This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
You remember the opening number of Fiddler on the Roof? "Tradition," Tevye cries, frightened by the changes the Russian revolution is bringing to his small Jewish community, "without tradition, we are all as shaky fiddlers on the roof."
A Rock Island friend of mine knows firsthand that this worry is more than musical. Dr. Alex Stone is a retired veterinarian in his seventies. Most mornings, health permitting, he is one of the minyan for morning prayers at the Tri-City Jewish Center in Rock Island, the ten men necessary to hold services.
At the turn of the century, there were three minyans each morning at Bnai Jacob, the synagogue that served the small Jewish enclave in Rock Island: an early one for the peddlers and rag pickers who needed to begin making their rounds, a second for the merchants on their way to open stores, and a third for those who did not need to worry about the time.
Today, at the aging congregation of the Tri-City Jewish Center, there is one minyan left—a precarious one at best. Widows of men who have died are sometimes needed to sit in for their husbands to make the required ten. The congregation itself has found it necessary to hold a bingo night each week to make ends meet.
Dr. Stone is worried about what will happen to his congregation and the morning prayers, to the traditions which have shaped his moral vision and given meaning to his days. Rituals which have survived the Holocaust now seem threatened in the midst of a peaceful Rock Island neighborhood.
One does not have to be Jewish to share the doctor's worries. Around Rock Island, traditions—patriotic, religious, personal—are falling away. Fourths of Julys have become fireworks displays. House by house, live Christmas trees are replaced by artificial ones, Thanksgiving has become the starting gun for the mall races.
Was Tevye right about tradition? What will happen when we each become fiddlers on his or her own roof?
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
