TRADITION QUESTIONS: Super Seder
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What is it?
A Shana Ba’aretz program for Yeshivish American students, located in the Beis Yisroel neighborhood of Jerusalem, hosts an annual Super Seder timed to coordinate with the Super Bowl. Students learn through the night until dawn and then daven vatikin. The Yeshiva solicits sponsorships online before and during the event, which includes a live video feed of the students learning (like superstars) in the Beit Midrash. In marketing the Super Seder, the Yeshiva uses the themes and logos of that year’s Super Bowl, including its Roman numerals and Lombardi trophy (artistically transformed into a silver shtender).
The yeshiva understands that its students would likely participate in the international celebration of sports culture and consumerism that is the Super Bowl, even during their years of study abroad. With great fanfare, the Yeshiva consciously goes head-to-head with the competing culture, creating an intense all-night religious challenge to channel its students’ energies. (Perhaps lifting a page from American consumerism and commercialism’s playbook, the Yeshiva uses the event as a fundraising juggernaut—complete with a “halftime show” and Super Bowl-worthy commercial.)
Why does it matter?
As Israel is seven hours ahead of EDT, the Super Bowl begins its broadcast in Jerusalem at 1:30 AM. For years, students have stayed up late into the night and have been known to miss Monday’s morning seder. Rabbis have used negative messaging to discourage participation in this secular rite, but to little effect. To acknowledge the Super Bowl phenomenon in the lives of its students is to move away from an ascetic, cloistered image that such institutions had projected in the past. Yet an honest confrontation with the real temptations within its students’ lives requires an integration of the calendar and norms of general culture. What will be the effect of this official integration? In generations to come, will the minhag of a mishmar on the second Sunday of February be the subject of divrei Torah seeking its hidden mystical meaning – perhaps even becoming the highlight of the six weeks of Shovevim? Purim draws near, but it may be no joke to imagine a sefer titled Super Bowl Sunday KeHilkhata.
What questions remain?
Some have been critical of this assimilation of general culture into frum culture, specifically in light of growing antisemitism. As Yisrael Besser recently wrote:
Something has shifted in the last few months, and you can’t hide from it. We’re starting to comprehend what our grandparents knew in their bones, to viscerally understand that we are alone in this world and that the excitement and allure and dazzle of secular culture is not meant for us. We always knew this intellectually, but now the knowledge is in our kishkes.
Is this in fact true? Will there be a move away from the Super Bowl and other totems of general society? What would be the indications of this new communal seclusion? If they do not materialize, why not?
For the moment, it appears that amidst war and growing antisemitism, the appeal of general culture – in the form of Super Bowls and Ivy League Colleges – has been largely undiminished in the Orthodox community. In a recent article describing secular Jews’ aversion to certain colleges, Bruce Scher, a college counselor at Kohelet Yeshiva High School outside Philadelphia says, “I don’t think people are giving up their dreams of going to Harvard — I’m seeing a lot of applications going there.” Does an Orthodox Jew’s commitment to halakha and protection within a strong community’s norms make him less likely to see the changes and threats from general society than his “less committed” cousins?
Turning the channel from Super Seder to this year’s Super Bowl, several advertisements called attention to the rise in antisemitism. They show a caring non-Jewish neighbor painting over a swastika graffitied on a Jewish home, Israeli dads who are very much like Super Bowl viewers, and the call to not be silent in the face of common hatred. The commercials encouraged their audience to see Jews as “one of us.” Do we still feel like “one of us”?
Elizabeth Rand, a mother of a Jewish high school senior, was quoted in the article referenced above, “I don’t think as Jews we should be hiding, I think that we should be fighting and not let this intimidate us.” The choice to not attend secular campuses rife with anti-Israel hatred is “to hide.” To nevertheless attend and be the victim of such hatred is “to fight.” Active shooter training teaches to first run; if that does not work, then hide; and if that does not work, then fight. Why do we not also use the metaphor “to run” from this hatred? To what safe place might we run?
Chaim Strauchler, an associate editor of TRADITION, is rabbi of Cong. Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck.