"By Any Other Name..."

5 Tammuz 5784

This is the fourth, and final, article written in 2017 which I am republishing this week.  It concerns the Maccabiah Games...

The Maccabiah is the world’s largest Jewish athletic competition and the second largest sporting event in the world – in terms of number of athletes competing – after the Olympics.  Taking place every four years in Israel, the Games are Maccabi World Union's largest initiative.  We are committed to the values of fair play, mutual respect and the pursuit of excellence.  

Our Story: Maccabi World Union is the oldest continuously active Zionist organization 

“Muscular Judaism” 

Theodore Herzl spoke of the need to reclaim the physical Jew.  At the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, Herzl’s chief lieutenant, Max Nordau, called for the need to develop what he termed “muscular Judaism”.  Nordau contributed greatly to the idea of the New Jew, a total transformation of the frightened Jew of the ghetto.    The essence of the New Jew was physical training through sport, gymnastics and clubs.   In the last years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, a number of Jewish sporting clubs began to develop, especially in central Europe.  They had names that echoed great heroic moments and characters from Jewish history such as Maccabi, Bar Kochba, Shimshon (Samson) or names that evoked power and heroism - HaKoach (Strength), Gibbor (Brave) and Gevurah (Heroism). (Source)

THE MACCABIAH GAMES – BY ANY OTHER NAME

Could anything be more oxymoronic than Greek-style games for Jews held in a sports stadium in Jerusalem and named after the very warriors who fought a similar Hellenistic assimilationist trend to their very deaths?  No doubt, when it was first conceived, all that the person must have thought about was the physical might and strength exemplified by Judah Maccabee, the Jewish Hammer, as portrayed in the story of Hanukkah.  What could he have known about that ancient clash of civilizations – the Greeks vs. the Jews? 

Perhaps, he had never even heard how the Hellenizers, in their all-consuming desire to make the whole world Greek, forbid the observance of Jewish law in Eretz Yisrael.  How Jewish attendance at and participation in the games were the clearest sign of loyalty a Jew could offer to this conquering power.  How the stadium would replace the synagogue as the communal meeting place.  How this assimilationist movement posed an existential threat to the unique identity of the Jewish people.

Surely, none of those things was on the mind of the 15-year-old Russian-Jewish émigré to Eretz Yisrael who originated the idea of a “Jewish Olympics” called Maccabiah.  After ten years of planning, he approached the Jewish National Fund (JNF).  The project eventually gained the support of the British High Commissioner of Palestine, with the caveat that the non-Jews of Palestine be included as well.  Approval received, news of the Maccabiah Games to be conducted in Eretz Yisrael was carried to the worldwide Jewish community who reportedly received it with great favor. It was spring of the year 1932 and Hitler, y”sh, was running as a candidate in Germany’s presidential election. 

Sporting is viewed by Torah Jews as incompatible with traditional Jewish values in part because of the spirit of pride and competition it engenders and the immodesty associated with it.  However, what is perhaps more central to the problem with sport is its emphasis on physicality over spirituality, but not necessarily to the exclusion of spirituality. 

In ancient cultures, like Greece, sport was an integral part of the worship of pagan deities. While no one invokes the gods and goddesses of Olympus at the modern games, one can still hear echoes of it up to the current day.  In his speech at this year’s opening ceremony Israeli president Reuven Rivlin told the assembled crowd that the games were intended “to elevate – not just physically, but also spiritually.”  It is meant to “create a new reality … [in] the same spirit from which came Zionism.”  That is to say, a spirituality divorced from the source of the Jewish people’s real strength and power and only reason for being – the Torah itself.

Today, the Maccabiah Games is an established and unquestioned every-four-years fact of life in the Jewish State.  But, maybe it’s time to rethink it or at the very least to rename it!  Unlike the early initiators of the games, today in Eretz Yisrael, Jews are better informed about their history and their heritage.  How can it be that we can continue to tolerate the association of the righteous Maccabees with the very concepts that they abhorred and gave their lives to eradicate?  Furthermore, can any of us claim that we are less vulnerable today to the assimilation that even ancient Greece saw as the method by which they would succeed in making the Jewish people into good Hellenists, thereby eliminating us as a separate and distinct nation?

The Maccabiah Games by any other name would remain another point of entry for the injection of foreign culture into Eretz Yisrael, but by changing the name we would be taking a step in the right direction.  Such a move would at least cause Jews to become consciously aware of the incompatibility between sporting events and the values and ideals that the Maccabees themselves held dearer than their own lives.