Adventures in Uman
By Yedidya Meir
When a Jew comes to Uman for the first time, what does he say? He says: What, is this all there is? A small hill with two and a half streets, seven-eight neglected buildings and one grave site. Even Tel Aviv's annual Taste of the City food festival is bigger. But the energies, if you will forgive the word, hit you from the first minute. And the fact that they cover such a congested area only intensifies them. At the top of the narrow path, dragging our baggage at 7:30 A.M., tired from the tribulations of the trip, a professional Bratslav Hasid approaches us. "Happiness, bro!" he says, turning to me, "here's a pamphlet that will help you find a decent match before the coming New Year." But I'm married, I tell him, I already have a child. "Happiness, bro!" he says, without missing a beat, and immediately whips out another pamphlet, called "Domestic harmony and respecting the wife, in which the virtue of respecting one's mother-in-law will also be explicated."
Everyone here is a great tzadik, a saintly person, who wields spiritual influence. While continuing to look for our apartment, I ask one of the group in despair whether anyone has even been updated about our arrival. "Our Master is updated about your arrival," a passerby interjects. For real. "Our Master" is Rebbe Nachman, of course. He looks after everyone here. It is a simple faith. Back in Israel, when I told a Bratslaver friend, totally sane, that the Bratslav World Center was flying a group of journalists, among them me, to Uman for Rosh Hashanah, he remarked, in all seriousness, "It is not simple. Our Master sent you an invitation." And, after a brief pause for thought, he added, "And at his expense, too."
Deathbed promise
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us begin from the first leg of the journey - of any journey: separating from the suitcase. You deposit it at the new terminal in the hands of the smiling check-in attendant and pray the whole way that you will manage to grab it on the revolution and a half that it makes on the conveyor in the destination airport. Otherwise - go look. In the case of Odessa there is no need for anxiety. The suitcase does not revolve on the conveyor and disappear. There is no conveyor. There is a yellow Ukrainian truck, very, very old, that drives to the plane's baggage compartment and from there staggers a few meters to the dark lot at the entrance to the airport. Five impatient porters (not to say thugs) grab suitcase after suitcase and hurl them onto the asphalt. Some of the suitcases break, others open, spilling out sheets, white clothes and Absolut vodka. But they are all here, in the small lot, not escaping.
It is 3:30 A.M. Two-something hours ago, hundreds of Hasidim, me among them, sampled perfumes, cigarettes and digital cameras at the duty-free shops, and now we are here, dumped amid the goyim. No one is waiting for us, no one explains where we go from here or where, for God's sake, the bathroom is. Still, those who have been here before warn us not to succumb to the temptation to turn one of the local trees into a makeshift toilet, because that could cost us a large fine, maybe even jail. There have already been cases of simple, innocent Jews who were caught, and afterward great intercession was needed to extract them from the authorities. Great intercession.
The flight from Israel to Odessa takes two hours; two and a quarter, tops. Hardly had we taken off and already the shofar was blown for the landing. However, the bus trip on the Odessa-Uman line simply never ends. It's a long, boring ride, the landscape never changing for a second. An hour, two hours, three hours. No curves, no turns, no stoplights. Just straight-straight-straight. Then, at last, a small turn right, and left, and Uman looms.
Our Master organized us a VIP place at 44 Pushkina, an old, ugly apartment building, but one that is much in demand both because of its proximity to the grave and because this is where Aryeh Deri stays when he visits Uman. The actor Shuli Rand also resides here, on our very floor (though most of the time he is on the street, the poor guy - he only wants to get to the mikveh, the ritual bath, the colorful towel on his shoulder, but he keeps getting stopped every two feet by fans who want to be photographed with him). Most of the apartments in the area close to the grave have been bought in recent years by Haredim -
ultra-Orthodox Jews - from Israel and are rented out at exorbitant rates to the Rosh Hashanah guests. Our apartment, for example, belongs to a Jew from Kiryat Sefer. "A three-Nachman suite," we call it when we finally find the key. Two small rooms, a kitchenette, a shower and a toilet. These "Jewish Agency beds" - bunk beds and mattresses - accommodate 12 journalists over Rosh Hashanah: two from Army Radio, two from Radio Kol-Hai, two from Bakehila, one from Mafte'ah Ha'ir, one from the Haredi newspaper Hamodia and three who write under different pseudonyms in a few papers.
