Only hours after the tragic death of a Georgian athlete during his luge training run, the opening ceremonies at the Vancouver Winter Olympics were beamed across the world. As the athletes filed into the stadium, the attending crowd gave the contingent from Georgia a standing ovation. Wearing black arm bands, the Georgian athletes were still in shock, only just beginning to mourn. What was the crowd saying with its sustained applause?  Certainly it was making a statement of unity, a show of support, in recognition of the team's grief. But it likely signaled an additional understanding ~ a reverent acknowledgment ~ that athletic competition, when played at the highest levels, is about overcoming obstacles in all its forms; and that even in the face of profound tragedy, the true Olympian finds the resolve ~ somehow, and shows up for the game.

In the aftermath of the terrible accident in Vancouver, one news commentator noted that the elite athlete is "unlike the rest of us." Where most of us modulate our risk-taking with a requisite measure of caution, the world-class competitor vanquishes fear in order to jump higher, push harder, exert beyond what was one thought impossible; the elite athlete's goal is to reset the boundaries of human endurance, to challenge the notion that there are limits to the human capacity to perform. It is no coincidence that the Olympic Games are modeled after the games of the ancient Greeks, and that those games were connected mythically to the powers of the gods. Almost more than winning a gold medal is the athlete's pride at simply being present at the Olympic Games. "I am an Olympian"… the statement of identity that elevates oneself beyond the merely human…. pushing, probing, testing to find out where the "edge" is, discovering where the absolute boundaries are, and then defying those human limitations.

I suspect that those of us who watch these games with interest, who share in the excitement of a the jump, the speed, the grace of the body-in-motion, who feel the disappointment of the fall, the crash, the injury, the failure to "place" ~ we understand (at least at some level) the athletes who decide to live on the edge. Perhaps this is because most of us have also been to the edge in our own lives ~ at least for a short moment; and we too have faced having to make the decision to stand up or back down. It is likely that the critical limits of endurance we have faced were not on the athletic field; but we have faced them nevertheless ~ somewhere amidst the crises, through the peaks-and-valleys of our own life-journeys.  Live long enough, and eventually we all confront challenges that seem to take us to the breaking point. In these moments, it becomes part of the normal human response to wonder whether or not we are up to the task ~ whether or not we are really capable of managing the burdens without stumbling, falling, or crashing into the barriers. Even if we don't live on the edge, we know what the edge is like.

In at least this one sense, we are not "unlike" the Olympic athletes. We succeed some days, and we stumble on others. When we fall, we generally get back up ~ even if we don't let our injuries heal completely. Sometimes the "conditions of the track" would seem too dangerous to play on ~ but we still take the risk and continue anyway. For what we do, of course, there is rarely a podium to stand on or a national anthem played in our honor. Few if any of us will be given medals to drape around our necks. But most of us do persevere.  And for that, there should be an attending crowd applauding receptively, as we file into the stadium.

Rabbi Herzbrun