Days of Awe

On the first morning of Rosh Hashannah, I was sitting in services and I realized that in the Ukraine, tens of thousands of male Jews were dancing and praying and blowing shofars at the lake in Uman.  This is where Reb Nachman told his followers to go.  Reb Nachman is from Bratislav, not Uman.  He chose to be buried there because it was the grave site of a horrible massacre of Jews by the Ukrainians.  After he was buried there, it became the site of a horrible massacre of Jews by the Germans.  But now... each year at Rosh Hashannah (the Jewish new year) all these devout men converge and sing out the ten Psalms that Reb Nachman asked them to sing at his grave.  You can see the trailer for a documentary about it called Yippee! I highly recommend that you click on that link and watch it.

Amazing.  But also think about the fact that in the Ukraine they have been hard at work to remove traces of Yiddishkeit because that also erases their collective guilt.  What Jews?  There weren't any Jews in our village.  (For more on this subject I recommend reading Omer Bartov's book Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galacia in modern day Ukraine. (Yes, this is the kind of stuff I read in my spare time.))

But the whole point is that as I sat in services and started thinking of the singing and dancing and praising of G-d going on at a place that should strike terror in our hearts.  We win.  We kept our soul.