There is a huge demand for rooms and beds in Uman. It's hard to describe how huge. On the night before Rosh Hashanah, two small brothers from Bnei Brak, one 10 and one 12, knocked on our door, said that their father's flight from America was delayed and asked whether they could sleep here for a few hours. Before we could say "Na-Nach-Nachm-Nachman-from-Uman," they had already laid down on one of the beds and fallen asleep until morning. What did the fellow whose bed they took do? He went to recite Psalms all night beside the grave.
The humility of the great
What did Rabbi Nachman from Bratslav look like? There is no doubt that everyone imagines him differently. One with a long white beard and a tarbush like the one worn by Rabbi Kadouri, a second with a streimel, a third pictures him with a contemplative visage like the Lubavitcher Rebbe. It's all imaginary. Rabbi Nachman from Bratslav died at the age of 38 (!). Now we can start imagining what he looked like. Just don't forget to add to the portrait that according to the testimonies he was a redhead and that he is described in the Bratslav literature as "patient, simple, and hapless and innocent in his deeds." How does this haplessness and humility jibe with what he said about himself - "I am a wonder worker and my soul is a great wonder. There has never been an innovation like me"? On the contrary, the Bratslavers will tell you, only a person who knows how great he is can truly be humble. Otherwise, where is the humility here? It is truly zero.
Be that as it may, moments before his death, in 1810, Reb Nachman went for the jackpot. He called in two faithful witnesses and promised them: "Whoever comes to my grave and recites the 10 Psalms of the Tikkun Klali [General Remedy] and gives even as little as a penny to charity for my sake, then, no matter how serious his sins may be, I will do everything in my power - spanning the length and breadth of Creation - to cleanse and protect him. By his very sidecurls I will pull him out of Gehenna [purgatory]!" That is where it all began, with that unequivocal promise: go to Uman, give a penny to charity, recite the 10 Psalms of the Tikkun Haklali - and in no time you are out of the netherworld. (The Psalms are numbers 16, 32, 41, 42, 59, 77, 90, 105, 137 and 150, in that order.)
But there was also a special request to visit the grave specifically at Rosh Hashanah. "From the holy words he spoke with us," said Reb Natan from Nemirov, his salient disciple, "we learned of the great obligation to be with him on Rosh Hashanah. Even though we knew this already, nevertheless, from his many holy words and from his terrible motions, we understood the power of the obligation more and more, and it cannot be elucidated in writing."
Since that promise, Bratslav Hasidim have been moving mountains to be with the dead rabbi at Rosh Hashanah. During the Communist era, the visit entailed a genuine risk of martyrdom. After the Iron Curtain fell, things began to be easier. In 1990 there were about 300 Hasidim in Uman, and since then the graph has been rising steadily, to the present 20,000 worshipers, from all over the Jewish world, this Rosh Hashanah.
What a millionaire looks like
Here is another hot update from Rosh Hashanah in Uman: Sruli Singer. He is a young American millionaire, barely 40, a bit odd, a bit tormented, and with one big obsession - Rebbe Nachman from Bratslav. It all started exactly a year ago. Out of curiosity, Singer went to Uman for Rosh Hashanah 5765. They tried to show him, explain to him, dance with him, but he didn't connect. It didn't make him feel good ("There were preventions," as they say in Bratslav jargon). So much so that he decided to hightail it home to Flatbush even before the onset of the holy day. But Rebbe Nachman had other plans. Singer stayed. And then, in the middle of the holy day, it happened. Something grabbed him. And since that day he has been wandering about in New York, in Jerusalem, in Uman and in his especially favorite place, the village of Peki'in, in Galilee, thinking about how to promote Our Master. In the first stage he donated hundreds of food packages to hungry Bratslav Hasidim. However, he very quickly understood that the truly important goal is not to look after a handful of Bratslav Hasidim but to cause there to be many more of them.
