Tag: change

Learning to accept changes

Whew, we’re dealing with so much these days. The pandemic seemed all-consuming, until the serious weather events started. It’s a lot.

Lately, I’ve thought about a Jewish folk tale, often retold in children’s books. Usually, it’s a man who goes to his rabbi because his small house, full of relatives, is too loud. The rabbi suggests he brings his chickens inside. Then maybe a dog, or a cat, goats, a horse and a cow. Then, the man is beside himself with all the noise and mess! He goes back to the rabbi, who suggests he return those animals to the barnyard. Suddenly, his house seems big and quiet. The rabbi’s lesson, of course, is to be grateful for what we’ve got. We have to realize (over and over) that whatever we have, even if it’s small or loud, maybe wasn’t so bad in the first place. Through this sort of change and gratitude practice, we may come to realize that there are good aspects to many situations that perhaps previously seemed dire.

Last week, I felt so lucky. I managed to “score” my twins (age 10) COVID vaccine appointments in a medical clinic about two blocks from our home. We were absolutely thrilled. I’d gotten us on a list at this clinic just in case they should gain access to the pediatric vaccine. We were expecting and willing to wait awhile because we didn’t want to go to a supersite. To our surprise, the clinic got the vaccines in quickly. They called us at 11 in the morning, I picked the kids up from school early, a little after 1 p.m., and the vaccines were in their arms by 1:45.

I’d promised the twins gelati afterwards, but the windchill had been -30 that morning, and our neighbourhood gelato shop is not doing dine-in. Even Winnipeggers have their winter limits. We celebrated by eating pastries from a local bakery instead. Then we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on the couch together. It was, coincidentally, American Thanksgiving. We had a lot to be thankful about.

All this luck evened out when, a couple days later, one of my twins developed what seemed like a full-blown head cold. We all went off to get tested because maybe we have new allergies, maybe it was a head cold or maybe it was COVID. The good news is that we all tested negative. Whew.

Bad news is that the kid still had a cold and he had to stay home from school with his twin while we waited for the test results. The good part is that, while at home, we had time to go through the kids’ bookshelf, removing all the easy readers and things we no longer needed. (It was then that I encountered multiple versions of that noisy house story I described above.)

I mention all this because, like me, you may be surrounded by those who are yearning for things to get better. Of course, this isn’t a bad hope. Sometimes, when things change, it’s seriously awful news, or it’s not a huge improvement in our lives. So, we maybe have to be grateful for what we’ve got, and learn to accept the change and work with it. It’s working with what’s in front of us, whether it’s climate change weather events or pandemic challenges.

I considered thoughts about change while doing my daily page of Talmud and studying the talmudic tractate of Taanit. In Taanit, on page 17, there’s a discussion about whether those who were high priests in the Temple can drink alcohol. In Rabbi Elliot Goldberg’s introduction from the My Jewish Learning website, he explains this situation. When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the priests weren’t allowed to drink when they were on duty. Yet, when the rabbis are debating this in the Talmud, it’s been a long time, more than a century, since the Temple was standing. At first, their conclusion is that all priests must stand by, forever, completely sober. After all, they must be ready to be on duty, if the Temple should be rebuilt.

However, according to Rashi’s explanation, Rabbi Judah HaNasi’s decision becomes law. He says that, since it’s unlikely the Temple will be rebuilt any time soon, priests are allowed to drink alcohol every now and again. Rabbi Judah HaNasi is willing to accept that a big change has happened. He finds something good in a hard situation, which might bring somebody a little enjoyment.

Change happens, whether we like it or not. Maybe, like the loss of the Temple, or the destruction of homes due to climate change or people who die from the pandemic, it’s a horrible loss. There’s no denying some losses are life-changing.

Yet, there is also just change. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was working flat out to schedule my kids into a series of summer camps. In March 2020, I was desperate to find the next best experience. Long story short, in Manitoba, many camps were canceled in 2020. We had to learn a whole new way of keeping our kids busy all summer long. We were oddly prepared when, in summer 2021, our preliminary summer plans again hit a snag.

Oddly, for both me and my kids, those unstructured summer days were a gift. I would never have changed our lives that substantially if the pandemic hadn’t hit. Now, faced with twins at home for a day in December due to a head cold, I was happy to let them wile away the unexpected time. There was a lot of creative play. There were books to read and activities to do, the dog to feed and dinner to make. The day passed. My kids were upset at missing school but, like Judah HaNasi, we can try to find the bright side.  Roughly 2,000 years ago, it meant high priests could have an alcoholic beverage if they wanted. It goes without saying that this doesn’t make up for the loss of the Temple, but it’s not a bad side benefit, either.

