After The Fall: Balance Beam As Metaphor

by Dvora Meyers
Special To The Jewish Week

A few months ago, I walked from my Upper West Side apartment to Madison Square Garden carrying a sandwich, a bottle of water and two tickets to the American Cup, an international gymnastics competition held annually. Round-trip, it was a 140-block jaunt on a sunny winter day, not bad for a long one, though I would’ve preferred to sleep in and arrive in a third of the time via subway. But it was Shabbos morning and walking was the only way to see the world’s best gymnasts in-person less than six months before the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Now, some of you might be thinking — haven’t I already read this in The New Yorker? You know, the piece by Shalom Auslander about his hilarious

and angry 14-mile trek from Teaneck, N.J. to the Garden to watch the Rangers in the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals on the Jumbotron?

I thought about Auslander’s essay as I traipsed to MSG dressed in casual Shabbos attire. Why wasn’t I walking to one of the four minyanim I frequent on weekend mornings? Was I just like Auslander? Would I eat a treif hot dog from a street vendor if my favorite gymnast didn’t win the competition?

I checked my pulse for signs of quickening and anger. It was normal. I was not angry.
I was not even invested in the outcome. Had the year been 1996, I would have had favorites. Back then, I was 13 and had been a devotee of gymnast Shannon Miller since I began in the sport at age 8. If she had not won gold at the Atlanta Games, I would’ve cried and very possibly sworn off God. But now, at age 25, five years after my active participation in the sport had ended, I had gymnasts that I preferred but none for whom I would forsake my religion. Yet a decade (or even three years) prior, I would never have walked even to the Olympics on Shabbos. I wouldn’t have done anything that could be seen as a violation of the spirit of the Sabbath.

Back then I was walking a thin line, both literally and figuratively. In the gym, I was on the balance beam, trying to fit cartwheels on the famously four-inch wide piece of equipment. Outside the gym, I was trying not to go off the derech in the million different ways my teachers described. I kept my knees covered in long skirts. I counted six hours between cholent and ice cream. And I made sure my family ripped their paper towels before Shabbat.

How far I’ve come, I thought as I rode up the escalators alongside my friend, who bought me the Starbucks vanilla latte I had requested before Shabbos. Or how far I’ve fallen.

I assume that’s how some might understand my present observance, and a few years ago, I would’ve agreed with them. When I first began to dress in pants and eat vegetarian food in non-hekshered establishments, I felt guilty. It’s just a phase, I told myself. Soon, I’ll return to how I once was.

But I didn’t. Once I had enlarged my world by allowing myself to eat with my friends, once I let myself walk into a clothing store and take stock of the entire inventory instead of only the pieces with modest hems, I didn’t have the heart to make it smaller. And at some point, I stopped feeling guilty. I might have been making a confusing mess of things, but I was happier in the mire than I had been when all my efforts had been aimed at some sort of halachic observance perfection.

As I sat in the Garden and watched the gymnasts compete, I thought about how I wasn’t the only one on what some might consider a downward trajectory. Falls abounded in this competition, as they have in all meets since the rules of gymnastics were revised to abolish the perfect 10 that made Nadia Comaneci and the sport so famous. With an open-ended scoring system in place, the gymnasts at the 2008 American Cup were chucking as many complex skills as possible, hoping to rack up a high start value for their routines. Bent knees, wobbles and crashes have become commonplace as the difficulty level has increased. Perfection (or the pursuit thereof) in gymnastics is also no longer a reasonable goal.

But at least the gymnasts know where they’re supposed to land. The balance beam stands still for them. When I plant my feet, I can’t be sure I put them in the right place. My lines keep shifting. And for that uncertainty, I get frustrated sometimes, perhaps even a little angry.

But then I walked 70 blocks back to my apartment and found the Shabbat meal my housemate left for me on the kitchen table. I listened as he chanted Havdalah. Blessed are You who makes a distinction between the sacred and secular. I wished that things were as simple as the verse stated, or at least as easy as landing a cartwheel on the balance beam.

Dvora Meyers, who lives in Manhattan, is currently working on a book titled “Unorthodox Gymnastics.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization