Understanding Uman

A guest post by Y Ginzburg:

Each year, the size of the audience increases dramatically as a long-dead Chassidic Rebbe turns Chassidus back into what it was originally, a mass movement back to Judaism for the unlearned and unwashed masses.

Current Chassidic trends demand that each sect have it’s own very specific attire, instantly recognizable to another Chassid even if invisible to the uneducated viewer. In some cases, this is the hat style they wear, in others the coat or the shoes. At the annual pilgrimage to Uman, though, anything goes, as it was in the 1700’s when Chassidus was invented and when most of the adherents were farmers and owned no more than one change of clothing. Thus Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, deceased since roughly the Louisiana Purchase, is influencing today’s Chassidic mores despite his death, and arguably in ways more important, more visible, and more dramatic than any living Rebbe.

Making the arduous trek to Uman, a shtetl in Ukraine that is about 5000 miles and 200 years away from New York, tens of thousands of Jews of all types unite as one.

The phenomenon of this trip has attracted even so many Sefardic Jews (traditionally not followers of Chassidus) that the world’s most famous Sefardic Rabbi, Ovadiah Yosef, has banned them, but to no avail.

What is the attraction of spending a few days away from family among tens of thousands of strangers, and paying dearly for the privilege? What spiritual uplift can be found in a backwards town of hygiene-challenged anti-Semitic villagers, whose most famous and most visited resident is dead?

A few years ago, I went to find out for myself, and this is what I wrote immediately upon my return, when the adrenaline was still pulsing, as it does now, years later, just remembering.

Without fanfare, without publicity, without subsidies from any of the umpteen organizations dedicated to preserving Judaism, tens of thousands of Jews converged on what is undoubtedly the largest Jewish gathering in the world. And they did so in perhaps the wackiest possible venue, in the remote backwaters of Ukraine, in a village that is still very close to medieval.

They ranged in type from the Ultra’s, the Meah Shearim Jews, to the secular Sefardic Egged bus drivers, to the new-agers dressed in robes and turbans. From blacks to black-hatters and from Ultra-orthodox to ultra-modern but respectful. Accurate numbers seem to be unavailable, but everyone agrees that there were at least 25,000 men there, and some claim as high as 100,000. Virtually no women were there, and there are no facilities for them. There were some hippie-ish and hermaphrodite-looking pony-tailed people there, though, that looked to me suspiciously like “Yentle” wanna-be’s.

No permission, no registration, no formalities, and yet they came. At great expense and with huge effort, they came from all over. A 3-hour drive from the closest airport in Kiev, some drove for days from more remote areas to where they found flights that were cheaper. Some of my roommates (we shared, six of us in a small “villa”, a 3-room house with no hot water and only an outhouse. Not even a cold shower!) came from Israel via Budapest, a 34-hour drive away. Others came via Odessa, 4 or 5 hours.

Ask any one of the people who attended how it was and the only response will be a glazed-eye look and a hummed snatch of the doggerel verse “Uman, Uman, Rosh Hashanah”.

So what inspires this kind of behavior, this kind of dedication, this elusive goal that every Jewish organization in America cannot achieve with their millions in subsidies, publicity, advertising, and convenient elegant venues?

If the answer could be cut and dried, it would be replicable, and that it obviously isn’t. Let me therefore reply with why I went, and what I got from it.

This past year has been emotionally turbulent for me, and with the High Holidays approaching seeking out a new and spiritually uplifting experience seemed more apt than returning to my dry and usual services. Because of this, I actually listened when my brother called me and, mostly in jest, told me that the Breslov Chassidim were offering cheap trips to Uman, Ukraine, for the holiday. He, knowing me and my rationalist leanings as well as my constant railings against Chassidic and neo-spiritual non-Jewish influences on our shared religion, was stunned when I actually booked the flight. In fact, with my self-claimed role as the Jewish Martin Luther, everyone who knows me was stunned by my spur-of-the-moment decision.

