Judaism and Jogging

...For under the Romans, athletic games included gladiatorial fights in which the death of some of the combatants was not only possible—as it had been in the Greek games—but was certain...

...An activity such as running, which has no overtones of the Greek games, ought not be seen as in conflict with the Jewish tradition...

...There are, however, many negative attitudes to athletics and athletes...

...I divide the year into two segments: preparation for the Boston Marathon, and recovery from it...

...When he died of a heart attack a few years ago, he didn't make a very good case for his views, but that didn't cause any indolent Jews to start to exercjse...

...Classical Judaism was very ambivalent about the Greeks and their culture...

...THERAMBAM WORE SWEATS...

...Greek trade, Greek vocabulary and Greek technology were entering the life of the Jewish community...

...they compete against themselves...

...A religion in which male homosexuality, frequently associated with pagan rites, was to be punished with death, would have been less than enthusiastic about a setting in which it was looked upon as a higher form of culture...

...He has rejected those aspects of the Greek world that need to be rejected, and taken those that have merit...

...Antiochus IV, the despised Syrian King of the Chanukah story was a great enthusiast of many aspects of Greek culture...

...I believe it to be the magic elixir which can cure everything but baldness...

...The political intrusions of the Alexandrian empire were deeply resented...

...Yad...

...It didn't earn him a hero's burial, but in dying, he could salvage a few scraps of honor despite his loss...

...In self-defense, I should point out that I am not as obsessive as some of my friends who jog in place in airplane washrooms...

...A people whose God is often called Shalom, peace, could have had little use for a set of activities glorifying the military...

...The Marathon as a race is a modern invention...

...The basic stance had already been taken...

...Not all motion is exercise...

...A measure of Greek disinterest in long-distance racing is the fact that the longer the race, the smaller the prize the winner received...

...What is wrong with running...

...In Eastern Europe, the strongest man in the shtetl, the wagon driver, was at the bottom of the social ladder, while the most prestigious figure, the yeshiva scholar, was ideally skinny, pale and weak...

...Instead, Greeks trained for contests...

...If an airplane trip keeps me from running in the morning, I become irritable and begin to manifest clear withdrawal symptoms...

...And I confess that I even have a few hidden hopes...

...JUDAISM AND JOGGING THE RAMBAM WORE SWEATS RICHARD J. ISRAEL I am an obsessive jogger...

...Though a tornado might give me pause, thus far bad weather has never kept me from running...

...Runners may pull tendons, or have sore knees, but such injuries as they experience are more likely to result from a lack of good judgment than from an excess of heroism...

...Pederasty was a commonplace feature of the gymnasium...

...It is something a proper rabbi oughtn't do...

...No Greek exercised...

...Thus Resh Lachish, the athletic Talmudic master, once earned his living as a kind of circus gladiator...

...A tradition in which proper conduct is far more important than outcome could not have accepted activities in which outcome is everything...

...The main thing is that one should strain one's body every morning until it has become flushed, rest a little until breathing is returned to normal, and then eat...

...Strain, yes...

...Pheidippidies, dropping dead as he did after delivering the good news from Marathon to Athens, certainly proved that the Greeks weren't into heavy longdistance training...

...I have no quarrel with the rabbis...

...Real running receives about as much attention in classic Jewish sources as is given to discussion of color TV reception in pre-Israelite Jericho...

...A tradition which viewed the body as a receptacle for the Divine spirit could not value a culture in which body is glorified for its own sake...

...When I put on my clothes and slow to a walk, our vision is immediately restored...

...Hilchot Dayot 1:2) "Nothing is to be found that can substitute for exercise in any , way . . . exercise will expel the harm done by most of the bad regimens that most men follow...

...His head is clear and soon he will be ready to return to the world of the intellect...

...As one who is mainlining running, it is difficult for me to function until I get my fix...

...The longest of the Greek foot races was about three miles...

...They didn't need to be trained for the reserves since they were already in the regular army...

...The issue I want to raise is whether the rabbinic rejection of athletics should remain as blanket a rejection of all athletic activity as it seems to be...

...He doesn't feel any less Jewish because he is using his body...

...But when medieval philosophers, who generally believed that the best thing one could do with the body was to get rid of it, say such things, then we had better pay careful attention...

...Still, I am a trifle possessed...

...One of those rejected was athletic games...

