Thoughts on Sacred Spaces, Baseball and the Kotel

My recent visits to the former sites of Hilltop Park and the Polo Grounds has had me thinking about Eliade's theories regarding "sacred spaces" and the way my former instructor Del deChant describes baseball as a "secular religion." I realised that these places are sacred to me by virtue of what took place there many years ago. But this sacredness is relative to the perception of the person seeing them. To others not initiated into my world of baseball I was visiting a housing project and a medical center, but to me I was visiting a place where baseball used to live. I was visiting history. Just as, I can imagine, an uninitiated person might wonder why people come to Jerusalem from all over the world to visit an old wall. To them it is at most a historical curiosity, but to Jews it is the place where God used to live.


Topic: baseball, Judaism; religion.