tradition
Who, day and night, must scramble for a living,
Feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers?
And who has the right, as master of the house,
To have the final word at home?
The Papa, the Papa! Tradition.
“Tradition,” the first big number in Fiddler on the Roof, emerges from Tevye’s introduction of the shtetl where the play is set, Anatevka. Instead of describing the village with geographic features or summoning its history, Tevye introduces the (heavily idealized and insanely reductive) roles at the heart of Jewish life, the context for the real story about cultural change that lurks between the verses of “Matchmaker” and “Sunrise, Sunset.” Encountering the modern world, his daughters stray increasingly far from the path he thought they were on, and, caught between the conquest of empires and two millennia of targeted persecution, the town and everything it signified crumbled.
Any mention of Fiddler typically gets a groan from most folx, even die-hard musical theater lovers, mostly because its songs are so easily parodied, its characters so often exaggerated and inflated to the point of caricature. That’s too bad, because it’s a show that peeks into change at the atomic level. Right off the bat, it introduces the types that had been constructed and reinforced for generations, and it goes on to show how well and how poorly those types reflected the reality of living. Characters are forced to make choices, and because it’s a musical, each choice comes with all sorts of heightened drama. But those are the choices that shape the rest of the story, the history that could only be written after it was lived because the reality was too unpredictable and too painful. The sorrowful lilts of Fiddler’s melodies are reminders of the grief that always, always comes with change.
A key piece of that story, perhaps one that’s easily overlooked, is the part played by the daughters. They’re comically introduced as beloved burdens on their poor parents, but as each marries and drifts a little further, Golde and Tevye don’t just grieve the transition in each young woman’s life. They grieve the death of the woman they imagined, the woman who would fulfill and perpetuate the structures that fulfilled and protected them for so long. That woman and the life she lived were gone. Tevye’s daughters left not just because they fell in love and that worked well for the script — they left because they no longer wanted to uphold an increasingly decrepit structure.
Early in the pandemic, Arundhati Roy recognized both the scale of the catastrophe that was unfolding and identified the one glimmer of hope.
“Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”
Beyond providing a critical and optimistic lens to understand what’s happened in the last couple of years, Roy saw our shock-driven response to maintain a sense of normal, a sense of routine. The scale and duration of the pandemic overwhelmed any routine’s power to steady the decks. Add to that the cultural reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and a divisive and ultimately existentially-threatening federal election. As a whole, we haven’t moved past that instinctive response to cling to the illusion of control, and we’re hooked on the question, “what is the new normal?”
That’s the wrong question. Semantically, it’s the wrong question because it’s passive. It assumes someone else will figure it out and assents to whatever will happen, as long as there’s no disruption in relationships or standards of living. Nothing has to change, and we’ll all have a good story to tell about how hard it was. The right question is rooted in Roy’s essay: if, as she writes, “pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” what do we want to keep, what do we want to let go, and where do we want to go?
This is a cultural moment nearly tailor-made for facilitators. We see people in every industry, colleagues in every corner of our worlds, questioning both the practicalities and the purpose of their work. We see traditional approaches to personal, local, and global politics failing. We see explosions of vocabularies and swings in ethical priorities that develop so quickly that we don’t have time to ask what each other believes anymore. We see experts in disparate fields locking horns around how to tell the story, how to assign the credit, and how to assess the blame.
Yeah, this is the moment for facilitators, so it’s no surprise that Priya Parker, the one real “celebrity” facilitator, is having a moment right now. Interest in her is as much validation of her expertise and her vision as it is an indication of our general hunger for making real impact and for constructing meaning, and our general lack of vocabulary to do so. I’m especially excited about Parker’s impact, both because of her potential impact but also because her vision, captured in her book The Art of Gathering, her podcasts, her ongoing consulting, and her dialogues with other thought leaders, captures and articulates my own worldview and understanding of how culture is made. So, yeah, Parker provides me that long overdue assurance that I am not, in fact, insane to think there is untapped potential for creating a just and peaceful world in intentional gathering.
I really honed that instinct as an educator and came to believe that each school is a laboratory for creating culture. Schools aren’t the only space in which we create culture, but, in American culture, it’s a hot spot that is somehow simultaneously under intense scrutiny and severely lacking in resources. As a nation, we have not funneled the resources needed to achieve the kind of world our educational system imagines. Independent schools generally seek to bridge that gap — they pop up in response to a lack of quality or accessible educational institutions, or they serve a population neglected by the people in control of the educational system.
Of course, there’s a dark side to independent schools, and many pop up with less noble motivation. Independent schools have always served as escape hatches for the privileged to retain privilege, both in the early days of the nation, in response to the expansion of mandatory, public schooling, and in response to integration (“white flight” schools). Even more progressive schools whose mission statements profess commitment to social justice and equity somehow miss a basic contradiction: even these schools were founded as escape hatches for the privileged, escape from the dominant purpose of American education around which our standard curricula and school cultures are designed: the automatization of students in the service of industry. Public schools play an essential role in preparing students to contribute to or be trampled by the economy; independent schools give the privileged a chance to ensure they’re the tramplers, not the trampled.