So, two weeks before Rosh Hashanah, Singer informed the directors of his flourishing Bratslav interests in Israel - Nehemiah Cheshin, Zvi Frank and Nachman Ben-Shaya, all three in their twenties - that he had decided to donate $1 million to subsidize plane tickets for people who have never been to Uman. When he saw the overwhelming response, he added another million. All told, 3,096 people have flown to Uman under the sponsorship of Our Master's millionaire. (By the way, nearly all of them are men - there are hardly any women in Uman at Rosh Hashanah, for reasons of modesty.)
Anyone who wanted to see what the mysterious philanthropist who paid for his ticket looks like, remained curious. Singer did not visit the crowded site much. But on the second night of Rosh Hashanah, for unclear reasons, he did his thing and shyly made the rounds of downtown Uman. It would not be an exaggeration to say that such a surrealistic sight has not been seen in Ukraine for many years. The millionaire with the boyish face put on a white Hasidic frock, following the custom of Jews during prayers on the Days of Awe. In one hand he continued to hold his tallit from the morning prayers, while he continually tried to extricate his other hand from passersby who tried to kiss it, as Hasidim do with their rabbi. It wasn't easy. They were persistent. They did not give up (acknowledging good is an important foundation of Judaism). When he saw that there was no chance, he started to kiss the hands of the kissers back. The kissing wars went on all the way to the graveside. When they got there, he was received by a group of youths from Netanya. They leaped about and sang to him with eyes closed and with great tenacity, "Thanks for everything you created, thanks for everything you gave me."
Music is a great and sublime part of the Bratslav way. But in the days before Rosh Hashanah, tranquil Uman turns into an earsplitting eve of distortion. You hardly hear the old-time Hasidic melodies, or original creations in the spirit of Adi Ran or Aharon Razael. Along the street are scattered innumerable donation booths that incessantly play cover versions of famous songs as loudly as possible. It sounds exactly like the original: the same melody, the same adaptation, the same rhythm, almost the same words, but then, at the critical moment, the song takes a Nachmanist twist.
An example? Sure: "Elokim gave you the gift of a great tikkun, a tikkun like you never saw / Elokim gave you the gift of being in Uman on Rosh Hashanah / Gave you 10 Psalms, for all the incarnations a cure / To lift your voice and sing, without fasting or suffering to endure." The people who play this music are a combination of deejays and preachers. Jews of the type who can grab a microphone and talk - sorry, preach - for hours and days. In Israel you can hear them mainly on the pirate radio stations. Here they are on the street. They don't shut their holy mouths for a second. Totally wiped out at midday after the flight, I decided I was going to get some sleep, come what may. I went to the room, closed the window, put down the blinds and put a pillow over my head - but this is what I heard: "Dear Jews, happy and blessed are you! Come to donate for the dissemination of Our Master's teaching and to make more and more Jews privileged to enjoy the Great Light! Dear Jew, take it upon yourself, as the Day of Judgment approaches, to donate for the dissemination of Our Master's teaching on the world Internet!"
Uman and me
On Monday, the 29th day of the month of Elul, a moment before the last sun of 5765 set, a great quiet descended on Uman. Only a violin sounded an ancient, melancholy Bratslav melody, played through the loudspeaker system of the compound. Pushkina Street, which until that moment had looked happy, assumed a radically different atmosphere. Everything was white. Everyone walked reverently to the synagogue. Since my return to Israel, I have not stopped thinking about what Uman has. Don't take my enthusiasm for granted. True, I am religious, I confess, but it is hard for me to find any obvious reason to be more moved at the grave of Rabbi Nachman from Bratslav than I would be at the grave of Rebbe Shloimele from Brooklyn or Rebbe Baruch from Mezhibuz or Rabbi Nachumkeh from Chernobyl. Do you have any idea how many gravesites there are? How many rebbes? How many tikkunim? And anyway, I am a graduate of the intellectual Lithuanian school, the mitnaged (the opponents of Hasidism as founded in the 17th century by the Ba'al Shem Tov, Rebbe Nachman's grandfather). What connection do I have with Uman?
