​SYMBIOSIS

No peanuts, no ball game. No ballgame, no peanuts. ​

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
No peanuts, no ball game. No ballgame, no peanuts.  Vendor, Chicago baseball parks.
 
At the end of daily morning worship, the rabbi from my New York synagogue, the remarkable Rachel Ain, teaches briefly, these days from a small but delightful tractate (larger than a chapter, smaller than a book) of the Talmud known as Avot or Pirkei Avot. It contains scores of pithy teachings (Pirkei) from the fathers (Avot) of rabbinic wisdom – the great rabbis of 1700-2000 years ago. The other day, she expanded on a teaching of Rabbi Elazar the son of Azariah, from chapter 3, teaching 21. That’s already more information than you need to know, but I am diligent about attribution.
 
Rabbi Elazar said, “No sustenance, no Torah. No Torah, no sustenance.” You gotta eat, and you gotta learn. You can’t have one without the other.
 
Though I have studied those words many times, the way Rabbi Ain presented them started me laughing as I remembered an old vendor at the ballparks in Chicago when I was a kid. I am certain I heard him for the first time at Comiskey Park and also pretty sure I heard him at Wrigley Field.  Back then, the White Sox and the Cubs were almost never at home on the same day, so the vendors could work both sides of the city. He would prowl the stands and shout, with a voice that could pierce through whatever else was going on among fielders and fans, “No peanuts, no ballgame. No ball game, no peanuts.”
 
He was enormously successful, much more so than the “hey, bottle-o-beer, bottle-o-beer” guy or the “COKE-a-cola” guy. The reason: he was right. No peanuts, no ballgame. No ballgame, no peanuts.
 
No, not literally. I watched a lot of baseball without peanuts, and I ate peanuts even in the dead of winter before pitchers and catchers reported or Topps released the first bubblegum cards of the season. But with three words ingeniously arranged, he created an association that was unforgettable. My proof: I haven’t heard him in probably sixty years, but his voice was clear as a bell just a few days ago.
 
Comparing a millennia-old religious teaching with a modern bit of micro-marketing might seem a little blasphemous, but this series of columns is entitled “wisdom wherever you find it,” and I mean it. The association of two ideas, one the listener considers essential and the other the expositor considers necessary, is a great way to persuade people of both.  People are naturally committed to earning a living. They have to feed themselves and those they love, provide for shelter, acquire clothing to present well and avoid shame.  A rabbi who wants to lay claim to their time with a less-natural inclination – to study God’s revelation and thus live a more righteous life – needs to create an equivalency that urges his priority upon them.
 
Mr. Vendor was likely not a student of Rabbi Elazar (trust me on this one). His goal was to convince people for whom baseball took its place with food, shelter, and clothing as essential that they needed to buy peanuts. His peanuts. By creating the association through his sing-song cry, every kid said to the grown-up who bought the tickets, every teenager said to friend who skipped school with them, every buddy said to their fellow fan, “Want some peanuts?” in a way that seemed natural. And at least in my family, it added to the soundtrack of happy memories that transcended eventual dispersion and the rift between Cubs and White Sox fans under the same roof.
 
I am confident in asserting that little boys did not go with their dads to the study hall, hear Rabbi Elazar and say to their fathers, “Want some Torah?” But whether you call it effective marketing or effective pedagogy, establishing an association between the organic and the desirable that rises above the noise is the best way to get results. Even sixty years later. Even 2000.