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The Road to Reb Nachman's Grave 
as experienced
 by Rabbi Goldie Milgram, author of

Reclaiming Judaism as a Spiritual Practice, Meaning and Mitzvah, & Make Your Own Bar/Bat Mitzvah

Hearing of my plans to return and teach in the Ukraine again, Reb Zalman asked if I would travel to the grave of Reb Nachman of Bratslav. Now, visiting dead rebbes was not the sort of work I had in mind at that phase of my life. It was as likely as my seeking out a mehitzah minyan, although I was already past the "fabrente" feminist phase of my development.  Still, I'd been so busy reconstructing Jewish women's history and creating vehicles for our inclusion in Jewish leadership, that I'd not made to time to deeply make the acquaintance of the works of Hassidic males in my Jewish inheritance.

However, when one's teacher, who gives so selflessly and constantly, asks such a small favor, a little detour, how could one say no? At the time I was working with Reb Zalman on preparing several of his manuscripts for publication. One, "Torah of the Void", was to be his translation of a work by Reb Nachman. I tucked the manuscript into my suitcase for study on the long plane-ride to Kiev, and casually asked of Reb Zalman: "Is there any special preparation for visiting a rebbe's grave?"

This is the essence of what I recall his response to be. "Since you ask, actually yes," he replied. "There are ten psalms selected by Reb Nachman for petitioners at his grave. Nachman was broygus  (Yiddish for angry) with the soul-damage being done by the severe attitude of Reb Israel Salanter's Mussar movement toward sexual aveyrot (miss-steps, slips, errors.) He created this recipe of ten psalms combined with pilgrimage to his grave as a ritual for freeing one from the torment of their het (sin, error). It seems to work for other concerns as well. One also goes to mikveh (ritual bath or river or ocean for a conscious dip with a blessing) before visiting  the grave and takes off one's shoes before approaching it."

In retrospect, I imagine Reb Zalman sent me on this mission more for my benefit than his. Offering people spiritual direction, or as I prefer to call it "spiritual mentoring" has as one of the tools, giving the person a mission that one divines will be helpful to them. Which ever, in this next episode I, Goldie Milgram, a feminist woman rabbi, search out contacts in the Hassidic community in New York City to find out where Reb Nachman's grave actually is located in the Ukraine and how one might reach it (the roads there are generally physically challenged, to say the least). Another sefer (book)could be  written on the wonderful relationships that this simple search initiated.

However, in the Ukraine, there was the problem of going to a mikvah, the ice being several feet deep in the rivers and lakes. Truth to be told I'd never even been to a traditional mikvah before. Word of mouth spread among the women seminar participants and rumor came forth of a actual mikvah being maintained by a Hassidic rabbi in the town of Berdichev.

So off we ventured in search of the mikvah. I will admit that I did not expect my orthodox colleagues to be receptive to me as a woman rabbi.. To my astonishment (based on biases to prove unfounded. Except for one, all  rabbis I encountered in Eastern Europe were delighted to meet a colleague and treated me as such) this rabbi was most welcoming, gave me a tour of his modern, stunningly tiled mikvah and offered its regular use as a  professional courtesy. We were soon to learn that hot water is difficult to come by in such regions on a regular basis and that the mikvah and its baths are a great source of income for the shul beside it.

This visit was to have another impact. The presiding rabbi admonished the  women traveling with me to not call me by my first name, which they had affectionately altered from Goldie to Goldishkeh, he told them to speak  with more respect and call me Reb Goldie. Now that felt to me like a pretty big  striemel (hassidic ritual hat, signifying scholarship, I believe) to try to fit into. They were unbudging from then on, and so I have tried to live  into that title ever since and hope that perhaps someday it will even come close to appropriate.

The seminar attendees succeeded in hiring a translator, a driver and car with no fewer than four retreaded tires in the trunk and on the roof and an unemployed Professor of Jewish history from the university in the town of Vinnyitsa, Ukraine to travel with me the next day to Uman, the site of Reb Nachman's grave. This was my day off from teaching for Project Kesher.

It was to be at least a four hour drive, conditions permitting. I began to study the ten psalms, balancing a Hebrew dictionary and the text, whispering out loud to myself. Tanita, my translator, who is not Jewish,  asked what I was doing. She is a brilliant, loving, and classically Ukrainian beauty - blond hair, blue eyes, red cheeks. I told her about the history of Reb Nachman's tikkun and she gasped:  "I must do it too, I have much to do this thing that you call teshuvah for."

