At the relatively late age of 43 — though basically a toddler compared to much of a recent audience for the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene production — I finally saw “Fiddler on the Roof.”

We all have our cultural blind spots. I’ve never seen an episode of “The Simpsons,” either, though I very much have always meant to. Some things just slip by. My failure to see “Fiddler” is only important in that it would be extremely on-brand for me to have seen “Fiddler” 35,000 times — to have “Fiddler” be the only show I’d ever seen. I grew up attending Jewish schools and in a home where my mother became Orthodox when I was 12, and where my mother’s full-time mission became to guide my sisters and me toward her enlightenment. This worked on my sisters. It still works for them.

Me? I failed to observe, I criticized their observance, all of which my mother called “my self-hating,” when she was lightly chiding, and my “anti-Semitism” when she wanted me to feel the full disappointment of what my resistance represented. She felt that if I had no love for tradition, I would only subvert it — that I would be responsible for the draining of what she most loved and found essential. We either replenish or we drain. My apathy was not replenishing.

I attended the show with my mother and one of my sisters — Tracy, the one who loves musicals — and my aunt, Lois, who has taken me to a majority of theater in my lifetime. I had not seen Bartlett Sher’s 2015 Broadway production, though my mother wanted to. I hadn’t seen the movie, ever, no matter how many times I passed through a living room where it was playing on a TV. And I hadn’t planned on seeing this, the version in actual Yiddish, either when it became a surprise hit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, nor when it moved uptown to Stage 42.