Return To The Garden

By: Yochanan Gordon

Someone mentioned to me in passing that I’ve been writing a lot about the Knicks lately.

That’s a bit disingenuous.

I have been following the Knicks’ historic run to the Finals, for sure.

The truth is that I have consumed my fair share of sports commentary during this time—Stephen A.; Mike Francesa; and Shaq, Ernie, Chuck, and Kenny just to name a few.

However, what I have been putting out cannot exactly be classified as sports commentary. Rather, it is an attempt to unearth deeper Jewish concepts against the backdrop of this year’s NBA Finals campaign.

Instead of waving off sports fandom as a complete waste of time, it’s important to demonstrate how there are sparks of light and meaning embedded within it, as there are in all parts of creation that are not prohibited by halacha.

If Hashem arranged for the Knicks to be back in the NBA Finals after 27 years, against the same team they lost to back in 1999, and the attention of the world is drawn to it, there must be a lesson to learn from it.

For frum sports fans, game two of the Finals taking place on Friday night was a bit of a disappointment. While I didn’t actively seek it out, I ended up finding out the score late Friday night when I heard someone talking about it in passing.

I got to shul early Shabbos morning and was told that the rebbe, who was also aware of what had happened the night before, walked into shul and asked the first person he saw: “What is the avodah of the Knicks going up 2–0 against the Spurs in the NBA Finals?”

He then answered his own question:

“Hashem wants Yidden to have a taste of what it means to wait for something for a long time and finally achieve that thing.”

It has been 53 years since the Knicks last won a championship in 1973. Aside from 1994, 1999, and the last few years when they became playoff contenders, it has been a pretty abysmal run for the New York Knicks.

The Knicks have been waiting only 53 years; the Jewish people have been waiting more than 1,900 years for their own redemption. And while there is no comparison between 53 years and 1,900 years, for anyone younger than 53 years old it is essentially the same thing, because in both cases we have no idea what it tastes like.

We regularly daven for geulah and, if we are truly sensitive, we may find ourselves praying in our own language and our own words, asking Hashem to bring the redemption both individually and collectively. Yet the truth is that we have no frame of reference for what geulah actually feels like.

Every Shabbos and yom tov before bentching we recite Shir Hama’alos: “B’shuv Hashem es shivas Tzion hayinu k’cholmim”—when Hashem returns the captives of Zion, we will be like dreamers awakening from a dream.

Rabbi Zakutinsky pointed out that when Moshiach arrives, all the years of pain, heartbreak, disappointment, and tragedy that accompanied exile will simply fall away in the overwhelming light of redemption. Not because they never happened, but because they will no longer define our experience. Looking back, the entire exile will seem like a dream from which we have awakened.

Perhaps that is part of the avodah of the Knicks’ success. To taste, however faintly, what it means for decades of disappointment to disappear in an instant when that which was longed for finally arrives.

And from my vantage point here, writing this within exile, although I believe in the concept of Moshiachand hope every day that he comes, right now exile is all any of us knows.

So if the Knicks end up winning the Finals this year, bringing an end to their 53-year drought, for many of us, in addition to being a story of sports redemption for the franchise and its loyal fans, it may renew our hope that our own redemption could sprout forth at any moment.

What is redemption?

It’s interesting that the Hebrew words for exile and redemption are almost identical. Exile is golah and redemption is geulah. The only difference is the letter aleph, which technically doesn’t even have a sound.

Our sages explain that redemption is the reintroduction of the Aleph—representing Hashem—into exile.

Many people think of exile and redemption as places. Leaving the Diaspora and arriving in Eretz Yisrael. But the truth is that even the Jews living in Eretz Yisrael today are still in exile. Redemption is not merely geographic.

Geulah is the ability to perceive G-dliness in everyone, everything, and everywhere.

The next question is what happens when geulah comes. If redemption is the revelation of unfiltered Divine light, what happens when that light enters our finite and limited existence?

In the revealed parts of Torah, the transition is often described in traumatic terms. The war of Gog and Magog and the upheaval preceding Moshiach’s arrival led even great Amoraim such as Reb Yosef to remark regarding Moshiach: “Let him come but let me not see him.”

Yet the Zohar and the works of Kabbalah and Chassidus describe another possibility: a geulah b’rachamim—a redemption that unfolds with kindness, mercy, and seamless transition.

I was reminded of this when I came across an Instagram video in which someone said: “If the Knicks win the Finals in Madison Square Garden, you might as well call FEMA and the National Guard because the streets of New York will be on fire.”

While exaggerated, it captures an interesting idea. It is almost as though New York before a championship and New York after a championship are two different realities. A redemption of that magnitude seems to require a revolution.

But perhaps there is another possibility.

Perhaps redemption can arrive not through destruction but through revelation.

Not by replacing the world, but by illuminating it.

Redemption, in its deepest sense, is a return to the Garden.

Not to another world, but to this one illuminated by the Aleph of Elokus. A world in which G-dliness is no longer concealed beneath the surface of existence, but visible within everyone and everything.

The world itself is compared in Shir HaShirim to a garden. Geulah is humanity’s return to the state of Adam HaRishon before the exile from Gan Eden.

How fitting, then, that after more than half a century, the Knicks stand on the threshold of their own redemption in a place called Madison Square Garden.

The Knicks may be chasing a championship, but the Jewish people are waiting for something far greater. We are waiting for the day when all of creation returns to its source, when exile gives way to geulah, and when the Garden is restored. 

Yochanan Gordon can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.