month, and, of course, dedicated to thanking the Lord for bequeathing a victory to the Phillies, 44 years after the disaster that befell our fallen Phillies in 1964.
Was this a sign of Messiah? Will he be riding on a white donkey from the dugout in Cooperstown?
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Showing posts with label Catholicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catholicism. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Papal Visit Planned Today at Yad Vashem
by David Bedein
Israel’s leading daily paper, Yediot Ahronot, ran a stinging editorial yesterday, on the eve of the Papal visit.
The editorial attacked Pope Benedict XVI for his involuntary service in the Hitler Youth and German Wehrmacht during World War II as well as the mistakes surrounding lifting the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a Holocaust-denying bishop, earlier this year.
The Pope joined the Hitler Youth as he was legally bound to do under German law at the time, but according to his book Salt of the Earth, he did everything he could to get out and was allowed to leave because he desired to enter seminary. The book also recounts how the then-Joseph Ratzinger served in the German army under an anti-Nazi officer who allowed him to desert his unit.
The editorial said: “Pope Benedict XVI will arrive [today] for his historic visit to Israel... Under this dark shadow, the Pope will visit Yad Vashem [today] at noon, a visit whose importance cannot be exaggerated.
“The Holy See, the head of the Catholic Church, the same church whose Pope, during World War II, did nothing to save Jews from the gas chambers, will meet there with those who survived that hell and succeeded in establishing a state here. The meeting will be too difficult for some concentration camp survivors who do not understand why they should host Pope Benedict XVI so nicely.”
However, six survivors of the Nazi horrors have volunteered to greet the Pope at the Yad Vashem Memorial for 6 Million Jews.
Gita Calderon, 83, is one of them.
“I feel that I am my people’s emissary to the Pope,” Ms. Calderon, whose entire family was killed in the Holocaust, said over the weekend. “If I could, I would tell him that the wound of the Holocaust has never healed for me. The wound is painful and bleeds all the time.”
Ms. Calderon is aware of Pope Benedict XVI’s past, but thinks that one should look ahead.
“I know that in his youth, the Pope was in the Hitler Youth and in the German army,” she says. “I hope that he did so because he was too young to understand. I hope that he also regrets it. The actions of the Nazis can never be forgiven. But we must demand of the Pope that he agree to rectify the errors that he made when he was young.”
Dan Landsberg, 70, will also shake the Pope’s hand today. Unlike Ms. Calderon, he claims that he is not excited by the occasion.
“I know that the Pope is a very important person, but I don’t look at this whole meeting from a personal perspective,” he said. “I was chosen to be a representative of the state and of my people, and all I need to do is to try to represent my people honorably.”
The Pope will also shake the hand of survivors Ed Mossberg, Yisraela Har-El, Avraham Ashkenazi and Ruth Bondy, and the hand of a “Righteous Gentile” Ivan Varantich who saved Jews during the war.
Other survivors politely refused the invitation to the historic event. Among them was former Member of Israel’s Knesset, Shmuel Halpert.
“I think that the Pope never should have been invited to the State of Israel,” Mr. Halpert told Yediot Ahronot. “Pope Benedict XVI was a member of the Nazi movement, and as a Holocaust survivor I cannot participate in ceremony honoring such a man, who was part of the war against the Jewish people. Everybody knows about the thundering silence of Pope Pius XII during World War II. Pope Pius XII and his people could have saved at least hundreds of thousands of Jews, but did not.”
These contentions, however, are disputed by world-renowned Jewish scholar, Rabbi David Dalin, whose research claims Pius XII saved more Jews during the Holocaust than Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and other notables who saved Jews from the Nazis.
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who survived the Bergen Belsen concentration camp as a small child and who now serves as the rabbi of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and as the head of Yad Vashem’s board, said that despite the “stumblings” of the Pope, his visit to Israel should not be rejected “in order not to give Israel’s enemies an occasion to speak.”
