A few weeks ago, we watched the JOY Musical Theater production of Fiddler on the Roof. The homeschoolers of NW Ohio did a phenomenal job! In my opinion, the production was of equal or greater quality than many of the plays we’ve seen in professional venues.
Tevye, the father and main character sings the song Tradition, bemoaning the fact that many of their comfortable, safe Jewish traditions are being discarded. He longs for them to return and to be valued by a younger generation.
Do you ever feel like Tevye? I do. Reading an article titled 20 Family Traditions From the Fifties That Are Rare Today1 made me wish we could go back. Let me share a few of those disappearing traditions.
Doing our own repairs. There was a day when we did most of our own basic repairs, whether that meant changing our car’s oil, replacing brakes, fixing a dripping pipe, or doing basic carpentry work. Today, it seems that we have a generation that struggles to tie their own shoes! I’m being facetious and exaggerating the point, but you know what I mean. Now, we hire someone else to do these basic things.
In our defense, though, many of the repairs we once would have done on our own are nearly impossible due to changing technology and computerization. Have you looked under the hood of your car recently? In some cases, you can’t even find the battery! You’re not even sure where they put the engine. I had a car a few years back that required the removal of the front bumper and grill just to change the light bulb!
Handwritten recipe cards. Those cards became a priceless heirloom, not necessarily for the recipe but for the person who wrote the note. What do we write by hand today? Not much! Some of those old recipe cards were beautiful because of the handwriting. Having good handwriting was valued. Today, it appears that most people are training to be doctors. Our signatures and anything else we might write are scribbled. What’s caused this? In my case, I now type everything and let the printer make it all look pretty and legible. And we hope autocorrect fixes our spelling errors.
Family photo albums. Grainy black-and-white pictures were replaced by the first color Polaroids. Then came the Instamatics. The photo albums were stained with age, but they provided a walk through the family garden as you relived events and saw relatives in their younger days. Today, everything is digital. We have a few photos that we use for screen savers, but we often don’t take time to look at any others. Perhaps that’s because in this digital age, we snap pictures of EVERYTHING. Hundreds of pictures have easily become thousands to sift through.
Making homemade gifts. To that, I would add practical and modest gift giving. These take a lot of time and considering how busy we are, it’s just simpler to Google it and have it shipped next day from Amazon.
Gathering around the radio. You can picture the scene on the Waltons as grandpa tunes in a radio station and several of the family sit around together listening to music, news, or a radio show. Grandma and Olivia might have been knitting, John was reading the paper, John Boy was reading a book, Elizabeth was playing with a doll, and Ben might have been tinkering with something. But everyone was together.
In the words of Tevye, “Tradition. Without our traditions, Our lives would be as shaky as… as a fiddler on the roof!”
Tradition becomes a bit of a stumbling point in our Christian life. On the one hand, traditions can be good. 2 Thessalonians 2:15 says, “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.”
On the other hand, we have Colossians 2:8. “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”
You say, “Well, a different Greek word for tradition is probably employed.” Nope. Same word. So, are traditions good or are they bad? Perhaps the answer to that is found in Matthew 15:9. “But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.”
When commandments/traditions of man are turned into doctrines of God, that’s wrong. If those traditions cross the line of God’s Word, that’s wrong. If those traditions become a burden on someone, that’s wrong. Keeping this separate has always been a struggle for many people.
Matthew 15:1-3 says, “Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, saying, 2 Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread. 3 But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?”
So what do we make of this? Is it a wrong or bad thing that traditions from the fifties are all but disappeared? Not necessarily. Let’s remember what was behind those traditions. What was the purpose and intent of doing them? What positives can we glean from those traditions, making them our own in the 21st century?
Any tradition, whether religious or not, must be weighed against God’s Word to determine it’s validity and worth. Ultimately, we practice 1 Thessalonians 5:21. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
Images are taken from https://pixabay.com/, https://www.pexels.com/, or https://unsplash.com/images or created in Windows Copilot. According to the websites, they are Royalty Free and free to be used for our purposes.
1https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/parenting/20-family-traditions-from-the-fifties-that-are-rare-today/ss-AA1CGdTa?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=85a22e7a7864455399bef4b9c9c4178f&ei=48#image=9