American public education was initially rooted in the vision of John Dewey. He imagined a public education system that primarily served to shape citizens, to enable people with the skills necessary for them to participate in a democracy, but, in time, American education was restructured to serve the needs of the industries that dominate the national economy. Wrapped in the myth of the American dream, attaining an education — reflected first in a high school diploma, then a college degree, then a specialized master’s degree… — both promised an antidote to becoming the trampled and completed a necessary step on the road to economic security.
When I bounce this idea off people sometimes, that our education system serves industry, not citizenship, I meet skepticism, typically bolstered by someone’s own contrary experience. Anecdotal evidence, am I right? Take the case of acquiring languages: Rooted in European cultural norms, including the university system and the role of academia, the priority for learning a language wasn’t to be able to engage in international business or to communicate directly with waitstaff while on vacation. It was about accessing the foundational texts that inspired and informed Western culture that were written in Greek or Latin or about engaging in ongoing academic dialogue that required fluency in French and German. Yes, the Eurocentrism of it is problematic, but bear with me.
Which languages students could study, however, drifted from these high-falutin’ aims and conformed to the needs of dominant industries (and the perceived threats of rising competitors in the global market). Public schools started emphasizing German in the early 20th century, in no small part a response to initially economic and later socio-political threat of Germany. Throughout the Cold War, study of Russian was promoted. Spanish became dominant both to reflect the growing population of Spanish speakers in the US and to prepare to communicate with/manage a subservient continent. Early in my teaching career, I saw the signs that a new perceived threat infiltrated our earnestly-idealistic schools: Mandarin, to prepare to engage with the new superpower on the block. Arabic has appeared more and more (not, sadly, in a culture-wide peaceful engagement with the Muslim world but in preparation to battle with and dominate the next rising power. I won’t be surprised when Hindi becomes the language all parents clamor to enroll their students in, should India be recognized as the next economic nemesis and socio-political maverick on the horizon.
Take the case of math. Once upon a time, math was foundational because it developed students’ capacity for complex, abstract thinking. Sure, mastering arithmetic was helpful for managing daily life, but math was so much broader than the skills that culminate in a calculator. Logical processing, rational ordering, understanding abstraction and proportion….but industry won out, and the conventional sequence of mathematical studies created a path from the crib to NASA’s labs. Mathematical competence has become a new dividing line in careers, and being conditioned as cogs in the machine toward universal domination has become the standard, not the exception among paths to rational genius. These shifts now prompt an identity crisis for higher education. Do they serve academic ideals and the development of critical thinking and observation of our world? Or are they (as most of the marketing suggests) stepping stones toward the retention and expansion of socio-economic power? It’s been a long way from al-Qarawiyinn to the University of Phoenix.
Many independent schools are founded as alternatives to the Academy of Little Cogs and genuinely intend to shape children differently, to prepare them to work and lead and live with clear values and commitments and passions. Except for a few schools that exclusively educate historically underserved populations, most serve privileged populations and prepare students to retain and expand their privilege. The juxtaposition of idealistic school missions with their shared context (the pipeline that our cultural definitions of education has created) is overwhelming. It’s too big of a problem to even define, nevermind address, but social and cultural transformation don’t begin with broad, sweeping statements and ambitious changes. They begin with the little things.
In my first job as a teacher and campus minister in an all-girls, independent Catholic school, I saw and contributed to meaningful change and enjoyed an ongoing education in constructing culture. This time of year, I’d be finalizing the background details of major events for the remainder of the school year and start to build teams of faculty and students to lead the retreats and design our weekly and occasionally liturgies. My co-campus minister and I inherited a program that was strong and earnest, but, like all school programs, it got a little stale and needed a refresh both to reflect the evolving commitments of our students, faculty, and the culture of the school.
Perhaps unlike the popular image of an all-girls Catholic school,we consciously, if subtly, defied the patriarchal norms inherent in Catholic schools and, whenever we could, enhanced the authority of women, especially among other women. We used language that was gender inclusive and prepared students to serve in roles of visible and meaningful leadership. We introduced or altered practices that widened the lane for conversation, that invited a dialogue or a moment to educate and reflect. We mined the school’s traditions for facets that reflected the inclusive consciousness of the world we wanted to create. We gave the ambo to students and staff to deliver reflections in Chapel every week. We couldn’t call it a “homily” or “preaching” — but we didn’t need to. It was evident that the person at the mic spoke from a place of critical reflection and spiritual and moral self-awareness. For the times when we needed a priest (the handful of masses throughout the year), we cultivated a short list of local clerics who knew us, who supported and shared our vision, and who wouldn’t report us to the diocese for letting our headmistress deliver the homily or putting students serving as eucharistic ministers too close to action on the altar.
