Baseball and the High Holidays
Every sport has a peculiar set of rules. Soccer has yellow cards. Football a false start. Basketball has a flagrant one and even two. Hockey icing. Australian Rules Football has…I have no idea.
Unique among these sports stands baseball. No other sport keeps track of errors and makes a distinction between an earned hit and advancing to a base on an error. At each game the scorer sits in a box and makes the determination: earned or error. At the end of the game there is a tally: runs, hits and errors. And yet, in determining the standings all that matters are the number of runs. This, and this alone, determines the winner and loser of the game.
And yet there it stands: the team’s hits and the team’s errors. I know of no other sport that tracks errors and mistakes. A team can lose despite earning many hits. And a team can win despite committing a number of errors.
Saturday is the first day of the month of Elul. It marks the beginning of the High Holiday period, a time of introspection that culminates in Yom Kippur on September 19th. It is a forty-day period that mirrors the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai communing with God. We are meant to turn inward, examine our deeds and look back on the past year.
We are meant to tally our errors. We are not meant to look at the standings. Our successes are immaterial. On these days it is only the error column that truly matters.
This may seem like a depressing exercise. But the faith of the High Holidays is that you can only get better, you can only improve yourself, if you look at your faults. True introspection is about being honest about our flaws and owning our mistakes.
Here is the hope that tempers this exercise. As the gates of repentance begin to close, in the final minutes of Yom Kippur, all is forgiven.
We may all enter the High Holidays like the Baltimore Orioles (sorry Dad!), but everyone emerges as World Series champions.
It begins by taking an accurate accounting of our errors.
Unique among these sports stands baseball. No other sport keeps track of errors and makes a distinction between an earned hit and advancing to a base on an error. At each game the scorer sits in a box and makes the determination: earned or error. At the end of the game there is a tally: runs, hits and errors. And yet, in determining the standings all that matters are the number of runs. This, and this alone, determines the winner and loser of the game.
And yet there it stands: the team’s hits and the team’s errors. I know of no other sport that tracks errors and mistakes. A team can lose despite earning many hits. And a team can win despite committing a number of errors.
Saturday is the first day of the month of Elul. It marks the beginning of the High Holiday period, a time of introspection that culminates in Yom Kippur on September 19th. It is a forty-day period that mirrors the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai communing with God. We are meant to turn inward, examine our deeds and look back on the past year.
We are meant to tally our errors. We are not meant to look at the standings. Our successes are immaterial. On these days it is only the error column that truly matters.
This may seem like a depressing exercise. But the faith of the High Holidays is that you can only get better, you can only improve yourself, if you look at your faults. True introspection is about being honest about our flaws and owning our mistakes.
Here is the hope that tempers this exercise. As the gates of repentance begin to close, in the final minutes of Yom Kippur, all is forgiven.
We may all enter the High Holidays like the Baltimore Orioles (sorry Dad!), but everyone emerges as World Series champions.
It begins by taking an accurate accounting of our errors.