...They had no interest whatever in a regimen of physical activity which did not lead directly to increased proficiency either as a warrior or as an atheltic contestant and the distinction between the two was not very great...

...It is not surprising that one of the events which led to the outbreak of the Maccabean revolt was his attempt to establish a gymnasium in Jerusalem...

...Death was not such a bad outcome for a loser...

...Most runners don't even compete against other runners...

...Some elements of Greek culture seemed neutral...

...pain, no...

...We all know that the text doesn't really mean it...

...Most of my rabbinic peers are forever quoting me Robert May-nard Hutchins' famous adage that whenever he got the urge to exercise, he would lie down and wait until it passed...

...The games were originally an opportunity for soldiers to demonstrate military skills, and later became paramilitary training for young men who might be called upon to defend their cities...

...And so I am still left with my original question: why don't most traditional Jews believe in running or, for that matter, any other form of exercise...

...To the Jews, the gymnasium and athletics represented the worst in heathen culture...

...There is concern for health in rabbinic literature, but such discussion is almost invariably concerned with proper food, the intake and output of body fluids, proper sleep, and cleanliness—never with exercise...

...There are three different kmds of satisfaction that can be derived from running: health, pleasure, and challenge...

...Rabbi Richard Israel is Executive Director of the Hillel Council of Greater Boston...

...And some of those required to fight were captured Jews...

...It Is, after all, hard to develop much of an interest in physical sports when the tradition claims that one of the reasons the Temple was destroyed was that Jews played ball on Shab-bat...

...Gods were also invoked as the guarantors of the rules established by the judges...

...The Regimen of Health, Chapter 1) No one would be surprised to find such a quote in Kenneth Cooper's New Aerobics or any of the other current volumes recommending running as exercise...

...It is not hard to see why the rabbis of the Talmud didn't think much of athletes or athletics...

...I am certainly not a competitive runner...

...At least that is what Rambam writes...

...Greek poetry, pottery, and sculpture pay greatest attention to the athletes and sports where those kinds of bodies were most likely to be found...

...Rambam knew that his mind would work better if his body did...

...From time to time we should also think of Maimonides panting down the streets of Cordova, shortly before the dawn, wearing whatever might have been the 12th Century equivalent of a sweat suit, with the glow on his face that can only be gotten from a good run...

...Among the Greek cities it was only Sparta that did not have an active gymnasium program, and that was because all of their young men were always in military camps...

...He was only barely strong enough to carry the volumes of Talmud he was studying...

...Athletics, like everything else supported by the state, was intimately tied up with Greek religion...

...But if nothing supports running, neither can I find any clear prohibitions against it in the literature...

...They are not inevitable consequences of the sport...

...When a fast is just over, and everyone else is busy eating, I go out and break my fast with a quick run of a few miles...

...In the middle ages there appears to have been some Jewish athletic activity from time to time—fencing, horseback riding, and mock jousts at weddings...

...I think they were right to respond to Greek athletics as they did...

...Since the games were confrontations and not sports contests, there was nothing wrong with maiming or killing an opponent...

...The Greeks had no use for the emaciated look of the long-distance runner...

...It is said that the late Rabbi Kuk, first chief rabbi of then Palestine, tried to beat the system by proposing calesthenics as part of the curriculum for inactive yeshiva students...

...Since Greek religion had far less to do with sin and good deeds than it did with triumph and failure, gods were asked for victory before the games, and thanked with offerings for success after them...

...For me, Boston's famous blizzard of '78 was a delightful occasion to run on the streets without having to worry about traffic...

...A well-porportioned, muscular body was thought to be a thing of enormous beauty...

...The man who came in second was just one of many losers...

...I blame it on the Greeks...

...The distance between Jews and athletics became even greater in Roman times than it had been during the Greek period...

...I could point out that the introduction to the Shul-chan Aruch says that one should run like a deer in the service of our RICHARD J. ISRAEL Father in heaven, but that would be cheating...

...About them the rabbinic tradition remained silent...

...A person should not eat until he has walked enough for his body to become flushed or he should engage in some other task or strenuous activity...

...And an enterprise which led Jewish young men to attempt to surgically conceal their circumcisions so that they could participate in athletics without self-consciousness alongside the Greeks could not be thought good for the Jews...

...It was impossible to participate in the games without paying one's respects to gods of the Greek pantheon in a rather direct way...

