“Is This Heaven Or Is It New Jersey?”

By Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman

(A baseball story excerpted from The Forward)

We had wanted to go to the shore — 70 miles to the south — to watch the waves and the seagulls. Instead, my wife Ruchama and I drifted toward Brookdale Park, a leafy paradise in Montclair, NJ, just a few miles from the concrete and cobblestone of our gritty homebase of Jewish Passaic.

Here the ballfields and tracks are manicured and vivid. The foul lines and base paths are brightly painted and the ball skips around in the golden hue of the late summer afternoon.

At the park, Ruchama and I settled behind the backstop of a baseball field. Two young men in their 20s were playing pitcher and catcher. You could hear the satisfying snap of the hardball into the catcher’s mitt, the catcher calling out balls and strikes as though it were a real game. I watched with the loneliness of a 10-year-old wanting to be included.

Even though I was many decades older than they were, and I was wearing the uniform of an Orthodox Jewish male from Passaic — white shirt, dress pants, black yarmulke — I nevertheless asked, “Could I join you?”

“Sure,” they answered. “Grab a glove, and we’ll hit some out.”

Jake, the pitcher, picked up a bat and corked the ball to the outfield. I didn’t realize a ball could get up so high. I got under it and waited for it to obey the laws of gravity and fall plop into my glove. I threw it back in.

He hit the next one to his friend Brad. This one went ever farther and higher. Brad galloped like a gazelle, chased it down, relayed it to me, and I passed it back home. Jake drew from a bag full of hardballs, spilling out near the backstop. He was a human fountain of pop-ups, hitting them faster than we could shag them.

I am well past the age of playing baseball. I’m almost a pensioner, and I was never good at the game anyway. I should have kept strolling in the park with my wife, both hands clasped behind my back. What keeps calling me to the game, even now in the late innings of life?

I grew up as a backbencher in the bais medrash in Yeshiva Chaim Berlin. In the yeshiva’s bucolic Camp Morris in the Catskills, on Friday afternoons in summer, the big men of the bais medrash would lumber over to the ball fields — and they would hit the tar out of the ball. Too young to play with them, I would “announce” the game from behind the backstop with my friend Mayer Weinberger. Afterwards, we would play high-pops for hours.

Perhaps these Montclair men saw something in me. Could they have known how happy baseball makes me? Did they sense a bond between us, a bridge across the decades? Our parks in Passaic are not as fancy. We have good food, good friends, and a wonderful life. Why stray into the manicured gardens of Montclair? No one from Passaic does.

As the sun drifted down, another friend of theirs joined us. “Now let’s do fast-pitching practice,” Jake said.

I wore a batting helmet, but I knew nothing of Jake’s control. An errant fastball could do me in. I had played fast-pitch softball, got beaned once and escaped with a swollen arm. But this was hardball, and a lot more dangerous. I stood there, shaky bat in hand, swung and missed, but then poked one up the third base line, a bonafide hit. I braced for the impact of Jake’s two-seamers, but I stood fast and hit some more.

After the last ball, we parted in different directions. I saw them climbing the small hill in right field in the dying light of the day, while I headed for the parking lot on the north side. We waved to each other with all the good will upon which this country was built.

Later that night, in my Passaic bed, I fell into a young man’s sleep and stumbled into a dream: Jake had hit the ball high above the treetops. Then he hit another and another. They rose in arcs. I settled under one, waiting for it, twisting, turning, my gloved hand held out.