Kol ha Moed Pesach  2009

Every year at the end of the Passover Seder, we say ‘לשנה הבאה בירושלים,’ Next year in Jerusalem. Five Passovers ago, in 2004, I finally had a chance to live that dream. That was the year I was living in Jerusalem, finishing my first year of study at HUC. Yet when Passover came around, I was not in Jerusalem, but in the Ukraine. Twenty-four of the students of Hebrew Union College volunteered to travel from Israel to Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus, to help the members of the progressive Jewish communities in those countries celebrate Passover.

I will never forget my experiences on that trip. I was one of six students who went to the Ukraine. Of the six, one of my friends at school, a rabbinical student named Cookie Olshein and I were sent on a trip that went from Kiev, to Venitza, to Genivan, and on to Lvov. We participated in five seders, not all of them on the first two nights! To our surprise, most of the communities we visited did not really need us to lead the seders. If some did not know what to do, there was usually at least one person there knowledgeable enough to lead the seder. 

The communities had financial problems, and problems getting Jewish items. The people in Genivan did not have their own seder plate. They had to borrow one from Venitza. Some places had only two or three haggadot for the entire community. One community held a seder in a huge room, with a large crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The chandelier no longer worked, and the light was provided by a single bare bulb hanging from a wire. This community could not afford a meal. As Cookie and I led the seder, we reached the part in the haggadah that said ‘the festival meal is eaten.’ We left that line out.

But we also met vibrant communities of young people who were trying to discover, after years of repression, what it meant to be Jewish. Despite the poverty and the lack, in many cases, of Jewish knowledge and the simplest Jewish ritual items, we found optimism there. I think I have never seen a seder as full of fun as the seder in Kiev, held in a hotel for over 300 people, which included skits by the youth group, a quiz games with prizes, and many more than four cups of wine.

Still, behind the vibrancy and the optimism, there was always a long dark note of sadness. We visited many holocaust memorials, often on the sites of camps, or simply fields where hundreds, or thousands, of innocent Jews were taken to be shot. We saw synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed, synagogues that the Soviets had turned into gyms. We saw neighborhoods, once Jewish, where doorway after doorway showed the outline where once a mezuzah was fixed. We saw an exhibit on Jews in a museum of ethnicity, including a photograph of a man who looked so much like my grandfather that I just stood looking at that one photo, until the museum closed.

And we visited Babi Yar, where 34,000 Jews were killed in two days, the first major massacre of World War II. 

My grandfather came from Kiev as a boy. I do not think that photograph could have been of him. But it could well have been a cousin, or an uncle. Whoever it was, that person almost surely died at Babi Yar.

When we were in Lvov, I dragged Cookie to a flea market. I was hoping to find some tea glass holders, or even a Kiddush cup, or Shabbat candlesticks. I found more than I bargained for.

Cookie came to the table of junk I was looking over, her face white as a sheet. “Go over to that table,” she said, “and tell me that isn’t what I think it is.” I went over and looked. It was a piece of parchment cut from a Torah scroll, with the portion of the Torah still on it, folded into an envelope. 

I asked the man at the table if he knew what it was. He shrugged. “It is some Jewish thing,” he said. “The Nazis did this to offend the Jews.”

The German soldier who had done it had been very successful. Over 55 years after he had desecrated our holy Torah, he was still offending the Jews.

Why was this a shock to me? Surely the Sefer Torah was not more holy than all of the human victims of the Nazi hatred. Better one hundred Torahs desecrated, and one life saved! Cookie and I could not save any lives. But we could purchase that scrap of Torah.

Sometimes all that is left of Judaism may be no more than a scrap. How much of the Judaism that was practiced in the days of the Second Temple can be found in our Judaism today? How much of the Judaism that was practiced before the First Temple?

When Cookie and I visited the various communities, we brought them gifts. Each place got two Russian-Hebrew Bibles, two Russian-Hebrew Haggadot, two talitot, a seder plate, and a pushke, a tzedakah box. When we visited the community of Lvov, they had only five talitot for a community of about 80 people. The religious leader there, the man they called ‘Rabbi,’ was a man with very little religious training. He told us that his father had always told him stories, and he didn’t even know they were stories from the Torah until after his father had been killed in the holocaust. The only thing he had been able to save from the war was his father’s Tanach, his Bible in Hebrew and Yiddish. He taught himself Hebrew from reading that Bible, which is how he became the ‘Rabbi’ of the community. 

He asked me to lead mincha before the seder. I said I would, so he asked if I had a tallis. I did not, because at the last minute I could not squeeze it into my suitcase. So he gave me one of the five that the community had. I told him I would borrow it, and give it back after the service, but he was insistent that I receive it as a gift. For him, this was a two way street. We were helping them, and also they were helping us. So in the end, I accepted the tallis. This is that tallis that I am wearing now.

What is the value of this Judaism of ours? It may be that our brothers and sisters in the Ukraine, who had only a scrap of Judaism, understood its value better than we do. Or perhaps it is we who have only a scrap, and they have but a scrap of a scrap. But Judaism has a way of making a scrap into a whole. When we ate the afikomen at our seders, that piece of a half of a single matzah takes the place of the entire pascal lamb sacrifice. And the scrap of Judaism the rabbis were left with after the destruction of the Temple looks pretty complete today. And I received more than this talis in Lvov. I received an understanding of how all the different scraps of Judaism all over the world, of the past and present together, somehow join to form a whole. We are all part of something bigger than ourselves. 

Cookie and I did buy that scrap of Torah. We wrapped it in a tallis, this tallis,  and we brought it back to Israel, to go to a museum, or perhaps to be buried in Jewish soil with other holy books. It was not as sacred as a person. But we really felt as if we had been able to save something, some little scrap of Judaism from the terrible destruction.

In a sense, our Judaism, and our connection with Jews all over the world, are also scraps saved from destruction. We do not always value them as we should. But what we have saved from destruction will save us. The value we bring to the table, to the Passover seder, is the value we create with our lives. Our connection with Judaism is our connection to a people, to holiness, and to our Gd.

I wish everyone a Zissen Pesach, a sweet rest of the holiday, and a Shabbat Shalom.