... then do to him as he intended to do to his brother. You must purge the evil from among you. Deuteronomy 19:19

Today’s Scripture Reading (September 18, 2012): Deuteronomy 19

I love basketball. In Junior High I was one of the tallest boys in the school. (Actually, I stopped growing in the ninth grade.) That meant that I was a hot commodity for a basketball team that was looking to increase the average height of the team. But, there was a problem. Although I had the height, the sports I loved more than basketball were football and hockey. The players that I respected were the tough ones (at this point in my life my favorite hockey team was the Philadelphia Flyers equipped with the Broad Street Bullies.) But the very thing that I valued about a hockey or a football team was frowned on in basketball. As a result, I was a defensive liability and a player continuously in foul trouble (I only really needed a quarter of hard playing to foul out.) So I gave up on any dreams of organized basketball and contented myself to play pick-up games in the school yard.

In spite of my foul trouble, I understand the need for rules in the games that we play. There has to be boundaries to the actions we can take on the playing field just as there are in life. And when someone commits a foul, a penalty should be the result.

But there is a trend in sport that really bothers me. It is the attempt to make the referee call a penalty when no wrong has been committed. It angers me to see a hockey player fall just to see if maybe the action of falling will force a penalty call on the nearest player to him. Or it is the football player that jumps backwards after a play to make it look like he was pushed. The trend in hockey when someone ‘takes a dive’ is to call offsetting penalties. The player on whom the hoax is perpetrated gets penalized, but so is the person that pretended he was pushed or tripped. But, for me, it would seem that it should be one or the other – it cannot be both.

The legal system in Israel makes the same distinction. If a person is caught lying so that someone else will be found guilty of a crime, then the one that lies should bear the penalty that he intended his brother to receive – whatever that penalty should be. Too often, in sport and in life, lying seems to be the crime that can cause the most damage but carries the smallest penalty. Maybe that should change in all the arenas of our lives, as we realize the damage that our lies can create. 

       

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Deuteronomy 20