Where’s the Peace?

One of the biggest gifts I got from my first trip to Uman, last year, was a sense of calm, peace, and ‘Jewish togetherness’. Most of the people I went to Uman with last year, didn’t know each other. But very quickly, we all bonded into a very caring, loving, considerate group of people.
 
It was a taste of how things will be when Mashiach shows up, and I loved the fact that all the bickering, fighting, yelling and arguing that people usually associate with a big, disparate gathering of Jews had disappeared.
 
This year, I stepped into Rebbe Nachman’s tomb – and one of the first things that hit me was the amount of dissension and arguing that was going on. OK, there were a lot more people there than when I’d come in the middle of the winter. OK, there was a much bigger range of people, everything from Bnei Brak hardcore ‘religious’ to jeans-wearing, cigarette-smoking, tattoo-flashing not.
 
But as I sat and watched all the different people arguing with each other, I thought to myself: ‘What is going on here?’
 
One set of people were having an argument over shoving bags of clothes and scarves on top of the tomb (it’s some sort of ‘segula’ or good omen for something or other), while another set of women were busy tossing them off.
 
Another argument developed between the people who were raucously screaming out blessings, and trying to fund-raise for their yeshivas, and the people who were trying to just do some quiet praying.
 
Then another argument sparked off because someone (secular) had been sitting very close next to the tomb, weeping, for an hour, and someone else (religious) thought it was enough already, and the weeping girl should move aside and let her and her friends take some pictures of themselves ‘by Rebbe Nachman’.
 
G-d, what was going on here? This is a place of calm serenity. This is a place of Jewish unity. This is a place where people stop thinking about themselves, and their own petty wants, and make some space in their souls to think about G-d and their fellow Jews, often, for the first time in their lives.
 
But apparently, not this year.
 
I even had a dose of ‘fighting madness’ myself, which I had to pray a lot to overcome. The first time I went to the tomb, at 1AM, there was a lot of noise going on, as a few different people were doing a seudat amen, and there was even a group of women making challah.
 
One woman in particular seemed to be in the middle of it all, yelling out blessings and amens as loud as she could, in a voice that really, really grated on me.
 
A whole bunch of negative thoughts started to surface in my head, and I spent a good half an hour batting them away.
 
“She’s trying to get people closer to Hashem,” I told myself. “She’s very excited to be in Uman,” I told myself. “She loves to do mitzvot!” I told myself. And it worked, at least well enough for me to not have any hard feelings towards her, and to not blame her for a bit of a disappointing visit to Rebbe Nachman’s tomb.
 
The following day, I got up early – 6AM – and I went back to the tomb. I thought after the craziness of the previous night, it would be much quieter, and I might be able to do some good hitbodedut (personal prayer). It was much quieter. Until five minutes later, when the loud woman from the night before walked in through the door and immediately started shouting out blessings and exhortations about what we all needed to pray for.
 
I bristled. I wasn’t the only one. I took a few deep breaths, I tried to think of something positive (‘Wow! That’s real devotion, to go to bed so late and still be up so early…’) and I tried to ignore her.
 
But she simply didn’t shut up. If she wasn’t talking loudly to her neighbor, she was loudly trying to get people to sign up to do a pidyon nefesh to support her yeshiva, or loudly trying to tell people what prayer to say when, or yelling out all the different things we need to pray for, like ‘unity! G-d’s mercy! Mashiach! Geula!’ – all good things, all mitzvot. But I was finding it harder and harder to concentrate, and I was desperately yearning for a bit of peaceful contemplation.
 
Three of four other people cracked, and one after another, they started telling the woman to shut up and be quiet. Which worked for around two minutes, until she started up again.
 
I left to have breakfast, and then came back for another session before we were meant to get on the bus and head out of Uman.
 
I stepped in to the tomb and looked around: no loud woman! Hooray! I settled down for another bit of praying and then – she appeared. This time, with another woman with a big bowl filled with flour, who announced another round of challah-making. I cringed.
 
Hard as I tried to know it was all from G-d, that it was G-d’s will, that the loud woman was just a stick in G-d’s hand, I was starting to feel increasingly resentful that I’d come all the way to Uman just to have this loud woman spoil it.
 
Again, I spent most of my time in the tomb trying to think positive thoughts about her. After the very loud challah-making, the loud woman decided to organize a loud communal rendition of the Tikkun Haklali, and started to loudly round up people to do it.
 
Just as they were about to start, the lights went out in the tomb – the timing was uncanny. For a couple of minutes, I thought Rebbe Nachman was giving me a respite from all the ‘loud’ after all. But I was wrong.
 
The loud woman grabbed hold of a few younger women, and started to sing some very loud songs. Before long, half the kever was madly dancing around and singing and whooping. The noise was completely overwhelming.
 
I looked around, and nearly all the people who weren’t dancing with wild abandon had tears streaming down their face.
 
What a contrast.
 
And I really didn’t know what G-d preferred. Did G-d prefer the loud woman, with all her energy and noise and disturbance and joie de vivre, or did He want all the quiet contemplation, and introspection and prayer that she was making it practically impossible to do, with all her antics?
 
I really didn’t know, and the thought made me very uncomfortable. I still don’t know.
 
Again and again the last few weeks, I’ve been very uncertain about what is the ‘right thing’ to do. Argue, or keep quiet? Pray, or dance? Stand up for what’s right, or let it go?
 
What kept me going in Uman was the thought that G-d hates it when His children fight. He hates it when we argue. Any prayers that I built on top of an argument with the loud woman to get her to be quiet would have been completely worthless.
 
But my experience at Uman this year – and at Meron, at the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Yochai the week before – made me really think that there is a tremendous fight for the soul of Am Yisrael going on at the moment.
 
Meron and Uman are usually such peaceful, loving places, even when they are absolutely packed. For the ‘fighting madness’ to have penetrated there, we really must be down to the wire in the battle against the evil inclination.
 
It’s a scary time. It’s a time filled with uncertainty, with deception, with people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right reasons. It’s so hard to keep from drowning in all the controversies, and all the ‘righteous indignation’ and all the holier-than-thou nonsense.
 
The only way to do it is to cling on to our holy people, to do whatever they tell us, and to remember that what G-d loves the most in the world is peace between us and our fellow Jews – however high the price we pay for it.