Locally, the Sports News may have been dominated by College Basketball talk, but many fans around the country celebrated something else big in American tradition this week: Opening Day in Baseball.
While every sport has its "first game of the season" there's something about baseball's opening day. Perhaps it’s the association with fresh cut grass and the sunshine of spring. Maybe it’s due to the country’s long history with baseball. (Or maybe, it's just the way I grew up!) Whatever the case, opening day is big enough that there’s a movement out there to officially declare the day a national holiday.
One thing special about the "opening day" of a 162 game season is that the past is history. The disappointment of the previous season is forgotten. Every team is at exactly the same place. Everyone thinks this might just be their year. In June, it might be a different story, but for now, each team has real hope and optimism.
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As Jews, we have many opportunities to experience this feeling. One is each morning. In fact, one of the reasons G-d created us in a way that requires us to sleep (just imagine how much we could get done without needing to sleep!) is to allow us that “fresh start” every morning. Without sleep life would be ever-continuous and we’d never have the ability to start anew and put yesterday behind us. A new morning allows us to declare, “Today will be different.”
And in a greater sense, Shabbos is a reset button for the disappointments of the previous week. As Shabbos concludes and we wish each other “Shavua Tov,” we leave the beautiful oasis of Shabbos and begin the work week anew.
And then, we have the renewal new month. It’s not by coincidence that the word in Hebrew for month, “Chodesh,” literally means “new.” With the new moon comes new hope and opportunity.
But this Shabbos we experience this renewal in a deeper manner. Called in the Torah “the first month of the year,” the month of Nissan is when our people became a free people. It is when we were able to rid ourselves of the negativity of our past and leave Egypt behind. Today too, Nissan is called “the month of redemption,” a time we are given the ability to transcend our natural limitations of the past and “pass over” the factors that so often restrict our growth. Passover may begin in two weeks, but the opening day of Nissan is this Shabbos.