Fiddler on the Roof’s enormous popularity has nothing to do with metaphysical content. Nonetheless, we find one of the most enigmatic issues in religious thought expressed by Tevye the milkman . . .
48 Comments Posted
Great article, Dr. Brawer!
Maybe someone could clarify for me something: isn't 'will' (ratzon), a property of some sort, or is it also an attribute of G-d?
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Mr. Brawer :
Yes, I read this entirely. ..Tevya is humankind.
Tevya, you would upset your own apple cart!
Tevya would no longer be a humble, lovable herdsman of the story; he would change.
Our Tevya is a man we love and identify with, are those rich folks philanthropic? I don't see it...!
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In Tevye's Query By Yaakov Brawer is it at all possible that Tevye is much more simplistic than this?
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Fascinating article, providing the momentum to actualize our inspirational, Divine, spiritually enlightened altruistic and compassionate potential.
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Wow. How can you argue with this article??
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With great clarity, questions loaded with the heaviness of all searching souls, were at least reflected with sympathy. Excellent, uplifting!
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Loved to read your article, Dr. Yaakov Brawer. Your article makes me hungry for reading more of your articles.
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And then we all die. So what's the difference?
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You have a magical way with words, profound and on target, your articles are highly inspirational. I try to read one every time I need a spiritual boost. Thank You
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I tried so hard to concentrate on your article, but "yuh, bah, de, be, de bah, bah"
was playing so loudly in my head, that it was very hard to pay attention to your scholarly words.......so, I guess I'll scroll back and try it again.
In any case, thanks for the memories! No matter how "not orthodox" the actual content of "Fiddler on the Roof" it sure sparked my soul, when I first saw it on Broadway, many years ago.........
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Thank you for a good essay that even a goy like me can appreciate.
It was thoughtful and well written, and showed interesting thought about The Inscrutable.
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It does make a difference. Because a lot can happen before we die. Because we can make a lot happen before we die. Think of all that the Rebbe did with his 92 years on this earth - how many lives he touched, how many people were affected for the better.
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Thank you for your delightful response. I sense that your post was designed as much to comfort as to correct, and it's nice to think that there are caring people like you in this world.
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Tovie was a “rich man” compared to my childhood in “Stone Age” Europe. In order to escape the Nazis I had to live like a forest animal under the ground for a long time. Two decades persecuted again in a communist country was a great improvement. I made it to a Ph.D. in chemistry and glass science working for 44 years - last 14 of it as a high-tech scientist. Reversing few times during my lifetime I have been both poor beyond any imagination and affluent again. Now I am a successful exhibiting artist. Kabbalah had been my interest all my life. Why am I saying it? Because so far nobody gave me a better explanation of my entire life experience than this article. Thank you Dr. Brawer.
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While making your excellent points, did you really find it necessary to sideswipe Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist, with the words "unwitting" (for him) and "fortuitous" (for his work)? Just because the man makes his living writing song lyrics, it isn't possible that he could be a thoughtful person, in fact a thoughtful Jew, wrapping a little message in his schmaltz like the aleph in the honey? As it is, you don't even bother to name him, never mind give him credit for publicizing the question, which in itself is more important than any specific answer that can be given.
Please rectify the omission and remove the denigration.
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similar to the story of elezar is the story of job in the bible, i dont know if youre familiar but it might be intereting to ponder :}
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A truly excellent article, my compliments to the author. And yet... I recall my wife, dying from a painful cancer. She heard those words, we are all part of a vast eternal plan, which supposedly were meant to be calming and comforting. But they weren't, and she cried out: but I don't want to be part of a vast eternal plan, I just want to be part of a small plan (and get better)!
So yes, doctor, we are both actors and co-authors. But in the world of olam hazeh and asiyah, even your well-articulated and wise words, which go beyond Tevya's, can be but cold comfort.
