Rabbi Howard Morrison

Dear Congregational Family,

This Thursday, the seventeenth of Tammuz, begins the saddest three weeks on the Jewish calendar. The three weeks will culminate on July 30, Tisha B'Av, the saddest day of the year.

The week before Tisha B'Av, called the nine days, introduces the saddest week of the year, associated with additional rules of sadness, including a ban on meat and wine except during Shabbat.

Ironically, this year, exactly one week prior to Tisha B'Av, the baseball season will begin on July 23. Due to Covid-19, the baseball season did not begin in April with its regular 162 game schedule. Instead, an abbreviated 60 game season will begin in a little over two weeks.

The three weeks of sadness is called, "Bain Ha'Metzarim - in between the narrow straits." The term sounds like the Biblical word for Egypt, "Mitzrayim," the first place where the nation of Israel was trapped in the narrow straits of Egypt, suffering persecution and genocide for over two hundred years.

According to archaeological scholars, the ancient Egyptians invented the precursor to baseball. In an article entitled, "Pharaoh at the bat - the ancient Egyptians and American baseball," it is pointed out that in the fifteenth century BCE, King Thutmole III would hold a bat with a grapefruit size ball in hand. Ancient depictions show something like today's baseball or stickball.

For many of us, baseball begins Spring and a new season of joy and uplift. This year, baseball will begin in late July during the last period of the three weeks of sadness.

Just maybe, given the difficult new normal caused by the Corona virus, we are meant to have a little bit of joy soon before Tisha B'Av. Now, if the Red Sox or Blue Jays could shock the American League East, that would be helpful in transforming a time of Fasting into Feasting.

Rabbi Howard Morrison