Leap of faith: why Fiddler doesn’t have an ending

I started crying a few bars in to the first song. There’s a way we do things. A way we pass on our identity to the next generation with our Seder meal, our Purim costumes, dipping our apple in honey.

Taking my son to his first viewing of Fiddler on the Roof was just another way of passing on tradition, identity, an understanding of who we are today. They are all inextricably linked, and sometimes all too painfully reminiscent of generations gone by.

He sat between my husband and I and coped with his uncool mum teary-eyed and clutching his hand as I prayed that society at large wouldn’t make it too difficult for him to be a proud inheritor of that tradition in his adult life.

So as we came out and I asked him excitedly what he thought, I took it a bit personally when he declared it “a bit disappointing”. What? Why? It’s brilliant and emotional and beautiful in its painful way. “Well it isn’t finished,” my astute 13-year-old bemoaned. “I was loving it – the music, the set, the characters but then they’ve just left me hanging. If I did that in an English essay my teacher would think I’d got lazy and left it unfinished. I want to know what happens.”

And that, dear reader, is why you don’t want to be the child of a rabbi. He got a sermon the entire way home from Regents Park to Finchley. The play doesn’t finish because the story hasn’t ended. He’s part of writing the next chapter and we never want to see an ending.

At the moment, more than ever before in my lifetime, I fear others want to see a conclusion, an ending.  People have tried to conclude it too many times in our history, from Tisha B’Av to The Final Solution and yet here we all were, a theatre filled with people we knew. An interval that felt like kiddush. If we knew what happened in the life of Tevye and each of his daughters it would be fiction, but the fiction becomes history when we each get to tell our story, how we got from that shtetl in Lithuania or Poland, from the Rivers of Babylon or the foot of Sinai to the Regents Park Open Air Theatre and we are still doing what “the Good Book says”.

In every generation we not only need a Seder, a Megillah and a production of Fiddler on the Roof but we also need to find the defiance to say that no-one else will end our story if we keep feeling a strong sense of belonging and a commitment to playing our part in the passing on of tradition.

And if that word ‘tradition’ starts you singing then it’s lucky they’ve extended the run. Seeing it is as much a rite of passage as dipping your apple in honey in a few weeks’ time.

It’s not Torah but it’s certainly all part of our tradition.