A World-Champion Marathoner again Chooses the Sabbath over Athletic Glory

Much like Eric Liddell, the real-life athlete who sat out an Olympic race because he refused to run on the Sabbath—a story made famous by the movie Chariots of Fire—Bracha (a/k/a Beatie) Deutsch is sitting out an international competition for the same reason. But while Liddell was a devout Scottish Protestant who wouldn’t run on Sunday, Deutsch is an Orthodox Jew who won’t run on Shabbat. Shiryn Ghermezian writes:

Deutsch, a New Jersey native and mother of five who moved to Israel in 2008, explained in a Facebook post on Wednesday that she qualified for the World Athletics Championships Budapest 2023. However, the women’s marathon is scheduled for a Saturday, making it impossible for Deutsch to participate.

“I have kept Shabbat my entire life and it’s a mitzvah I cherish dearly,” Deutsch said in her Facebook post. “I never imagined myself even contemplating otherwise, and yet for the first time in my life I found myself feeling pressure to compete on Shabbat.”

“I was extremely disappointed but there was nothing I could do,” said Deutsch, thirty-five, who is a previous winner of the Tiberias Marathon and the Jerusalem Marathon. [She] added that even after the Olympics were rescheduled because of the coronavirus pandemic, “they still refused to make any religious accommodations (although they had done so in the past when Ramadan coincided with the London Olympics).”

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Judaism, Sabbath, Sports

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society