Israel made it to the World Cup once, in 1970, in Mexico. We qualified through Asia because, technically, geographically, inconveniently, that is where we were supposed to belong. The route was bizarre even by football standards: Israel’s qualification path ran through the Asia/Oceania zone, which meant playing New Zealand and Australia. New Zealand is over 16,000 kilometers from Israel, and Australia is about 14,000 kilometers away. Neighboring countries. Right. I’ll just cross the border for that home-and-away game. North Korea, fresh from reaching the quarterfinals in 1966, refused to play Israel and withdrew. Sounds familiar? Anyone?

We did not go far. We scored one goal: Mordechai “Motaleh” Spiegler’s equalizer against Sweden, Israel’s only World Cup goal. And probably will be for the next 3,000 years (as was promised).

Football is Israel’s most popular sport. The league draws the largest audiences. There is rivalry, passion, adoration. The players are the highest-paid professional athletes in the country. Yet still, as a national team, we never advance.

Geography, in our case, is destiny: having been passed around the confederations like a hot potato, we now qualify through Europe, which, simply put, is not fair. The Norwegian team channels its Viking ancestors, the French attack with the finesse of ballerinas, and the Spanish play with a rhythm that makes the ball seem attached to their feet. For them, football is tradition, pastime, entertainment—an art form detached from existentialism. And us?

We tend to think in shorter intervals. The next week. The next siren. The next election. Football, unfortunately, is built on decades. The academy player who will peak at twenty-seven begins learning where to stand when he is eight. The Jewish tradition does not concern itself with eleven players and a ball. The Talmud has surprisingly little to say about the diamond formation.

Our young players are raised from infancy to be scorers—to lead, to have numbers, to be triumphant. Instead of building a system that relies on the team as a unit, we raise them to chase the instant elation of the goal. By the time they join the senior teams, those players lack the basic understanding of a team sport: a game that relies on being where the ball should be, not standing and waiting for the ball; on the precision of the last line of defense; on the work you do without the ball so that, eventually, you can strategically execute a move. Football is, above all, a game of thought disguised as instinct. We have both—thought and instinct—just not in relation to a ball.

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For about a month, the world feels like one giant stadium. You, me, the warmongers, the pacifists. The left and the right. We stop and celebrate. For one month, geography disappears. And we feel as if we belong.

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We fight to qualify, entering an endless cycle of countries either unwilling to play against us, claiming the moral high ground, or playing us while criticizing our politics, or forbidding their fans from attending. We do not host our games. Yet we persist.

We analyze the teams we are up against. Calculating odds, numbers, statistics. The saga of the national coach is always present, adding spice to the process. We debate, again, whether the Arab Israeli players, who have been a constant presence on the national team, must sing the national anthem, since the words “A Jewish soul” are uttered with this yearning for the Jewish state—a dilemma that encapsulates our political system. There are panels. Anxiety before games. Devastation after losses. And there are plenty of those.

Since that 1970 fluke, we have never qualified again, and it doesn’t look like we ever will. God could intervene, but watching our league, our players, our teams—it is possible even God doesn’t think we’ve earned it. Spare me the antisemites who think we control everything, because if we did, the number one wish in Israel, above all, would be to play in the World Cup.

Whenever the subject turns to war, Bibi, or our shitty politics, we ponder when the war will resume—and it will. But as I curse the ungodly hours of the matches, I mutter to myself: “Not now. Not during the World Cup.”

It is the only time when, no matter who you are, anywhere in the world, you clap loudly in the sanctuary of your home for Messi (my God, that man is pure art). You secretly hate, yet admire, Ronaldo (he is a machine—a 41-year-old machine!). You root for Cape Verde, a country of 500,000 people whose name you barely know how to pronounce. For about a month, the world feels like one giant stadium. You, me, the warmongers, the pacifists. The left and the right. We stop and celebrate. A game. A tradition. For one month, geography disappears. And we feel as if we belong.