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Like a fiddler on the roof

Like a fiddler on the roof

Last updated on: March 10, 2026 at 11:21 am by Dan Peterson

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Like a fiddler on the roof 2026-03-10T11:21:44-06:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

This Church-erected monument stands atop a hill above Whitingham, Vermont, where Brigham Young was born on 1 June 1801. (Photograph by my wife)

Becoming Brigham, Episode 7—”Young Brigham Young,” Part Two is now up online:

Camrey continues her conversation with Susan Easton Black about the youthful Brigham Young. Our hosts also explore how Brigham came to encounter the Book of Mormon, and how he reacted to this new book of scripture.

Sholem Aleichem (born Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich or Соломон Наумович Рабинович, 1859-1916), in 1907 (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

With a number of our friends and neighbors, my wife and I went out for pizza last night and then on to a superb production of Fiddler on the Roof at The Ruth and Nathan Hale Theater in Pleasant Grove. It was as good a performance as I’ve ever seen at one of the Hale theaters; the MWF cast was excellent.

Many years ago, we saw a production of Fiddler up at the Utah Festival Opera in Logan. Immediately prior to the performance, Michael Ballam, the founder and impresario of UFO, came out onto the stage and announced that the play’s composer, Jerry Bock, and its lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, were present with us in the audience. (At least, as I recall it was Bock and Harnick.) And, as it happened, they were seated directly in front of my wife and me. I remember wondering how it must feel to have created songs that are so widely known and loved all around the world.

There’s not a number in the play that isn’t familiar to me. They’re funny, and clever, and many of them are deeply moving. Last night, I marveled at the ability of the creators of Fiddler to take the very Jewish, very shtetl-focused stories of Sholem Aleichem upon which it’s based and make them so approachable, so very Yiddish and yet simply human, for audiences mostly made up of goyim. (The novels of Chaim Potok have had a similar impact, I think, across religious and cultural divides.) That is something at which, to the extent that we’ve even been attempting it (which isn’t much), we Latter-day Saints haven’t yet succeeded.

I talked with Jack Welch about that during the intermission — our neighborhood group typically attends the Pleasant Grove theater on the same night for which several of the Welch family have tickets — and he suggested that part of the appeal of Fiddler is the interesting foreignness of the play’s setting in Eastern Europe. (It’s set in Sholem Aleichem’s native Ukraine.) I had thought of that as well. Latter-day Saint culture is mostly middle-class American, which certainly doesn’t strike most of us middle-class Americans as very exotic.

It occurs to me, too, that, in some ways, Latter-day Saints may be better positioned to resonate with the story of Anatevka and its people than many Gentile Christians or secularists do. As a religious minority with is own history of being excluded, marginalized, and even expelled, and with its own concerns about persecution, assimilation, marriage outside the community, the potential threats of modernity, and so forth, I think that we can relate surprisingly well with Tevye and his struggles with the choices of his daughters.

And then I thought, as the little Jewish community of Anatevka went into its own diaspora at the play’s end under the pressure of Tsarist oppression, that those fleeing people could not possibly have known that the horrific worst was yet to come. Some went to America. One went to Palestine. Many, sadly, emigrated to other places in Europe that were seemingly safer.

Fiddler on the Roof is a rich, whole-souled play, with humor and sadness and joy and nostalgia and reflection and hope. And this was a wonderful production of it. I have no idea whether tickets are still available, but I highly recommend it.

Incidentally, too, for those who are keeping track: No portion of my pizza was paid for by the Interpreter Foundation or Redbrick Filmworks, my transportation was covered by no donor funds, and my wife and I bought our own tickets.

Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington (1797)
Wikimedia Commons public domain image

You might find this short article at Real Clear Religion, written by Andrew Fowler, to be of interest: “George Washington’s Warning About Religion Still Matters: Why America Needs a Renewal of Religiosity to Preserve the Nation”

Incidentally, regarding the Gilbert Stuart portrait above: Martha Bayles, in her 22 January 2026 article for National Review — “George Washington’s Grace, Grit, and Prudence” — describes him as

a man whose best-known image, the grim-faced portrait on the dollar bill, does not do him justice.

That image, which has lent itself to mockery and mimicry, was adapted from Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 painting of the 64-year-old president during his final year in office, when he had just been fitted with an excruciatingly painful set of false teeth. Better by far to have used one of several portraits of the young Washington, who was not Hollywood handsome but cut an impressive figure.

A section of sky, looking from the surface of the earth toward the vacuum of space (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

As I move into the final section of this blog entry, which will be dedicated to the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, I find myself thinking once again of the immortal words of the late John Lennon:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

Or, alternatively, of Quatrain LXXII of Edward FitzGerald’s wonderful 1859 translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help—for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

For those who are concerned at the myriad of injuries that theism and theists impose upon innocent, suffering humanity around the world, this composite report taken from the Hitchens File will be a veritable omnibus of horrors, and I hope that sensitive souls fragile biochemical units are sitting down when they read through it and watch the short accompanying videos: “Loving Our Neighbors: How the Church Provided Global Relief in 2025: The annual “Caring for Those in Need” report details service in 196 countries.”

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