Author Elizabeth Gilbert captured the essence of her
life-changing trip through Italy, India, and Indonesia in her memoir’s three-verb
title: Eat, Pray, Love. Looking back on my month-long kayaking
adventure through Lithuania with my daughter Rosa, I aspire to Ms. Gilbert’s
eloquent economy. Tonight and through the coming Days of Awe, I’ll be offering
my reflections on our pilgrimage. I am
profoundly thankful to you, my congregational family, for granting me the
generous sabbatical that made this possible; I consider it a great privilege to
share what I learned there, along the rivers of my ancestral homeland. Our expedition became a meditation on history
and memory, love and loss. It was an
upstream journey back in time and place, a mirror on our present American
Jewish moment and, I pray, a source of inspiration for our shared future. With due deference, then, to both Ms.
Gilbert and the traditional Unetaneh
Tokef prayer, I invite you to join me on a three part travelogue through
Lithuania that I’m calling Teshuvah, Tefillah, Tzedakah. Or, in English: Turn, Pray, Liberate.
I begin tonight, as we commence in our prayer book, with teshuvah—the turning.
**********
Journal entry, Monday, June 5. A little over halfway through our expedition,
Rosa and I struggle through one of our most challenging stretches.
We hit a series of
sluggish meanders, followed by long, nondescript straightaways, with ferocious
headwinds howling upstream. We're on a kind of riparian treadmill,
paddling with all of our might just to maintain our place. The water feels
dense and viscous, like we we're stuck in a bog. Since the dam, the
Nevezis River has seriously stagnated; it's now, essentially, a long, narrow
lake with almost no trace of current. Every time we finally reach the end
of a straightway, after an excruciating effort, we turn, hopeful for a moment,
either right or left—only to forlornly behold the same hideous collection of
radio towers we've been seeing since lunch, hours ago. Whenever it seems we might pass them, there
they are, somehow still in front of us, like giant upthrust middle fingers
taunting us, defiant maledictions from the spiteful earth.
What are we doing on this river, wrestling with wind and water and
history? Why
have we returned to the land that my great great grandfather, Rabbi Judel
Girsch Finkelstein, fled with his family over a century ago? In 1874, he taught Torah in the shtetl of Babtai, here on the
Nevezis. Sixty-seven years later, in the
summer of 1941, the town’s mayor extorted his Jewish residents for money, then
presided over
their slaughter and threw them into pits dug into these riverbanks
What are we doing here, surrounded by specters of a once-grand
Jewish presence decimated by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators? Is
it possible to go back, against the current, to explore the headwaters and
return with a report that might transform what lies ahead? The rivers witnessed
it all, the senseless slaughter, and the centuries of Litvak life that gave us pious yeshivot and
secular Yiddish literature, Zionism and socialism, tradition and
Enlightenment. Is that past firmly and forever fixed—or is it, we pray,
like the river itself, fluid, cutting fresh channels, carving new directions.
Like the river, we are turning and returning, pressing forward,
eddying back.
What are we doing here?
**********
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner reminds us that history is dynamic. He writes:
Over time, things
change meaning. I am reminded of how one
of my children took a rare book I loved and innocently used a few pages of it
for a coloring book. I was furious. But
now, as I reflect on those scribblings, they bring not only nostalgia but
tenderness. . . In this way, the present can change the past. Teshuvah, the
act of returning to whom you were meant to be can change who we were. . .
Obviously we cannot undo the past. What
is done is done. But what we do now
about what we did then, while not altering the past deed itself, can place it
into a new context of meaning.
Or, as William Faulkner put it more succinctly: “The past isn’t
dead. It isn’t even past.” We can’t revive the dead. But we can wrestle new inspiration from their
lives, cut tragically short before their time.
**********
Laima Ardaviciene believes wholeheartedly in the power of
the past to change the present.
She teaches English to high school seniors in Kedainiai,
where my great great grandfather was born. Known in Yiddish as Keidan,
for centuries it was steeped in Jewish culture. Jews comprised nearly half of the local
population—until the summer of 1941, when the Nazis and their Lithuanian
accomplices massacred 2076 Keidaners
in the forest outside of town. Today not
a single Jew remains.
Yet Laima will not allow her students to forget the legacy
of Keidan’s Jewish community. As a
teacher, she developed a strong interest in her city’s heritage and has used
the Facebook group Roots in Keidan to
connect with descendants of Keidaners’ living all around the world.
As Rosa and I paddled into town on the Nevezis, I posted a picture on
that Facebook site; a few minutes later, Laima generously offered to provide us
with guided tour.
We meet her the next morning in the plaza fronting two
restored eighteenth century synagogues.
