This is a little off the beaten path for me, but it’s just such a rich and fascinating interview, I thought it worth sharing.

It comes to us from the Washington Post’s On Faith section (whose virtues I’ve extolled several times at The Bench) and throws a spotlight on a rare football phenomenon: a devout Orthodox Jewish guy in the NFL:

Alan Veingrad spent seven seasons in the NFL as an offensive lineman, playing for the Green Bay Packers (1986-90) and then the Dallas Cowboys (1991-92) where he won a Super Bowl ring. Veingrad played nearly every position on the line, blocking for Emmitt Smith and protecting Troy Aikman. Smith presented Veingrad with a Rolex watch after the running back won the NFL rushing title.

Veingrad played alongside many Christians in the NFL and at East Texas State University in the heart of the Bible belt, but few of his teammates shared his Jewish heritage. As he put it: “In the rough and tumble environment of an NFL team, a Jew is an outsider.” Though he always considered himself a Jew, Veingrad didn’t embrace Orthodox Judaism until after he left professional sports.

Q: Tell me about your faith.

Veingrad: I was born Jewish. It was instilled in me at a young age that there is a God. The Jewish religion focuses a lot on family and holidays and getting together. I didn’t know a lot about the spirituality aspects of it. I couldn’t really talk about all the different holidays and what they mean until years after I started to look into it and I realized it is the most inspirational thing that I ever learned. It’s all about inspiration. Every holiday and every Shabbat there’s always a Torah portion associated with it. There’s so much inspiration. I thought it was all about history. God said to Moses this, Moses said to God that, and God said to Abraham this, Abraham said to God that. I didn’t know that there was inspirational messages sprinkled in throughout all aspects of Judaism. And as an athlete, I was focused on inspiration. As an athlete, I read books about inspiration. As an athlete, I listed to motivational tapes about inspiration, about motivation, about being positive. And now as an adult and starting to understand that Judaism is so focused on the positive, I said sign me up. The Torah is mine as a Jew. I want to know about it.

Q: Before you discovered religion as inspiration, you turned to other people for inspiration.

Veingrad: Coaches.

Q: Dallas Cowboys Coach Jimmy Johnson, did you find inspiration in his words?

Veingrad: Out of fear. You’re around great coaches, and I read great coaches’ stories about how they’ve taken teams to championships and players that had become great players. It’s really ironic to me that as a high school athlete I listened to every motivational tape that I could get my hands on about Vince Lombardi, then I go on to play for the Green Bay Packers.

Q: When did Judaism become an inspiration for you?

Veingrad: I went to my cousin’s house for a traditional Friday night dinner and at that particular dinner he asks me, ‘Would you go to a Torah class?’ Out of obligation I said yes. So I went to my first Torah class a week later. It was a one hour Torah class. . . . It was during that class in this very wealthy doctor’s home in south Florida that first 59 ½ minutes of the one hour class, I was looking around the house, the chandeliers and the beauty of this house and the pool behind this house and the lake, thinking about the party I would have in this house if I owned this house. And the last 30 seconds of the class, the rabbi looked right at me, and he talked about materialism, and he talked about jealousy, and he talked about if you allow yourself you can become consumed with materialistic items, and then the rabbi stopped the class and my mouth was wide open. And I looked at the rabbi and I thought he knew exactly what I was thinking. I went to the rabbi afterward and said, ‘Rabbi, I really need to know a lot more about what you’re talking about. I don’t have any books on the Torah.’ He said, ‘Come back next week. I’ll bring you your first Torah book.’

I was raised like the majority of Jewish people in this country. You go to the synagogue, you become a bar mitzvah, and the bar mitzvah should be the entrance into Judaism. It was the exit out of Judaism for me, as it is with most Jews. . . . Okay, it’s this holiday or it’s that holiday, let’s have dinner together, let’s do this. But we didn’t focus on the spiritual aspect of the holiday. We just focused on the family getting together and the food. You tell me the holidays from 25 to,30 years with my family, I’ll tell you what we had to eat and that’s kind of where it stops. Now I can tell you what we had to eat, I can tell you a whole lot more about what the holiday means to the Jewish people and what does it mean to me, how I can become a better person.

Q: What’s the most misunderstood part of your faith?

Veingrad: That it’s rigid. That it’s a rigid way of living your lifestyle. That you’re being told what to do. It’s a battery pack. It gives you inspiration. It gives you focus. It gives you meaning in life. . . . Nobody can argue with me, and none of my friends would ever try, because I sat in their chair for 40 years. Now for four years I’ve sat in a different chair. I’ve experienced both aspects of life and I didn’t lose my mind. Nothing horrible happened to me. A lot of people come to faith because something happened to them. They lose a loved one. They lose their fortune. They go through a divorce. Nothing happened to me. I just felt as I was going to my rabbi’s house Friday night for the traditional Shabbat meal and I was driving with my family, and then on Saturday night I was going out with my friends and their wives and I was comparing the two ways of life. Friday night was so meaningful and so rich and so fun and so real and then Saturday night was so, what? What? What do we talk about? The next vacation you’re taking? That new car that you got? Your golf score? You’re going fishing and boating? Okay, there’s nothing wrong with all those things and I enjoy all of them. And I also like to go fishing and I like to exercise, and when I have the time I love taking my kids to Orlando to the theme park to do things like that with them. However, that is a very small part of life. The main focus of life is your relationship with God and growing toward that.

Check out the rest and ponder that when the Super Bowl is on. You can also visit Alan Veingrad’s own website.