Dear Rabbi and Susan,
I learned a lot from this episode. One question I have with regards to “masculine” versus “feminine” actions: Would you consider competitive sports to be a masculine activity or is this also something that “masculinizes” women? In other words, can women compete in sports and still be feminine?
Is the answer different for team sports vs individual sports eg. basketball vs long distance running? Also, would you consider being a doctor a masculine or feminine profession? Thank you for your response.
Katie-Lynn J.K.
Dear Katie-Lynn,
Before we can approach your question directly, we’d like to reframe it. Let’s start by asking if competitive sports are a positive activity for anyone—male or female. While this question sounds shocking, even to us, we think it is worth analyzing.
As you know, Fitness is one of our 5Fs, the five arenas in which progress is essential for a well-rounded, happy, and fulfilling life. In our book, The Holistic You, within the category of Fitness we include our relationship with food, exercise, and keeping our bodies in good shape.
Where do sports fall in this picture? Staying physically healthy demands a certain amount of exercise. Whether that comes from swimming or hiking, basketball or soccer is immaterial. Our bodies need to move to keep us healthy and flexible. We have a responsibility to maintain the bodies that God blessed us with just as we have a responsibility to keep our cars and homes in working order.
However, that does not automatically translate into competitive sports.
In one of the strangest naming instances in history, the modern state of Israel instituted a “Jewish Olympics” multi-sport event based in Israel and called it the Maccabiah Games. To any ear familiar with Jewish history, this sounds richly ironic. One of the features of Greek culture against which the original Maccabees fought, back in 167 BCE, was the Greek emphasis on the gymnasium and the adulation of the human body.
For this reason, we have to question to what degree ancient Jewish wisdom encourages competitive sports for anyone, males included. Let’s dig a little deeper into this.
Competition serves a valuable purpose. Whether one is striving for athletic, business, or intellectual achievement, competition can spur one to work harder. However, as you suggest in your question, competitiveness is definitely a God-given masculine trait. Like anything else it can be carried to an extreme, but everyone knows that little girls in a group sit and talk or play together while little boys fight, strive, and struggle for top position. They compete because they are male. Just as it can be disturbing to see two women competing in boxing or in mixed martial arts, it can be disturbing to meet men with no competitive ambition at all.
Keeping score rather than simply shooting hoops certainly does add spice to the activity. Yet, at a certain point, competition becomes a negative. This is easy to see when large sums of money are involved and there is a temptation to throw a game or to encourage gambling on the results. But the big danger is when someone is single-minded in pursuit of being number one, and blithely ignores the other 4 of his 5Fs, concentrating solely on athletic prowess.
Directing all of one’s energies to one area, whether it be sports, artistic, financial, or intellectual achievement runs counter to our advice for good living. For example, we would see eschewing friendships, knowledge, family, and devoting oneself only to mastery of tennis or football to be a mistake. Occasionally in the short term, one might focus on one area, but to spend, let’s say, fifteen years devoted to only one specialty, even if you end up being the best of the best in the world, doesn’t bring one a fulfilling and happy life.
Too often, those who have reached the very top of a sport, whether it be baseball or ballet, are not well-rounded people, but individuals with one outstanding area and many other stunted ones. So, we counter your question about competitive sports for males vs. females by suggesting that there is a tipping point at which the pursuit of excellence, of hyper-competitiveness, becomes a negative for both.
That said, however, we would add that women have a physical indicator when they are placing too much emphasis on physical achievement. Amenorrhea is a condition when women stop or become irregular in their menstrual cycles because of training their bodies for athletics. Causing physical harm to one’s body in order to compete would add an additional complicating factor to this issue.
That being said, as long as it is kept within boundaries, the skills that both girls and boys develop from working with a sports team as well as responsibly developing one’s body are both positive aspects of sports. We aren’t suggesting being a couch potato, simply that the degree to which competitive sports is adulated in our culture shows an inheritance from Athens rather than from Jerusalem.
We would like to reserve our answer to your question about whether being a physician is the same for men as for women for a Deep Dive into this Ask the Rabbi. Stay tuned.
Competitively yours,
Rabbi Daniel and Susan Lapin
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