It's Maccabiah!

I've decided to give the political stuff a rest for now. It's Maccabiah season in Israel, and this article from Haaretz links nicely with the material I'm learning in my Israel graduate course. It turns out that a Cuban Jewish teen who recently immigrated to Israel was told one week before the start of Maccabiah that he's too old to play for the junior softball team -- this after having been cleared to play for said team by a Maccabiah staffer three months ago. Apparently, he's just a couple of months shy of the cut-off date. The teen, Yoandry Gil-Levy, was crushed. To put this into some perspective, this is more than just a clerical error. I've been to Cuba and I can personally vouch for the fact that baseball is practically a national religion there. I can't imagine how awful Yoandry must have felt.

What caught my eye about this story is the discussion in my course last week about the IDF's army service and the fact that Haredim are exempt. The army is the great equalizer where people from all sorts of backgrounds learn to work together and rely on one another. It's a bond that holds society together. But isn't this the spirit with which Maccabiah was created? To bring Jews together from all over the world in friendly competition -- to create a bond that will hold global Jewry together? I agree with the writer of this article: the Maccabiah people definitely dropped the ball on this one.