A Tale of Two Ball Players
“We now see plainly that God has been with you, and we thought: Let there be a sworn treaty between our two parties." - Genesis 26:29
In equally unusual and yet diametrically opposed ways, two famous basketball players have recently found themselves attached to the Jews. At one end sits the unnecessary-to-describe case of Kyrie Irving, the former NBA champion who now, on occasion, plays basketball for the Brooklyn Nets. At the other is Amar’e Stoudemire, the former NBA All Star and New York Knick, who has, since leaving the league, transformed himself into an observant Jew.
Their experiences illuminate a tension in the strange Biblical story of Isaac and Abimelech.
The text reads,
Isaac sowed in that land and reaped a hundredfold the same year. God blessed him, and he grew richer and richer until he was very wealthy. He amassed flocks and herds and a large household, so that the Philistines envied him. And they stopped up all the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of his father Abraham, filling them with earth. And Abimelech said to Isaac, “Go away from us, for you have become far too big for us.” So Isaac departed from there and encamped in the valley Gerar, where he settled. – Genesis 26:12-17
After some struggle, again Isaac prospers in his new setting, and again Abimelech comes to him.
Isaac said to them, “Why have you come to me, seeing that you have been hostile to me and have driven me away from you?” And they said, “We now see plainly that God has been with you, and we thought: Let there be a sworn treaty between our two parties, between you and us. Let us make a pact with you so that you will not do us harm, just as we have not molested you but have always dealt kindly with you and sent you away in peace. From now on, be you blessed of God!” Then he made for them a feast, and they ate and drank. Early in the morning, they exchanged oaths. Isaac then bade them farewell, and they departed from him in peace. – Genesis 26:27-31
When Abimelech first sees Isaac’s lonely success, he expels him because of envy, forcing Isaac to abandon great wealth. But when Abimelech sees that Isaac does well again despite this setback, his view changes and he instead he seeks friendship and peace.
The sages have long seen in the first part of this story a paradigm of historical Jew-hatred. Just as would happen later to Jacob’s sons in Egypt, England, Spain, Germany, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt (again), Isaac’s material success combined with his minority status made him a target of envy, anger, and expulsion. Despite repeatedly being forced to leave behind all they had accumulated and begin again in a new land, throughout their long exile over and over Jews often created material prosperity wherever they ended up.
The connection to L’Affaire Kyrie1 is obvious, since Irving seemed to reveal himself to be an adherent of the view that people with dark skin are the “original chosen people of God” and that this heritage was stolen by those who today call themselves Jews. Just as Isaac came to the land of the Philistines and prospered in a land that was not his, so have Jews today, the argument goes, prospered from a heritage that is not their own, leading to envy and anger from the heritage’s supposed true heirs.
Indeed, this particular style of Jew-hatred was, prior to the 20th century and its secular, pagan Nazi and communist pathologies, history’s most dangerous. Nothing more deeply animated Christian anger at the Jews than the Jewish refusal to recognize that Israel’s heritage had been transferred to the church through Jesus. So too did the Jewish refusal to accept Mohammed’s prophecy lead to a Muslim rewriting of the Bible in order to claim that the Jewish original was false.
Yet the case of Amar’e Stoudemire demonstrates the equal validity and power of the second part of Abimelech’s story, namely his replacement of his envy and anger for Isaac with admiration and friendship. Stoudemire began his journey to Judaism while he was still playing for the Knicks, saying at the time that his interest in Judaism grew from his personal belief, taught to him as a child, that to be a person with dark skin meant that one was also a descendant of ancient Israel.2
Stoudemire’s belief in this heritage led him ultimately to an extraordinary act of personal commitment and courage: formal conversion to Judaism while moving himself and his family to live in modern Israel. Whether as an owner/player of Jerusalem’s professional basketball team, a wine entrepreneur, or a student of the Bible, Amar’e Stoudemire appears to now be living a life filled with a purpose and meaning made possible by this positive spiritual commitment.
Kyrie Irving and Amar’e Stoudemire, in other words, both started from the same starting point of belief: an ineluctable connection of people with dark skin to ancient Israel. Yet their widely different choices in how to consider modern Jewry as a result of that belief – envy on the one hand, admiration on the other – led to starkly different outcomes.
They are the same outcomes Abimelech trades when he realizes there is much more to gain through partnership with Isaac than hatred of him, for he finds in Isaac a willing and friendly partner, happy to stretch out his hand, teach what he has learned, and build together a better world. It is akin to the choice Edith Eger wrote about in her book The Choice, and also one she learned from her teacher Viktor Frankl in his own book Man’s Search for Meaning. Both of these lesson echo the ancient Jewish mystical conviction, derived from the Bible, that we control our emotions and our emotions do not control us. As the Alter Rebbe put it,
The mind naturally controls the heart. Humans were created from birth with the ability to exercise willpower to control the drives of our heart, so that they not be expressed in our behavior, speech, or thought. - Tanya, Likutei Amarim, ch. 12
In other words, the unique history of the Jews has long shown a way of generating strong emotions from non-Jewish nations. Yet they, as all of us, can choose which direction to channel this emotion.
The scourge of Jew-hatred has certainly not died away. It is today however perhaps the first time met by an equal admiration for Jews. The historical animosity of Christianity’s institutions has been replaced by at least a condemnation of Jew-hatred and in some cases an enthusiastic embrace of Jews, a feeling that now stretches into the growing ranks of Korean and Chinese evangelical Christians. Even in the Arab world, the avant-garde of Jew-hatred for the past half-century, the great cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi now welcome Israeli Jews as business partners, with the potential to create together prosperity for hundreds of millions or more.
The message, written in plain language in the Bible for thousands of years: the choice of whether the Jews will be a source of hatred or inspiration lies in the hands of the nations. For them, as for Abimelech, one choice leads to conflict and poverty. The other leads to peace and prosperity. More than three thousand years after Revelation, the nations may finally in their majority choose the latter course, with untold blessings for us all as the reward.
Aside: the word kyrie is a vocative case of the Greek word for lord, and is used in the Septuagint as a translation of the Hebrew name of God
There is obvious at least partial historical truth to this assertion, as the Beta Israel are a dark-skinned Jewish group who trace their origins back to ancient Israel. Some people also assert a connection of the east African Igbo people to ancient Israel.