These commitments fueled our design of the retreat program, too. Retreats provided students at least yearly invitations to sit with their experiences, to step away from the routines and pressures of home. Traditionally, retreats intended to encourage pious engagement and get a glimpse of monastic life, but that view was rooted in an old theology, one that centered the patriarchal Church and put us all in various orbits around it. We drew on a new theology, one that put the lived experience at the center of our reflection and invited students to look for evidence of their own growth, of the values and relationships they forged. We offered (and strove to carefully not impose) language of the gospel and the Church’s social justice teaching, and in the lives of Jesus and our favorite saints (not just the virgins and martyrs — the prophets of social justice that the Church didn’t even fully recognize yet, like Dorothy Day, the now-canonized Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King…). We wanted students to imagine themselves capable of stepping in the shoes of any of these people whose profound personal transformation impelled them to recreate the world.
We never asked students to conform to any particular approach to Catholicism. We tried to respond to the religious diversity of our students — not just box-checking their religious affiliations but also the range of attitudes toward and engagement with religious practice. We didn’t make statements — we tried to ask questions that all students might want to engage, questions they could use to navigate their worlds. For students who were already deeply pious and even exclusivist in their religious outlook, we invited them to see the roots and practice of their faith in broader ways or from different perspectives. I like to think that we gave students not just an updated portrait but direct experience of a different kind of Church. If none of those thoughtful structures and practices worked, at the very least, they had a gay campus minister, a contradiction that took the shape of a middle finger to the heteronormative Catholic patriarchy.
I had a lot of doubts in those days about what I was doing — mostly because I felt like I was making it up as I went. Sure, I knew a lot of people working in campus ministries and chaplaincies, but I didn’t fit into those models. I didn’t want to be everyone’s therapist and/or savior. I wasn’t a cheerleader for Christ. I wasn’t Social Justice Guy. I definitely wasn’t the campus minister whose total vibe oozed an “I really wanted to be a priest, but, you know, sex” vibe. Where did that leave me? I wasn’t a true minister, because this wasn’t a vocation for me…a distinction that was very hard to clarify with folx (many a potential date walked away from me, puzzled that I was basically a professional Catholic and doing a shot at 11:30pm on a Thursday night at ManRay.) I was passionate and sincere in my work — it just wasn’t a vocation in the ministerial sense. I loved my work, but this was the crack in the door that revealed (at least to me) my fraud.
I didn’t know it, but I was facilitating. Facilitating what, exactly? Well, through the work of teaching and campus ministry, I developed both fundamental skills for facilitating groups and expanded my comfort zone for and capacity to relate to diverse groups. I learned from the pros (master teachers) how to shape groups toward the best, if not always desired, outcome. I learned how to read a room and to hear the question behind the question. When I returned to grad school, a classmate turned away from me and jokingly, but pointedly, told me that she felt I was looking into her soul. Another laughed uncomfortably when I asked, after learning of a career that took him farther and farther out into the world, “So, what are you running from?” You can take the guy out of the campus ministry office, but you can’t take campus ministry out of the guy.
But the question remains, facilitating what? I shared a vision with my colleagues not just of what our students could do and what our school community could be. We shared a vision for how the world could be different, and every mundane task we completed, from packing supplies in the van to communal response to sudden tragedy, looked toward that vision. In this light, the work of campus ministry is largely the design of experiences for students to get a taste of what could be and to find a role in, motivation from, hope from that little taste. You may have noticed that not much has changed in the Catholic church, but that doesn’t mean that our work wasn’t impactful. One of our students is a leader in the movement to ordain women as deacons, organizing a movement and designing experiences for people to get a glimpse of a radically inclusive Church…and to see their role in it, find motivation from it, derive hope for something new.
When it comes to Fiddler, my deepest disappointment is that it depicts change as necessarily and exclusively painful. As a theme, this isn’t exclusive to Fiddler — how many examples can you conjure of plays, movies, books, and other narratives that present change as a social good? Not easy or consistently joy-inducing, but good, a moment for growth, for adaptation, for redirection toward the world we really want to live in? I’ve seen that approach, and in the individual lives and collective efforts of students and teachers, I’ve seen it sustain and contribute to the transformation of people, communities, and the world. The swell of pride and emotion I feel when walking through my years as a campus minister, though, the hope I reclaim that I first generated in that role, fizzles a bit (just a bit) when I remember that we were one, small school. It’s not that I lose hope — it’s more that I recognize that change in this direction will continue to trudge, to move at a glacial pace, because so few people are equipped with the tools and vocabulary to facilitate that change — and the patience to change one tradition at a time. Facilitators are the engineers of cultural transformation, but few facilitators are out there, and most of the good ones (classroom teachers) are already underappreciated and underpaid. Perhaps the next big language children need to acquire isn’t Mandarin or Arabic, or even Hindi. Perhaps it’s the language of facilitation.
