Seidemann: Finding your inner fiddler

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From the other side of the bench

By David Seidemann

Issue of July 31, 2009 / 10 Av 5769

Close to 3,000 performances over a 40 year span. Quite a run, or should I say dance, for Israeli-born actor Haim Topol playing Tevye in the all time classic, Fiddler on the Roof. When my parents took me to see Fiddler more than 40 years ago at the Ohio Theater, Zero Mostel was still playing the part, his beard and side curls struggling to dance in synch with his feet. Topol or Mostel, the story is ageless, the acting masterful.

Since then I have left the little “shtetel” of Columbus. I struggled to raise a Jewish family on foreign soil; watched my wife and daughters light the Shabbos candles, and yes, wondered aloud what life would be like “if I were a rich man”.

I am sure that in certain parts of the world Tevye and his challenges are still relevant and the story line plays its way out on a daily basis. But with the religious freedom and tolerance afforded to us here in America, with palatial homes here in the Five Towns and in other Jewish communities, Jewish education at our doorsteps, and intermarriage almost non-existent in our circles, does the story of Tevye and his family have any relevance to us at all?

Of course it does, and to a greater extent than in the original script. Of course it does, and with the potential for a catastrophic ending.  Of course it does, and we don’t even begin to see it like Tevye did because we are deaf to the footsteps of the Cossacks, blind to the fires they have set and unable to articulate the prayer for a more wholesome future.

Tevye spoke to G-d like a father speaks with a son and a son speaks with his father. We are content to leave voicemail messages and an occasional note in the “Wall.”

When the American Jew, to his credit, emerged from the shtetel he clensed his essence of every vestige of the shtetel. That my friends, was a huge mistake. There was no sequel to Fiddler on the Roof but anyone who has seen it knows that wherever Tevye would have found himself, in a poor peasant village in the Ukraine; in New York or in Israel, part of the shtetel would have remained with him. Which part? The part that I sense has left us; the part that acknowledges that our homes, cars, and vacations; our religious freedoms and our fancy diplomas hanging on the wall, are all a trap; a trap that Tevye sought to avoid.

Self accomplishment and accumulation of wealth: every Chaim, Moshe and Yaakov finishing Daf Yomi or learning in Kollel; the best and brightest of us occupying positions of power have caused a dust storm to blow away the shtetel, and with that our ability and the necessity to remain connected in an Anetevka way to our heritage.  It’s too darn easy and that’s a problem.

Don’t misunderstand my words. No person or governing body has the right to impose the shtetel on us through overt or covert acts of discrimination. No outsider can tell us where to live, or how to live; where to build or when to build. When the shtetel is imposed on us, we must unite and fight to break it. I speak not of the shtetel of discrimination but rather the shtetel of connection. I speak of the shtetel of deep connection to ourselves, our families, our friends, our communities and our G-d.

When we leave that shtetel, our future is as shaky as a fiddler on the roof. When we lose that shtetel, the result is worse than intermarriage, worse than pogroms, worse than being uprooted from our homes. The net result of the pogroms, the homicide bombing, the intermarriage, the discrimination, is the awakening of the Jewish flame. Meetings are held, demonstrations ensue, legislation is passed and usually there is a brief rekindling of the Jewish shtetel. But when the Jew extinguishes his own inner shtetel, there is no one to rescue him. No one to rebuild.

If you read this and believe it does not apply to you, you prove my point. The more you think it doesn’t apply to you, the more ravaged and ransacked your inner shtetel has become.

How does one build or rebuild his inner shtetel? That’s an article in and of itself, if not two. But it starts with the premise, Tevye’s premise that the Master of the Universe watches everything we do and as a result, we have

unfettered access and unrestricted dialogue (nights and weekends are free!) Any sociologist or student of history will tell you that the more man focuses on man, the less he focuses on G-d. And so the inner shtetel begins with a dose of humility.

Yes, Tevye saw no great shame in being rich.  But he also sang of having a seat by the Eastern Wall. He dreamed of acquiring knowledge not to jettison away from his heritage, but to connect with it.

Like Mostel and Topel, one day all of us Tevyes must leave the stage and make way for the next generations of Tevyes. As we pack up our carts and saddle our donkeys, as we make that all important trek out of the shtetel, one can only hope that a piece of the self-made shtetel burns in our hearts with sufficient light to guide our children.

David Seidemann is a partner with the law firm of Seidemann & Mermelstein. He can be reached at (718) 692-1013 and at ds@lawofficesm.com.