“I expect that during the Pope’s speech at Yad Vashem, he will make statements that will dispel the fog around his relationship with Judaism and strengthen the bridge that his predecessor built,” he said.
Rabbi Lau recalls that, over the past several weeks, many people contacted him about the meeting with the Pope.
“Some asked for an opportunity to shake the Pope’s hand, while others wanted to give him notes or other souvenirs. Still others said that their families had been in contact with the Pope’s family, the Ratzingers, and wanted to reminisce with him. He must be received politely and with respect, but we must not be obsequious toward him.”
See this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
See this story at Israel Behind the News
Israel’s leading daily paper, Yediot Ahronot, ran a stinging editorial yesterday, on the eve of the Papal visit.
The editorial attacked Pope Benedict XVI for his involuntary service in the Hitler Youth and German Wehrmacht during World War II as well as the mistakes surrounding lifting the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a Holocaust-denying bishop, earlier this year.
The Pope joined the Hitler Youth as he was legally bound to do under German law at the time, but according to his book Salt of the Earth, he did everything he could to get out and was allowed to leave because he desired to enter seminary. The book also recounts how the then-Joseph Ratzinger served in the German army under an anti-Nazi officer who allowed him to desert his unit.
The editorial said: “Pope Benedict XVI will arrive [today] for his historic visit to Israel... Under this dark shadow, the Pope will visit Yad Vashem [today] at noon, a visit whose importance cannot be exaggerated.
“The Holy See, the head of the Catholic Church, the same church whose Pope, during World War II, did nothing to save Jews from the gas chambers, will meet there with those who survived that hell and succeeded in establishing a state here. The meeting will be too difficult for some concentration camp survivors who do not understand why they should host Pope Benedict XVI so nicely.”
However, six survivors of the Nazi horrors have volunteered to greet the Pope at the Yad Vashem Memorial for 6 Million Jews.
Gita Calderon, 83, is one of them.
“I feel that I am my people’s emissary to the Pope,” Ms. Calderon, whose entire family was killed in the Holocaust, said over the weekend. “If I could, I would tell him that the wound of the Holocaust has never healed for me. The wound is painful and bleeds all the time.”
Ms. Calderon is aware of Pope Benedict XVI’s past, but thinks that one should look ahead.
“I know that in his youth, the Pope was in the Hitler Youth and in the German army,” she says. “I hope that he did so because he was too young to understand. I hope that he also regrets it. The actions of the Nazis can never be forgiven. But we must demand of the Pope that he agree to rectify the errors that he made when he was young.”
Dan Landsberg, 70, will also shake the Pope’s hand today. Unlike Ms. Calderon, he claims that he is not excited by the occasion.
“I know that the Pope is a very important person, but I don’t look at this whole meeting from a personal perspective,” he said. “I was chosen to be a representative of the state and of my people, and all I need to do is to try to represent my people honorably.”
The Pope will also shake the hand of survivors Ed Mossberg, Yisraela Har-El, Avraham Ashkenazi and Ruth Bondy, and the hand of a “Righteous Gentile” Ivan Varantich who saved Jews during the war.
Other survivors politely refused the invitation to the historic event. Among them was former Member of Israel’s Knesset, Shmuel Halpert.
“I think that the Pope never should have been invited to the State of Israel,” Mr. Halpert told Yediot Ahronot. “Pope Benedict XVI was a member of the Nazi movement, and as a Holocaust survivor I cannot participate in ceremony honoring such a man, who was part of the war against the Jewish people. Everybody knows about the thundering silence of Pope Pius XII during World War II. Pope Pius XII and his people could have saved at least hundreds of thousands of Jews, but did not.”
These contentions, however, are disputed by world-renowned Jewish scholar, Rabbi David Dalin, whose research claims Pius XII saved more Jews during the Holocaust than Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and other notables who saved Jews from the Nazis.
