Leo Durocher, Hagar, and the Jewish People

A different approach to why we may not have felt tremendous gratitude after the war against Iran.

September 29th, 1954. Coogan’s Bluff in Upper Manhattan, where the Polo Grounds was located. It was the first game of the World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians, and in the top of the eighth inning, with men on first and second and the score tied 2-2, Cleveland’s Vic Wertz came to the plate against lefty Giant reliever Don Liddle.

On Liddle’s fourth pitch, a shoulder-high fastball, Wertz hit a towering drive into deep center field - a shot that would have been a home run in many ballparks, and in the Polo Grounds’ cavernous center field, was easily a double, and perhaps a triple. Roger Kahn, who was covering the game for Sports Illustrated in that magazine’s inaugural year, described the scene:

I had a nice view of the wallop. It was a monster. “Ballgame,” I thought. When you see a game every day, as I had for three seasons, you judge the ball more quickly than the fans. Ballgame, ballgame, ballgame. This was three bases. Two runs for the Indians. Then surely somebody would score Vic Wertz and…

At the instant of impact, bat on ball, Willie Mays turned his back and fled. He had taken one, quick, professional look and now he ran, with his back to the plate, on a straight line towards the bleachers, just to the right of dead center field. The bleacher wall was 450 feet from home plate. Mays ran and ran. As his toe spikes touched the narrow cinder track at the base of the bleachers, and the wall - a hard, unyielding wall with no padding - loomed before his face, he took the ball almost directly over his head. It carried a shade to the left of the button on his Giant cap. Then Willie stole the baseball out of the air. He spun and threw on the fly clear back into the infield. All Cleveland got out of Vic Wertz’s prodigious drive was a worthless base for Larry Doby, who tagged up and advanced to third. [Manager Leo] Durocher replaced Liddle with hard-throwing Marv Grissom, who walked the next hitter but held the Indians scoreless.¹

The Giants won the game in the tenth inning, 5-2, and swept the Series. Mays’s catch became The Catch; 71 years later, it remains one of the most famous moments in baseball history.

Immediately after the game, a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune asked manager Durocher if Mays’s play was the greatest catch of Willie’s career.

“What the !!@&* are you talking about? Willie makes !!@&* catches like that every day. Do you keep your !!@&* eyes closed in the press box?”²

Willie Mays, speaking with less invective than the vulgar Durocher, also denied that this catch was his greatest play.

Upon hearing Durocher’s comments, Cleveland manager Al Lopez was incredulous.

“I’ve been playing ball since I was a kid. I’ve been around the major leagues for thirty years. That was the greatest catch I’ve ever seen. Just the catch, mind you. Now put it all together. The catch. The throw. The pressure on the kid. I’d say that’s the best play anybody ever made in baseball. I got no idea, no idea at all, what Durocher is talking about.”³

When you see miracles happen every day, you tend to forget that they’re miracles.

---

After Abraham married Hagar and she became pregnant, she ran away into the desert to escape the abuse she suffered at Sarah’s hands. Near a well between the cities of Kadesh and Bared, Hagar was granted a vision of angels⁴ who offer her prophetic messages about her future progeny. Surprisingly, Hagar communicates with these angels without any apparent fear or reluctance; she seemingly treats this vision as a typical and common occurrence.

After the prophecy concludes, Hagar names God, E-l Ro’i (“God Who sees all”),⁵ because, as Rashi explains, “Could I have imagined that even here in the deserts I would see the messenger of the Omnipresent, after I had seen them in the house of Abraham? For there I was accustomed to seeing angels!” Rashi continues, “Know that she was accustomed to seeing them, for when Manoah [the father of Samson] saw an angel one time, he exclaimed, ‘We will surely die!’ Yet [Hagar] saw four angels one after the other, and didn’t tremble.”⁶

When you see miracles happen every day, you tend to forget that they’re miracles.

