When we moved into our new home in Florida last year, I noticed something that looked like a doorbell on two of our door frames. Later when my girls were watching the musical Fiddler On The Roof with me, I suddenly realized what they were.
“Do you see those little rectangular boxes on the top of their door frames?” I quickly paused the video so they could both look closer. “Those are called ‘mezuzahs’!”
“Me-what-zahs?”
“Mezuzahs! They were little boxes the Jewish people put on their doors as a blessing to the house. Inside each box was a tiny scroll of paper on which they inscribed Deuteronomy 6:4-8 and 11:13-21 in Hebrew.”
This is the kind of lecture you’re treated to when your father is a pastor.
“But here’s the best part – we have two mezuzahs on the doors of our new house! Bet you can’t find them!”
That did it. We were now off on a treasure hunt!
I finally led the way as we ran to the front door of our home. “See, there it is”, I said pointing up to it. The girls had never noticed it.
“But there’s another one too!” We now ran to the door leading to our garage. “Would you like to see if the Scripture is still inside of it?” Considering their level of excitement, that question was a no brainer.
I tugged the little plastic box off the side of the garage door and started prying it open with a screwdriver. Suddenly, it popped open. There inside was a rolled-up piece of laminated paper. On it was inscribed a passage, written from right to left in Hebrew:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.
Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, like the days of the heavens above the earth.”
Deuteronomy 6:4-7, 11:18-21
By the time our evening was through, my girls were actually sleeping with the mezuzah I took down and opened for them. Talk about your teachable moments!
Anyone who knows me knows I have a great fondness for musicals like Fiddler. However, the traditions Tevye sang about in that film are mostly smirked at today. People seem to think thousands of years of civilization got everything wrong until their generation happened along. Now it’s their job to straighten everyone else out!
This is the zeitgeist of our culture now, tearing down much of Western Civilization in the name of equity, justice, and victimhood. None of our founders were quite perfect enough, and so we demonize anyone who’s human. Certainly, great injustices occurred in the past…just as they continue to occur worldwide today. But just because an epoch in history got some things wrong doesn’t mean the “baby” should be thrown out with the bathwater.
Within the dirty bathwater of our imperfect history are found Shakespeare and Dickens, Bach and Beethoven, the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta. The fact that incredibly flawed people produced them does not make their ideas wrong. We don’t include the disenfranchised into honor by excluding the great thinkers of our past.
Inclusion is not a binary choice. It doesn’t have to be either/or. It should be both/and.
I believe we should hold fast to the things from our past which are precious, while exposing the things that were evil. The fact that evil existed then doesn’t invalidate our past. It only proves there were imperfect people back then just like there are now.
Some of Fiddler’s marriage traditions were intended to keep women from being impregnated and then abandoned. Likewise, Tevye’s prayer shawl was to remind him to have a daily habit of focusing on God. While many of those traditions restricted personal freedoms, they also protected the family and emphasized eternal values.
With our contemporary mindset, we might argue that some of Tevye’s traditions were backward and should be discarded. Some were more based on abuse of power than timeless values. However, many of those traditions were the glue that held their families and communities together. Their accompanying values of chastity and respect for Scripture continued to gradually disintegrate as Eastern Europeans immigrated to America. Today, some American Jews have not only abandoned those traditions but their faith as well.
As a Christian, I look at that disintegration and wonder what is to come for my own faith. Like Tevye, some of the traditions I was taught were merely products of the time. The prohibition against dancing my parents were taught kept them out of the bars so they could work their way out of the Great Depression. But that prohibition was fighting a temporary problem and has now worn out its welcome.
While some traditions are temporal and belong to a certain time and place, some are eternal and based on the character of God Himself. While it’s ok that my wife and I happily dance at wedding receptions now, there are other traditions we still hold firmly and will teach our children to honor. We don’t hold to these out of fear or a closed mind. We hold to them because they produce the values we cherish most: faith, kindness, respect, purity, and integrity.
Maybe that’s why I like those old musicals. As unrealistic as they are, I see in them a naive purity and innocence that’s mostly missing in our culture now.
Frankly, I’m nostalgic for a time when people believed in beautiful things so much they would burst into song about them. That’s one thing people make fun of about musicals the most: the spontaneous singing. Maybe we’re too cynical to singanymore, except in the occasional flash mob at the mall.
Or maybe what we need today is a little less smirking and a lot more singing. Maybe if we held on to more of those corny old, time-honored traditions, we’d live in a world worth singing about.
As Tevye said, “Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as …a fiddler on the roof”. The writing is on our walls, even if we don’t have a mezuzah.
