Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Jewish Tradition
One Jewish tradition that is practiced in Fiddler On The Roof is arranged marriages. In Fiddler On The Roof, Tevye tries his best to find husbands for his five daughters. He has help from the matchmaker, Yente, who’s job is to find matches between the young people in the community. Yente matches Tevye’s oldest daughter, Tzeitel, with the butcher. However Tzeitel is in love with Motel, the tailor. Motel and Tzeitel ignore tradition and get married anyway. Two of Tevye’s other daughters, Hodel and Chava, also ignore this tradition as they get married to men who are not from their village. Tevye’s daughters are representative of the times because that tradition has slowly faded away over time. Today, it is only practiced in strict, orthodox Jewish communities. I think that it is a good thing that it’s no longer practiced. I believe that young people should have a say in who they marry. I know that I wouldn’t want to marry someone I don’t even know, so why should anyone else have to? Arranged marriages might have worked out in the past but they don’t have a place in today’s society.
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In your post, you say that today "strict, orthodox Jewish communities" are the only places that still use arranged marriages. Actually, large portions of Asia and the Middle East continue to use this method of selecting partners. Whilst it's slowly fading in some places because of Americanization (like in India), there are still whole countries that follow this tradition. Oddly enough (as we learned in Sociology), the marriage patterns of those societies tend to reflect those in America fairly accurately!
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