But the moment you enter Uman's holy of holies, the grave site, pick up a booklet of the Tikkun Klali and start to read, something within you trembles (an elegant way of describing totally unexpected, and somewhat embarrassing, crying). I have no explanation for this. Maybe it is the long and grinding trip, maybe it is the atmosphere around the gravesite. Maybe it is the bad food and missing Rosh Hashanah in Israel - but the fact is that it does something to you. Here, of all places.
The Tikkun Klali that everyone here recites is just 10 psalms. Writer: King David. Compiler and editor: Rabbi Nachman from Bratslav. He is the person who, as we saw, recommended that precisely these psalms be recited. But before that, a brief prayer is customarily said: "I hereby connect myself, by reciting the 10 psalms, to all the true tzadikim of our generation and to all the true tzadikim who reside in the earth, etc." How pretentious, how delightful. To try, even if it is a bit pathetic, to connect, somehow, your personal, complex-ridden prayer, with the sublime prayers of the true righteous human beings, wherever they may be.
I try to approach the grave itself. No easy task. It is a small hall in which occupancy is 300 percent of the space. Everyone around is praying with great deliberation. Here this is not Rosh Hashanah. This is Yom Kippur. The Ne'ilah service - which concludes the Day of Atonement. With journalistic curiosity I examine the faces of the people here, but stop very quickly. It feels like voyeurism. Everyone in his own desperate style (Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Hasidim, Americans, yekkes of German descent, spruced-up arsim) is fighting for his life. Literally. The feeling is that this is the moment and this is the place. From here shall spring salvation. It is now or never.
The air in Uman is saturated with prayers. Each of the 20,000 worshippers here is also an emissary for something like 50 people at least. Everyone sent prayers with me, too. And when I say "everyone," I mean everyone. Not just religious Jews, either. I was asked to pray for health, I was asked to pray for education, I was asked to pray for love, I was asked to pray for a new startup in the e-mail realm, I was asked to pray for a format for a late-night show on Channel 2. If it were somewhere else, I might be ashamed to pray for things like that, but at Rebbe Nachman's everything looks straightforward. Everything is on the table. That is, on the grave. Someone told me that last year he stood here reciting Psalms piously when suddenly he heard the person next to him lean over the grave and say, word for word, the following: "Ah, Our Master, our Master, I know you have already heard everything, all the transgressions, all the confusions, but what I am about to tell you know - something like this, you have never heard in your life."
An hour before I left for Uman, a good friend of my parents knocked at my door. She was carrying a small bag containing a mass-produced honey cake. She said her son had gone to Uman the day before but she had not managed to give him the cake in honor of the holiday, so if I could, would I please give it to him the moment I saw him. I gladly assumed this small mitzvah, but in the chaos of Uman, her son did not find our apartment, and the whole matter was forgotten.
When I got back home, one of the first questions my mother asked me was whether I had delivered the cake to its destination. When I said I had not, she was appalled. It turned out that the cake was not the real issue: inside the bag was a small note in code, a list of some 30 desperate single women who are waiting for a match.
A star is born
There is one thing that I was surprised not to see in Uman: the inion "Na-Nach-Nachm-Nachman-from-Uman," which is so common in Israel. That is no coincidence. Most of the scrawlers of the mantra do not come to Uman. They believe that Rebbe Nachman's remains should be brought to Israel. And until then, they have established a minyan at the grave of their leader, Rabbi Yisrael Odesser. It's also a bit cheaper that way: He is buried in Jerusalem.
So, who comes to Uman? Original Bratslav Hasidim (families of the Hasidic lineage); Satmar Hasidim who have fallen in love with Rebbe Nachman because of things he wrote about the heretical spirit that will sweep over Judaism ahead of the advent of the messiah (which they view as an accurate prophecy of Zionism, which they abominate); curious yeshiva students from Israel; rich businessmen from the United States; rich businessmen from Europe (who sit on the benches of the huge dining tent and eat cholent like everyone else, but with an elegant cloth napkin covering their shirt lest it be sullied, heaven forbid); and hundreds of Yehuda Saado types. Really, hundreds. You walk down the street and every second you're positive you just saw the star (Saado won this year's "A Star Is Born," the Israeli version of "American Idol"). The oversized skullcap, the style of dress, the motions, the redemptive look in the eye. But no, it's not him, it's only a Saado-clone.
