Coming Back a Grateful Mess

Article by Rabbi Shimon Posner: I spent this past weekend in Kazakhstan: I added nothing to my carry-on, but it’s going to take me months to unpack. If there was one word to describe this trip, it would be vital.

By Rabbi Shimon Posner – Rancho Mirage, California

This article is a mess and so am I.  Enter at your own risk.

I spent this past weekend in Kazakhstan: I added nothing to my carry-on, but it’s going to take me months to unpack. If there was one word to describe this trip, it would be vital.  Vital meaning very necessary.  Vital meaning life-affirming.  Vital meaning life-giving. Kazakhstan is literally at the other end of the world, between Siberia and China. I flew over Iran to get there and flew over China to get back, taking over 24 hours to get there and another 24 hours to get back.

Eighty years ago this past Shabbat, the Rebbe’s father, known formally as Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson but simply as Reb Levik, passed away in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan (in Hasidic society, as a general rule of thumb, the greater the person, the sparser the titles).

He led his daily life according to the bedrock principle that there is only one G-d. My grandparents and my great-grandparents knew him and adored him, but I have been only peripherally aware of him.  I thought it appropriate to spend his eightieth yartzeit in his presence, trying to get to know him a bit better.

Yekaterinaslav appointed him as their rabbi in 1909. In WWI the city was flooded with refugees and his home became the place for a meal and a place to sleep.  Shortly after, the Commies gained power and things got even nastier.  The city was, and still is, the largest in Ukraine: the breadbasket of Russia. Now that the government-owned everything, including the flour that Ukraine produced, they saw matzah as a marvelous cash crop. They knew that Jews would only buy matzah for Pesach if the Rabbi attested that it was indeed kosher for Pesach. The commissars made it clear that they expected him to certify their matzah.

Reb Levik insisted that if he was to certify the matzah, he required inspectors answerable to him, not the government; answerable to Him Almighty not to apparatchiks looking for a job.  A certification is only as good as the person who stands behind it and how could he ensure that what he was certifying was indeed kosher?  The commissars did not want this, yet Reb Levik prevailed. But this really stuck in their throat; they did not appreciate his lack of going-along-to-get-along diplomacy.  Eventually, he was arrested; interrogated.

Perhaps the most perfidious abomination of Communist life is that the entire society becomes informants.  Spies.  Snitches. And of course, when they interrogated Reb Levik it was not about his own activities, but a fishing expedition to catch others in their net.  Give us names, they insisted. And he complied; Reb Levik provided the names of each and every one of his cohorts who had already passed away or had successfully fled the country. Other than that, they could not squeeze a syllable out of the man.

They subjected him to this marvelous concept called internal exile: not allowing him to leave the country – but forcing him to move to the most inhospitable place within the country, the Kazakhstani village of Chi’li. His wife, who could have tried to leave the country and save her skin, or who could have stayed in relative comfort of Ukraine, went with her husband. In this small village, this scholar had no one to teach; all he could do was write.  But in this crude, primitive place there was no Staples.

His wife, the ever-resourceful and hopeful Rebbetzin Chana, boiled herbs and berries to form a tincture. So now he had his ink. But where to find paper? He was allowed to bring only a handful of holy books; in the margins of the Zohar, he explained this mystical work.  There were also thousands of manuscripts from his home in Ukraine which have never been recovered.  A Rabbi Dubov from New Jersey has spent years trying to fathom Reb Levik’s work, principally on the Zohar. The Rebbe, his son, would teach from his father’s writings nearly weekly. And one readily senses not only the breadth and profundity of their knowledge but also how they take seemingly disparate elements of the Torah and the world, and show the symmetry between them. 

(Hold tight for the next two paragraphs.)  This method is founded on the teaching that while created, the world is immaterial compared to G-d’s absolute existence.  That the existence of everything, even – or perhaps especially the purest evil – is here only at G-d’s pleasure, is fundamentally dependent on the Divine willing it to be here and therefore Divine Will is the only notion that His people need entertain. 

This way of thinking, elucidated to elicit man to not be lulled in the lap of luxury (for luxury is here to further the Divine, and if it is detracting you from it, you are lost in the smoke and mirrors which surround it) was now marshaled to defy a murderous regime (reasoning that luxury and evil are of the same cloth, both challenge our focus, and that challenge is here only to elicit our resolve). In short, the affirmation G-d is one is not simply the negation of Greek mythology’s godheads, but a negation of any phenomenon that insists it exists outside of G-d’s privilege.  That it is a lifetime of discipline that forms a world view, as to paraphrase Jonathan Sacks, college assumes the world exists and you question the existence of G-d, the yeshiva takes G-d’s existence as self-evident and questions the role of the world.  

