WALKING THE WALK

 

Gut Yontiff, everyone. I have to begin with an apology. This will take less than a minute: Mayn be’emes antshuldikn, tu di gantse shpeeler fun “Fidler oyfn Dakh” in Eeddish, far vos ikh hob gezogt ven ikh hob ersht gelernt veigen a produktsye fun ​​dem pietza az dos vet gedoyern tsvey vokhn avek fun Brodvey. iz ikh oongerecht!

Well, that felt good. If you didn’t understand what I said, not to worry, I barely understood what I said. If I ever slip into Yiddish during a conversation, you can be sure someone else translated  it for me, in this case, a consortium of helpers including my Uncle Irving, Esther Eisenberg (God bless her) and if you can believe this—Google Translate. But I wanted to start this sermon in Yiddish as an act of teshuvah. You see, when I first heard that Fiddler on the Roof was going to be produced off-Broadway in Yiddish, I said to myself, well, this one ought to last about two weeks.  Then I saw the production. Oh my God—it was fabulous. Beginning in July of 2018, it was slated to run for only six weeks at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, it was extended four times, and then moved uptown to Stage 42 where it played for 11 months until its close in January of this year. Amazing and boy—were my initial instincts about this production off base! 

I didn’t think one could improve on the script by Joseph Stein or the lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, but Shraga Friedman’s Yiddish translation was magical and people walked away from the production thinking somehow it felt more authentic, more genuine than the English version itself. I was shocked in thinking the same thing myself. What is it about that production that made it so popular?

You have to begin with Sholom Aleichem’s “Tevye, The Dairyman,” first published in 1894. Sholom Aleichem, beyond telling stories that would make you laugh, and sometimes cry, was addressing a deeper phenomenon, which was the conflict between tradition and change. It’s no accident that the opening song of Fiddler is Tradition. Tevye and his community have their traditions. Everyone has a role and everyone has a place and everything runs like a well-ordered machine (most of the time). Tevye has four daughters and his daughters will prove the challenge to his beloved traditions. You know the story. The first doesn’t want to accept the matchmaker’s choice for her beloved and instead wants to marry, you’ll excuse the expression, for love. The second one chooses a Jewish man, but a new kind of Jewish man—a revolutionary (or as my father would refer to him---a CommooNEEST). And the third daughter falls in love with a non-Jewish boy, a development Tevye cannot accept. With all these changes, life was no longer the well-ordered, well-structured social construct that Tradition had provided the community, presumably for centuries, whether real or imagined. 

Fiddler ends with Tevye walking away from ole’ mother Russia, sometime in the early 1900’s, with an audience knowing the sequel to the story. How does the audience know the sequel to the story? Because the audience is the sequel to the story. We, the audience, know how far we’ve walked away from the traditions that Tevye adored, how far from those communal structures that kept little Anatevke humming, and even how far from the language of the play, from the Yiddish of our forebears, which if not for our familiarity with the musical to begin with and the blessed English subtitles projected onto the stage, we would not have understood. The conflict between tradition and change is a universal theme which explains the popular notion that Fiddler has been produced some where in the world everyday since its debut in the 1960’s, something which has come to an end due to—what else?—Covid 19.

One of the ironies of Covid-19 is, disruptive though it has been, in an odd sort of way it forced us back into some traditional modes of living. The synagogue was closed but the Zoom Room of Midway Jewish Center has not only not missed a single minyan since we started zooming, but our minyanim, both morning and evening, have never been larger. We chose not to zoom on Shabbat, a decision that was respectful of Jewish tradition, but our pre-Kabbalat Shabbat service sometimes drew over 50 or 60 windows, meaning the number of people participating far exceeded the number that might attend on a typical Friday night. As families were unable to fill their days with the 101 activities and appointments that somehow we have managed to fill our days with, more families were spending more time together. It was challenging but it also gave us pause to think about how we spend our time. Anecdotally we know that there was a whole lot of baking going on during the height of the pandemic, bread and hallah baking in particular. And I can tell you for sure that as often as Tevye turned to the Ribbono shel Olam, the Master of the Universe, for a few private conversations on critical matters of the day, there were a whole lot of conversations going on in our community with the Ribbono shel Olam too, about abundance and scarcity, employment and unemployment, fear and faith, sickness and health, and about life and death. I don’t think Covid made us more religious, but I think it made us more mindful of what religious people think about, which includes human vulnerability, gratitude for little things, dependence on loved ones, and the blessings we all too often take for granted when those blessings are suddenly snatched from our lives. Covid-19 did not necessarily bring out the good in people, but it brought out the genuine character of people. It had a way of exposing peoples’ identities. And for some of us, we found out who were our friends and who were not.

