The Chronicle's story on Avinoam Sachs, the Israeli freshman pitching for MCC, caught the detail that matters most: for many of his teammates, he is the first Jewish person, let alone the first Israeli, they have ever met.
His story is an American one, a young man bringing his fastball and his identity to a Kansas City diamond.
What I can add, from Efrat, is the view from the other side of that meeting: what it is like to be the first Israeli in the room, something an increasing number of us become the moment we leave the country, and something a country at war has gotten strangely practiced at.
The Questions People Ask
Being the first Israeli in the room means fielding a curriculum of questions that arrive in a reliable order. First the safety question, asked with genuine concern. Then the army question, since everyone has read something about the reserves. Then the political question, delivered carefully, the way people approach a subject they assume is tender.
What surprises people is the answer's texture: Israelis at ease with being asked, fluent in the conversation, and far less fragile than the careful delivery anticipates. A country that argues about its own politics at full volume, daily, over breakfast, does not bruise when Kansas City brings it up. Sachs will have discovered the same thing in the dugout: the questions are not the burden. They are the beginning of friendship.
The Photos on the Phone
Then comes the moment that no one warns you about: the photos. Every Israeli abroad carries an album on their phone that their American friends do not expect, the reserve duty pictures, the duffel by the door, the panoramic shot of the unit, the goodbye party with the cake.
The podcast interviewers who spoke with Sachs when he was profiled as a standout pitcher found an athlete whose story ran through army service, a scheduling fact of Israeli life that reads as exotic abroad and as Tuesday at home. Flipping through those photos with a teammate, explaining what a miluim call-up is and why you smiled in the picture anyway, is the realest diplomacy the country exports. Nobody forgets the evening it happens.
Ambassador by Accident
None of us applied for the job. But an Israeli abroad discovers that they are carrying the country in their pocket, that the yellow ribbon on a junior-college jersey in Missouri travels by the same logic as the flag patch on a backpack: somebody has to be the first Israeli these particular people have met, and it happens to be you.
The good news is that the job mostly consists of being ordinary in public, showing up, answering the questions, letting the teammate discover that the first Israeli he ever met is a freshman with a good changeup who does his homework. The bonds that form across that gap, on a team, in a shul, over a fence, are the quietest and strongest thing the Jewish world has going, and they run through rooms like the one Avinoam Sachs walks into every practice.
So to the readers who cheered Sachs’ story: send the kid a thought this season. He is carrying more than innings, and from personal experience, the room is going to love him.