One can readily sense the influence that the father had on the son.  I realize now, in a way that I never have, that these mystical, concise words are accessible, comprehensible, nurturing and something transmissible.  Enlightening. Vital.  

One of the fellow travelers spoke on Friday night, and although without a microphone, of course, his words resonated. But to understand what he was saying, you need to know a little bit of Hasidic society.  He asked: when you go to a wedding, how do you know who is the bride?  Simple: it’s the woman in the white dress. But at a Hasidic wedding, where all the men dress the same—black coats, white shirts, black hats –  how do you know who is the groom? Simple: wait till the end of the wedding; the one who gets in the car with the bride is the groom. While all gather this weekend to honor Reb Levik, remarked the fellow traveler, the one who is truly here is the one who takes Reb Levik home with them. 

Vitality. This is my mandate.  They say that the tyrant dies and his rule ends, the martyr dies and his rule begins.  The martyr lives on when what he died for – and more importantly, but often overlooked – what he lived for, continues to resonate. To bear fruit.  While it’s fairly easy (and simplistic?) to say that Communism is dead, the only assurance that Reb Levik lives on relies on our learning his teachings, inculcating them in ourselves, and sharing them with others.  His weltanschauung becomes our own when his day-to-day movements become ours as well.

Another fellow participant, who had urged me to make the trip, must have exclaimed in pain four or five times during our two-day weekend: “How could G-d do something like this? To such a holy, pure, and loving soul, to make this man suffer and keep him in exile to this day?”

What an exile it is! Besides being so far off the Jewish beaten track, when you walk into the cemetery it’s filled with statues. It seems that for the most part, Communist commissars had statues made of themselves as grave markers. You walk among these 15-foot-tall obelisks with the busts of men on top of them. After walking through these vaguely sinister vulgarities, you come to simple graves.  No one from Reb Leivk’s family, not even his son, was able to visit his grave.

When a chassid asks, “How can God allow this to happen?” it’s not just a rhetorical question but an incumbent cri de coeur; incumbent because G-d does not want us to accept injustice, He wants us to overwhelm injustice with the kind and the holy.

The Rebbe is, and becoming increasingly so, larger than life. And appropriately, because, well, he is so much larger than life that he makes our lives larger, deeper, and more aware than they ever were on their own. 

And yet, when you take the trip to Kazakhstan, drive from the Almaty airport (code ALA), come to the hotel, and then to his resting place, you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you are there representing his son, who could never be there. There’s a certain, very human element to that relationship, which becomes your own, and with that comes a mix of emotions. You see the profundity of their shared intellect, their enduring love for each other and the ruthless cruelty of the regime that separated them.

One of the stories I heard, and I had not remembered hearing it before, was that Reb Levik was forbidden to leave the country, even for a few days, to attend his son’s wedding. He penned him a long letter—several in fact—over the course of just one day. He spoke about the importance of the wedding, what we learn of it from our forefathers and others. “Don’t feel bad,” he wrote, “that I can’t be at your wedding. Jacob didn’t have his father at his wedding either, and yet the marriage turned out very well, and so will yours.” I sense that this scholar father and this scholar son would share that sentiment differently than people not of their stature. Yet, on a very human level, we all can appreciate it.

Another thing: small men would have seen Reb Levik as a man who could have looked the other way and lived a good life, could have (at least initially) accepted the offers of rabbinical chairs to escape the Soviets and who had failed to do so.  I am sure there were those some ninety years ago who thought him a failure.  In their myopic view, he was.  So now Reb Levik calls to me, in the lap of luxury that I have been blessed with, am I jealously guarding whatever vestige of integrity in my life that I can?  Am I taking the One G-d view or getting lost in the weeds of life?  Am I making Reb Levik my own, or a pious pilgrimage I visit and leave like a wedding hall?  This is a vital question.

One of the songs that Reb Levik sang, and that the Rebbe made famous, was one that is sung on Simchat Torah. It begins with a rousing crescendo and then it rouses even more. Adin Steinsaltz said of the Rebbe that he did not leave a legacy—he left marching borders. I think his father did the same.

I apologize for the rambling and appreciate your sticking through the article.  It’s raw and I’m working it through, but I feel I can’t wait for it to percolate.  I’m not yet sure what this trip was about, but I know something happened.  I think what I am saying is:  I gotta go unpack. TTYL.