Tanita translated my intent to the historian, who immediately indicated  his shared culpability in an all-too human life and the ever silent driver,  Ivan, confessing his laboriously hidden Jewishness, spoke up and asked if I could translate the Hebrew to English, Tanita the English to Russian and  could we all be on the pilgimage together! Then, each  of them began confessing their aveyrot (sexual error history-wow, what fascinating lives we all have led) in a profusion of Ukrainian, Russsian,  Yiddish, English - until I managed to quiet the situation down.

We continued along on the treacherous icy pot-holed roadways with me translating the Hebrew and Tanita attempting to turn it into meaningful  Russian, each of us alternating bursting into tears and prayer and sometimes laugher.

Now a particularly wonderful thing had happened the week before. Our Project Kesher mother-daughter teaching retreat was being held at a sanatorium in Nemirov. Also sharing this curious site, composed of dormitory and hospital-like buildings surrounding a spring with water reputed to have healing qualities, were several hundred children who had been damaged almost a  decade before at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melt-down. I had taught a session on the mitzvot of bikkur holim (visiting the sick) and hahnassat orchim (treating those around us as our guests) to the Jewish children on our retreat.

The sanatorium staff had taken down all the mirrors in public areas because of the children's often horrendous appearance (open oozing sores, deformities, etc.) I had brought bags of colored feathers for craft  projects (light weight, easy to transport) and accidentally left them on a  table. The girls from my class had taken them and were sprinkling them gaily into the hair of the children from Chernobyl who had gathered for dinner. No harm in that. However, horrified, the staff watched as the girls opened  the mirrors of their powder compacts and showed the children their festive reflections.

And then a miracle happened.  The tense staff relaxed as our Jewish girls told the children to "look at how beautiful you are" and the children's smiles were radiant, for the first time that week they laughed and clowned. One girl came to me and said: "Look Reb Goldie, I made my first mitzvah."

Why do I tell you this story? Because once in Uman we couldn't seem to find the grave of Reb Nachman. I'd read stories in the NY Times of the huge numbers of hassidim who camped there at high holiday time on  pilgrimage. We found a yeshiva building, but no one was in. It seemed winter was not pilgrimage season. Locals sent us here and there, but to no avail.

Finally, as the even greater late afternoon chill was setting in, the silhouette of a hassid appeared on the horizon with a similar,  smaller form beside him. Hastening forward, I asked in Yiddish if he would  show us the way to the grave of Reb Nachman. He and his teenage son were beautiful to behold - both with amazing, bright red flowing beards and hair, gentle  warm eyes. He answered me in English and Russian: "Are you the gentsheneh raveen?"  (Which in Russian means, "Are you the woman rabbi?")  Still dwelling in my biases, I responded that I was only a pintele yid (little Jew) on pilgrimage, would he please help me. "We have heard of the great healing you did with the children of Chernobyl," he said, "please let me escort you."

Of course, I'd done nothing, it was children performing a mitzvah. Somehow this moment clarified for me the stories of magical  healing that attended the lives of the rebbes of long ago.

He didn't care to take in my protestations of innocence while we trailed  him and his son to Reb Nachman's grave.  He brought us to a non-Jewish Ukrainian woman's house and we gave her  the fee he indicated was proper, vehemently refusing anything for himself.

She wished us well, and around the back we found an outdoor shul, with curtain mehitzah (partition to separate men and women's space.) He pulled  back the curtain, told us he would stand guard outside the gate and to stay  as long as we wished. A coffin-like box covered in royal blue velvet was attached to the back of her house. The grave yard having been destroyed to hold the housing development, this was the approximation of the hassidim  for his grave.

It would have been dangerous to remove our shoes in the acute cold, we realized. I leaned forward to touch the velvet and fell into a state of consciousness characterized by feeling among the stars in the heavens, a  comfortable, falling into blackness and light - perhaps induced by my  studies of the Nachman manuscript "Torah of the Void." The prayer of my  heart was simply Reb Zalman's request and utter awe at this then unfamiliar state of consciousness.

After what I am told was a very lengthy period of time, during which those with me borrowed blankets from the woman in the house to cover me, I heard a voice came of a young man asking, "Nu, nothing  for yourself?" (Later I was to learn that Reb Nachman died a young man.)

This was a wrenching phase of my life following divorce and several interim relationships. The acute loneliness of feeling called, compelled to travel and teach as a rebbe with all its satisfactions, rose up in my heart and recalling Reb Zalman's three divorces and impending re-marriage to a wonderful woman, I said to Reb Nachman, "Like you I feel called, but the price feels too high. I need a life companion with whom I can sustain a relationship, can you help me?"

The voice then asked, "How about some details?" And an exact description poured out from me like a prayer. It was only a few weeks after returning to America that the wonderful man to whom  I am now married (kinnah-hurrah poo, poo, poo) emerged from the fabric of life, identical to my prayer. Perhaps, all because Reb Zalman asked for one small favor.