REASON ONE
Rabbis get great seats. Or at least my brother does: for the last ten years or so, my older brother Steve has had a pulpit job at a large suburban temple in the Baltimore area. Many members of the congregation have a latent Jewish urge to impress their rabbi, to treat Steve well, and they’re only too happy to throw a few baseball tickets my brother’s way now and then. When I went to Baltimore last week to check out a Mets-Orioles game, I sat with my brother and his family right behind the visitors’ dugout—like, 50 feet or so from home plate. I had never had such good seats at a sporting event of any kind.
REASON TWO
Rabbis’ children tend to be very well behaved, although if you’re their uncle maybe less so. I sat next to my nephew Josh at the game. I told him, “Josh, these are amazing seats.” Josh said, “We always sit here. Except one time we sat way up there.” He pointed to the merely excellent seats over by the right field foul pole. Then my niece Tali laughed when I spilled overpriced ballpark lemonade on my jeans, but it wasn’t mean-spirited.
REASON THREE
Rabbis supply their guests with booze. In this case, microbrews from one of the pricier concession stands at Oriole Park. Much more enjoyable than a souvenir cup full of watery Bud Light (although there’s something to be said for souvenir cups).
REASON FOUR
Philip Roth was a terror the one time I met him. (This is, as I think you will eventually see, related to attending ballgames with rabbis.) When I was a junior in college, I was invited to a luncheon in honor of Roth, who was on campus because he’d just received the Poses Medal for Fiction. (I’ve never heard of the Poses Medal for Fiction since.) Before I went to the luncheon, the novelist Stephen Macauley, who was teaching the fiction workshop I was enrolled in that semester, called me up and left a message that went something like this: “I have a tip for you: don’t try to talk to Roth about literature. Try something like baseball. Roth is a huge baseball fan.” A thoughtful, sweet message, but in retrospect I have to wonder: Did my teacher think I was a socially awkward blowhard who only knew how to talk about books? (He may have had some reason to think this.) I was nervous about meeting Philip Roth. I was. I had read The Counterlife and all the Zuckerman novels. I wanted to be a writer and Roth was Olympian, a hero—I mean, The Counterlife. Plus those two or three stories in Goodbye, Columbus that were, as far as I could see, perfect. I showed up to the luncheon wearing a tie. The only other person wearing a necktie was Roth himself. We were seated at a long table at the faculty club with about a dozen other people—mostly graduate students and English professors. Then, as we sat there eating our salads, Roth began to rip into a seemingly unending list of writers I admired. Someone asked him about Grace Paley. “Grace is a sweet gal,” Roth said, “but a minor writer.” Milan Kundera? “Milan is a friend, but The Unbearable Lightness of Being is French-influenced crap.” On and on it went. My heart sank. I would never be able to touch any of the writers who were being crushed by the weight of the great man’s disdain. One of my only attempts to speak was wasted on a weak-voiced suggestion that Don DeLillo was a worthy novelist who in some ways was extending the fictional project Saul Bellow had begun. “I’ve never read DeLillo,” Roth shrugged. It would have been much better if I’d brought up baseball, the possibility of one day attending a ballgame with a rabbi. At the time, my brother was in his third year of rabbinical school. Maybe Roth would’ve liked hearing about that. Maybe it would have made him feel that he wasn’t sitting there with a spotlight trained on his face.
REASON FIVE
Rabbis have something to teach us about participating in the moment. They are intimately familiar with one of our oldest, most lasting books, so, to the average rabbi, the prospect of a luncheon where people cut down contemporary writers for not being “major” enough sounds preposterous. Better to sit and take in the diamond, watch the game unfold. And from such great seats.