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It seems that no one here is aware, that Tevye is a truly wise creation of the great jewish writer Sholem Aleychem. And the words of Tevye, although adapted by the lyricist, present actually the thoughts and the wisdom of its creator. The original book is full of genuine jewish wisdom, and it is not by chance and a whim of some "unwitting" lirycist, that some of this wisdom got through also into the musical version of the story-
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I offer my thanks for an article meaningful to me.
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As a single childless man nearing 50, unable to fulfill the first two commands of Torah, and laying in bed often asking why, this article speaks volumes to me. Thanks!!
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I wrote you once, reporting that my life had been saved by no fewer than THREE Jewish physicians. Update that now, please, to "four." Pneumonia, yo0u know; like deafness and near-blindness at almost 84, it happens.
Current curiosities: (1 comment on Eiunstein's quoted question, "In the Creation, did G=-d have to make any choices ?'
(2) When I was young, Jews in Entertainment often changed their names to others thought less-Jewish by their audiences, even when the fact was well-known.Now that everybody "knows" all about everybody, how many of these people remained (or returned) Faithful ? And what kind of Jewish lives do they lead now ?" Please forgive typing errors.
RESPECTFULLY, Bill izzell
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The whole universe? "He ate he garlic peel and fell into a faint, "
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You are right and you are wrong. First let me say I just saw Theodor Bikel in the musical, Lies My Father Told Me, in Montreal, at 9 PM, Saturday night at the Segal Theater in Montreal. He is known for his portrayal of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof in more than two thousand performances and he is now ninety, and still, fabulous!
My life is following a total stream of synchronicity and I will say, Yes we are co-creators, but no, God knows exactly what we will do, and so God has supreme authorship over the entire story, and we have only the illusion of changing the script, of "apparent choice" : a Parent Choice.
I am seeing that God wrote us all into a language based story and that we are purposively actualizing the potentials of the Hebrew letters and beyond. Consider that the quotation marks we use, are Yod Yod, the same Hebrew letters that do spell out one of the Divine Names.
We are moving rapidly into a new consciousness that ALL is GOD, and that consciousness will sweep the world
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Oh, please don't be so critical of Tevye. He's not really asking for anything. This song is only a daydream, not a prayer. It is only the second song of the play. In the opening number he proudly shows the audience the Traditions and ethics of his village. His life is going well; he has no problems. So, nu, he dreams of being rich....can it really hurt? In the next Tevye scene, as he is presented with a real challenge ("terrible news" of pogroms in neighboring villages) and with continuing challenges in all ensuing scenes, his questions and requests of G-d are humble and appropriate to each problem. You, a rabbi must appreciate SHOLEM ALEICHEM - the actual author of this enduring, lovable, flawed hero - for all the wonderful Talmudic concepts regarding humility, Tradition, mishpacha, community, Halacha, and ethics in all his Tevye books, and in Fiddler on the Roof. Read the original books upon which the play is based, then reread the play. Tevye is human, flawed and universal.
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The article was too long for me to read, but i got the gist of it. i am really interested in getting a copy of your book, ' Something from Nothing '. Am presupposing same idea in more detail and more instructive on how it all works.
Yasher Koach
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It is so nice of the Creator to even answer the question or to even ponder it. What if Rabbi Elazar said yes to the Creator's rhetorical question. I wonder what the Creator will do. He is all-powerful. He probably will allow Rabbi Elazar to see the effect of his prayer as He is a very generous Father. But Rabbi Elazar is given the understanding to see G-d's point in this matter.
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There is another point in the story & that is the confrontation that occurs when we face challenges to that with which we are familiar. R. T. finds a way to accept and 'sell' this acceptance in two cases but not in the third. There are limits!
Likewise, size MAY be a significant matter. When measuring or counting, a certain @ may or may not be an important %. It's like when Izzy is at The Court & tries to apologize for not imitating Moshe very well. The Holy Judge says: "If I wanted another Moshe, I'd have made one. I wanted you to try to be the best Izzy that you could!"
Z'ev זאב מרדכי
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Mr. Cowan's ascerbic comment regarding
Dr. Brawer's intentions are surely misplaced. The point was to examine Tevye's clearly rhetorical question, not to credit or discredit the lyricist. (Few people know his name, so there was no particular purpose in identifying him.)
