I spent Rosh Hashanah in Uman, a city of 90,000 in Ukraine, and there are at least three good reasons why I shouldn’t have. As a secular academic, specializing in Yiddish literature, what could it profit me to spend time with tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, few of whom would understand the specifics of my interest in them and still fewer of whom would care? I am also a “modern” yet religious Jew, who would be expected to observe one of the holiest ceremonies of the year in a Conservative shul or “progressive” Orthodox minyan—with my own family—not packed away to the other end of the earth, under trying circumstances, participating in services untroubled by the role of women in religious law, the reconciliation of traditional biblical interpretation with more recent scholarship, or even the basics of modern Hebrew pronunciation. And most unfathomable of all, why am I, or any of the roughly 20,000 men, and perhaps 150 women, assembling in this Pale of Settlement city, reversing the fundamental imperative of Jewish modernity since the time of Abraham to go west?
We were in Uman at the request of Reb Nachman of Breslov, who lived from 1772 to 1810, and who bid his followers to spend Rosh Hashanah each year at his grave. Though the Hasidim who have claimed him as their spiritual leader were almost entirely obliterated in the Holocaust, the movement began reconstituting itself in the late 1960s, and with the fall of the Soviet Union 20 years ago, an increasing number of ultra-Orthodox Jews have made the trek here. For one weekend out of the year, Uman again becomes an enclave of Jewish observance, with a hotel, dozens of prayer sites—including the courtyards of apartment buildings, streets, and alleyways—and an open-air bazaar catering to the assembled pilgrims.