This week is one of those weeks in my business when you tear up your sermon because the world has something more important, more painful, more pressing than whatever you were going to talk about.
This is one of those weeks. A week that lands you back in a deep well of sadness and fear. Sadness at the terrible thing that is happening. Fear of the terribler thing that could come. A week that awakens not only our present-moment fears, but the centuries-long fears of our ancestors too.
But we gather together for Shabbat anyway, because Shabbat doesn’t wait. We gather because we don’t yet know how to respond or what will be asked of us, so we come together to share that not-knowing. And we gather because being together is just what we do.
So here we are. Together tonight, concerned, alert, witnessing, waiting for a call to action of some sort.
In the meantime, for those who are inclined, I’ll mention one reputable organization called Kesher that has for years been working to support women and children in Ukraine, and they have created an emergency fund. So here is a link in case anyone feels like acting right away.
This week’s events live on many levels for us. There are people in this Zoom Room who have deep connections to Ukraine and living relatives there. Many people in this room trace their roots to this place. Many American Ashkenazi families whose grandparents came from “Russia” really came from this soil, from Ukraine, when it was part of the Russian Empire. It is a place that had Jewish presence as early as the Greek Empire, and certainly unbroken Jewish settlement since the Middle Ages. Unlike Poland, Ukraine was not emptied of Jews during the Shoah. At least a million Ukrainian Jews died, but many others survived and continued to live there, and live there still, including President Volodymir Zelensky.
Jewish life in Ukraine was never easy. It was characterized over the centuries by frequent antisemitic violence. The Chmielnicki Massacres of the 17th Century, in which something between 50,000 and 100,000 Jews were killed, was the most sweeping and violent pogrom in Jewish history until the Shoah. It was the pre-industrial Shoah. And it cast a very long shadow on the Jews of Eastern Europe.
But as is often the case in Jewish history, trauma and tragedy are followed currently by a kind of urgent creative blossoming. And this is what happened In Ukraine.
This week’s Torah portion, from which Atzilah’s beautiful chant is drawn, brings our attention back to the building of the mishkan, the Holy Tent. The portion talks about the generous industry of all who were wise and skilled. How they contributed their gifts and were able to weave holiness out of pure imagination. That generation that had spent their lives as slaves in Egypt created the mishkan.
Similarly, the close generations that followed the Chmielnicki Massacres of Ukraine included gifted, skilled, wise people who left us gifts that we still treasure. Gifts that have informed much of how we as a community do Jewish.
Because those were the generations that gave rise to Chasidism. I have, in my mother’s words, some faribl with much of today’s Chasidism. But Chasidism, in its founding, in those post-trauma years, was a radical development in Judaism. Its founder, Rabbi Israel, the Baal Shem Tov – teacher, healer, miracle maker – made available to many Jews a kind of joyful, God-soaked, transcendent soul experience that they were not getting elsewhere. Much to the dismay of the mainstream Orthodox establishment, the Baal Shem Tov taught that one’s kavanah – one’s spiritual state – is as important as the words of prayer or the mechanics of mitzvot.
For the Baal Shem Tov, scholarship was important but not essential to be a good Jew. Not even literacy was required for one to feel dveykes, a close bond with God. But meditation, joyful song, dancing, clapping, stamping – all these things could bring on a direct experience of the Divine. You didn’t need to know the words to all the prayers. Or even to any of them.
In a famous Baal Shem Tov story, it is Yom Kippur, and the congregation has been praying all day. A young boy who cannot read is sitting, frustrated, restless, until he pulls out a flute and begins playing it. He is instantly shushed by the adults around him. But the Baal Shem Tov steps in and explains the relief he is feeling. The prayers people had been offering all day were correct to the letter, but not from the heart, and those prayers were all still densely stuck in the room, unable to ascend to heaven. But the boy, who had no words but whose heart was filled with longing for God, broke the logjam with his flute, allowing all the prayers to take flight. This idea that God might be more easily reached by open heartedness than by careful prayer was quite radical in its context. And the very fact that we in this community sing niggunim in order to settle in or open up is because this practice was invented by the early Chasidim to give more equal access and more direct experience.
The early Chasidim were also radical in bringing mystical teaching into their communities. They leaned into the Zohar and the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria, drawing these teachings from Spain and Palestine and replanting them in their Ukrainian shtetlakh. Suddenly those Jews were imagining the Tree of Life and the shattered vessels of light and the beauty of the Shekhinah as she arrives, adorned for Shabbat.
The disciples of the Baal Shem Tov set up their own rabbinic courts and communities. These rebbes almost all came to be identified by the town where they preached and taught. To recite their names is to take a tour of the Ukraine: the Maggid of Mezeritch, Baruch of Medzibozh, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, Nochum of Chernobyl, Aharon of Zhitomir, Moshe Leib of Sassov, Nachman of Bratzlav, Chanah Rokhl of Ludmir.
Jews of Ukraine offered many other gifts of poetry and art over the centuries, but Chasidism is one that we in this community still feel and respond to. In the time of the early Chasidim, their gifts were unequally distributed – rich and poor, maybe yes, scholar and wagondriver, yes, but not men and women. Even though there are many Chasidic tales about pious women, usually the wives of the rebbes, and how much of the rebbes’ merit grew from the holy kavanot, the holy states of mind and righteous actions of their wives – even though the Chasidism praised women’s private piety, they offered them no path for public participation.
The gifts of the Chasidim are still not shared equally in Chasidic communities. But they are in ours, through the medium of the Jewish Renewal Movement – another creative blossoming in the wake of tragedy. The spiritual technologies piloted by the Chasidim have been brought forward, re-purposed, and democratized. Now they are more often than not held in the hands of women, and shared with all who seek them.
Chasidism did not develop in Ukraine because the 18th Century was some sort of Golden Age there. It developed in response to tragedy and in resistance to near-constant persecution. The gifts of the Chasidim are wildflowers that bloomed in a rocky, parched, hostile landscape.
So it is important to resist any schmaltzy Fiddler-style nostalgia for Jewish life as it was once lived in the Ukraine. But it is also right to notice how that land is imprinted on us, and how we are imprinted on it. There are not many places you can go in the world that doesn’t have some Jewish imprint. In Ukraine it is profound.
And so, our eyes are turned eastward. We watch, we tremble, we fear for the people of Ukraine, Jews and non-Jews, all of whom grew up on the same water and the same air, under the same weight of history. This is a fragile moment. We feel our strong spines and wait to know what it will be our task to do.