Laima greets us warmly, in excellent English, then lovingly leads us
into the former shul that’s now a
museum and cultural center. Over the
next few hours, she walks us through the narrow cobbled streets of Keidan’s
Jewish quarter, past what were once Jewish homes, shops, and courtyards. She points out a house with vestiges of a
sukkah attached, and the cheder where
the Vilna Gaon learned as a boy. We
follow the banks of the Nevezis upstream and cross through an expanse of fields
to the old Jewish cemetery where my Finkelstein ancestors were buried over a
century and a half ago. Laima comments:
“These were the lucky ones, who died of natural causes, unlike those who
followed them, murdered in the forest by the Nazis and their own Lithuanian
neighbors.”
We stop at Laima’s high school and enter her classroom,
which is decorated with Lithuanian and Israeli flags, a silver menorah, and
numerous awards from human rights organizations. On the back wall, there’s an astonishing,
student-designed and painted mural of a tree, composed of the surnames of the
Jewish families who populated the city before the war; below it is a banner
festooned with the proud Yiddish phrase beloved to generations of those Jews: Ich bin Keidaner—I am from Keidan! Laima shows us the projects that she and her
class have taken on in recent years: they have made a ghost map of Jewish
Keidan, a video exploring the role of Jewish women in the local community, and
their own Lithuanian translations of pre-war Yiddish poetry. Laima’s students have celebrated Jewish
festivals over cyberspace with a Hebrew school in Australia, and reached out to
the Jewish grandchildren and great grandchildren of their former neighbors.
As morning turns to afternoon, we walk along a dirt road to
the forest at the city’s edge, where the massacre took place. Laima brings her students here every year on
September 23, Lithuania's Holocaust Memorial Day.
They take turns reading the names of the victims, carved, like white
fire, into the copper memorial that marks this horrible, holy site. I believe that when Laima and her students
recite those names, they are, indeed, transforming the past. Alas, they cannot resurrect the dead. But they can posthumously affirm their human
dignity, and in so doing, ignite the possibility that goodness might yet cast
its light into even the darkest corners.
Today, the woods are quiet.
A gentle breeze rustles the pines.
I lay a Boise river stone to honor the dead. I chant the mourners’ prayer, El Malei Rachamim—God full of Mercy. . .for
those whose lives ended with none. The birds sing with me. Rosa and I weep. Laima hugs us both. And in her firm embrace, in this place so
devoid of grace, I feel the power of hope.
**********
Laima’s moral fortitude is rooted in the courage to pursue,
proclaim, and teach the truth. If we
wish to illuminate the darkness of our past, we must muster the faith to
address it head on. Individually and
communally, teshuvah starts when we
take responsibility for our failings and admit the truth about who we’ve
been. As Maimonides taught in his Mishneh Torah: “A person who
transgressed is obligated to confess, saying ‘I have sinned, I have done
such-and-such, I am regretful for my actions.’” (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah 1:1).
Such confessions do not come easily to our lips. In the face of harsh historical truths, it’s
tempting to avert our gaze. But this is
not how we grow, not how we transform who we’ve been into who, deep within our
souls, we’re called to become.
**********
Not every Lithuanian is Laima Ardaviciene. Many have yet to come to terms with their
nation’s complicated past. Between 1941
and 1944, over 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population was massacred—a more total
destruction than in any other country affected by the Shoah. Historians attribute this extreme devastation
to the locals’ all-too-eager collaboration with their Nazi occupiers. Doctors, lawyers, professors and priests
volunteered for Lithuanian paramilitary groups that ruthlessly murdered their
longtime Jewish neighbors. This horrific
fact was largely brushed away during the post-war years of Russian occupation;
even today, many Lithuanians still use that genuine legacy of suffering under
the Soviets to excuse their parents’ and grandparents’ complicity in the Nazi
genocide.
**********
But most of the young people we met on our trip are
confronting their history with remarkably brave openness—and thereby reshaping
their difficult past into a better future.
They remind me that sometimes, the work of teshuvah unfolds very slowly, over generations.
Rimantas Zirgulis, who designed the powerful memorial in the
forest outside Kedainiai, now directs a human rights organization much like
Boise’s own Wassmuth Center.
Photographer Richard Schofield is a British ex-pat living in
Kaunas, where he directs the International Centre for Litvak Photography. He has dedicated his professional life to
capturing the remnants of Lithuania’s Jewish past on film; for his “Back to
Shul” project this summer, he hitchhiked across the country photographing one
hundred former synagogues in twelve days.
Justas Pipiras was our guardian angel. He provided our kayak, helped us provision,
and shuttled us countless hours down Lithuanian highways and dirt roads, to
launch us at our put-ins and retrieve us from our take-outs. He transformed our dream of paddling across
Lithuania into a reality with his constant material and moral support—because,
as a student at Vilnius University, he developed an interest
in his nation’s Jewish past and when I reached out to him,
he saw an opportunity to explore that heritage more deeply through our eyes.