...In spite of his great prestige, he received no support form the rest of the rabbinic community...

...that would have seemed like a frivolous activity...

...Today's ritual of carrying the Olympic torch is a vestigial relic of the Greek torch races continued on page 48 continued from page 45 in which fire was brought from one sacred altar to another...

...I find that it peps me up far more than the food which I take later...

...He failed...

...Running for me is physical fitness, weight control, meditation, thanksgiving, therapy, serious thinking time and personal challenge...

...Furthermore, some of the issues that bothered them are still relevant...

...No concept of sportsmanship was implied...

...On the rare occasions that I have a fever, I run shorter distances, but run nevertheless...

...But such sweet sentiments aside, there are no negative references to running...

...I can see very few ways Jewishly to justify professional football or boxing...

...My finishing position will always be closer to a zip code than to one of the official winners' places...

...R. 2:4) So, for close to a thousand years, the major Jewish athletic endeavor has been chess...

...My big achievement of a few years ago was discovering how to run on Jewish fast days...

...Exercise is powerful or rapid motion or a combination of both, vigorous motion which alters breathing and increases its rate...

...If you work in the fields and engage in hard physical labor, you don't need any additional exercise, but what if you don't do physical work...

...Homosexuality was the uniquely human act, the bit of culture and civilization that could be added to ordinary sex...

...The latter group and I have a tacit agreement that if I am wearing my running suit I can't see them and they can't see me...

...But such activity never received much rabbinic encouragement...

...It is a mistake to assume that the term game implied a measure of play for the Greeks...

...There was only one issue: winning...

...Greek athletic games were not "sports...

...Perhaps he is trying to solve a difficult halachic problem or determine what to prescribe for one of his sick patients...

...No matter how charitably one judged the enterprise, if it caused Jews to try to break their covenant with the Lord, it had to be viewed with alarm...

...Heterosexuality was, in the Greek mind, a moderately dull option, available to any run-of-the-mill animal...

...No silver or bronze medals were given to the also-rans...

...The moment he decided to devote his life to the study of Torah, we are told, he became too weak to put his armor back on...

...I propose another image, not to replace this one, but to add to it...

...Lam...

...It never happened...

...There was no value attached to "doing one's best," no notion of the value of coming in a close second...

...Within the gymnasium there was a considerable amount of sexual activity...

...Running is the only sport I know in which a person can come in 1,000th and still feel like a winner...

...Only goyim are robust, and so we find the Yiddish saying that someone is gesund me a goy...

...And so, when I run by my shul, some people are amused, some are faintly uncomfortable and look at me disapprovingly, and a few seem to have decided that I am invisible...

...There are some reports of Jewish athletes who tried to join the games without deferring to the gods, but their attempts were clearly a rarity and do not seem to have met with any great measure of success...

...To be sure, there are some who would consider normative running attire a bit immodest, what with bare legs showing and all that...

...I am almost never ill now that I am running, and when I am, I am likely to lie about it and deny that I am sick...

...I should like to argue that running, at least, is different...

...Most of our mental images of this pious and great scholar would picture him deep in thought at his desk, hunched over his manuscripts with several volumes of the Talmud open on the table before him...

...In fact, starting with Samson, there are almost no favorable comments about men of strength...

...Within this context, erotic relationships between adolescents and middle-aged men developed...

...None of them requires the harming of people, the mutilation of one's own, or anyone else's body...

...On Shabbat, one is only supposed to run rapidly in the direction of the synagogue . and go slowly when leaving it...

...All else was disgrace...

...Gymnasium means a place of nakedness...

...The attempts to make Jews serve Greek gods were considered an abomination, yet all the while, Greek culture was becoming an integral part of the Jewish world...

...To the contrary, the Greek games were a very serious business...

...The Greeks were not very interested in what went on inside the body, but they were enthralled with its external aesthetics...

...Running is also a cause for occasional embarrassment...

...Everyone knows it is harder tb kill an attitude than a man...

...Others were in direct conflict with Jewish values, and on these the rabbis took a stand...

...Why is it that some very nice Jews view the whole thing as at best silly, and at worst a clear manifestation of a lack of piety...

...The central activity of the gymnasium was the transmitting of manly skills to young men through the guidance and advice of older experienced men, none of them wearing any clothes...