Literary wisdom has it that comedies end in marriage, and tragedies in death. By this measure, the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered on Broadway sixty years ago this past Sunday, on September 22, 1964, is a comedy. Based on the collection of Yiddish short stories Tevye and His Daughters (1905), the musical follows the life and troubles of the pious milkman Tevye, made iconic by Topol’s portrayal in the 1971 film version, in the fictional town of Anatevka. It is a hard thing to be a Jewish peasant in imperial Russia, and harder still to be a peasant with five daughters to marry off and little dowry to speak of. Though the local matchmaker Yente tries her best to make matches for Tevye’s three oldest daughters, each girl of marrying age finds love on her own terms. The bulk of the musical follows Tevye’s exasperation at life never going as he expects, and Golda, his wife, scolding him for it. But like any good Shakespearean comedy, by the end of the musical Tevye’s three oldest daughters are married.

Life in Anatevka is a perilous dance, like that of a fiddler on a roof. And what helps Tevye keep his balance is, as the iconic opening number declares, tradition! Anatevka is a fictionalized shtetl of the Pale of Settlement, a region of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth to early twentieth century where Jews were permitted to set up permanent residency, being largely barred from doing so in cities throughout the rest of Russia. These communities made it possible for Jewish faith and culture to persist amidst persecution, but their existence was precarious and poverty often prevailed – something the musical addresses with a playful tone that nevertheless maintains the destitution and precarity of life in the shtetls. Tevya describes tradition as that which shapes and grounds this difficult life, from the clothes they wear, to the food they eat, to the way they pray. Where do all these traditions come from? “I don’t know!” declares Tevye, himself prone to starting sentences with “As the good book says…” before proceeding to share his own idiosyncratic opinion. And yet despite the ambiguity of its origins, tradition, this body of knowledge and practices that has been handed down, offers security and surety to Anatevka’s residents. With tradition, Tevye says, “Every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”

The musical, however, seems to test this bold proclamation, for it is often very unclear what God expects Tevye to do. When his daughter rejects the match that has been made for her, preferring the poor tailor to the wealthy widowed butcher, Tevye is faced with a decision: abandon tradition or make his daughter miserable. Which must he choose? Can tradition stretch to accommodate the happiness of his daughter? Circumstances that challenge Tevye’s idea of tradition recur again and again.

Marc Chagall, The Fiddler, oil on canvas, 1913.

There is something admirable about Tevye’s life, something mysterious and powerful about its appeal to tradition. In our frightening and disjointed times, tradition with a capital T can seem like a shelter, a fortress against the tide of modern life’s continual assaults and loneliness. But one of the key revelations of the musical is that tradition does not rescue Tevye from the ambiguities of life. With all his devotion to his religious tradition, he is still torn when the happiness of his daughter hangs in the balance. Tevye earnestly tries to discover what is right to do, often looking to the scriptures, whose stories are often much more ambiguous than the traditions they inspired. For instance, as Tevye agonizes over whether to let his daughter marry without the blessing of a matchmaker, he observes that Adam and Eve did not have a matchmaker. The patriarchs and prophets lied and stumbled and had favorite sons; the biblical witness is not one of clear traditions followed flawlessly, but flawed humans trying to interpret and do what God asks. And so even with the guidance of his tradition, Tevye is still faced with difficult questions tradition does not dissolve. Playing in the background of the scenes in which Tevye attempts to determine what is right to do, what tradition requires of him, what God would ask, is the fiddler’s questioning theme. This musical nod reminds Tevye that tradition is not stability, but the mystery of a faithful life, letting the past’s demands and the present moment exist with enough tension to attain balance.

But what distinguishes Tevye’s devotion to tradition above all is that it is not primarily a blind devotion to a rigid list of rules, but a life ongoingly addressed to God. Rewatching the 1971 film, I was startled to remember that the whole movie is narrated as a prayer, addressed by Tevye to God. In the moments where he struggles to know what is right to do, the camera zooms out of a frozen scene, and he speaks to God. The fiddler plays his questioning tune, as Tevye tries to listen to God, to be guided by tradition, to not lose balance. The implication seems to be that this itself – the tension of how the world has been and how we find it in all its current complications, lived before God and in conversation with community – this is tradition. Gustav Mahler famously wrote that “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” But perhaps for Tevye it is more appropriately said that tradition is not a list of rules to follow, but the preservation of a divine conversation lived in community. This finds expression in Tevye’s verbal evaluations of his own decisions, not only in the light of his immediate community and his religious tradition, but also of the lives of the figures in the holy texts he loves; he is a member of a long, unfinished, divine conversation.

