Anna & Jamie's Wildest Ride in the Middle East

I delivered a sermon this morning at HUC's Shabbat services, about my experience in Ukraine. It's unusual for a cantorial student to be given the opportunity to deliver a sermon here, and I'm proud of what I accomplished. The Hebrew might not come out, but don't worry--it's all translated.

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I wrote a d’var torah, all about holiness and sacrifice and the book of Leviticus. I was determined to avoid Yom HaShoah and ritual purity, the topic of the day in our calendar and this week’s parashah. And then, three weeks ago, I went to Ukraine for Passover. My family on my mother’s side comes from Ukraine, from a small shtetl called Rafalowke. My great-grandfather ran away from the Red Army, about 30 years before the Nazis came through the town, brought all the Jews to the graveyard and killed them.

I got the chance to visit Rafalowke while I was in Ukraine. A town official directed us to the Jewish graveyard, not too far away. With the help of our translator and the driver we’d hired for the day, we drove down a small dirt road, stopping to ask directions whenever we ran into someone. The first man said that he thought it was in a wooded area directly behind us, but he suggested we ask his neighbor. That man told us that he remembered his grandfather telling his father that the Jewish graveyard was destroyed, so he assumed it was long since gone. It was a little weird to me that no one knew where the only Jewish graveyward was. In a town with maybe 200 residents; how could no one know the location of the only Jewish graveyard?

We turned onto a very bumpy dirt path—I wouldn’t even call it a road—driving in the middle of a heavily wooded area. We stopped when the road dead ended at someone’s farm. The driver wandered off to get some more directions, and came back with renewed energy, leading us on foot back the way we came. We came to a huge canyon, and across the canyon we could see a graveyard. But it was filled with big, clean gravestones with enormous crosses on them, so we knew that wasn’t right. The guy that had directed us over to this place came up to say we’d gone the wrong direction and led us back towards the car. As we walked, I noticed the driver had stopped ahead of us. As we caught up with them, I found myself walking on rocks. It was only when I looked down that I realized we were walking on broken gravestones.

They were covered with moss and grass and shrub, some completely buried, some standing at an angle, some broken into pieces. The graveyard was a disaster, hardly visible from more than a few feet away, almost every gravestone illegible if it wasn’t broken. We searched for a gravestone with my family’s name, but the graves only showed Hebrew names, and I didn’t know the Hebrew names of anyone in my family. The man who gave us directions told us that years earlier a rumor had gone around that there was gold in the graves. The residents had come, dug up the graves, and destroyed the gravestones. We gathered in front of one anonymous grave to say Kaddish.

We walked back to the car, leaving behind the graveyard hidden in the middle of the woods. Our friend Matt said, “You know, we might be the last people to ever say Kaddish over these graves.” Residents who lived not even a quarter-mile away didn’t know it existed, and the graves were all but hidden by the trees, grass, and dirt. I kept thinking, what is my obligation to this graveyard? Here I am, standing 12,000 miles from my home in California, at the graveyard which almost certainly holds the remains of people in my family, and I am one of the last people in the world who knows where it is.

If you read through this week’s parashah, you’ll see that the way our biblical forebearers dealt with ritual impurities like menstruation or leprosy was by ostracizing the person from the community. Though the affected person is still part of the community, the priest orders them to stay outside the camp until the infection is gone. As I read through “Tazria,” when I came to this priestly directive, my mind returned to the Rafalowke graveyard. Like the biblical leper, that graveyard is outside the Jewish community. It is no longer a part of the community, but I am. I am whole, healthy, and connected. Do I have a responsibility to say Kaddish for those people in the graveyard? Or to clean it up and repair it? The analogy isn’t strong; the people who died in Rafalowke were not ordered out of the community by the High Priest, they were murdered. There was nothing ritually impure about them, but they were driven from their homes anyway.

Jewish tradition tells us that community is the source of all holiness and ritual purity. God commands us in Leviticus 19
“[ קְדשִׁים תִּהְיוּ כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אֲנִי יְהוֹה אֱלהֵיכֶם ] You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal your God, am holy.” The Hasidic tradition tells us that God did not issue a fact, but a commandment. It is not that we are holy, but that we must become holy, it is our responsibility to make ourselves holy. God also did not say [ תהיה ], speaking to us individually, but [ תהיו ] as a group. As a community we must be holy and only as a community can we be holy. Everyone is a part of the group, even those who are outside the camp. Those who are on the periphery are also a part of our holiness.

In his commentary on Leviticus, Prof. Baruch Levine clarifies that “holiness cannot be achieved by individuals alone, no matter how elevated, pure, or righteous. It can be realized only through the life of the community, acting together.” We realize the communal nature of holiness whenever we say a blessing: [ אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו ] “who sanctified us with His commandments.” The sanctification occurs not only for all of us, but through all of us, acting as a community. In Jewish practice we are reminded again and again of the holiness of community, through communal worship in the synagogue, communal thanksgiving after a meal, and communal atonement for sins on Yom Kippur. Each of these holy acts occurs only as a communal enterprise.

The Sfat Emet takes it even further and tells us that, “No one can attain holiness except by negating his own self before the whole of Israel.” Not only do we achieve holiness through our community, but we are unable to achieve it any other way. We need our community so that together we can achieve the holiness which God has commanded us. That includes those outside of the community. We have an obligation to the lepers who have been forced outside the camp. We need them in order to be holy, because only as a community may we achieve holiness. They didn’t choose to get leprosy, but they are forced to the periphery anyway. We have an obligation to them, and that obligation is to treat them as members of the community even though they are apart from us.

We learn about our obligation to those on the periphery after God’s commandment to be holy, when the Torah tells us how to be holy. First, the Torah gives us the 10 Commandments. What’s unusual about Leviticus 19 is that the 10 Commandments aren’t in order, and they’re not alone. Not only are we to honor our parents, but we are also told to leave the fallen fruit of our vineyards for the poor and the stranger. Not only should we not steal, but we are also not allowed to delay payment to our employees. Do not murder, do not insult the deaf, and do not place a stumbling block before the blind. These are the ways to holiness.

Aside from a few of the 10 Commandments, all of these are about how we deal with people. Honor the blind, the hungry, the poor, the stranger, and deal honestly with everyone. Do not hate your brother in your heart. We become holy by treating those around us with dignity and respect. And if all of those commandments are too hard to remember, God sums it up in verse 18: [ואָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ ] Love your neighbor as yourself. If we want to be holy as God has commanded us, all we need to do is treat those in our community with love and respect. Though people within our community will sometimes be pushed to the periphery—either for the good of the community or the good of the person—we have an obligation to treat them with the honor and respect they deserve.

And maybe that’s the answer to my trouble with the Rafalowke graveyard. I can’t maintain it; I don’t have the money to fly there regularly, and I don’t think I could live there forever. I also can’t continually say Kaddish for the Jews buried there; no one should spend their whole life in mourning. I can’t help them, but I can honor their memory. I can’t help them, but I can show the world that the Jewish community exists, that it is strong and based on values of love and respect. There is no one left to take care of the graves in Rafalowke, but its memory is honored by our holy communities. Even though the graveyard is lost, by treating those in our community with love and respect, we are made holy and it too is made holy.