Empty Stadiums and Empty Shuls

To own a baseball team, it helps to be wealthy; it also helps to be clever. Faced with a pandemic-shortened season and the accompanying absence of fans, certain intrepid owners decided to do the next best thing: to create their own fans. And so they constructed thousands of life-size cardboard cutouts to “fill” their stadiums. For 50 dollars you can have your own full-color picture enlarged, laminated, and cardboard-ized, and placed in a choice seat behind home plate — where it will remain for the entire season.

The advantages are many. Your likeness is at the game, while you relax at home. No more frantic searching for a parking space within a mile of the ball park. No more standing in line to get to your seat. You don’t have to imbibe warm beer or soggy peanuts. You don’t have to get hoarse cheering for your team. No inebriated spectators to disturb you, no pesky ushers to ask you to sit down because you’re blocking the view of those behind you. For 50 bucks you’re set for the season. Personalized life-size cardboard cutouts at athletic events: an idea whose time has come.

Which generates some speculation during this awesome Tishrei season. Many of us, unable to be in a shul these Yamim Noraim, davened at home, or at best in some tent or front yard or driveway. Suppose that some enterprising shul gabbai, unhappy with his empty shul, placed a cardboard cutout of ourselves, complete with tallis and yarmulke, at our regular seat in shul, and kept it there week after week.

For the gabbai this would be, if I may use the expression, a G-dsend. The cutout would never demand an aliyah or an honor, would sit quietly and never whisper to his neighbor, would disturb no one by moving in and out of the row, would listen respectfully to the rabbi’s sermon and never fall asleep, would never complain that the davening is too slow or too fast: the very model of a model congregant.