Horses and Mules

An iconic scene in the stage production of “Fiddler on the Roof” occurs during the first number “Tradition,” when the shtetl of Anatevka is whipped into a frenzy over whether or not the animal sold recently at the market was a horse or a mule. Anatevka is divided into two sides, each shrieking “Horse! Mule! Horse! Mule!” at the other, only to ultimately all join hands and sing a final chorus of “Tradition.” Arguing is indeed cooked into the tradition of the Jewish people. The debate of “horse or mule” is as deliberate as it is symbolic, resembling the trivial bickering between Jews one could expect to find at a Shabbat dinner table while simultaneously representing the larger disputes in our community.

This month, Member of Knesset Idit Silman of the Yamina Party chose to break ranks with Israel’s governing coalition, tanking its legislative majority, over the issue of whether or not leavened bread, chametz, should be allowed into state hospitals during the holiday of Passover. True, this debate was simply the latest of many disagreements between Silman and left-wing ministers in the coalition, but that it was this issue that finally “broke the camel’s back” and tied the competing factions in the Knesset calls back to themes in “Fiddler on the Roof.” This argument is seemingly petty. Other countries tear themselves to shreds over budgets and military spending, issues to which Israel is no stranger, but because Israel must be a Jewish state along with a democratic state, disputes over chametz are bound to be just as contentious. The ramifications of a tied Knesset may be severe, but I reveled in the opportunity to gleefully sing “Tradition” during the ensuing drama nonetheless. I feel sentimental, rather than frustrated or vindictive, when I realize the only tangible difference between Israel and Anatevka is the presence of a military at its borders preventing the people from a pogrom.

Indeed, this month, before the Silman incident even occurred, Dr. Einat Wilf aptly tweeted: “Sometimes within Israeli discourse, when some commentators want to claim that we haven’t really progressed much, they say that at the end of the day Israel is no more than a Shtetl with an army. And I think that’s actually pretty great.”

Every time a seder plate is adorned with foreign objects intended to symbolize various social justice causes, and every time Jews of different stripes object, the themes of “Fiddler on the Roof” are again front and center.

Not all the world’s shtetls have an army, however. Inter-community bickering in the Diaspora is no less biting. A recurring point of disagreement this time of year is how to honor the true essence of Passover — that is, whether it is better to find meaning in the specific plight of the Jewish people in Egypt and their redemption in The Promised Land or rather if it is more noble to tether our slavery to the oppression of marginalized people around the world in our contemporary era. Every time a seder plate is adorned with foreign objects intended to symbolize various social justice causes, and every time Jews of different stripes object, the themes of “Fiddler on the Roof” are again front and center. The “Mule!” crowd pulls Judaism toward a recognizable seder, while the “Horse!” crowd yanks it toward a looser interpretation of the Haggadah. 

The “horse” represents the universal Jewish impulse, calling us to say “to each their own,” to practice Judaism as we see fit, and to equip Jewish civilization with the facets of non-Jewish society to render it more egalitarian. In contrast, the “mule” symbolizes Jewish particularism, calling on us to impose Jewish law on Jewish hospitals in the Jewish state and to recite the Haggadah the way our shtetl-dwelling forefathers did. 

Tevye the dairyman grapples with this age-old Jewish problem in “Fiddler.” Each of his daughters pose for him the challenge of how to balance the universal and the particular. His eldest wishes to marry a man he did not choose, his middle daughter falls in love with a secular Jew, and finally, the youngest, Chava, wants to marry outside the faith entirely. Tevye concedes the first two, but balks at allowing Chava to marry a Christian — “If I bend that far, I’ll break,” he reasons with God. Chava, rejected, is left cradling her tear-stained face in a field, as her father presses on with the day’s work. As the world changes around Anatevka, the Jewish villagers are pulled in different directions and must compromise, debate and reform to survive.

But once we make it to the land, Jewish society collapses into fragments in a shorter time than it took to get there.

I return to the Jewish squabblings during Pesach because of the nature of Pesach itself. This is a story of miracles, true, and of the first gasp of Jewish self-determination in the Jews’ ancestral homeland. But once we make it to the land, Jewish society collapses into fragments in a shorter time than it took to get there. Judges and kings with differing opinions along with various civil wars and secessions form later biblical texts in the way that collective hope forms previous passages. We failed to ascertain how to best create a Jewish civilization then, as much as we are still struggling with it today. 

Perhaps this is the central meaning of the celebration of Pesach, behind all the interpretations. Perhaps the victory of Exodus is that today the Jewish people are free to argue over what Judaism is, and are free to debate what a Jewish state should be while in a Jewish state. The conflict of universal versus particular indeed forms the being of the Jewish people as much as it challenges it. I’m not sure where we would be, or if we would be, without this central disagreement. When I drink my fourth cup of wine, I’ll say “L’chaim” to honor not only the spirit of Pesach, to life, but also the experience of the shtetl, and how its cliches, horses and mules, shape how the Jewish people continue to survive and thrive.

Blake Flayton is New Media Director and columnist at the Jewish Journal.