Fiddler Sermon 4 - Why a Fiddle? And Who Plucks a String on a Roof Anyway?!? – The Metaphors of Fiddler on a Roof

In the 1999 movie, ‘The Sixth Sense,’ a young boy, played by Haley Joel Osment, begins to see a child psychologist (Bruce Willis) because he claims to see dead people. And not just see them, he interacts with them as well. And as the movie progresses, we watch him indeed speaking to, dealing with, and eventually assisting the spirits of people who are deceased, who no one else can see. Now, I probably shouldn’t ruin the ending for you, but I really think there has to be a statue of limitations on these kinds of things. You should have seen the movie by now, people!

So, the big plot twist at the end is, Bruce Willis, the psychologist, is ALSO dead, and he is one of the spirits that the boy is helping. Until that big surprise was revealed, however, we, the audience, never noticed that no one else EVER interacted with him. It was one of those really fabulously well-orchestrated build-ups by director M. Night Shyamalan, where the moment you ‘get it,’ you go back in your mind and realize that no one else ever saw, spoke, or related to this psychologist. And, in truth, it kind of blows your mind.

I mention this at the start of my D’var Torah today, because I sometimes think of the Fiddler, in ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ the same way. Not that he’s dead (necessarily…), but that despite being the title character of the play, and the first one you see on stage, and the last one who leaves at the end of the performance, and whose music is so essential to the flavor and atmosphere of the play and the town of Anatevka itself; despite all these things, NO ONE, except Tevye, ever notices or interacts with the Fiddler.

So, who is this guy? Is the Fiddler a real person, living in the village of Anatevka? If so, who’s paying him to play, and why do they want him to sit on rooftops all the time? Where’s the rest of his klezmer band? And is there a training program specifically for musicians on rooftops? Seems like a rather narrowly-focused skillset… You may laugh, of course, because it IS a bizarre element in the play. And the Fiddler does not ever come up in the dialog or music of the show, other than Tevye’s intro, where he claims that ‘each one of us is a fiddler on a roof, just trying to play a little tune without breaking our necks.’ That one line basically attempts to tie together the title and the content of the play, but it leaves me (and maybe only me…) wondering about how the Fiddler fits in with everything else.

It is interesting to note, on this subject, that Sholem Aleichem, the original author of the stories about Tevye the Milkman, never imagined a Fiddler playing on any rooftop in his little village. His eight books about Tevye all focus on the man and his family, and it was only when the stories made their way to Broadway in the 1960s that Jerry Bock, Joseph Stein, and Hal Prince gave the play the title, ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ It’s kind of crazy to think that Sholem Aleichem himself, were he to come back today and see the great success of his characters, wouldn’t really know what was going on with this title, or how a balancing violinist all of a sudden hijacked his wonderful stories!

According to Alisa Solomon, in her book ‘Wonder of Wonders: A cultural history of Fiddler on the Roof,’ the title was inspired by the paintings of Marc Chagall. Though even there, we can’t actually refer to any one painting called ‘The Fiddler on the Roof,’ or that even focuses exclusively ON a violinist; it was just one of many themes that recurred in Chagall’s paintings, and somehow came to epitomize shtetl life. Solomon writes about the ‘invented memory of the shtetl brought forth by… Chagall’s paintings, and representations of Sholem-Aleichem’s works.’ Together, the combination of Chagall’s images and Sholem-Aleichem’s stories ‘gave depictions of the people of the shtetl a newly, and nostalgically, noble purpose – not as passive victims but as preservers of a great culture that would be redeemed.’

So intertwined were the stories of Sholem-Aleichem and the paintings of Marc Chagall, that they were already brought together 20 years before the play would make its debut on Broadway. In a 1946 New York Times review of a newly released volume of 27 Sholem-Aleichem stories, the article was illustrated with a Chagall image depicting: “A crooked line of point-roofed houses, a horse draws a cart into the frame and a fiddler rushes along, violin in hand, looking like he’s about to take a tumble.”

Is it any wonder that the creators of the play eventually just ‘made it official,’ and used the Chagall image to make the performance famous across the globe?

And somehow, the Fiddler alone has come to symbolize Judaism everywhere. Any image, painting, story, or backdrop suddenly becomes an Eastern European shtetl if you just stick a guy on the rooftop, playing along on a violin. In fact, just earlier this week, I was reading a children’s story to a group of Pre-K and Kindergarten students at Kehillah, about a group of barnyard animals acting out the story of Purim. On the very last page, out of nowhere, and just to really hammer home the point that this truly IS a Jewish barnyard… we all of a sudden see a cat on the roof of the barn, holding a violin! It’s everywhere!!!

But let’s return then to our original question: If the Fiddler is so prominent, so important as to title the entire show, and if he signifies this era and represents all these colorful characters; how come no one else sees him? Doesn’t he matter to anyone else but Tevye? Who IS this Fiddler on the Roof?

