Have you filled out your bracket yet? Yes, “Madness” is in the air as the most exciting two weeks of sports in America are about to begin: the NCAA Men’s (and Women’s) College Basketball Tournament. Roughly 50 million Americans (myself included) will take time out of our busy schedules to plot out 63 different matchups and enter our picks into office pools or online competitions. We will spend countless hours sneaking peaks at TVs or mobile broadcasts of the games during work and neglecting our kids at home for hours at a time on the weekends, leading to the inevitable stories about how many billions of dollars in productivity our economy has squandered. But why do we care so much about a bunch of college basketball games?
For starters, there is the chance of work-place glory and even some petty cash for winning one’s office pool. The self-proclaimed “experts” among us will analyze conference records, strength-of-schedule comparisons, and other analytical metrics, agonizing over each pick until we are convinced we have the perfect bracket. We will check our results daily, arguing at the water cooler over why our upset picks should have won. And then we will lose our office pool to the person who picks teams based on who has the cutest mascot! For those who yearn for more than just office bragging rights this year, Warren Buffett has upped the cash ante by offering $1 billion to anyone who can correctly pick all 63 games (spoiler alert: the odds are roughly 1 in 9 quintillion that you will do so, so don’t start spending that billion just yet).
For many others, the thrill of the NCAA Tournament is less about filling out brackets than about a celebration of all that is good about sports. While professional sports are filled with doping scandals and selfish athletes who play more for their next contract than the welfare of their teams, college basketball is different. As one blogger recently put it, “March Madness is the culmination of hundreds of hours of blood, sweat and tears. It is a group of unpaid athletes brimming with school pride and playing with emotional intensity that only comes with playing on the national stage.”
There is a sense of meritocracy in the Tournament; of hard work, effort, and sacrifice for the greater good being rewarded with team wins, since the best teams in college basketball are not necessarily those with the best individual players. The passion of the players and coaches in the Tournament is palpable, from the shouts of joy to the tears streaming down players’ faces as they realize that their year, and for some their career, is over. This passion somehow works its way through the television and into our own hearts as we cheer on our favorite teams or shriek with delight as this year’s Cinderella teams make buzzer-beating shots. I challenge you to watch the famous CBS video montage, “one shining moment,” at the end of the Tournament and not feel your heart race!
But I think there is a deeper reason why so many millions get engrossed in the NCAA Tournament. It offers us a bonanza of something we rarely get to experience: unpredictable and exciting results. So much of our lives today are on auto-pilot. We have our work routines, our home routines, our usual Starbucks stops, etc., that we thirst for what is new or novel. The randomness and unpredictability of the Tournament provide this in abundance. In the homogenized, gentrified world in which so many of us live, the Tournament’s inherent uncertainty offers us something we rarely find, especially in real-time.
The sad truth is that this is what Judaism is supposed to offer us. Our rituals and our religious calendar are supposed to give us breaks from our quotidian existences. Shabbat and other holidays are supposed to provide respites from, and a reorientation of, our normal work-weeks. Praying during the day, whether in formal services or extemporaneous prayers, take us out of our automated consciences and give us the opportunity to access the sublime. Unfortunately, we, as Jewish leaders, are failing in our efforts to transmit this crucial experiential legacy. We are not providing the kind of targum (translation) of how our texts and rituals have the potential to be transformative, to shake us from complacency and satisfy our desire for authenticity and creativity.
March Madness reminds us that we all need experiences that feel genuine, organic, and even miraculous. We crave these breaks from our ordinary lives, these chances to feel truly alive. The NCAA Tournament offers this to us for two weeks each year. The challenge for Jewish professionals is to find ways to transmit our heritage, our culture, our Torah in the same way. We have the potential for 52 weeks of Madness; it us up to us to deliver.
p.s. Florida is looking tough to beat this year, and don’t forget to pick at least one 12 seed to upset a 5 seed!
Torah
Pronunced: TORE-uh, Origin: Hebrew, the Five Books of Moses.
