Recently, Esther and i attended an outstanding performance of Fiddler on the Roof. It just so happens that we are friendly with the director of the show, and totally by chance we had been invited to his home for lunch on the Shabbat immediately after the Thursday we attended the show. As could have been reasonably expected, some of the table conversation revolved around the show. During that conversation, the director (Robert Binder, by name) revealed to us that the parts of Pertchek and Hudel were played by a ritually observant young man and young woman, who, as part of their observance, refrain from touching a member of the opposite sex, in any way.

What is delightfully ironic about this fact is that these two characters – Pertchek and Hudel – are the two who break the traditional gender taboo by dancing together at the wedding of her older sister, Tzeitel. In this version of the show, to meet their religious requirements, they danced together without touching. This in no way detracted from the excellence of the performance.

Fiddler on the Roof, as its opening number suggests, is all about “Tradition! Tradition!, and its ultimate step-by-step crumbling. It begins with Tzeitel marrying Mottel out of love without the benefit of a matchmaker, but with her parents’ blessings. In fact, not a great deviation from tradition, as, in essence, it duplicates the conduct of our patriarch, Jacob/Israel who marries his great love, Rachel without benefit of a matchmaker (in contrast to his father, Isaac). The second break with tradition is the decision Hudel and Pertchek make, on their own, to marry, not seeking her father, Tevye’s permission, only his blessing. After some hesitation, he ultimately gives them his blessing. This is a more serious break with tradition in that, whereas Tzeitel and Mottel will remain within the religious tradition, Hudel and Pertchek are revolutionaries who, more than likely, though knowledgeable of the tradition, will leave it behind. The proverbial “straw that breaks the camel’s back” as it were, of course is Chavele’s marriage to the Russian Fiedka by a priest in church without informing her father at all. When she comes to him, after the fact, for understanding and his blessing, he can not and will not give it. He can bend the tradition, but he cannot break it. Although as they are leaving Anatevka, he shows he has not completely abandoned Chavelle, by stage-whispering to Tzeitel to “God bless” them.

The end result is exile, as it were, to America and Israel with Poland, as a stopover on the way to America.

But as our history has shown the apparent breakdown of tradition is not irreversible. This truth, it seems to me, is symbolized in this production of Fiddler, by Pertchek and Hudel, the rebels against gender separation, being played by two young people who uphold that tradition.

The second interesting lesson, at least to me, in this ironic twist of these two tradition-breaking characters being played by two tradition-upholding actors is one that i have written about in the past.

There are two distinct contemporary approaches to the issue of kedushah (the sacred) and chol (the secular/the ordinary): the one says we must avoid the chol and separate ourselves from it as much as possible; the other perspective (espoused by the late Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook, the first Twentieth Century Chief Rabbi of Eretz Yisrael) holds that nothing is really chol. What we may consider to be chol is merely something we have not-yet invested with kedushah.

This concept is beautifully realized by these two mitzvah-observing young people participating in this production of Fiddler on the Roof.  On the surface a musical show is clearly a chol enterprise, but this production was invested with kedushah by their observance of the Judaic practice of unmarried people choosing not to touch a member of the opposite sex.

It occurs to me that this latter lesson provides us with a mission for the upcoming year of 5771. We should strive to invest all of our activities in the coming year – the ostensibly chol ones, and even the apparently kodesh ones – with an authentic sense of kedushah.

Esther and i wish you and all those you cherish a year of health, contentment, peace and kedushah.

  EZ