The Wrong Path to Haredi Reform

It was a balmy Wednesday evening in June of 1986 and I was on tenterhooks. England was playing Paraguay for a place in the quarter finals of the World Cup, and the need to know the score had completely overcome me. The house was quiet, my mother was in the kitchen doing whatever it is women have done in the kitchen for millennia, my father was in the front room, probably studying Torah, the younger kids were upstairs sleeping, and so I had the backroom all to myself. I crept inside, climbed up on a chair so I could reach the music console, and flipped the button to turn on the radio. This was the first time anyone had turned on the radio in our home. I spun the dial until I found a frequency that was transmitting the game, and to my immense joy heard Gary Lineker scoring the third goal to Paraguay’s none, which basically meant that England had won the game. I jumped off the chair and cheered, a little too loud I guess, for my father immediately came out of the front room to see what the commotion was about.

I never turned on the radio in the house again, not for any other game nor for any other reason, but 40 years later, Gary Lineker, one of England’s most prolific goal scorers, still occupies my thoughts. Lineker has another claim to fame: he is the only top-flight football player who never received a yellow or red card during his entire career. He has always been a perfect gentleman on and off pitch, and yet today he is a prominent and outspoken member of England’s far left, almost an occupant of its lunatic fringe. He advocates for illegal refugees, exorbitant rates of taxation, and other progressive causes, and it goes without saying that he detests Israel. This, to my mind, is a conundrum: how could such a law-abiding man, a sportsman in the traditional sense of that term, be part of a movement that is anti-law, institutionally violent, and generally aspires to the breakdown of Western society? In fact, anyone who aspires to “improve the brotherhood amongst nations”—the phrase used by Rabbi Moses Hayyim Luzzatto in the introduction to his The Path of the Just—should be troubled by this incongruity.