Bring Home the Gold!
I’m not much of a follower of the Winter Olympics.
To be honest, some of the games I don’t even understand. For example, there is a sport called curling that came from Canada. Canada is known for producing good beer and I suspect the founders of this sport imbibed large quantities of it when creating this game. Basically it is a game of shuffleboard played on an ice skating rink whereby the players sweep the ice with a broom while trying to guide a large rock down the surface. I am not sure what kind of athletic ability is required to be a curling “athlete,” but any sporting event whose equipment can be found in my kitchen closet leaves me with some skepticism.
I do, however, find inspiration from Olympic athletes and their stories. Look at the discipline of the Olympic athlete. Since he was young he has woken up countless mornings well before his friends; given up fun activities so that he could practice; restricted himself from certain foods that would ruin his chances of winning; and spent a lot of money on lessons, equipment and tournaments. In short, the Olympian has eschewed many of life’s “good things,” things that those around him were enjoying, because he was driven with one goal – to win a gold medal.
In the same vein, people who choose to live a Jewish lifestyle are willing to make what others perceive as “sacrifices” - whether it's honoring Shabbat, avoiding non-kosher, being careful not to gossip - in order to achieve a higher goal: namely to attain a relationship with God and nourish their souls. If an Olympian is willing to do all that for a gold medal, how much more should we be happy to give of ourselves for eternal transformation?
These particular Olympic Games provided me with another lesson.
There is a 17-year-old, originally from Cleveland, named Red Gerard. Red is a snowboarder participating in these Olympic Games.
On the night before Red’s event he stayed up with a friend watching movies on Netflix until the wee hours of the morning. (He may be an Olympian but he is after all a 17-year-old kid who may not make the greatest decisions!)
As anyone who has teenage children knows, teenagers usually have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Red was no different, especially given his late night of movie-watching. Consequently, Red overslept on the very morning he was to compete for a medal. Imagine, he spent his whole life preparing for this one moment and he almost missed it because he couldn’t get out of bed as a result of spending the night watching movies!
Fortunately for Red, his friend dragged him out of bed. He couldn’t find his jacket so he had to borrow his friend’s. With his day getting off on the wrong foot, Red set off to the snowboarding competition.
Putting aside his disastrous morning, Red went on to not only compete but to win the gold medal! In a short time he went from almost wasting his years of hard work as a result of a dumb decision, to standing on top of the sports world with a gold medal validating his thousands of hours of effort and toil.
I found this story to be very inspirational on two levels.
On the surface I find this a good lesson for something that happens all too often.
Many mornings things go off the rails from the minute we wake up. We might oversleep, have a hard time finding the car keys, struggle with getting our kids to school, sit in traffic coming late to work – we’ve all been there.
When the morning goes bad it has the potential to throw off the rest of the day. What we should do instead is regain our composure, take a deep breath and tackle our tasks that we set out to do every day. There is no reason we can’t make the most of our day, no matter how things may go badly at the outset.
There is a deeper lesson as well, using this incident as a metaphor.
People are often moved with a desire to take their spiritual growth more seriously as they get older. But they are slowed down by the realization that they have spent their earlier years neglecting this side of themselves and not pursuing these goals. In essence, they have been engaged in “binge-watching Netflix movies” and are now sluggish and have a hard time “waking up” their spiritual self.
Along comes a “friend” - maybe a class that they hear, an article they read or maybe a literal friend - who “drags them out of bed” and gets them to refocus. And with some effort and determination, despite the rough times preceding that moment, there remains the possibility to get to the top and bring home the “gold medal.”
After all, if a 17-year-old kid could do it for a medal, how much more do we owe it to ourselves when dealing with something that lasts for eternity?
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yosef
