Tradition and Change
Our grandchildren are always catching me by surprise. Last night, the baby figured out how to start the dishwasher and set it for a three-and-a-half-hour cycle. We are rapidly losing control of our lives.
A more important moment came on Yom Kippur. The last part of the day is called Ne’ilah, a beautiful service that accompanies sunset. It’s marked by a sense of hope and urgency. As the gates close on the prayer world of the day, we imagine a last opportunity to claim God’s attention. The melodies of the liturgy are chanted to their climax, the shofar is blown, and then it’s over.
As it turns out, those melodies matter. The baby was way too young to notice, but the older two were listening carefully, and as soon as we came to an unfamiliar tune, both expressed a kind of righteous outrage. It was as if something precious had been snatched away. “Why did they have to change the melody? We liked the old Le-Dor Va-Dor.” They said it with real and unhappy passion. It was as if their Church had been betrayed by Luther.
On one level, their outrage was age appropriate. Our oldest is nine. Her brother is six. Despite our ideas about youth and change, there is no one more conservative than a growing child. She wants the world to be safe and unalterable. He craves stability and predictable experience. If something happens—death, divorce—they work to restore what they have always known. That applies no less to the culture of the synagogue. Whatever they learn, they want it to be fixed in stone, regardless of the heaving changes in their own small bodies.
I’m sympathetic to all of this, but I want something else: novelty, innovation, new words and melodies. My successor included two poems this year that I had never read during my time as rabbi. Both readings felt like the opening of the heavens. Everything else disappeared out of consciousness.
That might also be a case of age appropriateness, but it is more likely just how I am built. I have rarely felt the draw of established patterns. At this point in their lives, our grandchildren crave traditionalism. All I want is what I’ve never had before. If I could have solved for this difference, I would have split the world in two, half for them and half for me.
But that, precisely, has already happened, and we are better off because of that diversity. One melody is never sufficient to contain us. There need to be a thousand melodies, a million words—each tradition suited to its believers. The same is true in every community—religious, secular, or in-between. If our grandchildren gravitate toward inherited forms, they will have a share in the career of the Jewish People. If their grandfather drifts toward what he does not yet know, I hope that he, too, will be accounted as part of that same career.
Whatever happens, I rejoice in these differences, and in a God who offers belonging to all of us. Neither orthodoxy nor innovation is right or wrong. We choose one or other because that is what our souls require.