Let the (Jewish) games begin

Barbara Kay, National Post  Published: Wednesday, July 08, 2009

We Jews would like to be -- but are not -- a light-hearted people. We often indulge in humorous one-upmanship, a sparring instinct that bubbles up when social anxiety partners with ratiocination. But we are not by tradition physically playful, which requires a light heart. Physical playfulness after childhood emerges from cultural confidence and socially sanctioned joy in bodily exertion for its own sake. That has not been the normative Jewish condition.

Our ancestors, in moral thrall to a decidedly unplayful, disembodied God, recoiled from the celebration of naked pagan bodies striving to emulate the corporal perfection of their ludic Olympian deities. But then, as the Greeks did not look kindly on "imperfect" circumcised male bodies, barring them from competition in the games that inspired the modern Olympic movement, it was on balance a Hellenism vs. Hebraism saw-off.

Throw in 1,800 years of Diaspora marginalization, forced physical impotence and unrelenting exposure to anti-Semites' contempt for Jewish physiognomy (eventually internalized: Jews pretty well invented the "nose job" industry), during which commercial and intellectual endeavour were the only permissible outlets for cultural self-realization. The result was a knowledge-fixated people for whom physical "play" as an honourable adult preoccupation was not the historical norm.

All the more reason, then, to marvel at the opening next Monday of the 18th Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv, where about 5,000 Jewish athletes from 60 countries will participate in everything from chess to the 100-metre backstroke, ensconcing the Games, participation-wise, among the five largest sporting events in the world.

The Maccabiah Games' philosophical father was 19th-century physician and journalist Max Nordau, an assimilated German Jew. Like modern Zionism's founder, Theodor Herzl, Nordau drew the lesson from France's shameful Dreyfus Affair that if passivity-conditioned Jews didn't learn to protect themselves from injustice, nobody else would.

At the 1898 Second Zionist Congress in Switzerland, Nordau promoted a new Muskeljudentum-- "muscle-Jewry" -- to counter the weakening "neurasthenia" he identified with Diaspora Jewish culture: "But now, all coercion has become a memory of the past ... let us take up our oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men." He called for adoption of the Greek body-cultivation ideal to make Jews "anthropologically fit for nationhood."

Even before Nordau's European crusade, New York Sephardic Jewish poet Emma Lazarus had written in a popular Jewish magazine, American Hebrew: "Let our first care today be the re-establishment of our physical strength ... so that in future, where the respect due to us cannot be won by entreaty, it may be commanded."

A gamut of Jewish gymnasiums in Europe and America sprang up in response to these calls-to-arms. But the Maccabiah Games themselves were the brainchild of Russian-born Yosef Yekutieli who, inspired at the age of 15 by the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, began to dream of a Jewish equivalent. The first Maccabiah Games were held in Tel Aviv in 1932.

By 1948, when the renascent Israeli state managed to hold an attacking Arab world at bay at the horrific cost of 6,000 deaths, and especially after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel definitively trounced the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, "muscle Jewry" had become a fait accompli.

So Jews finally proved they were as fit and as tough as other nations in their own defence. But can a true passion for "playing the game," unattached to moral or survival ends, ever feel as natural to us as it does to others? Jews keep trying, but the elusiveness of total acceptance by gentiles bedevils even athletically superior Jews (so eloquently expressed in the 1981 film, Chariots of Fire). And even as sporting normalcy seems within our grasp, events conspire against us. The massacre of the 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics will forever stand between Jews and the innocence of the authentically playful spirit.

Our family attended the 1997 Maccabiah Games. My daughter competed in the triathlon and my husband, Ronny, played in the Masters Tennis. Seated in the stands awaiting the athletes' parade at the opening ceremonies, my son-in-law and I learned that there would be no march. The athletes had just begun to traverse the rickety temporary bridge spanning the polluted river next to the stadium when it collapsed under the Australian team, killing four and injuring 60.

The games went on, but joylessly. I should remember sunlight smiling on sleek and sculptured bodies in their sprint for glory. I should remember the excitement of our daughter winning the gold medal in her sport. Instead, what chiefly remains is the sombre pall hanging over the memorial service at Modi'in, home of the heroic ancient Maccabis for whom the games are named, and the doleful cadence of the Kaddish, the ritual prayer for the dead.

As I said, not a lighthearted people.

bkay@videotron.ca