May the changes that come be easy to cope with and good ones for you. At the very least, let’s hope some of the changes have an unexpected benefit!

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Nostalgia’s place in progress

There were no doubt many emotions surrounding the Israel Prize this year: disdain over Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu intervening to disqualify some judges apparently on ideological grounds, pride for the winners and disappointment among those forgotten. Even Chaim Topol, this year’s Israel Prize winner for lifetime achievement, said he had mixed feelings about his victory since other deserving candidates have been shut out in recent years. And for those who think about Topol in what is his most popular role, that of Tevye in the 1971 film (and some of the stage productions of) Fiddler on the Roof, there is likely one other emotion: nostalgia.

Nostalgia often gets a bad rap when it is talked about in the context of social maturity. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, the collective experience of nostalgia can also be a source of psychological sustenance for mourning an apparently simpler past in order to embrace a more complex present. In 20th-century Jewish popular culture, nowhere has this been more apparent than in the case of Fiddler on the Roof.

This was a time of emerging feminism and rising divorce rates. Races, religions and ethnicities were mixing as never before. The nature of Jewish religious practice was becoming viewed as a personal choice – something that Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen have described as the emergence of a “Jewish sovereign self.” On this backdrop, Fiddler’s audiences were given a “safe space” – in today’s parlance – to mourn patriarchy, cultural homogenization, and collective adherence to folkways and cultural conventions.

Consider the dream sequence. In presenting his concocted reverie as a divine omen in order to convince Golde that Tzeitel should marry Motel, Tevye pulls a trick out of the bag of shtetl superstition. And the conceit works. Though we know it’s a ruse, we become caught up in the ghoulish spin of the costumes, choreography and music. For a few minutes, we bid farewell to outmoded beliefs and traditions without feeling that we are abandoning our past commitments outright.

Or the ironic and comical number “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” where the comfort of convention is as thrilling for the daughters initially in the show, as is their fierce independence by the end.

Or Tevye conceding in the prologue that he doesn’t know the origin of some of the community’s customs. As Judaism becomes increasingly infused with contemporary values – the ecological dimension of powering down on Shabbat; the blending of new food politics with kashrut and the search for personal spirituality – Tevye’s proverbial wink directed at the audience allows us to keep one foot in the present of personal autonomy and choice, while the other dips into the comfortable past where automatic adherence to Jewish tradition formed the bonds of community.

American Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick complained that Fiddler portrayed Sholem Aleichem’s stories as “naive,” with “the occasion of a nostalgia for a sweeter time, pogroms notwithstanding.” Fiddler’s Broadway director and choreographer Jerome Robbins was concerned about the play appearing overly nostalgic, writing to his costume designer that he didn’t want audiences viewing the characters “through the misty nostalgia of a time past….”

For allowing Americans to come to terms with a changing America, however, and for American Jews to reflect on the rapid changes within their own communities, the nostalgia in Fiddler has been important. As Stephen J. Whitfield has written in his history of the show, Fiddler “had the advantage of distance: play-goers were far enough removed to memorialize without honoring any particular claims it might make, and without submitting to any moral mandates it might demand.”

Thinking about the role of Fiddler in today’s Jewish landscape, I think about the constant tensions between history and tradition on one hand, and modernity and contemporary values on the other. This has been especially important in how Jewish communities negotiate difference.

From the ashes of the Holocaust, the Zionist struggle for sovereignty and postwar North American Jews fighting against prejudice and discrimination, Jewish concerns now include many additional tensions. There’s intermarriage – how to broaden the tent enough to include intermarried families who may wish to be part of the Jewish people, but not so much that the meaning of being Jewish is lost; increased women’s ritual participation in North American synagogues and in public space in Israel; and LGBTQ Jews looking to take their place in Jewish communities. For their part, Israelis struggle – not hard enough, perhaps – to honor their state’s Jewish identity while extending full equality to the Palestinian minority and contending with the ongoing occupation, all while confronting the difficult plight of African refugees and asylum-seekers.

With Passover just behind us – and, for many, its nostalgia-drenched experience of gathering around the seder table – we might pause to consider how to navigate the uncertain waters of change while being anchored by tradition. And yes, a little nostalgia now and then might just help.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.