---

Last week, I wrote an article called “Where’s the Jubilation?” I wrote that while we are grateful for God’s benevolence during the war against Iran, many of us feel empty and unable to celebrate. I offered five reasons why, I believe, many Jews across the world are not experiencing the euphoria that we otherwise might have expected to feel.

Yet in thinking about it further, and considering everything we have learned about the incredible work of the Mossad and the IDF, I would like to suggest a sixth, more hopeful reason that I did not consider earlier:

When you see miracles happen every day, you tend to forget that they’re miracles.

One of the opening missions - to kill Iran’s greatest nuclear scientists - was, according to the Wall Street Journal, “considered so fantastical by even its planners that it was called ‘Operation Narnia,’ after the fictional C.S. Lewis series.” It was, in other words, essentially the stuff of fantasy literature - yet it worked brilliantly, as did so many other aspects of Israel’s unprecedented surprise attack.

Some might argue that this success is due to the incredible abilities of Israel’s army and intelligence services, and has little to do with divine intervention. But as I asserted on an episode of the Orthodox Conundrum Podcast soon after the war began, Israel’s strength - the fact that the unquestioned superpower in the Middle East is a tiny country of ten million Jews surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who harbor an eliminationist mindset against them, created only three years after a third of the world’s Jewish population was slaughtered and populated by refugees from countless countries that had kicked them out - is a miracle of unprecedented proportions. This is not a case, like the miracle celebrated on Chanukah, of God’s “giving the mighty into the hands of the weak.”⁷ No, it is the miracle that the weak underdog, with everything seemingly working against it, became the mighty.

As Rav Soloveitchik wrote years ago, “From the standpoint of reason and logistics, our efforts against imponderable odds are insane. Building a homeland in a hotbed of hatred, surrounded by wealthy Arabs in enormous numbers whose opposition to Jewish strivings is seething and unabated, lacks all rational justification. Yet we struggle because the land was promised to us four thousand years ago.”⁸ And somehow, out of the mist of near impossibility, a good and thriving State of Israel has emerged - a testament to God’s continued involvement in the life of His people.

If we only witnessed this in the war against Iran, then we would most certainly have taken notice. But the amazing reality is that this happens all the time! When rockets and missiles are intercepted with such boring regularity, we forget how incredible it is that we barely register any fear. (The countless videos of Israelis receiving a warning that they soon need to enter their bomb shelters because of incoming Iranian or Houthi missiles, while they continue laughing on the phone or playing ball because they don’t need to go into their shelters for another ten minutes, indicate how much we simply assume that everything will be OK.)

Israelis demonstrate their resilience and strength by continuing with their routines despite air raid sirens; yet this bravery largely comes from the reasonable assumption that the IDF will take care of the problem for us. We’re so used to Houthi missiles being intercepted that we forget that most people in any other society would not take this as a given.

Accordingly, upon further reflection, I think that we didn’t feel an intense need to thank God for his miracles because we experience miracles day after day. They have become commonplace. We are like the Mishnaic sages Choni HaMaagal or Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, whom the Talmud calls “accustomed to miracles.”⁹

When you see miracles happen every day, you tend to forget that they’re miracles. So let’s do our best to remember - and thank God accordingly for His demonstration of kindness and love.

If you’ve been enjoying what you read here and want to see Orthodox Conundrum Commentary grow - with more posts, additional writers, and a greater range of topics - I’d love for you to consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s a small way to say, “I want more of this,” and it makes a big difference. Thank you!

1. Roger Kahn, Memories of Summer, p. 193.

2. Ibid. p. 194.

3. Ibid.

4. Because of the unusual repetition of the phrase, “The angel of Hashem said to her,” Rashi asserts that four different angels spoke to her.

5. See Targum Onkelos on Bereshit 16:13.

6. Rashi on Bereshit 16:13.

7.

From the Al HaNisim prayer on Chanukah.

8. Abraham Besdin, Man of Faith in the Modern World: Reflections of the Rav, Volume Two, p. 31.

9. See Sanhedrin 109a and Meilah 17b.