Religion and Sports -very interesting
Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 6:33 pm
Jewish ambivalence about sports goes back to earliest Olympics.
http://www.jewishchronicle.org/article. ... e_id=10449â??The Chanukah story is really an anti-sports story,â? Jeffrey Gurock, professor of American Jewish history at Yeshiva University, told the Chronicle in a telephone interview.
Rabbi Mendel Senderovic
The original Olympic games started in ancient Greece as an expression of that cultureâ??s idealization of the human body, and it was closely associated with the Greek polytheistic religion.
According to the two books of Maccabees, one of the things the Greek-culture Seleucid Empire and its Jewish collaborators did to provoke the Jewish revolt was to establish a Greek-style gymnasium in Jerusalem.
The religious Jews of Judea objected to Greek athletics because of its links to Greek religion, because of its public nudity that violated Jewish laws of modesty, but also to some extent because Judaism emphasizes the mind and spirit over the body.
â??The Hellenists were those Jews who strayed from basic Jewish belief to become involved in Greek culture, which involves body worship,â? said Rabbi Mendel Senderovic, dean of the Milwaukee Kollel-Center for Jewish Studies. â??Your mainstream Jews of more spiritual leaning did not involve themselves in that.â?
â??In Jewish culture and tradition, the ideal Jewish male is the rabbi, the teacher, the scholar,â? and not the athlete, said Gurock.