I had a funny experience recently. My laptop, a MicroSoft Surface, requires no password for access as the notebook opens on the basis of facial recognition software. One day, I sat down to work, and the screen clearly indicated that it did not recognize me. I did what most of us would do: turned the computer off and rebooted, and still, the computer did not recognize me. I was mildly offended. And then I realized, I had forgotten to take off my mask and the computer literally did not recognize me. That was actually good news: it meant that both the computer and my mask were working

Facial recognition is one of a series of biometric technologies that identify people on the basis of texture, shape, and movement. One of the most fascinating biometrics, and perhaps the scariest in terms of invasion of privacy, is recognizing people by the way they walk. According to a New York Times article in October of 2019, the latest technology is learning how to decipher identities based on gait, that is how one walks because our walks are as distinctive as our characters. If you think of personalities like Groucho Marx, Walter Matheau, or even Mae West, whose personas were in part a development of a unique walk, it makes sense. But you probably never thought of yourself as having a gait that actually gave away your identity. According to some French and Australian researchers writing in the Journal of Applied Physiology, the way we walk is that distinctive. The way we walk identifies us.

If we were to search for this biometric in the intuitive sense of our ancestors, we might find it in the expression—to talk the talk and to walk the walk. It’s a way of determining whether a person who espouses certain principles actually abides by them. They may talk the talk, but the character is ultimately defined by walking the walk. The walk is one’s true identity. Again, we might find an intimation of the gait theory in the metaphor of path. One person pursues a noble path while another may have gone down the wrong path. And so it is with the whole of our moral character. We may talk the talk, but it’s our walk or the path we take that reveals our identity to the world.

You may think that the path and the walk are easy determinations, as if there were some travel guide out there determining what the path of righteousness actually is. But there isn’t. The moral and right thing to do is not always clear and there are always people on different roads, or let’s say multiple paths, who speak authoritatively and passionately about which direction to go, and muster their arguments or proofs to back up their claims. Which direction shall you go—to the right or to the left? How far to the right? How far to the left? Those are decisions we all must face.

Over Yom Kippur, we read the book of Jonah and there is a puzzling passage at the close of the book which speaks to this issue. You remember that Jonah was charged with going to the Assyrian city of Nineveh to tell them that their doom was fixed and that they would in short order be destroyed. Jonah did not want to do it, runs away, is swallowed by a very large fish, accepts God’s charge reluctantly, goes to Nineveh, and tells the people they are all going to die for their sins. But the people of Nineveh repent, God forgives them, destruction never comes, and Jonah ends up looking like a fool. He was really upset. He was having a bad day. Plus which, it was hot and there was no air conditioning. God shows Jonah compassion and causes this tree to grow shielding Jonah from the blazing sun. He cools down, but the tree withers, Jonah grows depressed and shvitzy, begs for death, whereupon God says to Jonah—“You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!” It’s a response that has caused much puzzlement over the centuries as to God’s exact meaning. Surely in Nineveh, a great city, there must be people who are moral and ethical, who do know their right hand from their left. Then again, maybe God is asking Jonah, and perhaps all of us, to consider our own ignorance about ethical living. We may all know a whole lot less than we believe when it comes to determining which is the right path, the righteous path in life to take. And at those times in life when we are most vulnerable or fragile, when the turmoil that life can be is forced upon us, those are the times when we are most likely to turn to the tried and true, to that which has been done for hundreds if not thousands of years. Those are the times when we turn to tradition because there is in long- established, age-old, time-honored ritual and faith a stability that life does not always offer us with any degree of generosity. We turn to the stability of the past because of the instability and frightening nature of the present. The number of people who turned to prayer or baking hallah with their children over the past few months, is not at all surprising. 

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the great 18^th century Irish Member of Parliament, philosopher and statesman, was no fan of the French Revolution, sympathetic though he was to some of its ideals. He felt that a movement steeped in the principles of the Enlightenment with its attacks on traditional institutions like monarchy, clergy, religion, and class would surely end in violence and dictatorship. And so it was this  high-minded revolution evolved into what we now refer to as the infamous Reign of Terror in 1793-94, when thousands who purportedly did not tow the new line of enlightenment were put to rest by the guillotine and then later, when disorder threatened most seriously, only a figure like Napoleon, whose rule was tyrannical and absolute, could bring stability back to France. That wasn’t at all what the Revolution had hoped for. The fact is that history gives us multiple examples of damage done by people who thought the world needed something radically new and were seduced by their own inventiveness. The most obvious examples are the Communists who killed in the name of the working class or the Nazis who killed in the name of the nation or volk. Both movements were experiments in social engineering to make the world a better place, both are regarded today as colossal failures, and if there is one thing that both had in common, it was the war they waged against religious tradition. They regarded tradition as a threat. 

