From Baseball to Torah: Eighteen (Chai) Innings

By Ira Glasner

Last week, I went to Holy Blossom for what I thought would be a quick night watching the World Series. I expected a few innings, some friendly chatter, and hopefully a Jays win. Instead, it turned into a six-and-a-half-hour marathon that stretched into the early hours of the morning.

On October 27, more than eighty people, including rabbis, cantors, and congregants, gathered in the Philip & Fannie Smith Congregational Hall, decked out in blue and white, ready to cheer. Each inning brought new twists: the Jays took the lead, then fell behind, then tied it again. The score was 5-5 for a total of eleven innings, from the bottom of the 7th to the bottom of the 18th.

By the twelfth inning, the room had thinned out, but those of us who stayed kept our enthusiasm. Impossibly and unexpectedly, the conversation drifted from baseball to family, from travel to Torah, and back again to baseball.

That one long evening somehow felt like a small version of life itself – full of highs and lows, laughter and waiting.

When Freddie Freeman’s home run finally ended the game, it was an eighteenth-inning heartbreaker. But sitting there among friends and community, I think we all grapsed the Kotzker Rebbe’s wisdom: “There’s nothing as whole as a broken heart.”