Learning to Do Real

First, it was the Rebbe Reb Meilech.

There are many to whom 21 Adar in Lizhensk is sacrosanct. This year, when they couldn’t go, everyone else nodded along and said, “It was getting too much, we’re a pampered generation, you can find Hashem wherever you are you don’t have to go running to Eastern Europe.”

Then it was Reb Shayele, and the thousands of whom descend on Kerestir on 3 Iyar were despondent when COVID shut them out. But everyone else said, “This whole Kerestir thing was really getting out of hand, you can take a Tehillim in your living room and connect the same way, and anyhow, it’s the travel agents and tour operators who push these things.”

Then it was Uman, and people worried about losing their source of spiritual oxygen panicked, and the never-despair army acted out their rallying cry as a play in several scenes, and many of us squirmed and realized that we liked it better as the chorus of a geshmake song. Yeah, we know that Rabbeinu sha’ag bekol gadol ein shum yi’ush, but really, please act normal, Uman is just a place and Rosh Hashanah is not about a Ukrainian graveyard, it’s about crowning Hashem.

We shook our heads, because everyone is just so spiritually spoiled, needing their little experiences and highs just to feel something, anything.