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who survived the Bergen Belsen concentration camp as a small child and who now serves as the rabbi of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and as the head of Yad Vashem’s board, said that despite the “stumblings” of the Pope, his visit to Israel should not be rejected “in order not to give Israel’s enemies an occasion to speak.”
“I expect that during the Pope’s speech at Yad Vashem, he will make statements that will dispel the fog around his relationship with Judaism and strengthen the bridge that his predecessor built,” he said.
Rabbi Lau recalls that, over the past several weeks, many people contacted him about the meeting with the Pope.
“Some asked for an opportunity to shake the Pope’s hand, while others wanted to give him notes or other souvenirs. Still others said that their families had been in contact with the Pope’s family, the Ratzingers, and wanted to reminisce with him. He must be received politely and with respect, but we must not be obsequious toward him.”
See this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
See this story at Israel Behind the News
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Israeli Minister of Tourism: 'Pilgrims instead of Models'
by David Bedein
Israel’s Minister of Tourism, Stas Misezhnikov, has informed the media that he plans to take advantage of the Pope’s visit to Israel and focus his ministry’s marketing on bringing pilgrims to the country.
He says he intends to bring in Catholic pilgrims and Evangelical Christians to Israel.
“Past tourism ministers made a mistake when they tried to market Israel as a vacation destination by showing Israel’s beaches and beautiful young women.
“Ministers who focused on photographing models, or on being photographed with them, thought that this would bring tourists to Israel.
“But their mistake was that our neighbors also have pretty young women and beaches, and we can’t compete with them in terms of the prices that they offer for vacation packages,” the minister said.
Mr. Misezhnikov was referring to the recent disastrous campaign of the Israel Ministry of Tourism that featured Israel’s bathing beauties, some of whom gave extensive interviews to the international media where they expressed their lack of patriotism to the State of Israel.
Meeting more than 100 reporters who have come to Israel to cover the Papal visit, Mr. Misezhnikov said: “What Israel needs to do is focus on what we have and others don’t, or, in other words, the Holy Land. Israel is sacred to Judaism, Christianity and also to Islam, and the Tourism Ministry’s current focus is to market Israel as the Holy Land. I hope that the Pope, who will be... visiting Israel soon, will call upon Catholic believers to come to Israel, and I intend to do everything I can to take full advantage of this visit. In addition, the Ministry of Tourism will work together with Evangelical communities all over the world in order to increase the number of their visitors to Israel.”
See this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
See this story at Israel Behind the News
Israel’s Minister of Tourism, Stas Misezhnikov, has informed the media that he plans to take advantage of the Pope’s visit to Israel and focus his ministry’s marketing on bringing pilgrims to the country.
He says he intends to bring in Catholic pilgrims and Evangelical Christians to Israel.
“Past tourism ministers made a mistake when they tried to market Israel as a vacation destination by showing Israel’s beaches and beautiful young women.
“Ministers who focused on photographing models, or on being photographed with them, thought that this would bring tourists to Israel.
“But their mistake was that our neighbors also have pretty young women and beaches, and we can’t compete with them in terms of the prices that they offer for vacation packages,” the minister said.
Mr. Misezhnikov was referring to the recent disastrous campaign of the Israel Ministry of Tourism that featured Israel’s bathing beauties, some of whom gave extensive interviews to the international media where they expressed their lack of patriotism to the State of Israel.
Meeting more than 100 reporters who have come to Israel to cover the Papal visit, Mr. Misezhnikov said: “What Israel needs to do is focus on what we have and others don’t, or, in other words, the Holy Land. Israel is sacred to Judaism, Christianity and also to Islam, and the Tourism Ministry’s current focus is to market Israel as the Holy Land. I hope that the Pope, who will be... visiting Israel soon, will call upon Catholic believers to come to Israel, and I intend to do everything I can to take full advantage of this visit. In addition, the Ministry of Tourism will work together with Evangelical communities all over the world in order to increase the number of their visitors to Israel.”
See this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
See this story at Israel Behind the News
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