Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Judaism, Fiddler on the Roof, and Humanity

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:8/28/2000; 10:14:13 PM
Topic:Judaism, Fiddler on the Roof, and Humanity
Msg #:20446 (In response to 20364)
Prev/Next:20445 / 20447

Dave Winer: Beautiful Paul. Totally sweet and positive, and on behalf of Jewish people everywhere, thank you.

You're more than welcome. Another irony, to me: Jewish culture places an extremely high value on education and intelligence. What does Nazi Germany do? Alienates their most intelligent and educated citizens, who flee to America! Who gets Albert Einstein? We do! Who gets The Bomb first? We do!

(By the way, what is it with Jews and physics, anyway? Einstein, Szilard, Oppenheimer, Gell-Mann, Feynman... my guess is there's some really interesting cultural intersection there, something that drives these extremely intelligent people to want to know how Universe works at the deepest possible level. What it is, I don't know.)

Dave: However, some of our clan are not getting the message. Music is a wonderful thing, to be shared so it can teach us over and over. To lock the most beautiful human creativity behind an outdated distribution system is un-Jewish, imho. Or maybe it is very Jewish, but not the light side of the culture.

Well, it depends: is music Torah or Kabbalah? ;-)

In the movie biz, we saw the dark side and the light side back in the Battle of Brazil, with Arnon Milchan producing (that is, working with director Terry Gilliam) and Sid Sheinberg then heading up Universal and originally green-lighting the deal. Things got so tense in the process that Messrs. Milchan and Sheinberg both had unkind things to say about each other that involved the fact that both are Jewish (it came down to "I'm more Jewish than you are," in essence). I found this sad.

In the music biz, I dunno. It's difficult for me to understand how "the people of the book" (a phrase that middle-eastern religious moderates use to cover Jews, Muslims, and Christians, all of whom are textually related), who thoroughly understand the value of the spread of good information ("Torah ora," the chant goes: literally "Torah is light," and Torah scribes are exquisitely trained in not omitting, adding, or altering a single character to or from it—an exercise in "informational cleanliness," as Neal Stephenson put it in "Snow Crash") could somehow see music as anything less valuable or important.

Dave: I don't know. (That sentiment is very Jewish!)

It seems to be! That was certainly what I picked up on in the wedding/"Sunrise, Sunset" scene in Fiddler: that Tevye and Golda didn't know how to react to this major rite of passage, didn't know what to say, how to smooth the way, make the newlyweds' lives any easier, what advice to give, etc. It was really the first time I had been presented with the idea that adults don't have all the answers, and yes, I've since come to understand that we-don't-have-all-the-answers is a distinctly Jewish philosophy (quite a contrast to mainstream American Protestant Christianity, which tends to come across like it has all the answers).

I think that's one reason I find Jewish philosophy appealing: I think an attitude of I-don't-know leads pretty naturally to a philosophy of let's-find-out... and I think I just answered my own question about what is it with Jews and physics. :-)

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