Somewhere, perhaps in Iowa or New Jersey, a field of Jewish dreams. Photo by IStock

We had wanted to go to the shore – 70 miles to the south – to watch the waves and the seagulls, but Satan came in the form of a family squabble and the time frittered away.

Instead, my wife Ruchama and I drifted toward Brookdale Park, a leafy paradise in Montclair, NJ, just a few miles from the concrete and cobblestone of our gritty home base of Jewish Passaic.

Here, the ballfields and tracks are manicured and vivid. The foul lines and base paths are brightly painted and the ball skips around in the golden hue of the late summer afternoon with the promise of an everlasting American Eden.

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At the park, Ruchama and I settled longingly behind the backstop of a baseball field. Two young men in their 20s were playing pitcher and catcher. You could hear the satisfying snap of the hardball into the catcher’s mitt, the catcher calling out balls and strikes as though it were a real game. I watched with the loneliness of a ten-year-old wanting to be included.

Even though I was many decades older than they were, and I was wearing the uniform of an Orthodox Jewish male from Passaic — white shirt, dress pants, black yarmulke —I nevertheless asked, “Could I join you?”

“Sure,” they answered as one. “Grab a glove and we’ll hit some out.”

Second inning

Jake, the pitcher, picked up a bat and corked the ball to the outfield. I didn’t realize a ball could get up so high.

I got under it and waited for it to obey the laws of gravity and fall plop into my glove. I threw it back in.

He hit the next one to his friend Brad. This one went even farther and higher. In the brilliant daylight, it’s easy to lose track, but Brad galloped like a gazelle, chased it down, relayed it to me and I passed it back home.

Jake drew from a bag full of hardballs, spilling out near the backstop. He was a human fountain of pop-ups, hitting them faster than we could shag them. The balls that were lost were simply left. I remember as Jewish kids, every ball that fell in someone’s yard or down the street, was tracked down, retrieved. We would never have dreamt of leaving them on the field. In our world, money didn’t grow on trees.

But this was an hour of heaven.

Third inning

When it was my turn to bat, Eden, (Eden!) who was apparently Jake’s girlfriend, introduced herself to me from the sidelines. When she did so, America itself seemed to offer its outstretched hand.

Why did I take it? I am well past the age of playing baseball. I’m almost a pensioner, and I was never good at the game anyway. I should have kept strolling in the park with my wife, both hands clasped behind my back.

What keeps calling me to the game even now in the late innings of life?

Near home plate was a pile of dusty cleats and well-worked bats. They told of what I imagined to be the summers past for these fellas — ice cream and corn fields, cotton candy. Prom nights, drag races. Baseball and more baseball.

That was not my background.

Fouth inning

I grew up as a backbencher in the bais medrash in Yeshiva Chaim Berlin. In the yeshiva’s bucolic Camp Morris in the Catskills, on Friday afternoons in summer, the big men of the bais medrash, young but somehow already sagacious, would lumber over to the ball fields — and they would hit the tar out of the ball.

One of the sluggers was a man named Shloimie Drenger, who at 32 was already a saint and a scholar. Though I was 16 years younger than he was, I had schemed to be one of his roommates that summer. I hoped that by being close to him, his deftness in Talmud would rub off on me. Drenger gave his own chabura (informal class) to a select few. More than that, he was strong and compact with big blue eyes and he had enormous strength up in the shoulders and a power swing.

If there was a fly in our bunk, he would snatch it (he had the quickest hands in the world) and it would buzz around in his clenched fist. He would then release it into the great outdoors. It was said that he would not hurt any of God’s creatures, but he could smack that ball into the outer atmosphere.

Too young to play with them, I would “announce” the game from behind the backstop with my friend Mayer Weinberger. Afterwards, we would play high-pops for hours.

Our Esau-hands smelled of birch and bark when Sabbath came. As the sun set over the mountains of Woodridge, we said our prayers. Talmudic knowledge was supposedly the imaginative frontier of our lives, not sports. Secretly, however — with a degree of shame — we, the people of the book, also yearned to be baseball heroes.

As young as we were then, we “knew” that the dictum “one does not live by bread alone” works both ways. Perhaps ours was to put blood and muscle into Jewish life and to put Jewish life into blood and muscle.

Of course that was then. What made me ask to join these men now? What made them offer? They were content in their practice, these men and their girlfriends on a golden day.

