Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel

This spirited, entertaining feel-good documentary follows the success of an Israeli baseball team — made up of American Jewish players — in an international tournament. Not so much David vs Goliath as Rocky One: survival proves as significant as victory.

The film’s primary theme is Identity. The Americans come from the whole spectrum of Jewishness, from Devoutly Practicing down to Married to One. Several qualify by their parents or grandparents. As one player observes, they qualify as Israeli players by the same terms Hitler qualified even non-practicing Jews to slaughter. 

  The players’ varied experience reveals a similar spectrum of antisemitism. In contrast, the media reports on the team’s unexpected success shows the American society’s embrace of the team, with a sense of adopted community and humour. 

Several players express the profundity of their emotional experience in Israel, whether in the spiritual aura of the Wailing Wall or in their confidence that Israel is the refuge to which Jews from all over the troubled globe can repair, if necessary. The title points to the double meaning, the runner hitting home to score and the diaspora Jew finding security in the homeland. 

      Because Israel is the Jewish state “Team Israel” legitimately comprises Americans, not  Israeli citizens. All Jews qualify for Israeli citizenship. A journalist raises the issue. The tournament’s Heritage regulation allows that; Spain too is made up of Spanish speakers not citizens. 

The Americans hope their example will generate Israeli baseball and a national team that won’t need Americans. A baseball is planted in symbolic parody of the trees that have been historically planted to turn the desert into a garden.  

  In that hope — and the planning of a baseball stadium named after a young terrorist victim — the game replays the state’s overall emergence into independence and self-reliance.

Another scene extends the identity theme beyond the Jews. The players visit a shop that sells Hebrew versions of US sports jerseys. The Arab owner jokes with the players and even tops them on some US baseball stats. Despite their bonhomie, though, he can’t even pretend that he will cheer for the Israel team. He can’t get a passport. He can’t feel himself an Israeli. 
     In the harder edged extension of that theme, a terrorist drives a truck through a Jerusalem crowd. This is the shadow that falls across even the feel-good stories that depict the remarkable growth, accomplishment and hopes of the Jewish state.