Long before I ever considered becoming a rabbi, I was convinced I would play NBA basketball.

Rest assured, I was not the first kid to labor under this hilarious illusion.

But there you have it. And so rather than learn the alef-bet or go for bar mitzvah lessons or acquire some keen davenning skills, I prayed on hoops, dribbles, sneakers, and obsessed over offensive strategies and defensive schemes.

Every August from 5th through 9th grade, I traveled to Nashua, New Hampshire for a week to attend the Wayne Embry Basketball School, where the former Boston Celtic and then General Manager of the Milwaukee Bucks ran a camp. For seven solid days I ate, drank, and slept basketball–drills, games, classes–all in an effort to get to the next level.

As I look back on the experience in the wake of Arnold “Red” Auerbach’s death, I recall one other older Jewish Boston man who worked under Mr. Embry at the camp who seemed at the time to be in his sixties and well on the other side of his own basketball dreams. He was already in the role of sage, passing on wisdom of the game to the next generation and in his spare time talking about his grandchildren.

When any death occurs (and certainly the death of an icon like Red Auerbach), it always provides a good opportunity to consider lineages and legacies, how they trace themselves across the inner landscape of our lives as well as the geographic realities of where Jews go to pursue their dreams.

As we know about Auerbach’s career, when he ran the Celtics, he was the first to integrate the NBA by choosing Chuck Cooper, an African American, in 1950. In the 1963-64 season, Auerbach was the first to start an All-Black team: Bill Russell, K. C. Jones, Sam Jones, Tom Sanders and Willie Naulls. And finally, when Auerbach handed over the coaching reins, he made history again by appointing Bill Russell as the first black coach in league history.

One doesn’t understand the context of these accomplishments when one is trying to transcend one’s barely five foot tall stature and praying to God for greater size, speed and leaping ability. But when, years later, one is cut from one’s high school team and forced to swallow the bitter medicine the there are limits to what one can do with the body and talent God gives, one reads books and looks at things differently.

Okay, enough of the third person bullshit.

I became a rabbi in part because of the aspects of Red Auerbach’s (or anyone’s) life which represent transcendance: the son of an immigrant from Russia to Brooklyn; the unapologetic desire to cross borders and integrate an institution; and the inspiring model of what it means to lead in a world where integrity matters.

During my first year at the basketball camp, I got a letter from my dad who was also traveling that week. It’s written, by hand, on a piece of stationery from the St. Moritz on the Park in New York. He describes Central Park, his train ride from Philadelphia to New York, that my mom was talking to Mr. Cohen about how my Little League team was doing in my absence (they were fine and probably less uptight), and then he lists all the places I’ve been in the country.

I don’t know if he was nervously looking for content to put in the note between a father and son or if he was pridefully expressing that quintessentially Jewish wandering gene: “Let’s see–you’ve been in California, Nevada (when you were very little we used to drive from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe), Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.”

Besides the fact that his listing moves in geographic order from West to Northeast, you can sense his own enthusiasm for the adventure. He was a short, intelligent, Jewish man who smoked cigars, too, though admittedly, he lit them up after watching, not orchestrating, victories.

My own trajectory moved beyond the Northeast of this country. And so after my father died, I took myself to Jerusalem, where I got in touch with the Source of All Life. There I began to assemble another narrative, with different role models and different advice, this time on the grand scale of eternal justice, mercy and peace.

In the rocky land of prophets, I was made to understand the elemental truths of our tradition, how they were formed and shaped in a geographic trajectory back toward the West, so that a first generation Jew with Russian parents can write in a letter to a son, “Have a good time, eat well, and work on the left hand dribble,” and it can mean so much more.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Brooklyn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.