Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Skip the Ads, Watch Torah at Halftime

No Hype, Just Torah: Amid a flood of hype for the Super Bowl, Yeshiva University has produced a halftime video focusing on spirituality in sports. Image by getty images

Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow thrust religion into the consciousness of football fans everywhere this year by famously taking a knee and bowing his head in prayer on the field. And while his prayers caused their fair share of controversy, not everyone thinks mixing football and religion is such a bad thing.

Ahead of Super Bowl Sunday on February 5, Yeshiva University has produced a 35-minute halftime show featuring three professors who share their thoughts on the spiritual side of sports. You could say it’s the Modern Orthodox take on Tebow’s evangelical Christian beliefs.

The Y.U. Torah Halftime show is the brainchild of Moshe Isaacson, Y.U.’s director of interactive marketing. He said that the aha moment came two months ago, when someone told him that Tebow etches Bible verses into his under-eye paint during games.

“That got the wheels turning,” Isaacson recalled thinking. “Here’s a guy who’s capturing the attention of millions of people, and he’s really proving the case that there’s no need to live your life in compartments — you can put religion and sports together.”

Isaacson said that dovetails with Y.U.’s stated mission of torah u’madah, roughly translated as “an effort to live a religious Jewish life in a secular world.” “We thought this was right up our alley,” he said.

The video contains three eight-minute lectures by Y.U. professors Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (“Hold the Wings: Maimonides on Physical Fitness”), Rabbi Ely Allen (“The Importance of Halftime”) and Yitzchak Schechter (“The Ultimate Comeback”). Highlights include Schechter using a sports theme to teach the lesson of never giving up hope, and Allen talking about taking time out and recharging yourself — not unlike halftime. “It’s pretty direct,” Isaacson said.

The 38-second trailer is set to dramatic, sports-promo-type music and concludes with two helmets facing off.

Y.U. mailed 280 free copies in advance of the game and is airing the video on its YouTube channel and on its Facebook page during the Super Bowl. The video will be available for about a week after the game, Isaacson said.

One thing the video won’t be is preachy. “We realized that in the middle of the Super Bowl, its not time to get super serious,” said Allen, who explained that he tried to keep his video lecture light but also present a meaningful subject, such as, “What are some spiritual lessons we can learn from football, if any?”

Filmed on campus, the entire production cost less than $6,000 — “Definitely not like the budgets for the ads in the Super Bowl,” Isaacson quipped. And Y.U. filmed two months ago, so the show won’t have the rabbis rooting for the hometown favorite, the New York Giants, who will face off against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI.

Ironically, when asked who he’d be rooting for this weekend, Allen replied that he’s the opposite of a sports fan. “Is it this Sunday?” he asked. “I’m more of a music and art guy.”

Contact E.B. Solomont at [email protected]

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.