On the surface, America still has respect for religion and tradition, but my sense is that it ain’t what it used to be. Our western world remains suspicious of religion, dismissive of God, contemptuous of faith, and disdainful of religious authority. And yet—look at what we’re doing here. We are gathered here in what can only be described as a counter-cultural demonstration. We are doing something that our ancestors have done for centuries, engaged in age-old rituals and appealing to God to cleanse us of sin and move us to set out on a better path in our lives, better for ourselves and those around us. Whoever thinks it backward to look to the past for answers that are enduring and reassuring thinks so because they themselves are apparently facing in the wrong direction.

Tradition is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is nice but it’s the past in memory alone. Tradition is the past  meeting the present and it is an essential component of civilization. It provides stability, comfort, and context to all the challenges we face. Edmund Burke and Reb Tevye would have a meeting of the minds on this very subject, if not a rather peculiar conversation between one speaking with an Irish brogue and the other with a Russian Yiddish accent. Yet both would agree that to look backwards to the tried and true, to that tested by generations of communities that have come to some settled understanding of what makes for stability and peace, is not a naïve thing to do. It’s a smart thing to do. And it’s not that Burke didn’t believe in change; he did. And Tevye himself knew that concessions must be made if one were sensible and prepared to live in the modern world. But neither believed that the past was so obsolete that there was nothing within it to guide us. Burke and Tevye would have agreed that the allure of tradition lies in the order of the past, the assumption that there is purpose and meaning to life, and in the supremacy of God. Tradition is thus a vehicle for navigating the craziness of life. How many times have you heard someone sigh and observe what we are going through right now with the following expression, “This is just crazy!” 

And that is why, so often, you hear in this community an appeal to what we call Halakhah. Halakhah is typically translated as Jewish law, but what it really means is the way we walk. Halakhah is our gait. Halakhah is the way we identify ourselves as Jews, it’s the way we take the beliefs that are most sacred to us and give them legs. We take the talk and turn it into walk. And we don’t wait for a pandemic to turn our lives upside down before we turn to the past for answers. We live this halakhah each day of our lives. 

The liberal seminaries these days are filled with young people who have not grown up in religiously observant families, but are nonetheless, drawn to ancient texts that challenge them into thinking how the past might invest a present with richer meaning. And maybe for us, set in our ways as we may be, comfortable without anyone challenging our routines, maybe it’s high time that instead of just watching a musical like Fiddler and dreaming of a past that is no more, actually find a way to incorporate some of that past into the present in order to create a richer, more stable today. This is not an attempt to turn anyolne into a Goldas or a Tevye, but it is a challenge to you to deepen your religious convictions through practice, to pick up some good books and read about ways you can bring a little more Shabbat and a little more kashrut and a little more prayer and a little more study into your lives. In incorporating a little more Halakhah into our lives, we adjust our gait and thus our identities, and we could all begin to walk a little more authentically, because we are Jews. 

In conclusion, I would like to say a few words of apology.  Mayn be’emes antshuldikn tu dem gantsn geshtalt fun “Shtisel,” ven ikh hob ersht ervist az Netflix vet durkhfirn a seriye vegen khareidishe EEden in Yisroyel, alt oyf Yiddish, az dos vet gedoyern be’erekh tsvey vokhn. Iz ikh oongerecht! Oh—that felt good too. I just apologized to the entire cast of Shtisel for having said, when I first learned that Netflix would air a series about Haredi Jews in Israel all in Yiddish, that this one ought to last about two weeks. Was I wrong on that account too!  I can’t wait for Season 3. And if there is a season 4, and the writers are running thin on ideas, I’m thinking that if they were to introduce, let’s say, a Long Island Conservative rabbi into the plot, maybe I could audition. The possibilities for scandal are infinite! Jerusalem meets Oyster Bay!

Shtisel. What is it with tales of religious life, Yiddish, and American Jewry? There is an allure to this spiritual life as defined by Halakhah, one that we are almost afraid to admit to. But why resist its charm? Fiddler ended with Tevye walking away. We are the sequel to that story and the story is not over. We are the Jewish people—the story is never over. We have the ability and resources to walk back toward tradition. And in this topsy-turvy world that we are now thrust into, when we don’t even recognize what our lives have become, tradition may be just the walk we need to remember exactly whom we are.

I want to wish you all a Tzom Kal, an easy fast and a Gmar hatimah tovah, a secure and sealed listing in the Book of Life, of Gezint (health), and a besser Yur (a better year).