In 1991, I ran in the Pan American Maccabiah Games in Uruguay. I was young, and I did not fully understand at the time what was happening to me. I knew I was there to compete. What I did not know was that I was also being initiated into something larger: my entry into Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, not through a classroom or a service, but through sport.
There is something about athletics for me that creates belonging in a way that little else does. Anyone who has stood in a crowd as the Knicks come back in the fourth quarter or watched a World Cup match in a packed bar with strangers who become, for ninety minutes, family, knows this feeling. It does not require you to be in the field. Fans are part of it too. The roar of a crowd is not incidental to the game. It is the game, as much as anything happening on the court or the pitch. Belonging does not require playing. It requires showing up, caring, and being part of something collective.
That is what happened to me in Uruguay in 1991. I was a runner among other Jewish runners, swimmers, and basketball players from countries I had never visited, speaking languages I did not understand, and yet there was a thread connecting all of us. We were scattered across the globe, and somehow, in that moment, we were not scattered at all.
This year, my daughter Eve competed in the Maccabiah Games in Israel, on the track and field team for the USA. And this year’s games carried something I have never seen before: many of the uniforms, including hers, were imprinted with the date 2025. That was the year the games were originally supposed to take place. Because of the conflict, they were delayed. And when the moment came to decide whether to hold them at all in 2026, the answer was yes. Fewer athletes, perhaps. Fewer countries able to send teams. But the games would go on as they have since 1932.
There is something quietly profound in that decision. The uniforms bearing last year’s date are not a mistake to be corrected. They are a statement. Our past is present at this moment, and yet we are moving toward a new and better tomorrow. The games happened not because everything was fine. They happened because everything was not fine, and the choice to gather anyway, to compete anyway, to stand together anyway, was itself the point.
It did not matter, in the end, who won each event. What mattered was that the games happened at all. That athletes from across the Jewish world put on uniforms, some of them a year out of date, and walked into a stadium together. That feeling, the feeling of an ideal being upheld even when circumstances argued against it, is one of hope. Not naive hope. Hope that has been tested and chosen anyway.
Eve stood on that field wearing her USA colors, next to Jewish athletes from countries across the globe. We thought about the countries that could not send teams this year. We thought about the communities we missed, the athletes who wanted to be there and could not be, the teams that made it and the teams that did not. Their absence was felt. It was acknowledged. And it was held alongside the presence of everyone who did come.
Athletics does not always bring out the best in people. We know this. Competition can curdle into something ugly, and sport has its share of that, in Israel and everywhere else. But athletics also creates an opening, a spark, a moment where camaraderie matters more than the scoreboard. And when that spark catches, it does not stay on the field. It carries into the rest of your life.
It carried it into mine. The feeling I had in Uruguay in 1991, of being part of Am Yisrael through something as simple as a race, became part of the foundation of my rabbinate. Long before I understood Jewish text or Jewish law in any depth, I understood Jewish peoplehood, because I had felt it in my body, on a track, surrounded by people I had never met who were, somehow, mine.
That is what the Maccabiah Games offer, at their best. Not a tournament. A gathering. A reminder that we are a people scattered across the world, and yet capable, again and again, of coming together. Of learning from each other. Of growing alongside each other. Of standing in a stadium wearing a uniform that says 2025 in the year 2026, because the date does not matter as much as the fact that we are there.
May we carry that spark with us, long after the games end. May it light something in our daily lives, as it did in mine. And may we, wherever we are scattered, keep finding our way back to each other.
Rabbi Jodie