This does not, of course, mean that keeping the balance is always easy. Half of the musical is filled with Tevye’s rantings and ravings, and frantically reversing his decisions. But this too, it seems, is a part of the fiddler’s tune. If tradition is strong enough to endure, as it has for many generations, it must encompass the instability of human beings, their wobbling and doubt. This too is tradition: the transgression of tradition, the playful mockery of “the papa,” is a part of what keeps the fiddler from falling off the roof. As the movie nears its conclusion, it seems that Tevye’s view of tradition could stretch to encompass almost anything – he has, after all, consented to the marriage of two daughters outside the usual way of things. But in Fiddler on the Roof, tradition can stretch so far it breaks. And for Tevye, that point is marriage outside the faith.

I said that Fiddler on the Roof ended like a comedy because it ends with marriage instead of death, but perhaps this is not completely true. By the end of the musical, one of Tevye’s daughters is dead – at least to him. After finding out that his daughter Chava has secretly married Feydka, a young Russian Orthodox man, Tevye, once again addressing God, tries to make room for his daughter’s marriage within tradition, the fiddler’s tune playing in the background. Tevye’s confused and tender lament as he tries to understand his daughter’s marriage is one of the most poignant in the musical. “Little bird, Chaveleh,” sings Tevye, addressing her by a diminutive version of her name, “I don’t understand what is happening today.” In the film, as Tevye sings the song the camera pans away to the three daughters dancing together to the tune of the fiddler. Her two sisters, Tzeitel and Hodel, are approached by their respective husbands who dance them off the screen, in time with the fiddler. By contrast, Feydka stands still and beckons Chava away from the fiddler, and they run off screen, not dancing to the tune of the fiddler; Chava no longer willing to keep the balance of Tradition’s dance on a roof.

“I beg you to accept us,” Chava pleads as the sequence concludes.

And Tevye, who has tried to stretch and change with the moving times confesses, “If I try to bend that far, I will break,” before turning his back, an angry reprisal of the show’s opening song “Tradition” playing, as he leaves his broken-hearted daughter behind. Left alone on stage, the fiddler’s probing theme plays again as if to ask, “Is this what tradition requires?” Even, or perhaps especially, in this strictest application of tradition, Tevye is not saved from uncertainty, or from pain, but thrust into it.

And this loss is made all the more pronounced by the threat that pulses beneath the surface of Fiddler: the Russian pogroms of the early twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, these violent riots began against Jewish communities, eventually boiling over and resulting in mass migration as those affected sought safer lives abroad. Chava’s choice to marry a Russian Orthodox man represents not only a rejection of her family’s faith, but the abandonment of their struggle to survive in a hostile land. And as the musical comes to an end it becomes clear that perhaps the greater threat to Tevye’s faithfulness to tradition is not the changing and modernizing world, but the violent expulsion of his people from the place they have worshiped and come to call home.

Though cheerful and endearing, the musical is suffused with the threat of sudden violence. When Tevye accepts the old butcher Lazar Wolf’s proposal of marriage to his oldest daughter, they go to the local tavern to celebrate. The scene is absurd: Tevye getting drunk with a soon to be son-in-law older than himself. And yet amidst this comic absurdity, there is a moment when the potential of violence bubbles over and fills the scene with tension. The tavern is split in half between the Jewish men, with their prayer tassels dangling and hats still on, and the Russians with their silky blond hair and oversized tunics. At one point the drunken Tevye stumbles over the invisible line dividing the room, and slams into one of the Russians. The tavern becomes silent and looks on. For one pregnant moment it seems the young Russian man will take offense at Tevye and start a fight. But then he breaks into dance, celebrating Tevye’s good fortune with him. The scene is raucous, joyful, absurd, and yet the sense that this moment of human frivolity could just as easily have devolved into violence makes a strong, fearful impression. This impression is driven home when a Russian police officer informs Tevye that the locals are planning some “trouble” for Anatevka, which is to say a pogrom. The police officer notifies Tevye of this, almost as an act of friendship. “I always liked you, Tevye,” says the officer, adding without irony or shame, “even though you are a Jew.”