Let me offer a couple of possibilities:

1) The Fiddler represents God’s Presence in this village. Tevye, like a prophet, engages in little, endearing conversations with God throughout the play. Usually, these monologues are directed heaven-ward, not to anyone in particular. But God’s manifestation is never limited to just one medium; we interact with God – in all our lives – in many, many different ways. Perhaps, when Tevye feels like speaking directly to God, he turns to the sky and makes requests, challenges, accusations, and jokes, while yet other times, he prefers to dance, wordlessly, with God, or just gesture towards God’s Presence and share a silent, and beautiful moment together. THAT (might be) the Fiddler.

And though aspects of this might give us a pleasant image of God, it can also be a theologically troubling one. So often we look to God for salvation and justice, but then we don’t see it come to pass in real-time.

Towards the end of the play, the rabbi’s son, Mendel, asks the rabbi, ‘We’ve been waiting for the Messiah our entire lives, wouldn’t THIS be a good time for him to come?’ And the rabbi can only shrug his shoulders and reply, sadly: ‘We’ll have to wait for him someplace else.’ At that moment, we look around for God – for the Fiddler – just to get some explanation, an answer, but there is none to be had. It’s hard to accept, sometimes, that change needs to come from US, from our own actions and decisions; that God offers us strength, comfort, compassion, support… but often from a bit of a distance, like the Fiddler, refusing to come down off his roof…

2) But the Fiddler can also represent tradition. Certainly being the representative of all of Chagall’s paintings, and thus the image of an entire world, and even a mindset, the Fiddler symbolizes all that was, in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. In many ways, Tevye is the gatekeeper between the old world and the new; his fellow villagers holding fast to their old beliefs, and Tevye singing along with them about ‘Tradition!,’ and yet, Tevye also welcomes in the rebel, Perchik, to his home, and acquiesces to the radical ideas of his daughters. He is torn between two worlds.

The wedding scene, which arguably represents the fulcrum when everything shifts, switches from the village denouncing the young men and women dancing together to everyone joining in, only when Tevye steps across the barrier to dance with his wife. Tradition is a very powerful concept for Tevye, even when he sees the need for change. At the close of the play, when everyone else has been evicted, and there is silence on stage, Tevye waves to the Fiddler to join him, as if together with all the other belongings he has packed into his wagon, he also brings with him his traditions and values into the new world that lies ahead.

And because we’re seeing the world from Tevye’s point-of-view, we only see his interaction with the Fiddler. Whether the musician represents God or the ancient traditions, he is a powerful figure for Tevye, and thus he also becomes powerful for you and me, because we are experiencing this world through Tevye’s eyes.

In the original books, Sholem-Aleichem imagined Tevye speaking with the author himself! I was surprised, and intrigued to learn this. We don’t get a complete sense of it in the play; perhaps because it was hard to translate it onto the stage. But Tevye told all his tales – about his daughters, his village, and his misfortunes – TO the author, living in another world, and outside the pages of the book. It was as if the two were good friends, perhaps writing letters to one another, or chatting over the phone (though no such modern invention existed in Tevye’s time). What a fascinating way to tell a story! And we feel some of that in the audience, when Tevye steps outside the narrative, the other characters freeze, and Tevye weighs his options, with everyone in the theater seats as his close confidents.

And that is why, in the end, I feel that you and I must consider who the Fiddler is for us as well. Like the child psychologist in ‘The Sixth Sense,’ once we have figured out that we’re the only ones who can see him, we have to ask ourselves what he’s doing here, and what he represents for us.

Throughout these sermons I’ve delivered about ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ I’ve talked about analyzing the play from the perspective of Sholem-Aleichem and 19^th Century Eastern Europe, AND from the perspective of 1960s America, when the Broadway show debuted. BUT we also need to look at it today. What does it evoke for us, for you and me? Looking now at the metaphor of the Fiddler on the Roof in YOUR life, what does he represent?

- What do you bring with you, everywhere you go, that represents your heritage and your ancestry?

- What are the ‘themes’ that play over and over in your head, that help guide you in your decision making, whether it’s about how to live an ethical life, which path to walk, or who to share your journey with?

- And does the sound of your own violin work in harmony with you? Does it inspire and motivate you? Give you meaning and purpose? Or is it a sound you try to drown out and run away from, or that you find embarrassing and harmful?

The answers to these questions are SO individual, so personal to you and your experience, to me and mine. And it almost doesn’t matter whether the Fiddler represents God, Jewish tradition, or just a narrative story that we carry with us from our family of origin, or our experiences from childhood. It is still a tune that is ALWAYS with us. Like Tevye, we have to weigh (on the one hand and the other) what to do with it.

And in that endeavor, in trying to decide how our history, our culture, and our relationship with the Divine should impact our lives, we too are often in the midst of a balancing act. Sometimes we adhere to tradition, taking comfort and inspiration from what was. And sometimes we take bold and unfamiliar steps forward, challenging the status quo to see what newness the future might hold. And when we do that, when we balance back and forth, actively in relationship with the voices of our heritage, we are all, ourselves, in those moments, Fiddlers on a Roof.

Shabbat Shalom!