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Rabbi’s World Series prediction: Anybody but the Cubs

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/30571/full/30571/rabbi-s-world-series-prediction-anybody-but-the-cubs/ Rabbi’s World Series prediction: Anybody but the Cubs Friday, October 13, 2006 | by joe eskenazi The Book of Exodus dutifully records 10 plagues, but Rabbi Byron Sherwin knows there’s really 11. Plague No. 11 is something of a mishmash of blood, boils and, of course, wild beasts: being a fan of the Chicago Cubs. “Calling my wife a Cubs fanatic would be an understatement. During a seder five or six years ago, she kept leaving the table and we could hear her cursing and yelling and throwing things. And one of our guests, a physician, asked if dinner wasn’t going well and she was angry. “But I said no, no, she’s just watching the Cubs game. And, as usual, they’re losing,” recalled Sherwin, a Chicagoan who manned the vacant bimah of Walnut Creek’s Congregation B’nai Shalom during High Holy Day services this year. The guest made a suggestion Sherwin would take to heart: “He said he knew of no medical remedy for this, but maybe I knew a kabbalistic remedy.” And, in a way, Sherwin did. He penned a novel in which a rabbi who specializes in Kabbalah (like him) is married to a lawyer who obsesses over the Cubs (like his wife) and the rabbi strives to “cure her from this terrible affliction.” Sherwin released his book, “The Cubs and the Kabbalist,” in April; in it the rabbi removes several curses on the team in kabbalistic fashion, leaving the Northside Boys free and clear to win their first World Series since 1908. Former Cubs President Andy McPhail dismissed the concept as asinine — and then promptly guided the team to a putrid 66-96 record before stepping down this month. The baseball fan’s rallying cry of “Wait ‘til next year!” has long carried the sweet taste of snail bait for Cubs fans — next year the team has invariably stunk, too. In contrast to the agonies of the Boston Red Sox, who came painfully close to snatching the crown during their 86 years of futility, for the past 99 seasons the Cubs have, with rare exceptions, emanated an odor befitting a city once known as the “hog butcher to the world.” “The conclusion I have come to is that they’re cursed. There’s no other possible explanation,” emphasized Sherwin, a professor at Chicago’s Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. The Cubbies last appeared in a World Series in 1945, falling to the Detroit Tigers in seven hard-fought games. While popular folklore holds that tavernkeeper Vasili “Billy Goat” Sianis placed a curse on the team when they refused to let him take his stinky goat into the game with him (go figure), Sherwin sees things differently. He believes the Cubs’ anti-Semitism damned them to collapse down the stretch in ‘69 to the Miracle Mets (don’t bring this one up around any Chicagoan), hit the ground face-first vs. Steve Garvey and the Padres in ‘84, feel the wrath of Will Clark and the Giants in ‘89 and — literally — suffer at the hand of Jewish fan Steve Bartman in 2003. The star player of the ‘45 Tigers, as any Jewish fan well knows, was Hank Greenberg. Greenberg was mercilessly hounded from the Cubs’ bench during that series, which Sherwin feels was far more fateful than any curse placed by a Greek immigrant and his goat. But the Cubs’ curse goes deeper than that. Sherwin claims the team initiated its suffering in 1932, the World Series where Babe Ruth allegedly called his shot to center field; fans and players ragged the Bambino because he supposedly had black relatives. In Sherwin’s book, the rabbi removes curses on Wrigley Field before creating a golem who pitches and hits his way to the World Series title. Sherwin has no plans to go down to Waveland Avenue and cast an incantation on Wrigley’s ivy-strewn walls. His book is a fantasy — “but the Cubs winning the World Series, period, is a fantasy,” he noted. While the Cubs’ 99 years and counting is a number often bandied about by the national media, local fans know that the San Francisco Giants haven’t won it all since 1954. And Sherwin has an explanation for that, too. The Giants are cursed because they took Willie Mays out of New York and put him in a windy hellhole called Candlestick Park — a move akin to taking the Venus de Milo out of the Louvre and putting it up in a Port-a-John. And the Giants also stole Mays and the team from a young fan named Byron Sherwin. “After the Giants left New York, I really stopped being a fan,” he admitted. “The Cubs and the Kabbalist” by Rabbi Byron L. Sherwin (260 pages, West Oak Press, $24.95).

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