The violence finally boils over at the wedding of Tevye’s eldest daughter. This scene features one of the most memorable songs of the musical, with the whole community singing “Sunrise, Sunset” as the couple is married beneath a chuppah, in a solemn reminder of the ways life is “laden with happiness and tears.” Like the scene in the tavern, here tensions over old grudges are dissolved by dancing and joy and laughter. But this joy is broken with a sudden and terrifying blow; this is the moment the imperial powers have chosen for the pogrom, this is the trouble the police officer warned of. In a brutally short interlude, Russian soldiers ride in on horseback, overturning tables, setting houses on fire, and slashing the goose-feather pillows lovingly gifted to the new couple. The pogrom is precise and restrained, harming not people but property. And yet the message is clear and the emotional devastation palpable. In a moment, Fiddler turns from comedy to tragedy, happiness to tears, sunrise to sunset. The musical concludes with the mass exodus of Anatevka. In the concluding musical number, what seems to worry the residents is not their survival but whether they will be able to continue their treasured traditions. Their plaintive questions as they pack up their things and leave seem to echo the lament of Psalm 137:4: “How shall we sing to the Lord in a strange land?” In this final scene, recalling his ambivalence about the origins of tradition in the opening number, Tevye ties his own experience to the wanderings of Abraham and theorizes: “Maybe that’s why we always wear our hats.”

In our own day, a growing number of people, especially young people, are drawn to the idea of tradition. Many see in it a countercultural force resisting the increasing alienation and despair. They imagine marrying young and having a clutch of children, forgoing their office jobs to live on a farm. They idealize the old, the agrarian, the traditional. They practice their faith with a self-serious piety – the older the tradition, the better the liturgy. And no doubt, many of these desires are based in innocent, even good instincts. But as I watched Fiddler on the Roof, I thought how distant Tevye’s pious wrestling with the suffering and uncertainty of his life is from what has come to characterize a certain brand of “traditionalism” in our own day. Throwing dust in the eyes of the idealized agrarianism of anonymous online accounts wanting to quit their job in the city to homestead is Tevye the pious Jew who is not permitted to live in the city because he is a Jew, who asks God whether it would “spoil some vast eternal plan” to have made him a wealthy man. Far from the sexualized milkmaid traditionalist wife selling beef tallow to her followers on Instagram is Tevye the milkman, who earnestly loves the God he is irritated with for making his horse lame before the Sabbath. But perhaps Tevye’s example has something to teach us about tradition.

First, Tevye reminds us that tradition cannot save us from uncertainty, from ambiguity, from pain. In a world as uncertain as our own, it can be tempting to think that tradition will act as a bulwark, to take shelter in a rigid dogmatism that promises to tell us who we are and what God expects us to do. But as Tevye’s example shows us, even in the most tight-knit of communities most earnestly following tradition, it is not always clear what we should do; and who we are will change over time. Tradition will not rescue us from these ambiguities and frustrations of life, but rather give us a context within which we can find our footing and ourselves. It is a highly modern view that sees tradition as a list of rules and beliefs to be followed and believed. In contrast, Tevye’s tradition is a mystery into which he throws himself, not surrendering discernment but doing his best to balance on the roof of life, knowing that sometimes people will laugh at him. Tradition does not invite us to take ourselves more seriously but to find that our lives are very small in the scheme of this long conversation – allowing us to laugh at ourselves too.

Second, Tevye shows us that tradition should be first and foremost addressed to God. It seems to me sometimes that the most earnest traditionalists of our own times forget that tradition itself warns of its own downfalls. Within the very scriptures that lay out the traditions that Tevye faithfully attempts to follow, is a recantation of those traditions when they distract from what is essential: the love of God and neighbor. “I hate all your show and pretense” declares the prophet Amos on God’s behalf, “the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies. I will not accept your burnt offerings and grain offerings. I won't even notice all your choice peace offerings. Away with your noisy hymns of praise” (Amos 5:21–24). Tradition is meant to draw us closer to God, and tradition itself casts us away from its trappings and practices when they begin to get in the way of this essential calling; and this renunciation of tradition is itself a return to tradition.

As I watched Fiddler on the Roof, I found myself thinking of the waves of migration washing over Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world. In the past years, multitudes of people have been driven out of the homes they had known, by the whims of imperial forces, religious and ethnic violence, war, and natural disaster. I do not know the solution to this crisis, but now as I pray, I remember those who, like Tevye, struggle to find a way to practice their traditions, to live a life addressed to God within community, when that community has been scattered and even destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people across the globe find themselves asking, like the inhabitants of Anatevka, “How shall we sing to the Lord in a strange land?” Watching the pain of this play out in Fiddler created in me a grief and an urgency for those who are struggling to maintain their faith and follow their tradition even as they are tossed into unfamiliar places, where they are resented, unwelcome, and even despised by their new neighbors. As I learn from Tevye’s understanding of tradition, I also pray for all who attempt to live lives of faithfulness even as they are haunted by the proximity of tragedy and exile, a life as fragile as a fiddler on a roof.