It has been my experience that total immersion in another culture can allow one to reap a wealth of information in a short time. This has worked for me in the past in a wide variety of arcane areas of interest, and my need for increased spirituality this year led me to try this.

Anyway, I always try to follow that saying that could have and should have been by a Rabbi, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (It’s actually by Nietszche).

It is tempting to digress about the backwater culture found here, where people live without running water or electricity. To talk about my feelings of gratitude to the communists, who drove my family away from this part of the world in the early 1920’s, else I might have grown up here, too, pummeled by lack of opportunities and facilities, even had I managed to survive the Pogroms and the subsequent Nazi and Ukrainian Nazi-sympathizer mass killings.

But to digress, even though it would be interesting, would detract from the story of this holiday ritual, observed at such a high cost and with such physical strain by so many people.

Uman has three huge synagogues, as well as many many smaller ones, and there were outdoor minyans set up everywhere one turned, including very many right in the open streets, which were free of traffic. The synagogue I attended had about 4500 seats, and every inch of standing room was occupied. The lower floor of the same building was only slightly smaller, and was equally jammed. The other main synagogue had about 2500 seats, again crammed to capacity.

All of the synagogues, while they follow varying prayer customs, follow the “shteibel” concept of informality in prayer. Thus, it is perfectly acceptable to wander in and out during services, or to have brief conversation during the service, except at the most solemn moments.

More importantly, they also follow the Breslov concept, what I believe is the secret of the whole thing, that “Our Father In Heaven” isn’t just lip-service, it’s real. The Lord is viewed as a real father would be, someone to be equally loved and respected, but in any case to be spoken to with love and affection, and with an open heart. What follows from this approach is that everyone who shares that same father is a brother, to be treated as a brother would be, blood no matter what his behavior, his looks, or his dress.

Thus one has a huge crowd powered by unbridled affection. No handshakes with dry New Year wishes- here there are hugs and big sloppy kisses on the cheek. Even casual acquaintances are greeted like family, taken to heart and affection. Attire, skin color, dress habits, all the usual things that at home differentiate between us here are ignored, detritus fallen by the wayside. One sees the striped caftans of the Jerusalem Chassid embracing the New-age Kabbalah-Center devotee, the Yemeni with long peyos hugging the Black-hatted American, and the Ethiopian bonding with the Carlebachian from California or Oregon. Cab drivers embraced doctors, the rich and the poor became indistinguishable, all covered with the same thin layer of fine gray dust and thick layer of brotherly love. Professional status, financial standing, political opinions, nothing mattered but that you were a Jew, and thus my brother. And all this was accomplished without any intoxicants, without alcohol, indeed without even the things many consider basics. Yet somehow, no one went hungry and no one felt slighted.

And this boundless love creates an effect similar to a contact high. Somehow, annoyed as I was by the people walking in and out during the service and exchanging pleasantries, at the high points of the service, I wept like a baby.

When the entire assemblage clapped for Kabalistic reasons at certain points in the service, it sounded like they were giving God a round of applause, and I wept.

When I witnessed the spontaneous eruption of spirited dancing (to the tune of “Uman, Uman, Rosh Hashanah”, thanking the Lord for the privilege of being there), after the service, where all barriers between the different types of Jews present fell totally so that I strained to impress the beautiful sight into my mind, I wept again.

And when I witnessed a boy of perhaps ten years old, confined to a wheelchair and wheeling himself around in the circle, filled with boundless joy and beaming in happiness, I wept at the sheer beauty of the moment.

And I do feel, strongly, that all that weeping changed me. I just pray that I can hold on to that feeling.

It will take me a long time to fully assimilate what happened to me there, in that bleak gray Ukrainian village, but this much was immediately clear: The spiritual values one seeks for the high Holidays, inclusiveness, boundless love, closeness to Hashem, and pleadings for your loved ones, were far more easily accessible than they would be in the sterile synagogues I am familiar with.

And, with my own eyes glazed, I can only challenge you: Try it. It’s not replicable here.

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