Team...Jewish community from an athlete's perspective

It's been almost a month since my last post, and even though I feel relatively unmoved to write today, I thought it was important to write something, lest you think that I had abandoned the blog all together.

So here are a few quick reflections which I've been meaning to set down for a while about team, and by extension about community.

In the life of an athlete "team" serves several specific and inextricably linked functions.

1) Team allows you to play the game. Athletic goals can only be achieved through team. Even Michael Jordan couldn't have played and won on his own. It is only through team that we can have success.

2) Team provides motivation. Not only is your team your vehicle for victory, but it is your source of motivation. On the most successful teams players work out, practice, and play their hardest out of a sense of obligation to the group, as well as because of the sense of friendly competition within the group.

3) Team is your support. Physically and emotionally athletic teams are one of the best examples of human systems functioning at their highest level. Each piece depends on the other, and you can only truly speak about a player when you talk about their relationship to the group and to other players. On great teams these relationships are both practical relationships on the court and emotional ties that extend beyond the court creating the foundations for solid communication and interaction on the court.

4) Team is family. I know that most students of congregational life will tell you that a congregation's tendency to manifest aspects of family dynamic is unhealthy. I'm here to question that assumption. Necessarily acting like a family creates an incredibly challenging professional environment, and may inhibit certain aspects of practical organizational function. However, watching teams functioning, seeing how they unwaveringly support their members on and off the court, how they work through difficult times and stress between players, how they navigate life and create a lasting sense of community greater than the individual demonstrates to me that there are many aspects of the familial relationship, as manifest in team dynamic, that should serve to bolster congregational life. Teams create an inherent sense of obligation, of belonging, of responsibility, of love, and of purpose while providing a framework for actualizing goals. They do this without ever needing an outside force to tell them this is how it should be, they form organically, and this is what we want for our communities. I believe if teams didn't function on some level as families than they wouldn't achieve the kind of success that they do. Further I believe that team interaction with coaches, administrators, owners and managers could potentially provide the kind of model for congregational life that we need - one that encompasses the best of the family dynamic while retaining the professional distant needed to make the congregation qua organization a success.


I owe a great debt to my college volleyball team. With their help I learned to be the best athlete I could be, I learned to work harder and do more than I ever thought possible. With them I learned what it means to live in community, giving love, support, encouragement, and motivation when I had it to give, and receiving compassion and support when I needed it most. Over the past few years, and particularly in the past few days, I have watched how teams (both mine and others ) have rallied around a player or group of players not only to win championships, but to navigate crises, and even just manage the every day with a sense of kavod for the group as well as the individual. I hope that one day I will feel as passionately about my Jewish community, my shtetl, as I do about my team, because it will prove that we have truly been able to embody the kind of communal civilization that we in the line of Kaplan envision.