{"id":23485,"date":"2010-09-12T16:30:36","date_gmt":"2010-09-13T00:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=23485"},"modified":"2010-09-12T21:10:11","modified_gmt":"2010-09-13T05:10:11","slug":"life-lessons-from-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=23485","title":{"rendered":"Life Lessons From Football"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.jewishpress.com\/pageroute.do\/45097\">Rabbi Meir Goldberg writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>The importance of a tzibbur: Joshua Schwager, member of the 1986 national champion Penn State Nittany Lions and now a shomer Torah umitzvos Jew, told my students at Rutgers that the 2007 New York Giants became a great team and won the Super Bowl only after they got rid of Tiki Barber and Jeremy Shockey.<\/p>\n<p>             Shockey and Barber had both been offensive superstars for the Giants for years before the &#8217;07 season. They both put up flashy individual statistics, but that didn&#8217;t translate into playoff victories for the Giants. Shockey and Barber negatively affected team chemistry by being &#8220;me first&#8221; players who loudly criticized teammates and coaches. But after Barber retired prior to the 2007 season and Shockey&#8217;s injury forced him to miss the playoffs, the Giants came together as a team.<\/p>\n<p>Devarim 33:5 tells us, &#8220;And He was King in Jeshurun, whenever the sum total of the people were gathered, and the tribes of Israel were together.&#8221; Rashi, quoting the Sifri, comments, &#8220;When Israel is gathered together in a unified group, and there is peace among them, God is their King &#8211; but not when there is strife among them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Klal Yisrael can only be Hashem&#8217;s people when we are all working as a unified whole. <\/p>\n<p>RABBI RABBS EMAILS: The better example would be the 2001 Seattle Mariners who won an insane 116 games. What was their secret? Prior to the start of that season, Alex Rodriguez had left.<\/p>\n<p>ARod set a record for signing for the biggest contract ever as he made a fortune in Texas, and Seattle immediately set an American League record for the most wins in a season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rabbi Meir Goldberg writes: The importance of a tzibbur: Joshua Schwager, member of the 1986 national champion Penn State Nittany Lions and now a shomer Torah umitzvos Jew, told my students at Rutgers that the 2007 New York Giants became &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=23485\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[23708,23706,20271,23709,23707,651],"class_list":["post-23485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","tag-champion-penn-state","tag-giants-shockey","tag-new-york-giants","tag-penn-state-nittany","tag-penn-state-nittany-lions","tag-rabbi-meir"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23505,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23485\/revisions\/23505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}