Most disturbing, however, is the commenter's assertion that "... the question ... is more important than any specific answer ...". If that were so, we'd have a dearth of Torah discourse, as well as (l'havdil) no benefit from science or any other field of knowledge!
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This article make it seem that poverty is necessary and without it there would be no doubt about it or the significance of questioning it, and on the relevance of eternal planning etc.
I would like to suggest that poverty is not a necessary thing and that by skillful government it can easily be eliminated, only today few governments are likely to want to purchase such skills nor are they inclined to develop them.
Perhaps we should ask, as Shalom Alechem (the originator of the Tyve stories) also wrote:
"The Almighty clearly hates the poor, else why does he make them so wretched?"
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An excellent well written article. I found it inspirational and a wonderful explanation of an aspect of our purpose and being
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So were the Leaders and who/what took place in WW11 according to PLAN.....
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This is what I see here- nothing more, just speculation being passed off as fact. When it comes to G-d, that is all Jews have to go on- speculation by Rabbis. Some are honest and some are not-
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This is what I see here- nothing more, just speculation being passed off as fact. When it comes to G-d, that is all Jews have to go on- speculation by Rabbis. Some are honest and some are not-
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I too watched my partner die of cancer. Such things are hard to comprehend AND since his death, things have changed in unforseen ways for me and the three children, and much has been learnt and if I dare say it many good things have come about. Yes, I think even cancer can be part of the "vast eternal plan", even though there is pain and horror, grief and suffering. I have come to think that accepting my life and my husbands pain are possible and even essencial if I am to continue in life in a positive way for myself, my children and others. It becomes an act of generosity. The words of the article are most comforting if a little scholarly for the purpose of comforting one in mortal pain.
I liked the article a lot.
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In Tevie's time and place, Jews could not own arable farmland. This forced them to be tailors, milkmen, laborers, merchants, etc., and to buy food grown on land owned by gentiles.
At the end of the play, they depart for the U.S. They would arrive in New York City, which had little or no farmland. Because they had the experience of working in other occupations, they could secure employment, first as deliverymen and pushcart vendors, then as storekeepers and teachers, and eventually as lawyers and investment bankers. They might even write for Broadway.
If Tevie had lived the life of the wealthy "gentleman farmer", he would have been woefully unprepared for life in the big city. But his "poverty" prepared him well to prosper in New York.
My great-grandfather painted houses for a living in Wyłkowyszki, Suwalki, Russia (now Vilkaviškis, Lithuania). In New York, he found an unexpected demand for the skill of holding a paintbrush, and became the artist Nathan Ambutter.
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I loved this article and the comments as well. A gem. I have a question and I don't know where to ask it, so forgive me for asking it here in this company. It occurred to me yesterday that if God permitted the Holocaust, then the Jews must have deserved it; unless there is no God, in which case it was just human animosity. Let's go with God though. What bothers me is that I think the Jews of today, and mankind in general, have decayed since then, and that means that another H. would be called for. It occurred to me that maybe after all, God is still holding Jews, practicing or not, to a very high ethical standard, which is why we were punished extremely severely for what we would only consider minor character flaws, certainly no worse than everyone else's. If that is so, not just thousands of years ago, but now, today, then it is frightening to think of the consequences, is it not? Can this be right? Can we be held to a very high standard, such that we are punished so severely?
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The world would not disappear if we managed to eradicate cancer through science, or eradicate poverty through wise governmental edicts. The world would not change in any way, shape or form. In fact, we managed to wipe out polio through vaccines, etc. There is nothing spiritually beautiful, G-dly, or holy about being so poor one can't find food or a roof over one's head, and can't afford health care. So, give me a break! Tevye should not have asked Go-d that question because it is not G0d who orders all the bad and evil things in this world. I just don't believe it happened in the Torah, and don't believe it is happening now. According to Torah believers, I guess they would call me an atheist, then? But, I don't care. I believe in G-d. Just not the G-d as painted in the Torah. My G-d is loving and kind and is my strength to go through my poverty and breast cancer and congestive heart failure and aches and pains in my body. I never, ever ask G-d why me. It's not his fault. !!!!!!!!
