Author Profile: Rabbi Byron Sherwin

Still waiting for that miracle: Chicago rabbi combines Kabala and Cubs in novel

For the 98th straight year, the Chicago Cubs missed out on a chance to win a world championship. The team finished last in the National League Central Division, their manager was fired, and the front office is once again embarking on a “rebuilding effort,” sports jargon for “It’ll take a few more years until we’re competitive again.”

<a href=”http://baseballbookshelf.mlblogs.com/photos/uncategorized/sherwin_1.jpg”><img title=”Sherwin_1″ height=”137″ alt=”Sherwin_1″ src=”http://baseballbookshelf.mlblogs.com/my_weblog/images/sherwin_1.jpg” width=”100″ border=”0″ style=”FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 5px 5px 0px” /></a> Picking up on the pain and suffering of Cubs’ followers — among whom is his own wife — Rabbi Byron Sherwin sought to invoke Kabala to give the faltering ball club a leg up. For Sherwin, author of 25 scholarly books and over 150 monographs and articles, The Cubs and the Kabbalist: How a Kabbalah-Master Helped the Chicago Cubs Win Their First World Series Since 1908 (West Oak Press) represents his first foray into fiction. The tale’s hero, a rabbi and expert in Kabala, amazingly enough, conjures up spells and a golem to help the team win and his baseball-crazy wife get over her obsession.

Although fiction, aspects of the story do parallel Sherwin’s life. “My wife liked her ‘portrayal’ in the novel. She is a fanatic Cubs fan and an attorney. However, she understands that it is a novel, which means it is not a biography,” Sherwin wrote in an e-mail interview.

The idea for the book had its genesis during a seder. “My wife would constantly leave the table. We would hear yelling, shouting, banging, and the sound of things being thrown around in the kitchen. We thought that the dinner hadn’t come out too well. But what was actually happening was that she was going inside to see how the Cubs were doing, which was badly, as usual.

“A physician friend of ours began to express concern. I told him that the cause of all the ruckus was that my wife was watching the ball game. Half in jest he said, ‘I know of no medical treatment for this condition. You’ve studied Kabala for a long time. Maybe there’s some kabalistic magic you could use….’ That was the seed that became the book.”

<a onclick=”window.open(this.href, ‘_blank’, ‘width=179,height=271,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false” href=”http://baseballbookshelf.mlblogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/cubskabala_2.jpg”><img title=”Cubskabala_2″ height=”227″ alt=”Cubskabala_2″ src=”http://baseballbookshelf.mlblogs.com/my_weblog/images/cubskabala_2.jpg” width=”150″ border=”0″ style=”FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px” /></a>Sherwin said he wrote the book for several audiences. “I explain a lot about Jewish rituals and practices, which are quite elementary, but both Jews and non-Jews who have read the book have told me that they learned much about Judaism in a ‘painless’ way. The same may be true of readers who don’t know very much about baseball.”

He followed the New York Giants as a youngster, but when the team abandoned the East Coast, along with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he lost interest in baseball. “Somehow I feel the quality and sportsmanship of the game has deteriorated since then.

“Over the long run — now almost a century — I see no other explanation than that [the Cubs] are cursed, and that the curse needs to be removed. After all, when Babe Ruth’s family lifted the ‘Curse of the Bambino,’ the Red Sox won the World Series.” Indeed, with that Sox championship in 2004, the Cubs are now the poster team for postseason futility and fan disappointment.

But what if, by some miracle, the real Cubs had managed to get into the postseason? “If the team had won the Central division, the pennant, and the World Series this year, one could expect that the Messiah would not be far behind,” Sherwin joked. “I was not at all worried about that happening and hurting book sales.

“If the book has encouraged its readers to learn more about Judaism and also about Kabala, [it] has served its purpose.”

<align=”right”></align=”right”>This article appeared in the New Jersey Jewish News, Oct. 19, 2006