This is a paraphrase of the introduction I usually give right before the Mi Comocha: “Where ever we live, it is probably Egypt”.
That is just one example of an unsustainable lifestyle. But in more recent memory it is Anatevka – from Fiddler on the Roof – that we all remember. Nonetheless, I suspect that there is a great deal we have forgotten about this beloved play, or maybe that we never knew.
Most Broadway insiders expected the play to fold in less than a week. Why? Because Fiddler begins without an overture, the first act ends with a pogrom and the play ends with a mass eviction. Is that what the public wanted to see?
On the other side, critics called Anatevka the cutest shtetl we ever had. This chorus was joined by my mother, who described Tevya’s and Golda’s house as a mansion in comparison to where she had lived.
Shalom Rabinowitz – better known as Shalom Aleichem–painted a much darker image of life in the shtetl. Tevya’s fifth daughter, Shprintze (you don’t remember her? Maybe it’s because she was not in the play) – commits suicide.
And, of course, you must remember how the thug leading the pogrom says to Tevya that he really hated to do it, because Tevya was a nice guy–for a Jew. You don’t remember him, you say? Well, he wasn’t there, either. The vicious and murderous thugs who carried out the progroms were too horrible for the play, so they were changed into a thug who actually liked Jews.
Did you know that the crew had to build the wooden synagogue from scratch because there were no wooden synagogues anywhere in all of Yugoslavia and Poland? And by the way, the crew took the shul home with them.
What is perhaps most ironic and most important for our time is how Fiddler portrays tradition. TRADITION! I love that song.
But tradition takes a real beating on stage. Tzeitel is set to marry the butcher, Lazar Wolf, but she wants to marry Motel, the tailor. And why?
BECAUSE SHE LOVES HIM! In the words of that great Jewish songstress, Tina Turner, “What’s love got to do with it?” The tradition of the family trying to arrange a proper young marriage is (with the exception of the Ultra-Orthodox) – gone.
Then there is Hodel, who marries Perchik, the revolutionary who believes people are at the center of society. It’s not God, not community, not family, just people. Perchik is arrested, and Hodel leaves home to go with him. Family – gone.
And finally, there is Chava, who marries Fyedka, the non-Jew. We are part of the greater world. Community – gone.
And where does Anatevka move? Lock, stock and barrel the Jews move to America, the Golden Medina, where you can choose to be Jewish – or not.
We, the new Fiddlers, are precariously balanced between Anatevka – with God, family, the community, ignorance and superstition on the one hand – and America, with countless opportunities and the door open to walk away from Judaism on the other.
This time of year, when we focus on bettering ourselves, maybe we should focus on bettering ourselves in the community, as well.
How long can we balance?
B’Shalom
Rabbi Stanley Halpern