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Would anything make sense of the Holocaust? Was it just a Hollow Cost, of so many lives, so much desecration of humanity, such a terrible, horrible, beyond acceptable story.
What IF this were not the whole story? What IF this entire story were orchestrated by G_d? And what if, we were never ever deserted, even when we thought we were, even when we were so cruelly decimated?
Deep questions that seem imponderable. A life of total synchronicity is leading me to ask, and to wonder, deeply, if this story is not over, and IF G_d is not a dispassionate observer in the affairs of man, then there has to be, another story running.
I cannot, being human, go there, in terms of what happened, but I am saying, my life is taking me there. And so I ask, if all is G_d as rabbis on this site are saying... then WHO is responsible OR why did G_d not intervene and stop this. STOP THIS.
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I do not believe that the Holocaust was a punishment for the Jews. All over the world people are persecuted - under Sadim Hussein the Kurdish people were slaughtered, In ancient India the Buddhists were slaughtered and wiped out in India by the Muslim invaders of the time and in Tibet also under the chinese. In France in the Hundred Years War the Huggonots were torture and murdered in huge numbers. I am not trying to "put the Holocaust in proportion" or anything so hideously pretentious. My thought is more that human nature is easily corrupted. You really shouldn't consider it a punishment but more a triumph of good over evil because the Nazis were defeated and the Jews survived. There is suffering in the world, it comes with the human territory. Please Jews, continue to be a "Light for the World" and do not loose faith that good will always triumph over evil - always, always, always.
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I think anyone who talks about the Holocaust in terms of a punishment for the Jews is really misguided and saying something quite terrible. I heard a story recently, about how an Orthodox man said those who died in the 911 World Trade Center collapse were being punished justly for being bad people. Now how anyone could arrive at this seems so beyond the bounds of reason to me, and treasonable. The idea itself is evil.
You are right Julie, that around the world there are ongoing atrocities, examples of inhumanity. We do not or should not compare the magnitude of the one to the other, but certainly genocide was part of the Armenian experience too. And Hitler used this as his excuse, saying the Turks got away with it, and so could he.
If there is a cosmic story running here, and in a way, hard to describe, and very difficult to absorb, then we have to ask G_d for the answer. My faith tells me we cannot ever have been deserted, even in the worst of times. Just maybe, it's not over.
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I love the hollow cost for holocaust, and I love the "do not lose faith that good will triumph over evil" belief. On another post, someone said they don't ask "why me", but they ask, "Why not me?" I also love that sentiment. One day, I watched a TV show called The Twilight Zone, in which a little child was playing with tiny characters and the child hurt a bunch of them with one sweep while having a temper tantrum. When the camera panned down to the little characters, they were actually humans on this earth. I assume the child was supposed to be symbolic of G-d in the way G-d is sometimes portrayed by humans, with human emotions and angers and characteristics. Something to think about, no?
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Hello again Karen! Hope you are well! You post an interesting idea in "Something to think about". I know a lot of people think of G_d that way but I can't. The above article indicates a much larger scheme of things than the human mind can fully grasp and I would tend to agree. My own faith teaches me to bow before G_d (with or without statues!!) and know the frailty of my human mind which persists in thinking in opposites, while G_d transends such thinking. Maybe faith is the way we humans transcend the oposites?
Ruth, what did you mean by "... it's not over yet"? (I hope you are not being persecuted, if you are you should tell someone straight away.)
I have often wondered what it would be like to be rich but my thinking is that it would be a lot of bother and worry - oh how do I invest it? What if I should loose it all? Unlike Tevya I have decided one is rich when one knows one has enough. Thanks be to G_d.
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Doesn't the Torah say that when the Jews keep the Commandments they will be supported, and, conversely, when they stray they will be persecuted, and their numbers diminished? Is it "terrible" to follow what the Torah teaches? Can someone with knowledge of the Torah please weigh in here? I am not sure which of us is "misguided."
