Dear friends,
I wish you were all with me on my trip. It seems like a dream, even though it was barely a week ago. I don't know if this is how it was planned, but the Three Weeks and Nine Days are times of exactly the kind of contrast that we confronted again and again as the trip progressed.
Both Moldova and Ukraine are places of astounding natural beauty. When I first realized how much time we would be spending on the bus, I looked forward to the empty space that I could fill with reading, listening, and quietude, while also enjoying the company of the women who came. I didn't know most of them initially, but simply coming on a journey like this one meant that I was in the company of mevakshot – seekers.
My window revealed more than I could have imagined: vast fields of ripe wheat, greener-than-green crops still ripening, and seemingly endless forests. The organizers, Peretz and Chavi Rubel, kept our creature comforts provided for so well that even my critical Inner Kvetcher was on vacation.
The contrast between the land and the people became apparent at the border crossing. Nothing went wrong. The passports were collected, the waiting was uneventful, but the expressions on the faces of the men in charge were a rather disturbing mixture of dour and vaguely annoyed.
I initially assumed that the job itself was tedious enough to affect them. There are many jobs that no six-year-old dreams of having when he grows up (think of the people at the airport who spend each day endlessly saying, "Bags on the belt," for instance).
When we stopped at one of the immaculate and almost identical rest stops, I noticed something that made me change my mind. I was looking at the stuffed animals. Their mouths were straight lines. No smiles for these teddy bears.
To the folks who live here, apparently this is de rigueur. The land didn't seem to speak to them in a language that could touch their souls.
It made the moment we finally arrived at Mezhibuzh, the home of the Baal Shem Tov, far more meaningful.
I knew his life story before, but standing there made it come alive. He was orphaned at five, born to elderly parents in a village so poor that no family took him in and made him one of their own. He often wandered the forests, but he saw Hashem giving life to every leaf.
When a group of Kabbalists who had escaped from the distractions of urban life met in the forest, they "happened" upon the child – no doubt as part of Hashem's plan. They brought him up and taught him the unique brand of Torah that later became known as Chassidus.
He married young, as was the custom of the times, and worked at various jobs (which historians have discovered by finding Mezhibuzh's tax records). But when he found his niche as a teaching assistant, there was no turning back.
He helped the children learn much more than Aleph-Beis. He taught them how much Hashem loves them, and how much they could discover their own love of Him within themselves. He taught them with words and with songs.
When he was thirty, he went out to teach those same lessons to his people. They were almost all observant and connected on the outside, but for many, the struggles of staying alive in the wake of the Khmelnytsky Massacres (1648–1657) had left deep scars. It was a catastrophe unmatched until the Holocaust.
His name is still used in Ukraine (in fact, Khmelnytskyi is a city we passed on the road). In the Baal Shem Tov's time, everyone's parents or grandparents were witnesses to the unspeakable horrors of those years.
Shabbetai Tzvi proclaimed himself Mashiach in 1665. When he converted to Islam, the shock was indescribable. Everyone had heard of him, and his apostasy left a layer of cynicism that was not always conscious, but was still hard to penetrate.
Unlike the people among whom they lived, almost every Jewish boy knew Chumash, basic Hebrew, prayer, and some Mishnah, but literacy and scholarship are not the same thing. Historians estimate that perhaps 15–20% had significant Gemara learning, and perhaps 5–10% were serious scholars. Women, in general, were deeply knowledgeable through family tradition, popular Yiddish works, and living day to day with practical halachah.
What the Baal Shem Tov confronted wasn't only a lack of learning. It was a lack of hope.
He taught how precious every Jew is, how involved Hashem is in every life, and how scholarship is not the only measure of a person's worth. Everyone has a specific mission, and the intrinsic value of each of us depends on the commitment we make toward serving Hashem as we fulfill that mission.
The depth of his message didn't only touch people like us. Great scholars such as the Maggid of Mezritch saw him as their rebbe.
When we went to his kever that night, I think we all felt some of his light.
Maybe that's why our teddy bears look different. (Theirs have frowns….)
The next day we went to the spring where he immersed. It is so cold that it makes the Ari's mikveh in Tzfat feel lukewarm. Those of us who went in (including yours truly) spoke about feeling both clean and happy.
The next leg of our journey took us to a tomb on top of a high hill in a town we all had heard of. We were in Breslov, at Rav Nosson's resting place.
Rav Nosson's life could be summarized by what was written on the velvet covering over the monument: "The Great Light. The Faithful Disciple." He wrote down everything we have of Rav Nachman's teachings – with utter humility. The town itself is shockingly beautiful, overlooking a lake and echoing tranquility.
And then it was on to Uman.
Uman is ugly.
No more fields. No more houses that look like the Three Bears live inside. It is the kind of place that gives the word shantytown its well-deserved reputation. Ugly streets, broken up by countless attempts at repair. Ugly houses.
You may wonder why Rav Nachman chose to live there.
It was because he saw something profound in its ugliness.
Uman was the scene of one of the worst massacres in Jewish history. Rebbe Nachman chose to move there because he wanted to be buried among the victims. In 1768, a peasant rebellion directed against the Polish nobility swept through the area, and thousands of Jews died al kiddush Hashem.
Before his death, Rebbe Nachman moved from Breslov to Uman to be with them.
His message, like that of the Baal Shem Tov, is that darkness can lead you to light.
The next morning we went to Sophia Park in Uman. It is extraordinarily beautiful and is said to be where Reb Nachman would go for solitude.
And then home.
To the Three Weeks – a time of destruction that opens us to doing the same within ourselves.
One of Rav Nachman's teachings tells us that Hashem "reduced" the way His Presence is felt so that human beings could relate to Him – not through an overwhelming Presence that would leave us unable to have a relationship with Him, but through a Presence that allows us to seek Him and draw close.
The destruction doesn't mean that He left.
It means that His grandeur is still here, but we have to be humble enough to find it.
The way to do this is by serving Him with joy.
Have a wonderful, if vicarious, trip, and may the Torah of finding light bring us all closer to the restoration of the Beis HaMikdash.
Love,
Tziporah