On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, when I knew that my time in Uman was almost up and that there was no way I was going back to Israel without touching the real Saado, I went to the vast hangar in which hundreds of followers of Moharash Schick (Saado's supreme spiritual authority, higher than all the local rabbis from Kiryat Ekron) were praying. About a month ago, immediately after he won, I wanted to interview him for my radio program. That turned out to be almost impossible. But here everything is free and intimate, almost like with Our Master. On the door is a very long list of all the worshipers along with their exact location. Here he is: "Saado, Yehuda. Seat 207." As it happened, there was a break in the service ahead of the blowing of the shofar, and I went straight to Seat 207. And, yes, there he was - Yehuda Saado. Real-live, full-size, alone. No PR people, no production assistant of the impresario Tamira Yardeni. Just Saado and his prayer book. I try to strike up a conversation with him, ask, take an interest, compliment him - but nothing. Saado does not respond. He does not say a word. Only all kinds of broken syllables: "Nu, oh ... nu, nu ..." It took me a few minutes before I got it: the tzadik has imposed a "fast of speech" on himself. Throughout Rosh Hashanah he does not utter a word other than in prayer. That makes sense. Last year, he said in an interview, he came to Uman as the drummer in a wedding band in the south of the country and prayed "to be a little more involved in this business of music." So now he is going to come to Uman and waste words for no reason?
Nu, have you prostrated yourself?
One of the loony things about Bratslav is that you can speak openly, skeptically and even critically about the Rebbe. I didn't try that, but I imagine that if I were to come to the court of the Rebbe from Vizhnitz and launch into a theological discussion there - whether the Rebbe is totally righteous, a depressive megalomania or just a healer of crazies - I would be kicked out fast. But in Uman it's different. The fact is that on Rosh Hashanah afternoon we sat with our neighbor Shuli Rand on the sidewalk at the entrance to our building and held a spontaneous symposium on the theme, "Rebbe Nachman and us - whither?"
Rand plays it cool. If you want, partake; if you don't want, don't partake - but it's obvious that he is dying for everyone to become Bratslav followers here and now. Someone asks him whether it is not clear to him, when he reads the master's writings, that this was a person suffering from clinical depression. Someone else diagnoses schizophrenia. A third says simply that Rebbe Nachman has no place in Orthodox Judaism, as evidenced by the fact that all his followers are former criminals and, to judge by the way they leap and cavort at intersections, current druggies. Rand has heard all this heretical stuff before and has no intention of engaging the detractors in a debate: "You know what, let's say you're right, let's say. But there is the gift that Our Master gave the world and gave me: solitude. Simply to sit alone and speak with Hashem [God] all day. To thank him for what is happening with you, to ask about things that are not going well, to tell him what is happening with you. Not from the prayer book, from the heart. I know that when I'm in solitude and when I'm not, there's a tremendous difference, it's a different world. More than that: I'm capable of looking at people and saying: This one does solitude, this one does not. So I say to you that, if only because of the solitude, only because of that, all this Uman is worthwhile."
The Bratslav people are innocent and simple. They don't understand much about public relations (the fact is that instead of flying in Gadi Sukenik or Yaakov Eilon - the news anchors of Channel 2 and Channel 10 - they flew me in). Nevertheless, Rebbe Nachman has very high ratings. No sooner had we landed back in Israel and got into a taxi when the phone calls started from programs that wanted to interview "people who came back from there." When Amit Segal, from Army Radio, who was also in Uman, went on the air on Razi Barkai's program ("Nu, Segal, did you prostrate yourself?"), I got a call from Israel Radio's parallel program, "It's All Talk," anchored by Ayala Hasson, which also wanted to put a Bratslaver on the air. I was a bit nonplussed. I spoke like a witness to a terrorist attack - not that I'm making any comparisons. What can I tell you, Ayala, it was a huge blast. I didn't really succeed in explaining what goes on there, what everyone is looking for there and what is so moving there. But as I was being interviewed I was already being bugged by a new Bratslav acquaintance whom I met there, in calls waiting: "Happiness, bro, I heard you on the radio," he told me immediately after the interview. "I can hear in your voice that next year you'll be with us again."
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