Tradition!

Sunday, October 05, 2025

It was the rattle that I first heard over the honking of the flocks of geese on the beach.  A steady shaking, not a snake, but rhythmic, persistent, consistent. It came from down the beach somewhere, possibly where a glop of distant figures were sitting on a log. The dog and I were heading that way anyway. As we got closer, we could disentangle the huddle of bodies to three or four—two older men, a woman, a teenage boy. And the rattling then doubled, as another figure, 100 yards out on the beach standing over a large pool of seawater left from the receding tide began a counterpoint. The teenager stripped to a bathing suit, then walked out to another leftover pool and lie down in it, splashing the water over his body. I shivered.  Maybe he did too. It was a stormy day and snarling gray clouds covered the southwest horizon as the wind quickly dragged them toward us.

Then the chanting began. Low, soft, deep. Melody was not discernable above the geese, the wind, the rattles. But it was undoubtedly there. Sasha and I settled on a log nearby to watch the skittering clouds, the peeks of the early morning sun when one cloud broke formation to let a bit of blue sky emerge. And to listen. The chanting went on. As did the rattles. The geese. The  howls.

I caught the two older men on the return walk down the beach. Wished them a good day, asked where they were from, and thanked them for the rhythmic welcome to the morning. We all smiled.

These were from a First Nation community visiting our resort town for some event. Which tribe, which event, was unclear. But it was unlikely to be Yom Kippur, which was that morning’s event in my world. Still, their ritual greeting of the morning was indistinguishable from the hordes of well dressed Jews in cities worldwide attending shul and greeting the new year with hopes of being inscribed in the book of life. The ritual, the tradition, the continuation of a set of ideas that were thousands of years old. Maybe that teenage boy will be back here half a century from now, tightly wrapped in a thick sweatshirt against the cold and shaking his own rattle.

Cue the klezmer music. “Tradition!!” Exclaimed Tevye. We all have them. They bind us together over the generations, the centuries, the expanses of the globe. 

That afternoon, I watched more tradition. No, there was no visit to a synagogue for me for the holiday, even if there was a Jewish synagogue in rural Vancouver Island. That’s not a tradition I follow. Instead, I look for God’s thumbprint on the vast natural world and thank him for allowing me another year to see it.

Today, it was  the Big Qualicum River not Temple Beth Hillel or Congregation Emet. Rushing waters, small bands of white spilling and swirling over low dams of rock in the river. And the salmon, coming each October to leap these miniature waterfalls on their way upstream to spawn. Their hesitation and circling at the base of the falls. Then the leap, sometimes knifing through the rushing waters, sometimes high in the air. Half of them reach the next level, the other half splash back down to circle and try again. And, in the pond above, a clump of salmon sitting on the bottom of the stream, tails flickering in unison, readying for their next stage upstream.  Soon they will  spawn and die and their offspring follow the swifter path downstream to the ocean. Until next October.

This tradition likely long exceeds the rituals of humans chanting at the morning sun or reading the Torah before an overdressed congregation on a certain day each year.    Tradition is not just limited to us humans, nor is it always a voluntary act of cultural bonding. These patterns are sometimes embedded in the very DNA of our existence. Certainly for the salmon. In a delusional hungry moment of my fasting, I imagined the fish standing on the rushing waves and dancing to If I Were a Rich Man.

Back home, a different set of traditions. I’ve been on the advisory board of a family-owned scholarly publisher for the past few years. Our periodic Zoom discussion occurred the  day before. Hearing their reports, I felt blessed that I had escaped from running a similar press almost a decade ago. This family was trying to still make a go of it in the world of large competitors, predatory journals, paper mills, and AI writing.  We advisors had suggestions for them, a few of them quite radical. And we felt the pushback immediately. They had a tradition, a way of doing business, a model of the publications built over the decades. They weren’t going to leave that tradition for a new path. And yet. And yet. And yet they wrung their hands about how many of their core activities were no longer producing what it needed to in order to survive. The down side of tradition. Not changing when the world has.

I shouldn’t be one to throw stones. On that same day, I got the first note I’ve received from Jen since she left Left Coast two years before we closed, over a decade ago. She was my right hand person-- equally often I was hers-- in running the press. Her complaint when she resigned: we were too staid in our ways, not willing to adapt and change as the profession and audiences were changing. It had been a full decade since we talked. Her words echoed loudly throughout the day. Was I as guilty of clutching to tradition and not adapting my publishing house as the family  I  critiquing for the same shortcoming?

When does tradition preserve what is good, important, timeless? And when does it shut off avenues for change, for survival? Jewish religious tradition has transformed in recent years in most places where Jews still practice. But many congregations have still shrunk or vanished.   Salmon have learned to weave their way through boats, nets, and dams to get to their spawning ground, or have found new spawning places. Or been locked out and died. Publishers have changed their operations to become almost unrecognizable to someone raised on publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet many, including mine, failed or were bought up by global communication companies.  Would I want to run a publishing organization now? Could I do it without failing? I’m not sure my publishing traditions would still work.

I need to ask Tevye.

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