It is I, King of All Jewish Baseball, once again, with the financial opportunity of a lifetime. Finally, your chance to do something good, GIVE US YOUR MONEY, to make right all the wrong, to be born anew, fresh and clean. All it takes is a small donation, an offering, if you will, something symbolic, a seared lamb shank, some sage, a few thousand here, a million there, a sacrificial Visa or Master Card number offered at the sacred alter of crowd funding, where self-anointed modern-day saints kneel before friends and family and accept the wealth they assuredly deserve. How can I do this, you ask? Allow me to explain.
Many months ago, my man Tom, aka Dizzy, Gillespie, King of All International Scouting for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Executive Director of Play Global (http://www.play-global.org/), called me and said he had an idea, “Let’s set up a series of fraudulent crowd funding campaigns,” he said, “then disappear forever into Mexico City.” Kidding, kidding. He said, “Fish, I have an idea, let’s start a program in Israel for Jewish and Arab kids to play baseball together. I am, after all, the King of All International Scouting for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Executive Director of Play Global, and you are the King of All Jewish Baseball and the Executive Director of the Israel Association of Baseball. Together, we could surely accomplish this.” To which I said, without thought, “That is a horrible idea, Tom. But let’s do it anyways.” And thus was born BASEBALL LE’KULAM, or, for those of you not fluent in transliteration, BASEBALL FOR ALL.
After much preparation and convincing of parents to loan us their children, on March 5th and 6th of the Great and Nearly Perfect year of 2015, 30 sixth graders, boys and girls, 15 Jewish kids, and 15 Arab kids, who would have never met despite living so close, the Jewish kids from Modiin, the Arab kids from Ramle, just a few miles apart, came together for Baseball Le’Kulam. None of them had ever played baseball before. But we played together. Some of them had never shared a dinner table with a member of the other group. But we ate together. And a few had never spent a night away from home. But we slept together– wait, that didn’t sound right. We slept over, in the same building, that is, the coaches staying up all night chasing the kids back into their rooms when they tried to escape to bond over junk food and air guitar bands.
And like that, magically, Baseball Le’Kulam went from a nice idea, a theory, to a real thing. The kids turned from names on a piece of paper into real human beings with real faces and real lives and real families. Just two weeks ago, all the kids and their parents and siblings were eating pizza and playing catch for Baseball Le’Kulam Family Nightas the sun set at Kibbutz Gezer. We have 2 more sessions, June 4th and 5th, and October 15th and 16th. But all this real pizza and real coaches for these real people costs real money. Which is where you come in.
Watch the video. Read the campaign page. And donate. If you can. We need it to continue the program. We will not go to Mexico City and put it all on black. Promise.
CLICK HERE!!!!! https://www.crowdrise.com/baseballinisrael-playglobal/fundraiser/playglobal!!!!!!!
