Should I Care Who Wins?

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

Nov 9-10, 2024 • 8 Mar Cheshvan 5785 • Lech-lecha (Gen 12-17).

People like to say that competition is good because it pushes people to excel.

The thing about competition is that it creates losers.

Not only that, but there are usually more losers than winners. That's a lot of hard feelings. Is it worth it? 

I cannot recall specifically being aware of "strongman competitions". 

I'm sure that I've heard about them... but it's one of those things that I don't generally pay attention to.

You could try asking this at your table - Can you name one such competition or one champion?

There are many, including: World's Strongest Man, Arnold Strongman Classic, Europe's Strongest Man, Strongman Champions League, World's Ultimate Strongman, World's Strongest Viking, World Muscle Power Classic, Fortissimus, Pure Strength, Rogue Invitational, Shaw Classic, Giants Live, IFSA World Championships, Strongman Super Series and World Strongman Challenge

I'm sure it's entertaining to watch men lifting cars and bending steel bars but it's frankly not something I've ever tuned in. 

But for some reason the death this week of Britain's most famous strongman captured my imagination. This is a guy who at his peak could literally tear phone books in half and bend steel bars.

But what caught my attention was the following detail in his biography:

He supported himself and his young family by working as a police officer. One afternoon, he was sent to arrest a man for not paying a fine. He knocked on his door. When the man opened it, Capes saw dozens of budgerigars — a type of parakeet — chirping about in cages.

“Could I have a look at your birds?” Capes said.

They brought back memories of his childhood, when he tended to injured birds and animals. The man invited him inside and served him a cup of tea. They had a lovely chat about the tiny, chatty budgies. Capes even held some of them in his giant hands.

Alas, after an hour, Capes reminded the man that he was there to arrest him.

“He came quietly and afterwards we kept in touch,” Capes told The Sunday People, a London newspaper, in 1998. “Two weeks later he gave me my first ever pair of breeding budgies.”

Capes began breeding them with the same enthusiasm with which he trained for strongman competitions. He competed in budgerigar shows throughout Europe, winning a world championship in 1995. He was named president of the Budgerigar Society in 2008 and frequently judged competitions.

“There’s something about their color and beauty that fascinates me,” Capes told The Sunday People. “They bring out my gentler side.”

I love that he didn't merely experience the beautiful birds in the zoo like most of us might do.

As in his first career as a strongman, he took his God-given talents and pushed himself towards his potential. He channelled all of that amazing physical power into his art, which was an interaction with the profound beauty of nature, and in so doing, left the world a better place than he found it.

Two questions for your table: Do you think that his success has anything to do with the fact that he grew up in a time before the advent of so many modern distractions and addictions? And as asked above, is competition worth it, given that it creates losers?


Shabbat Shalom 

PS - This week's Table Talk also appears online at http://rabbiseinfeld.blogspot.com.

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Who Was That Unmasked Man?

Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

Nov 1-2, 2024 • 1 Mar Cheshvan 5785 • Noach (Gen 6-11).
In memory of Jeremy Dossetter (Yermiyahu Matan) z''l, whose 7th yahrzeit was observed this week.

I recently had the opportunity to spend six hours in the City Department of Planning.

The first five hours were merely waiting for our turn at the Zoning Commission meeting.

What a blessing to have a laptop (and plenty to do with it)!

During one of my writing breaks, I wandered around the lobby there on the 5th floor and happened upon a pile of stapled copies, obviously left for the public to read and/or take. The cover sheet:

MEMORIES OF A 50-YEAR CAREER
Frank J. Murphy's Journey Through the Transportation Profession
From 1974 to 2024

It is a monumental record that can only be fully appreciated if you are holding it in your hands. It would be very difficult for a mere mortal like me to fairly represent the contents of this hundred-page autobiography. Mr. Murphy has been blessed with either a photographic memory or the self-discipline to keep a meticulous journal for fifty years.

But here are a few impressions:

• There may not be a single road, crosswalk, traffic light, or stop sign in the City of Baltimore that doesn't have Frank J. Murphy's fingerprints on it.

• There is no bravado - merely a happy account of his journey both horizontally and vertically through a civil engineering career: gratitude for landing in a career that he could continuously find challenging and meaningful for fifty years.

• He's multi-dimensional - the packet included a photo from the office holiday party showing him playing electric bass.

While I stood there perusing the tome, my immersion in his fifty-year transportation journey was interrupted when a door nearby suddenly opened.

A man carrying a small briefcase silently and rather swiftly exited, walking past me toward the elevators, some fifty feet away (a foot for every year of FJM's career?)...

While awaiting the lift, the man looked back towards me. Was this indeed he? The legendary Frank J. Murphy himself? The photo on the document was a younger man with a goatee and the man by the elevator was older and clean-shaven. But still....

Our eyes met. I put on my best inquisitive expression and pointed to the autobiography, trying to ask across the fifty-foot divide, "Is this indeed you?"

He made no motion of his head, but if I'm not mistaken, his eyes were smiling. And then as suddenly as he had appeared, he stepped into the elevator and was gone.

Most of us can live in a city for an entire lifetime and never have a clue who actually designed and facilitated all of that flow of traffic. Even when something you don't like appears and you'd like to know whom to blame, it's always just "The City."

But if we're honest, we should admit that most of the time, things do work, and we never have a personal connection to anyone who actually created that functional design.

Question for your table: At what point does a mere civil servant become a hero?

Shabbat Shalom 

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The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI.org) is to foster a paradigm shift in spiritual education to enable every human being to access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.