Big Game, Small World by Wolff Alexander

Author:Wolff, Alexander [WOLFF, ALEXANDER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO004000
ISBN: 9780446561310
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2010-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

In the late 19th century Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist considered the father of Zionism, asked the British to cede part of the Sinai for the establishment of a Jewish state. The Brits offered Uganda instead. Herzl passed, and that was as close as the paths of Zionists on the one hand and black Africans and their descendants on the other were fated to come for nearly a century. Then “the basketball rabbis” got busy.

By 1982 more than half the starters in the Israeli league would be Americans, many of them so-called snip-’n’-dunk converts who had become Jews with little more than circumcision and immersion in a ritual bath. The circumstances of some of those spiritual transformations—one involved payments to a synagogue in Milwaukee; another followed from a civil wedding in Cyprus between an American import and an Israeli grandmother—caused Israel’s National Religious Party, which is affiliated with the Orthodox rabbinate that must sign off on all conversions, to raise holy hell. (Of course, the NRP’s own team, Elitzur Netanya, was then fielding so many converted Americans that Israelis called it “the Orthodox Globetrotters.”)

All the chicanery would come to an end in 1986, when the Israeli Basketball Federation enacted a rule requiring a three-year grace period before any new immigrant could play in the league. But at the end of the 1977–78 season, when Aulcie Perry went back to visit his Baptist parents in New Jersey, the escalating number of basketball conversions hadn’t yet become an epidemic. Perry insisted on the sincerity of his desire. The warmth of the people, he said at the time, “the way we can go anywhere, north to south, and it’s a holiday everywhere we go, told me I want to be here for life.”

Late that spring Perry walked into Orthodox synagogues in New York City, introducing himself and explaining what he wanted to do. His visits started to follow a familiar pattern. A rabbi would hear him out and then wordlessly leave the room. Maybe he had to go to the bathroom, Perry would think. A few minutes would pass, then 10 minutes, then 30, and finally Perry would realize: He isn’t coming back. Ultimately, with Maccabi’s help, he found a rabbi willing to take him on. Sunday through Thursday, from May through September, he schlepped out to Brooklyn, to an Orthodox synagogue on Ocean Parkway.

Judaism is not an evangelical faith. It holds that a rabbi should wait for a potential convert to knock three times, to be sure the petitioner really wants to become a Jew. A passage in the Talmud pointedly questions the motives of anyone who wishes to join a people so “scorned, oppressed, humiliated and made to suffer.” At the same time, Abraham, the patriarch of the Jews, was himself a convert, and the Torah enjoins the Jewish people 36 different times to welcome the stranger. Perry was eager to be welcomed. Raised a Baptist, he had been frustrated at being told the same thing whenever he questioned what came from the pulpit or Scripture: “You must have faith.

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