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I looked to my future and what would I need as I age without my children able to care for me. So, I got a three wheel scooter (to help me stay mobile), a reclining chair which lifts so when my joints get stiff, I won't have to have pain rising, a car to get me to my doctor's visits, a portable commode (toilet), and such things. I didn't get a house, because as I get old, I wouldn't be able to take care of it. I didn't invest, because I didn't know how many years I had left on this earth. And, I moved away from the city in which I had so many very frightening events happen to me. So, if Tevye was smart, he'd have said, "Look, Go-d, I am poor, but the little I have, please help me to use it wisely", he'd have had better results of his prayer, I am sure. Also, he'd be happier. No?
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I have a deep feeling we came back and that souls do return, in different garb, and also by some alchemy identity, is somehow retained. This is what I mean I am saying there are recent discussions on line about what is Infinite, and that's hard to fathom, and yet, this to me, means the story is never over. We continue, as souls, and by some alchemy of mercy, because I do deeply trust and believe in a G_d of infinite mercy, we continue on.
We all have our epiphanies in life, and we all have the most amazing stories, of survival, hope despair and transcendence. i deeply believe G_d is the author, the final authority, behind all stories. I am seeing G_d does not play dice with the universe. We are co-creators, and gifted a ladder of compassion.
I do not believe this is radical thinking but some on line seems to feel it is.
I am not persecuted. I am so fortunate to be here at this time. I say, constantly, "Thank YOU for bringing me to this place at this time". I regret any misconception
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Ruth, the questions surrounding 1939-1945 are indeed difficult to place in a world view consistant with Judasim. I tend to view the events of the area in terms of teshuva. Since teshuva can be performed without having to have sinned against G-d, then the question of punishment never comes up and the purpose of punishment is still accomplished.
Whether punishment or not is then not the question, the purpose of either is teshuva and coming near to G-d.
We do not need to understand G-d role in this if we only underwstand our role is that of coming nigh unto theEternal One.
If the eternal plan of things was punishment, then teshuva is our reponsibility. If the plan was for another reason, then our responsibiliy is the same-teshuva.
The purpose of the shoah is not our focus or resonsibility. Ourfocus is our reaction. Our reaction is to stay night to our G-d and to be a lamp unto all nations-no matter what the circumstances or difficulties.
I say this only as an outsider student.
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There is a limit. I learned as a child to not ask of Hashem personal things for myself. Never thought it was about me, but about others. One time, before I realized this, I asked Hashem for something for myself and when I received what I asked for, I was not happy.
I do what I do for the Great One. But others, who are supposed to do but don't, should not be made obscenely wealthy for my mitzvah. That is when enough was enough. For me and from my perspective.
Yet, I was made to do what I do for the Great One, and that has not changed. My unwillingness to corrupt this gift is also for the Great and Holy One.
There has to be a balance somewhere, somehow. So I decided to write my own book, to take responsibility of the atrocities other subhumans do, rather than have the victims or families of murder or violence blame Hashem.
Einstein once said the world was a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but for those who do nothing!
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I do not think it is over by any means. I am reminded of the story of Esau, Jacob, the Blessing from Isaac, and the fact that Isaac knew, the smell of Jacob to be the sweet aroma of the Garden of Eden. Adam....
This biblical tale, deep in meaning, reminds me deeply of today. The Blessing. There is going to be an answer to the Holocaust, and continued Holocaust thru the World because the actions are committed by Esau, but Esau's blessings were of this world, not the next and not above, like Jacobs were.
Hashems time is not our time. He abandoned no one, and they stand with Him in Eden now. Hashem personally retrieved the victims of the Holocaust.
Jacobs blessings are now, it is HIS turn, and Nations will fall, because Jacob is ready to act on his note, from Isaac his Father. Change is inevitable and in the process for more than 60 years, and it will be a heavenly restitution. Perfectly complete in every detail. Baruch Hashem!
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