And since returning to America, I’ve been speaking with
Agneska Avin, a Lithuanian grad student interning at the YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research in New York City. She
read about our trip online and reached out to me:
Coming from Vilnius. . . we often
encountered evidence of Jewish heritage. But our experiences were always very
fragmented and episodic. We could feel the Jewish essence fluttering in the
streets of our city but were never able to touch it. Moving to New York and
meeting Jewish people with their roots in the Old Country was crucial in
understanding our history and rethinking our self-identities as Lithuanians.
Today, we feel a great responsibility to represent young future-oriented
Lithuanians, willing to rebuild the past and present in order to create a
brighter tomorrow for our country and Lithuanian-Jewish relations.
**********
These resolute Lithuanians embody the possibility of teshuvah, our capacity to transform past
failings, individual and communal, into future opportunities. They inspire me—and remind me that, lest we
be too quick to condemn Lithuanian bystanders, we have plenty of our own
turning to do. Before I leap to judge
those now living in our former homes on Vilna’s Zydu Gatve, the Street of the Jews, I must remember that I, too,
dwell on purloined property, brutally seized from its Native American
owners. We, Americans, tend to obfuscate
and avoid our own nation’s original sins of slavery, genocide, and
xenophobia. I returned from my ancestral
homeland that was decimated by the Nazis and their accomplices only to watch,
just a few weeks later, as Nazis and Klansmen marched through the heart of my
alma mater chanting “Jews will not replace us!”
I listened, stunned and appalled, to our president’s tepid response to
that evil. And I wrestle with my own
complicity in the systemic racism woven into the fabric of our nation. Before we criticize others, let us tend to
our own gardens.
**********
But my journeys have taught me that even the darkest chapters
of our past can be prologue to a brighter future, if we confront them with
integrity and courage. Over seventy years after the Shoah, there are still
ample openings for teshuvah. The descendants of the perpetrators have the
opportunity to teach by example, like Laima, to acknowledge the sins of their
ancestors, to stand up to racism and bigotry, and to lead us all in bending the
moral arc of the universe toward justice.
We Jews should stand with them, even as we honor our dead by recommitting
our own lives to creative Jewish living, spiritual growth, and acts of
lovingkindness.
**********
On Monday, June 5, a couple days south of Kedainiai, I wrote
about our effort to paddle down a tough stretch of stream, how we struggled to
push past what I called a “hideous collection of radio towers” taunting us. I asked myself: What are we doing here?
Two months after I posted this passage on my blog, I
received a response from Harry Gorfine, an Australian fisheries biologist who I
met in Vilnius. Well after the fact, his
words completely transformed the way I understood our adventure on the
Nevezis. He wrote:
Dear Dan:
I keep meaning to tell
you about those radio masts that were driving you nuts as you and Rosa paddled
between Babtai and Kaunas. They were of
critical importance to native Lithuanians during January 1991 as ordinary
citizens mobilized in their campaign for independence from the oppressive
Soviet regime. Gorbachev ordered tanks
from the Soviet military compounds to wrest back control from a native
uprising. Many came out to demonstrate and were maimed
as the tanks driven by young Russians ran over them, crushing their limbs into
the muddy ground.
Those radio towers were
the means by which the underground operatives of the de facto Lithuanian
government in Kaunas desperately got a message to the West, to let them know
what was happening as it unfolded. Time
was of the essence. Without swift
communication the world might have awoken to news about a large scale
massacre. That’s all history now, but as
much as I am aware of what you were up against on that stretch of the river,
had I been paddling beside you, I would have drawn motivation to persevere, for
the demoralizing headwinds and cold, wet conditions that you faced were trivial
in comparison to what others have endured in this land of our forebears. I gather the towers remain in use today, but
even if they were abandoned, I doubt that permission to demolish them would
ever be granted, given the legacy of freedom that they helped to secure for the
country.
**********
What are we doing here, on the eve of this new year,
wrestling with the changing winds and weather of our lives, looking forward,
looking back?
As Harry Gorfine and Laima Ardaviciene and so many others
I’ve had the blessing to encounter on my sabbatical remind me, we are affirming
that the past is not prologue to a fixed future.
We are remembering that with honest commitment, we can
transform our failings—and those of our forebears—into the vision of a better
world in the making.
And on the threshold of 5778, we are insisting, proudly and
defiantly, that our task this Rosh Hashanah and beyond is not to make America
or Judaism or even ourselves great again—not to restore such a mythical,
idealized and ultimately false version of the past; our calling is acknowledge
our flawed histories, to learn from our mistakes, and in so doing, begin to
approach the true greatness we yet aspire to achieve.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that God speaks slowly
in our lives, a syllable at a time. It
is not until we reach the end of life that we can read the sentence
backward. Our stories are not over until
we write the final utterance, which has the capacity to change all that came
before.
Tonight, my friends, as always, the Holy One lays the Book
of Life open before us.
Each of us, you and I, choose the stories that we will
inscribe.
May they be for a blessing.
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