We in Passaic have what we need too. Our parks are not as fancy, but our God is an indestructible presence for us. He is available in any of the 50 houses of study and prayer that dot every block in town. We have good food, good friends, and a wonderful life. Why stray into the strange gardens of Montclair? No one from Passaic ever does.

Fifth inning

My father told me that in the Bronx of the 1930s, Talmud Torah, afternoon Hebrew school, offered his cohorts one humble blandishment: a free baseball game at Yankee Stadium in exchange for a year of attendance. Young boys endured the entire year of Hebrew subjects for one free game. Back then, baseball was a gateway drug to an America of possibility and promise.

Perhaps these Montclair young men saw something in me. Could they have known how happy baseball made me? Did they sense a bond invisible between us, a bridge across the decades? Even as they were humoring me, they had to know.

Growing up, we had our own culture, yet we were always ready at a backstop to play or watch. We loved America and America loved us. The congenial club of the men of baseball: Mickey Mantle, Carl Hubbell, Babe Ruth, Phil Rizzuto and Joe DiMaggio were a portal to America that didn’t require the surrender of our religious ways as the price of admission.

But it was more than that. Baseball is metaphysical. It’s a celebration of energy as a staple of life. It stands both alone and in opposition to the more dominant Jewish values of reflectiveness, patience and endurance, but it doesn’t negate them entirely. You clobber the ball, but you wait for your pitch.

Sixth inning

As the sun drifted down, another friend of theirs joined us.

“Now let’s do fast-pitching practice,” Jake said.

We moved over to a different diamond with fewer people around so no one would get hurt. Jake set up a steel barrel behind home plate against the backstop and he pitched them as hard as he could.

Ruchama had since decamped for a stroll to other parts of the park. Now I was alone and frightened. I wore a batting helmet, but I knew nothing of Jake’s control. An errant fast ball could do me in. I had played fast-pitch softball, got beaned once and escaped with a swollen arm, but this was hardball and a lot more dangerous. His pitches smacked loud against the barrel. K-nock! I stood there, shaky bat in hand and swung and missed, but then poked one up the third base line, a bonafide hit.

The pitches kept coming and I trembled. These were not just the tremors of a 60-year-old man facing a 25-year-old’s fastball — the paranoid part of me kicked in: I was in the gentile’s hands.

Another pitch whizzed by. When was this charade going to be over? When would they announce “get the Jew” and his Jew-woman?

I imagined these “gentle giants” going off to their Montclair mansions where these Brobdingnagians lived with their wholesome and agreeable 20-something women and drinking in the basement where there’s a mirrored bar, knotty pine wood paneling, an ice bucket, and swizzle sticks.

Seventh inning

My late father, a rabbi who loved America, would warn: Every exile has a sell-by date. “The American exile is a sweet one,” he would say, “but like all our exiles — Babylon, Spain, Poland, Russia, France, England — it has an expiration date.” Jews come, are enormously successful, we integrate; ultimately we are expelled, spit out.

“Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other,” he would say, quoting from the bible. “Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.”

I braced for the impact of Jake’s two-seamers, but I stood fast and hit some more.

After the last ball, we parted in different directions. I saw them climbing the small hill in right field in the dying light of the day, while I headed for the parking lot on the north side. We waved to each other with all the good will upon which this country was built.

Eighth inning

In the last glimmers of daylight, we wound down the hill and on to the monstrous and crammed Route 3, New Jersey’s national boulevard of nowhere-dom. “I saw you hit the ball hard and make those catches,” Ruchama said. “We played really well,” she added, speaking now in the language of two people who experienced something as one.

After all that exertion, I was sweaty and hungry and when I was home, I went right to the kitchen and bit into a peach that was perfect right down to the pit. My mind was still flashing back to the baseball diamond, but far from the ballfields I had my own date with the Talmud and the laws of Moses.

In my folio of Talmud are wisps of my father’s beard that told of a powerful and complicated story of acceptance, coercion, submission and love. I tried when I was young to love the Talmud the simple way I loved baseball, but alas it was a different love — a love that you could only acquire by bending, stooping, suffering.

Last inning

In the end, baseball beckons to both dreamlike and practical ambitions. As the son of an oppressed and improbably successful people, I felt as though a romantic impulse from summers past lived out in me that day, and perhaps will forever more.

Later that night, in my Passaic bed, I fell into a young man’s sleep and stumbled into a dream:

Jake had hit the ball high above the treetops. Then he hit another and another. They rose in arcs. I settled under one waiting for it, twisting, turning, my gloved hand held out.

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