Like many of you, I imagine, I have been glued to this year’s Winter Olympics. I can’t wait to cheer on Israel’s first ever bobsled team (nicknamed Shul Runnings!) when they compete next week, I was devastated when the US women’s hockey team shut out the Canadian team, and I love hearing the individual stories of triumphs and challenges from athletes across the globe.
Lindsey Vonn’s story is one that I’ve been closely following. Vonn is an American alpine ski racer, who returned to the Olympics this year at the age of 41 for the first time since 2018. She crashed in a World Cup race last month, and was determined to compete in Milano Cortina. At Sunday’s race, she crashed and had to be evacuated by helicopter for surgery on a broken leg. But the part that stands out is what Vonn herself said after Sunday’s injury: “And similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try. I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.”
Vonn’s words are not that far from the Talmudic story of Rabbi Eliezer, who told his students that they should repent the day before they died. The students replied, “But how do we know when that will be?” Their teacher responded, “Then you should repent today – just in case!” Judaism reminds us that life is uncertain – we need to live fully with the days that we have. While our version of living fully may not be hurling ourselves down a mountain with a torn ACL (to each their own!), Judaism calls us to live in the present, knowing that our mortality is inevitable.
