Rigging the Game - Bo 5775

(To hear this sermon as it was delivered at Shabbat Unplugged with JeTSeT at Temple Shaaray Tefila of New York City, please click here.)

I like sports. Most of you know that about me by now, to be sure. I like sports because, once the matchups are set, the competitors in place, nothing is scripted. Nothing is predetermined. The game is the same, the rules are the same for all involved, the competitors literally and figuratively stand on a level playing field. There may be a favorite, there may be an underdog, but none of that matters once the game begins. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, the team or athlete who performs the best, whose efforts merit the greatest results within the framework, rules, and score-keeping of the game, will win. That’s why we love sports. Sports comprise perhaps the only arena of life in which success is based entirely on performance. Not your background or the neighborhood you grew up in. Not where you went to school or who your daddy is or who you know in all the right places. Victory is based on performance. Period, paragraph. And in that regard, the world of sports, in its ideal sense, is a world in which justice is consistently served; blind, as she is famously depicted, to the competitors, weighing only their deeds and misdeeds on an unknowing scale.

And that is why I get so upset, so angry, when people cheat. I know – believe me, I do – that sports are for entertainment. I know that sports are not a matter of life and death; that sports don’t feed the hungry, or build homes for the homeless, or cure cancer. I know how so many of us dismiss sports as a frivolous waste of time and energy and money, and perhaps, at the end of the day, there’s a point to that. Even some athletes themselves see a sliver of that perspective, like running back Arian Foster, who tweets about there being so much more to life than just football, and quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who this week proclaimed publicly that he highly doubts God cares at all about football games and their outcomes. But for millions, if not billions, of people worldwide, sports are sacred—a necessary, if only momentary, escape from a world where judgments, evaluations, and performance assessments are not always so balanced and unbiased.

That world was tainted once again this week, with allegations against Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, star quarterback and coach of the New England Patriots, respectively, of deliberately under-inflating footballs used for last Sunday’s AFC Championship game in Foxboro, Massachusetts, where nothing less than a trip to the Super Bowl was on the line. That may sound silly, especially to those of you who already find sports in general to be so; it may sound funny, as it becomes another opportunity for self-applauding journalists to name another scandal with “-gate” as the suffix, even though it makes zero sense to do so, and displays even less creativity. It may not even have had the desired impact, as stat-heads will point out that Tom Brady, the Patriots quarterback, actually did better in the second half, once the footballs were re-inflated to the correct pressure. But let me tell you why I don’t find this funny or silly in the slightest.

Little girls and boys whose worlds stop on Sundays to don their heroes’ jerseys, the hearts within them rising and falling with each moment of triumph or disappointment, defending their idols to their friends at school during the week. Their fathers and mothers who grew up doing the same, still wearing jerseys as grown adults, sharing precious hours of emotional bonding that somehow transcend time and space and the age difference between them. The women and men who spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of their hard-earned dollars to experience the thrill and excitement of actually being there, attending a live sporting event, to be amidst and a part of the roars and groans of the crowd, not merely witnesses from the comfort of their couch. The vendors and maintenance staff and ticket-takers and stadium officials, all for whom their livelihood is entirely dependent upon the product on the field being what it purports to be, that is to say, authentic and professional, in every sense of the word.

When athletes cheat, when coaches and managers flagrantly trample upon the rules and regulations, whose very purpose is the fairness and equality so sorely lacking in virtually every other venue of life, these are the people who really get cheated. These are the folks who are robbed, both literally and figuratively, while the wool is pulled over their eyes. These are the men and women, boys and girls, whose hearts are broken by the very people they look up to, heroes they strive to be like on their best days and who give them hope on their worst. The cheater messes with people’s lives, either because he’s so self-consumed as to be oblivious to the needs of others, or egomaniacal and narcissistic to the point of simply not giving a damn for anyone else.

Because choosing to cheat, deciding which rules are beneath you, which ones you’re exempt from because you’re somehow special, different from everyone else, you are playing God. And no one gets to play God but God. And even when God plays God, sometimes, for many of us, even that can be too much.

What happens in Bo, this week’s parasha, is exactly that. For me, this is one of the most intriguing and difficult passages in all of Torah. It picks up in the middle of the epic theological throwdown between God and Pharaoh, beginning with the famous episode of Moses’ staff becoming a serpent, and that even when the Egyptian magicians are able to do the same, the serpent of Moses’ staff swallows that of the Egyptians’. There, and for each of the first five plagues upon Egypt—turning the Nile to blood, the frogs, lice, insects, and pestilence—we read that no sooner had each marvel dissipated than Pharaoh’s “heart hardened” or he “became stubborn” and he went back on his word.

But something fascinating happens with the sixth plague, that of inflammation and boils. Here, for the first time, we read Vay’chazek Adonai et lev par’oh, that “God hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he would not heed [Moses and Aaron].” Not Pharaoh “hardening his own heart.” Not Pharaoh “becoming stubborn.” God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. God makes it so that Pharaoh will not accede to the demands placed before him. A small difference; yet, all the difference in the world. And perhaps before we’ve even noticed it, and the next plague of hail has come and gone, the language reverts, and once again, Pharaoh’s heart hardens on its own.

But lest we think this is some error in the text, grammatical or otherwise, lest we desire so deeply to give God the benefit of the doubt here, the very first words of Parashat Bo make God’s intentions crystal clear. “Then the Eternal One said to Moses,” we read, “Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display these My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your children and of your children’s children how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them—in order that you may know that I am the Eternal.””

So there it is. God is rigging the game. God is saying, in essence, “I’m the One making all of this happen. I’m the One pulling all the strings here, so that I will win, and I will win big.” And then, as we all know well, that’s exactly what God does. The locusts come, the locusts go, and God again hardens Pharaoh’s heart. The darkness comes, the darkness goes, and God again hardens Pharaoh’s heart. Moses issues the imminent threat of the death of the first-born sons of Egypt and God says to him, “Pharaoh will not heed you, in order that My marvels may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.” When his and every Egyptian first-born son lies dead at the feet of their fathers, then and only then does Pharaoh finally give in. Why? Why all this and the detailed instructions for the Passover celebration? Because “with a mighty hand the Eternal freed us from Egypt.” Because God is the champion. God is the winner of the Super Bowl of Super Bowls. And God’s making sure that you never, ever forget it.

God gets to play God. And we can like it, dislike it, struggle with it, be squeamish about it. But that’s God. And that’s the God of our ancestors, the way they wanted us to know and remember Him. But we don’t. We don’t get to play God, and we should never do so. Because when we do, when we decide that we’re above it all and we rig the game—in sports, in school, in work, in politics or our personal lives—it betrays some of the ugliest, most harmful, and most destructive elements within the human character. And that, my friends, is not what God intended us to be.

Let us strive to find the best within ourselves, every single day of our lives. Let us be inspired by figures in our lives for their accomplishments, for their work ethic, for their passions and charisma, for the dedication they demonstrate in their respective fields, and the determination to follow through. Let us be moved and empowered to accentuate those same qualities within ourselves, to actualize and maximize them, with integrity, dignity, and respect—for ourselves and each other. Because, at the end of the day, that is, I believe, what God ultimately wants from us. And, at our best, I pray, that is what we want, and expect, from ourselves.

AMEN.