Between Light and Storm by Esther Woolfson

Between Light and Storm by Esther Woolfson

Author:Esther Woolfson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00


7 Tradition

Once, a long time ago, I spent an evening with a friend. We were both reading quietly and pretentiously. By now, I can’t remember the exact manifestation of the pretension, but at the time we were moral giants of seventeen, and more than just reading we were deeply engaged in the meaningful, worthy tradition of not going to musicals. Having refused the opportunity to take part in the kibbutz outing to Haifa to watch a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, we were revelling in the exceptional nature of our superiority. The absence of people and consequent near-silence gave the evening a unique sense of peace. The only sounds were the singing of crickets and pond frogs. Everyone except the infirm, infants too young to be inducted into sentiment and schlock, and teenage cynics had boarded buses and disappeared off into the night for a theatre thirty miles away. My friend Reuven and I turned down the opportunity to go. We were bemused by the thought of busloads of other Jews, many originally from Germany (including both Reuven’s parents), who had survived the years of the Second World War with unimaginable suffering, setting off to watch the performance (with music!) of a piece of theatre which we believed sentimentalized a past way of life of extraordinary deprivation, denial of civil rights, of racial and religious persecution and prolonged, violent discrimination. I’m not sorry I didn’t go. I felt uneasy about the prospect of listening to an actor singing a song called ‘Tradition’ and though I may have adjusted some of my attitudes over time, the evening stays to remind me to be wary of the word and how it’s used, of how it’s invoked to justify some of the most outrageous, discredited and damaging human behaviour, much of it involved in the destruction of the lives and endangerment of the future of the many species with whom we live on earth.

In the years since then, I’ve often thought about tradition, what it is and what it does. I’ve wondered whether we can continue to think of it as the maintenance of continuity with precious aspects of our past, handed down from generation to generation or whether it has to be questioned and subverted, changed as society and ideas change.

‘Tradition’ isn’t fixed. There isn’t a single moment that turns a habit, a once-performed ceremony, a way of obtaining or preparing food, of singing, dancing or lighting a candle into a tradition. Some rituals, festivals and celebrations may be truly ancient, a few years old or increasingly something we’ve done casually for a couple of years or months or once, enjoy, decide to repeat and call a ‘tradition’. Our acceptance of a practice on the grounds of its antiquity may rely only on our not knowing its origins. In the introduction to the book The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm writes of traditions which are ‘quite recent in origin and sometimes invented’ and uses examples of royal pageantry, which is thought



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