I Am Proud to Be Born in Brookly, New York

I Am Proud to Be Born in Brooklyn, New York

April 12, 2013

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

 

I was born in Brooklyn, New York in the last years of a waning era that I didn't realize at the time. We moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey just before I turned eight years old. While we returned often to visit my grandmother, my mother's mother and my aunt and uncle who were living in Brooklyn, it would be decades before I returned to visit Nostrand Avenue and Park Place. I have vivid memories of the streets and the stores and two good friends. I only remember their first names. Paula was white. Bobby was African American. He lived in a brownstone and I played with his electric trains. I remember passing Ebbetts Field, standing lonely and unused as the Dodgers had moved to Los Angeles. As my father was not a sports buff, despite living the sports mecca of the world, I never saw a game played at Ebbetts Field.  But I always proudly salute the place of my birth and I have returned to visit places special to me. Our children were brought to see them while we still lived in New York. I didn't realize how deeply founded was my allegiance to the Brooklyn Dodgers only years afterwards.

 

My father's employment brought us to move to a small town north of Newark, New Jersey, and from third grade until ninth grade I lived in a world that was lily white. In those days you attended the school in your area. As no African Americans lived in my neighborhood, all the students in my elementary school, from kindergarten through eighth grade were white. As there were no African Americans in our area I did not see them in the stores where we shopped. As there were no African American Jews, I did not see them in synagogue, nor in any synagogue I attended neither for USY programs nor in the summer programs of Ramah or USY. The African American community lived in one specific area of our town, I don't know how that came to be but I can imagine, for it was near the train tracks and industrial area. But we had only one high school. For the first time I had classmates who were black. Nothing special happened in school. We were all worried about doing our homework, passing our tests and getting good grades. We wanted our football team to defeat the neighboring towns, something they rarely did. I was focused on studying Judaism. There seemed to be so much to learn and I loved it. While I read the paper every day I did not pay that close attention to everything else going on in the world.

 

Even though I was an avid baseball card collector and lament the disappearance of a collection that could have funded my retirement several times over, I had complete sets for at least five years beginning in 1958, I was totally unaware of the cataclysmic event that took place the year before I was born in Brooklyn, New York.

 

By the time I was aware of baseball, there was a Willie Mays, Don Newcombe, soon a Roberto Clement and so many others that were African American and Latino. While teams were still predominantly white, there were stars and average players from other races. My baseball attachment was through cards, newspaper and television. It required the documentaries from much more recent years to expose and make an indelible impression upon me how difficult it was to be Jackie Robinson and what he had to endure, physically, verbally, spiritually, and psychologically. I never had a clue what it meant for a black student to sit next to me in school. I was worried about being a Jew sitting next to a Christian.

 

I have only followed the reviews of the movie "42," Jackie Robinson's number, whose historic entrance into baseball happened sixty-three years ago. I have watched repeatedly the documentaries on PBS about Jackie Robinson and about the Brooklyn, Dodgers. I have seen most if not all the PBS documentaries about baseball. Baseball, at least back then, was more than a sport. It was also a mirror of America. It really doesn't matter how good this movie is or who are the actors. Like we recite in the Haggadah, that each generation has to feel as if it had been enslaved and redeemed from Egypt, it is necessary that each generation of Americans remember the journey of America to fulfill its stated ideal, its founding principle, the one core faith that differentiates this country from all others in the world: "that all men – and women – are created equal." It has been a long, hard road, whose journey is not complete. The horrendous abuse that Jackie Robinson had to endure is incomprehensible to me, and certainly to our children. Our children and my grandchildren live in the land of plenty, in a time when barriers are falling for homosexuals, and where people from other ethnic and national origins will cumulatively be the majority of Americans. I remember how a third grade classmate checked my head for my horns, but no one ever spit on me. I never had to sit in the back of the bus against my wishes, nor enter the school through a different door, nor use a different bathroom. We needed to be reminded what America was like, not so long ago, so that we and the next generation can make it become better than what it is. There are challenges ahead for our country, without easy solutions, but which must be faced honestly and solved: the growing aging sector of our society, myself included, and the need to properly sustain Social Security, and Medicare. Despite the rising Stock Market there is a growing sector of poverty, especially as unskilled jobs which are both dignified employment and sustainable income are disappearing, along with disastrous cuts to Medicaid and the programs of the safety net. And there is the staccato drum beat of the guns and violence that are intertwined with poor education, drugs, poverty and unemployment. And the leadership on every level from the top to the bottom is incapable and unable to "punch its way out of a plain paper bag."

 

Yet just maybe it is vital, it is critical to look back at a turning point in our personal history when we made a leap greater than the step on the moon, when our humanity, our love for our neighbor, our respect for other of God's creatures, shone forth and changed destiny. April 15^th, 1947 was such a day. The team was the Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of my birth. The place was Ebbetts Field, now just an apartment complex. And the man was Jackie Robinson.  In all of the emotions that I feel whenever I reflect on specific times, places, people and events, there is one special piece of this story that always stands out. Jackie's courage was matched by another player of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a white man, dyed-in-the-wool white man from middle America, who played short stop. His name was Pee Wee Reese. In our lore, we speak of the  first person to enter the Red Sea as the Israelites were paralyzed by the water in front of them and the Egyptians behind them, a name nearly forgotten, Nachshon ben Aminadav. He had the courage to jump in, and then the waters parted so the Israelites could enter. It was Pee Wee Reese who publicly and proudly put his arm around Jackie Robinson's shoulder. Perhaps that gesture is not understood in its greatest implication. But we baseball buffs know that the two players who make the most intricate plays together are the second baseman and the shortstop, in this case, Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese. Sometimes a picture is worth a million words. The picture of them is just that. Sometimes a gesture can create a new dynamic. This one did. It changed baseball. It changed all sports. It contributed mightily to the change of America. This movie reminds of what they did and what we have left to do.

 

So I am proud to have been born in Brooklyn, New York. When we unwittingly moved to the Yankee territory of Belleville, New Jersey, when asked about the team that I rooted for, I am proud that I answered:  "The Brooklyn Dodgers." I took a few knocks for that. May the memory of Jackie Robinson, his team and teammates be an everlasting blessing and inspiration to us all.

 

Shabbat Shalom.