The Kibbitz
passion, or at least tolerance or drive, to make that a priority in your life. If you’re twenty-five and you’ve never been ex- posed to the beauty of personal devel- opment and doing everything you can to just master your craft, the chance that you just drop everything and say, I’m going to be like a kick-ass marathon run- ner ? It’s really small. It happens. It real- ly does. People can change their lives around, but it’s a really small chance. What it requires is something cul- tural. It has to be formative, either in school or among your peer group or from your family life. I think that it’s less to do with Shabbos and more to do with priorities. When they made that joke in the movie Airplane about the Jewish sports stars — a passenger asks the flight attendant for some light reading, and she gives him a small pamphlet entitled Great Jews in Sports — they weren’t really addressing the religious Jews. They were just addressing Jews. I think a lot of Jews use observance as an excuse. A lot of chess tournaments are held on Shabbos, yet we do have quite a few chess players. If there was a demand for it, if there was a critical mass, there would be a league that ca- tered to it. Those are just the market dynamics. No one’s intentionally dis- criminating against Jews. How much of your choice to do skel- eton or bobsled was informed by the knowlege that we’re never going to field a full team of hockey players, and how much by finding an unusu- al sport to diversify? The issue with hockey was that Israel kind of bounces between B- and C-level. I could be an NHL-level goalie, which I’m not, and it wouldn’t make that difference to propel Israel into the top twelve in A-level, which is where it would need to be to make a mark. My energy devoted to that mis-
Adam Edelman competing in the skeleton event at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
and it said that I would never ever make the Olympic Games no mat- ter what I did. And I thought, This is the story I want to tell. If I could flip this, then I could go and tell this story forever. That’s my athletic superpow- er, because the Olympics are 95 per- cent mental. As for the Olympics, there’s an amaz- ing value it brings: when you step onto a field, it’s very hard to be prejudiced against a person that you’re looking at competing against. Israel’s mortal en- emy is Iran. But when I see Iran com- peting in the Olympics, I don’t get twisted with hatred. If anything, it just normalizes the country a little bit in my mind. It acts as a very nice, posi- tive face, unless he’s a jerk and doesn’t shake the Israeli’s hand. But if he puts up a good fight and seems like a de- cent dude, it actually leaves a pretty positive impression of the country. The benefit of a competition is that I stay an extra hour after to meet every- one who’s at the track. I stay in all the Israeli gear. I meet them, I shake their hand. It’s important to put a friendly face on Israel and the Jewish people. That’s the power of sport. I’m probably the only point of contact as an Israe- li that they’ll ever meet. At least they come away with a positive impression in their mind, of a guy who’s not trying to go murder a Palestinian.
sion would not be, in my view, worth that time. I wanted to use my adult years to create a larger change than having just existed in the program. If you’re going to use your life’s energy, and you’re going to derail a lot of things, it has to be commensu- rate with the impact that you make. I got the scouting report for skeleton “Many people have outlets: of chess, of reading, of art, of music. But for many kids, the best way to learn about loss, goal setting, personal development, or to grow in life is through sport. I think we should be far more represented.”
26 WINTER 2025/2026
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