At the beginning of “Fiddler On The Roof,” the Broadway musical set in a Jewish village in czarist Russia, the main character, a poor milkman named Tevye, compares the precarious position of the Jews in the village to a fiddler on a roof and asks the question, “And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word. Tradition!”
The traditions of Tevye’s age—arranged marriages, sons following in their father’s footsteps, daughters raised to become wives and mothers—are long gone, swept away by 150 years of emancipation, revolutions, wars, industrialism, and technology. Some cultures still hold to these traditions even today, but if you, as a Westerner, were to advocate arranged marriages (and surely some fathers look at their daughters and the boys they are dating, and wish this were a possibility), expect to find yourself savaged by a mob or at the least, to endure a lecture from your mother on the meaning of the word Neanderthal.
