blog 12

12. Blog: 29^th   Oct 09

Red Square - Revisited

-          Laibl Wolf, Dean, Spiritgrow - The Josef Kryss Wholistic Centre, Australia

The air was damp. The cold arctic pushed the ever-present dampness to seep into the skin with blistering force - a typical Moscow autumn day.

My first visit to Russia.  A connotation of dictatorial suppression of human freedoms and ideals. The camouflage of communist clichés about equality and egalitarianism could not forever hide its truth of  terror and apparatchiks. My spiritual antecedents had been carted off to Siberia for expressing their truths. And here was I – in Red Square, outside the gates of the infamous Lubyanka Prison – the friendly home of the KGB, Cheka, and its antecedents – a building so tall that Siberia could be seen from its basement (as the Russian joke goes).

Thumbing my nose at its massive gates and smiling within - how the wheel turns! I had just come back from one of the most moving Shabbatons I had ever conducted, just outside Moscow, with a karge participation of latter-day refuseniks. These refuseniks weren’t defying a malicious secret police as had their predecessors. The new ‘refuseniks’ are defying the more pervasive and cancerous effects of freedom, economic opportunity, and social acceptance.

I sang, prayed, and conversed with latter day heroes. Keen, single minded about their Jewish quest to the point of simplicity (some might misinterpret as naivety), we spent hours oscillating and vibrating in subjects like nationalism, ritual, identity, Mitzvot, music, emotion, Talmud, mysticism, adversity, feminism. These Russians are intellectual, genuine, and determined to be Jewish to the core. The softness of western Judaism does not appear in their sharp edged keenness to authenticate their previously estranged lives.

After leaving the retreat centre 50 K from Moscow, I visited the Chabad centre in the heart of this newly emerging cosmopolitan city. And what a centre. Many a Jewish community centre in wealthy USA would be envious of these premises, six stories high, with basketball courts, swimming people, gym, classrooms, three restaurants, and a magnificent synagogue. All run by bearded Rabbis, Chassidim to boot! This is a Chabad centre to reckon with – and it’s the major player in town. And Jewish to the core!

So think to myself: here we are in Australia, USA, and even Israel – free to choose linkage to our historical past, free to express as Jews, free to explore the wisdom baggage of centuries. How many of us take these liberties to heart? The Russians do. Those who had trodden warily under the watchful cameras of the secret police are now thumbing their noses at their former tormenters and transforming a former Jewish stutter into a fully expressed Jewish soliloquy.

I left Moscow with a sense of elation. I aspire to be a latter day refusenik like those I had met here for a brief weekend. They taught me much more than I taught them – of that I am certain.

 www.laiblwolf.com