In Memory of Jim Gollin, z”l
Adapted from Rick LaRue’s contribution at Jim’s Sheloshim, January 12, 2022 (B’Shallach, 7th Aliyah – Exodus, Chapter 17
Baseball, particularly through Jim’s own words, can enhance our appreciation of our wilderness journey described in Exodus, Chapter 17.
Ellen and I shared our love of baseball with Jim, including minor league games in Frederick, major league games in Milwaukee and, in 1983, an Oldtimers’ game at RFK. Jim renamed this the “‘Hey, Sandy!’ game,” because our seats were so close that Mr. Koufax stopped and turned to us upon hearing his name called.
Baseball was a frequent topic in Jim’s and my long-running correspondence. Because he was such a gifted writer, I chose not to delete any of his e-mails, and so can quote him, which is fitting tonight because the act of writing is mentioned in the Torah for the first time in this Aliyah, in Chapter 17, Verse 14.
In 2003, Jim taught a Study Center course, Jews in Baseball. Alan Berg and I were lucky to take it. Ten years later, I wrote Jim from Cooperstown after Ellen and I had spent the day at the Baseball Hall of Fame. He lamented in reply that he never made it there, despite intending to go … to prepare for that class. He explained:
I think I spent something like $700 in books researching that course and I decided that I couldn’t justify (to myself) spending any more money.
To honor his example, I spent $31 on two books for tonight. One, “The Baseball Haggadah” didn’t help much, but has lyrics for “Take Me Out to the Seder” and suggests we pretend to spit into our hands while we wash them during Urchatz.
The other, “Baseball as a Road to God” by John Sexton, is a treasure. The Catholic former president of NYU anchors his 2013 book with Heschel’s definition of God as the ineffable. Sexton goes on to extend the subjective nature of our connection with God to baseball:
It is not that this evocative experience occurs for everyone in every ballpark every time; but it can happen to anyone, in any ballpark, anytime. In this place, magic can happen, and the fan can be transported to a space and time beyond, to an experience we know profoundly but cannot put into words.
Our own Max Ticktin, of blessed memory, reminds us of the connection between Jews and baseball, from his appearances in Aviva Kempner’s documentary on Hank Greenberg to his season-predicting challenge, EPPYK – Erev Pesach-Post-Yom Kippur.
And at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1995, professor Ismar Schorsch wrote an article, “Baseball and Jewish Endurance,” which starts:
Seminary lore has it that Solomon Schechter advised the young Louis Ginzberg, when he joined the faculty, to master the game of baseball. “You can’t be a rabbi in America without understanding baseball.”
Such context sets the stage for two stories through a baseball lens. I will not equate Moses’s staff with a bat, discuss Israelites grumbling in the dugout, or suggest that Aaron and Hur were the relief pitchers for Moses, the tired starting pitcher who needed help holding up his arms. Nor will I ask if Moses leads as manager or a star player.
Rather, I’ll discuss smiting the Amalekites and wandering the wilderness for 40 years. First, regarding the Amalekites in this Aliyah, Everett Fox says that “conflict with foreigners is a significant wilderness theme.” Now of course, to the other tribes, we were the foreigners. Every baseball team has an ultimate opposing tribe. The Red Sox have the Yankees. The Nats have the Phillies. And the Milwaukee Brewers have the Chicago Cubs.
Of his Amalekites, Jim wrote in August, 2011:
Milwaukee has a Cubs problem. . . . A woman at our shul was once married to a prosecutor, and he told her that the crime rate in Milwaukee is most highly correlated with three phenomena: (1) a full moon, (2) Friday night, (3) Cubs in town.
Again in August four years later, in 2015, he recalls the same story, adding:
. . . Well, last night we hit the trifecta. I looked at the paper this morning, but I didn’t see an article about any out-of-the-ordinary criminal activity, but I’m sure it must have happened nonetheless. You can’t trust Cubs fans.
But then in October, 2018, his tone changes. The Cubs ended the season tied for first place with Jim’s own Brewers, but lost in the one-game playoff between them, and then lost again in the one-game wild card match-up for non-division winners. Jim wrote:
Gotta say, I do have some compassion for cubs fans. They had the best record in the NL for at least two months (maybe more), and in the last two days of the season they shared that distinction with the Brewers. Then, two days later, they are out of it. That must be tough to take.
That Jim could feel this way toward the Cubs – now an even less sympathetic foreign tribe after finally winning the World Series two years earlier – is no real surprise. He understood that we demonize the other at our own peril and take ten drops from our Seder wine glasses for a reason.
Jim’s truer Amalekites were innovations like the wild card. He wrote in 2011:
What would a discussion about baseball be without my fulminating against the wild card?
He recently labeled it the “water closet,” because of its initials. Jim was a traditionalist. No surprise there either.
Second, our time in the wilderness is frequently used to describe a baseball team’s time between World Series victories. Or even appearances. Much is made of such cities’ suffering without attaining this culminating goal.
Last year Jim began anticipating this threshold because 2022 marks 40 years since the Brewers’ only appearance in the World Series, which they lost. He pointed out that the Brewers are one of only six franchises to never have won a World Series. He started pondering a curse against his team.
In our lifetimes, two franchises broke long-standing curses and reached the promised land after wandering in the desert more than twice as long as the Israelites. In 2004, the Boston Red Sox snapped the Curse of the Bambino (named for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees), 86 years after their prior Series win in 1918. The Cubs’ hiatus was 108 years before they broke their Curse of the Billy Goat in 2016 (that’s its name, but it’s a longer story).
These curses emerged well into their teams’ wanderings, so Jim contemplating a Brewers’ curse 39 years in was timely. But he acknowledged that his initial ideas for causes – poorer performing players associated with blown draft picks – were weak. He was, however, just getting started.
Had he had the chance this year, he surely would have identified a good cause for the curse. Doing so also would have channeled one of Jim’s regular interactions with the game: research, from which he would derive trivia questions. Baseball trivia for Jim was not trivial. It was history. It was connection. And when he wrote it, he did so with nuance and thoughtfulness. It was one of the ways Jim created rhythms through each season, the same way Sexton says that all religions mark time – in a cyclical, repetitive fashion.
Finally, baseball has the longest season and is played every day. This requires daily attention, which deepens the connection, which becomes an obligation – both expressed and eased through ritual. And fans do this with the looming knowledge that they may not leave their desert, whether for the first time or ever again.
Jim never saw his team win the World Series. He would be counted among the many Israelites who, like Moses, never made it to the promised land. But his life was filled by the presence and pursuit of things ineffable and potentially unattainable, which he observed daily. Am I speaking of his Judaism, baseball, or both?
I don’t know or, as likely, can’t recall if Jim ever used baseball to share his sense of Torah. Were he to do so, I envision a Purim spiel more than a drash. He’d have had us in stitches. Sheldon Kimmel imagined him starting with a pun Sheldon suspects he heard from Jim about the foundational connection between baseball and Torah, the latter of which, after all, starts: In the Big Inning.
Jim’s passing is sorrowful. His memory is a blessing.