Hebrew Voices #19 – Holy City Soccer

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #19 – Holy City Soccer

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Le ma’an Zion lo ekhesheh, u’l’ma’an Yerushalayim lo eshkot. (For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Isaiah 62:1)

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon, and I am here with a very special episode of Hebrew Voices. This is a sports episode, and I’m releasing it to coincide with the Super Bowl. That’s the championship game in American football. I’m not much of a sports fan, but I have an emotional connection through my late friend, Reggie White, who passed away on December 24th, 2004. I’ve dedicated this episode to my friend, Reggie, and his memory.

For those who don’t know, he was an American football legend who decided to learn Hebrew after retiring from sports. My connection to him was as his Hebrew teacher, and we spent many long hours together over the last nine months of his life. I’m gonna post a video on the website, nehemiaswall.com, which was made by ESPN, about Reggie’s desire to learn the Hebrew language.

Anyway, I decided to do something very different for this episode of Hebrew Voices. I’ve lived in Jerusalem since 1993 and have never been to a soccer game. Actually, I’ve never been in any kind of sports game in Israel. And in Israel in general and Jerusalem, in particular, soccer is an important part of the culture. In Israel it’s called “kaduregel,” literally, football. What Americans call soccer, pretty much everyone else in the world calls football – not to be confused with American football, the game that Reggie White played. So, after over 20 years in Israel, I decided to go to an Israeli soccer game and find out what it was all about. I’ll admit, I don’t know the first thing about sports, so I invited an Israeli sports blogger named Ari Louis to join me at the match and help me understand what was going on. I ended up having some amazing conversations with Ari on everything from soccer strategy to how Orthodox Jews view the coming of the Messiah. I also gained some profound spiritual insights from the game that I’ll share at the end. You heard that right, spiritual insights from a soccer game.

One of the things that inspired me to look at Israeli soccer was an old episode of what I consider to be the best television police drama of all time. And no, guys, I’m not talking about “The Wire.” It was a British drama back in the 1990s called “The Cracker,” starring Robbie Coltrane as a psychologist who extracted confessions for the police. One episode in particular contains the best acting I’ve ever seen, ever. If this had been a movie, I have no doubt it would have won a series of Academy Awards. It was an episode called “To Be a Somebody,” starring a young Robert Carlyle, who I have no doubt would have won an Emmy if this had been on American television. Incidentally, the episode also starred Christopher Eccleston, who would go on to play Doctor Who. His performance was Academy Award-worthy, as well. I don’t think I’m exaggerating in saying it is the best acting I’ve ever seen in my life.

Now, in this episode of The Cracker, the main character, Robert Carlyle, he plays a hardcore working-class English soccer fan, whose life was changed when 96 football fans were crushed to death during a match at a place called Hillsborough. During his police interrogation, this football fan gives an amazing speech that explains what soccer, or “football,” as he calls it, is all about for the hardcore fans. Let’s listen to this clip, the speech that Robert Carlyle gave, and here it is.

Robert Carlyle: It’s when I failed. Nothing going right. Non-stop pressure, yeah, but nothing going right. A minute to go, and the ball’s pumped into the middle. And Anderson goes up, and boom. It’s there. Another victory. Another last-minute victory, and that’s not down to 11 greedy footballers. That’s down to 40,000 people praying, willing it to happen, believing it could happen. You see, people need to believe. People need to congregate, but there’s nothing left to believe in, nothing left to congregate for, only football.