My Dinner with an Oakland Raider

This past Saturday night, I left the NCSY National Yarchei Kallah in Stamford, CT to have dinner with an NFL player. This pro football player, a member of the Oakland Raiders, was in town to play the Jets on Sunday, so I picked him up from his hotel near the Meadowlands and took him to Dougie’s in Teaneck.

A little backstory may be necessary at this point. NCSY’s Rabbi Jack Abramowitz moderates an online Q&A forum called AskNCSY (AskNCSY@ou.org: ). He and this Raider have been corresponding for several months. The football player reads his Bible and has questions about Chizkiyahu HaMelech and Elisha HaNavi. He found Rabbi Abramowitz online and they have developed something of a real-life friendship. So Jack, Joey Pollak (husband of NCSY Atlantic Seaboard Regional Director Bonnie Pollak) and I took this Raider out for dinner. (Joey speaks “football,” which neither Jack nor I do, so we brought him along as interpreter.)

What a nice guy! One might expect a pro athlete to be full of himself, but he was down to Earth, humble, and an outright mentch. We talked about his career, the Yarchei Kallah, “Genesis and the Big Bang” and many other topics. One thing that he mentioned was that in his hometown, he can’t go out without being mobbed, in Oakland there’s a 50/50 chance of being recognized, but in New Jersey his anonymity was pretty safe.

Shortly after that, a man walked over to a table near ours and started talking with two girls who were seated there. Surprisingly, this man was wearing an Oakland Raiders Jersey! Jack joked to our guest, “Why don’t you go over and give him a thrill?” (Our guest, modest as he is, declined.) From this Jack drew a lesson: Sometimes the very thing we’re looking for is virtually under our noses. What Raiders fan expects a member of his team to be seated two tables away at a kosher restaurant in New Jersey? All he had to do was open up his eyes and look around! Isn’t the same true with so many other things in life? Isn’t the perfect job, the perfect school, the perfect mate, the perfect relationship with G-d right there? G-d puts what we need within our reach. All we have to do in open our eyes and see it.

  1. AMEN RABBI.
    keep ‘em coming.

    -Kaley M. Ames.

    p.s. I was at Bermans for shabbos with my sister, when are you guys coming over?

    Posted by Kaley M. Ames  on  01/08  at  08:59 AM

  2. R’ Burg:

    Reb Shlomo Carlebach would tell this story and end off by strumming his guitar and slowly chanting “you never know....”

    Awesome story!

    --Menachem

    Posted by Menachem Butler  on  01/12  at  12:43 PM
    3. Page 1 of 1 pages

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


Next entry: The Effect of NCSY

Previous entry: Yarchei Kallah Atmosphere

<< Back to main