Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

April 14, 2023

The Teenage Runner Who Chose the Sabbath over the Championship

Chariots of Fire in suburban Maryland.

In fall 2021, Oliver Ferber—then a sixteen-year-old and a stand-out athlete at a pluralistic Jewish day school in suburban Maryland—made one of the most difficult decisions of his young life. Like one of the two protagonists of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, Ferber decided to sit out a championship race being held on Shabbat. Sam Borden tells his story:

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