David Roth's Weak In Review: An Easy Fast

It is not an uncommon thing for me to find myself, in the middle of the afternoon, alternating between a somber consideration of my own failings and daydreams about sandwiches. I seldom do this while wearing a suit, and only once a year do I do it while inside a house of worship. This Wednesday, on Yom Kippur, I did both. I fasted and put on my best clothes and stood with my parents, in front of our dour old testament deity and alongside a suburban congregation of checked-out orthodontists and their restless wormy kids.

There I chanted some prayers in a language I don't know—in what is either a hilarious indictment of my sect of the religion or just hilarious, I can sound the letters out on the page, but have basically no idea what the sounds I'm making might mean—and asked forgiveness for another year of stupid, lazyboned mistakes. That and I periodically had extremely vivid memories of a specific sandwich I ate at Parkway Bakery in New Orleans in 2011. So, pretty much the holiday as I have observed it all my life.

Remove the aforementioned deity from the equation, which I mostly have, and what's left are some quiet moments of introspective exercise and slashing collective self-indictments spoken in unison with a bunch of similarly afflicted near-strangers. That is, it's a little bit like going to a Mets game anytime between 2007 and the middle of this season, and also a little bit like therapy. Anyway, amid the lulling ritual and all the rhythms passively learned by heart, there is some time and space to think.

For a long time, I thought the challenge that Yom Kippur represented was to make the most clear-eyed and constructively ruthless assessment possible of where and how and why we have failed, individually and collectively; then, when we're done and the sun has gone down, we get to eat a bunch of smoked fish. While that work always made for a rollicking good time, I think now that this approach to repentance is, if not quite wrong, at least incomplete.

Our consciences are not just for making us feel bad when we screw up, after all. It will do that, from time to time, but that is not what a conscience is for. A conscience, properly deployed, reminds us how to be good. The rest of it, the precepts and commandments and scrolls and tablets and catechisms, is only what it is. It can be helpful, and those precepts and etc. help some people lead beautiful lives. That they can also serve to retroactively justify the smallest, cruelest, weakest, and most multiply impoverished human behaviors suggests that they can also be noise, or obfuscation. Most of us know when we are doing right and when we are doing wrong. Most of us do wrong when, and because, we choose not to notice, or care. It's not malice born of forethought. So much of our everyday wickedness comes from no thought at all. The rest just comes tumbling after.

Sports, like any other human expression that works—art or music or literature or the hot roast beef po'boy at Parkway—gives us delight because it lets us feel interesting new things. These games are played here in the stupid, cynical, intermittently beautiful world in which we live, and so are touched by and even surrounded by the ugliness we make around them; their power, or the bigger part of it, is the way in which they let us out of that world and into a space that's clearer and brighter and more expressive. They offer a pleasure that burns cleaner and hotter than the ones most easily available in our grubby, desperate, transactional everyday lives. It's the innocent thrill of play and the secular agape of awe, and neither is really an intellectual thing.

The time out of mind that comes with playing and watching or even a cruise control conversation about sports is good, but it can also feel irresponsible. Earlier this week, Jessica Luther wrote about the chainsaw-juggling tension of enjoying these games—of letting ourselves slip under and enter the altered state of fandom—while knowing what we know about their less sublime aspects. We're pulled forward by the simplifying emotion of it all, and then awaken with a start as we remember all the exploitations and excuses, the things overlooked and tacitly approved, that make the games possible.

The temptation is just to go under and stay under—to allow ourselves to believe that the pure clarity we feel in the throes of fandom is true, and that these temporary superhumans really are something more than human, that the hero of a given moment is a hero in all others, that Our Guys really belong to us in some way. This is false, and you know that, too. You have likely known it for some time. So we let ourselves forget, or forget ourselves, and go in. Or we can't, and so we don't. Knowing what we know—knowing what we can't help but know—about what professional football does to the people playing it, and how little it does for them in return, the only ethically defensible position on the NFL is to refuse it. Knowing what we can't help but know about the ways in which the NCAA and college sports plunder and profit off of gifted kids, the same is probably true, there.

So we do… what, exactly? I don't watch college football anymore, but I don't watch it for the same reason I don't eat foie gras or chug crude oil—sure, it's unethical and gross, but also I don't really like the taste that much. Ethically, it's a happy accident. I do watch the NFL, and if I enjoy it less than I did back when I still somehow believed that it was the cartoon war it purported to be, I also still enjoy it. It is my job to know about all this—to know about the teams and players, and to know about the exploitations and evasions and real world horrors—but that is just my job. There are choices all up and down the line, and you can maybe see where they all lead. I want to be good, just as most everyone does when they bother to think about it. I can see what is more good and what is less good, when I bother to have my eyes open. I can try to do my best, and I do try. I stand there all day, fasting and thinking and being as honest as I can. And then the sun goes down again, and I eat.