Hekima Review No. 42 (May 2010)

At a time when the world and the church are short of reasons for celebration, here is a candidate: I invite you to celebrate the priesthood in this “Year for Priests.” I recommend that we applaud especially those who are in the ministerial priesthood because, in our contemporary African society, they are like the “Fiddler on Roof” who has to balance precariously different facets of his life. Do you remember the movie with that title? In the movie, the protagonist, Tevye, is an archetypal symbol of the tension in the meeting of two cultures, western civilization as industrialization and the Jewish culture as tradition. The “invading” Western culture is daring, aggressive, and too sophisticated to be ignored. The Jewish traditions, ingrained in the cultural life of the village of Anatevka in general and in Tevye in particular, seem ill-equipped to adequately confront it.