14 September 2025

Mary-Catherine and I saw the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ when we were students at Edinburgh University. She loved  it and it remained a firm favourite. Last week we saw it again on our forty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Although it wasn’t such a successful production as the one featuring Topol, the Israeli actor and singer who made the part of Tevye his own, the songs were familiar and the story as true as it was then for it was all about family life and that resonates with us all.

The opening song is about tradition. It is very important because it gives life balance, as Tevye says. When we follow traditional patterns of life and living, we know where we are within our family and community. It benefits from common consent and the wisdom of our forebears.

This philosophy is challenged by Tevye’s five  daughters and,  in particular, the three who get married in the show. Each one challenges the tradition. The first challenges the concept of arranged marriage. The second challenges the concept of a father’s choice. She chooses a political radical.

Both of these daughters win their father round. They acknowledge that part of the tradition cannot be sacrificed – the consent of their father and the harmonious relationships within the family. The third daughter is not so wise. She falls in love with a Christian.

This challenges the long-held belief that Jews should marry fellow Jews. Instead of winning her father’s approval, she marries in secret. This is the marriage which Tevye cannot accept. It marks the prelude to the Russian progrom and the scattering of the Jews to the four corners of the earth.

The traditions surrounding our Kirk have been challenged too by a generation which doesn’t frame their lives in the context of a family and a community but in the context of personal choice and the freedom ‘to do what I think best to reach my full potential’.

This is not the Gospel. Oh yes, Jesus offers us life in all its fullness but it emerges  out of a discussion about the Good Shepherd. His goodness or his attraction stems from his willingness to die for the sheep. The choice which the Gospel offers us is a life for self or a life for others and only in the latter is there life in all its fullness.