A GRAVE, one might think, is the last thing that could go missing.
If only it were so.
Besides the millions of Jews incinerated during the Holocaust who never had graves, cemeteries were a favorite object of disrespect by both the Nazis and the communists.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, one aspect of the open commerce between the West and the former Soviet Union was the attempt to locate and restore old Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe and beyond.
Readers of the IJN may recall any number of stories about shopping centers and housing complexes planned for cemeteries.
Jerry Feldhammer, who used to be active in the free Hebrew burial society in New York, once told me to this effect: Its not the most popular tzedakah; thats for sure. But every Jew, including the indigent, deserves a Jewish burial, grave site and headstone.
He was right. One does not notice a lot of dinners and plaques for those who round up the funds for a modest burial, and round up a minyan for the funeral of a Jew whom virtually no one knew and whose legacy, well, who has no legacy.
That is what I call really doing a mitzvah for is own sake.
How odd, then, that one of the most famous personages in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe had a grave yes but no known grave site, and no headstone, either. Rabbi Baruch Ber Leibowitz occupied a very limited, unique niche in the seemingly endless ways the Nazis found to dishonor the Jewish people.
There were great scholars in Eastern Europe. There were great saints. Rarely, however, were they one and the same person. The teachings of Rabbi Baruch Ber are legendary; his gentleness, easygoing nature and humility are, too.
Books have been written about him: a legacy, he surely left behind.
But no headstone.
No known grave.
Not because he met his fate in a gas chamber.
In fact, he died 75 years ago this week in Vilna, Lithuania. World War II had begun three months earlier and Vilna, needless to say, was in chaos. Rabbi Baruch Ber was buried in one of the three Jewish cemeteries there, near his father, after whom he named his scholarly work (The Blessing of Samuel) and whom he tended to with extraordinary devotion.
The Holocaust quickly unfolded, and a headstone was never erected.
Later, the Nazis destroyed the location.
Still later, the communists ravaged whatever the Nazis might have left.
For all practical purposes, Rabbi Baruch Ber, despite having avoided the awful fate of millions of Jews in the gas chambers, had neither grave site nor headstone. His burial, so to speak, was truncated; his grave site, unknown.
Believe it or not, in 2014, four people who attended the funeral of Rabbi Baruch Ber at the end of 1939 are still alive. Through their memories of the topography of the cemetery and the odd position of Rabbi Baruch Bers grave (squeezed into a cemetery that was already full, just so the rabbi could be buried near his father, which seemed to be his last wish); through the efforts of East European Jewish cemetery experts, who eventually located a map of the cemetery; and, no doubt, through a distinct dose of Divine aid, Rabbi Baruch Bers grave site was located.
I imagine that by the time this appears in print, a headstone will have been erected.
I wonder what will be written on it.
Think about it. Typically, the contents of a headstone reflect the feelings of the surviving family. The immediate impression of the deceased is what goes up on the stone.
In this case, the closest family members are grandchildren. More to the point, Rabbi Baruch Bers place in the intellectual and pietistic history of the Jewish people is defined and set. Will the message on his headstone reflect his place in the Jewish society in which he was active, or his place in history? It is hard to imagine that history will not color the character of the message.
This is the ultimate paradox: The man who went 75 years without any headstone at all will receive one that carries him way past the horizon that any of his surviving contemporaries could have known.
RABBI BARUCH Ber, his towering scholarship notwithstanding, managed something that even his colleagues the likes of the chief rabbi of Vilna, Rabbi Chaim Ozer, and the author of Shaarei Yosher (Gates of Straight Thinking), Rabbi Shimon Shkop never managed. Rabbi Baruch Ber was always a disciple. This teacher of thousands, this preeminent mind, found a way to subjugate himself to a superior mind, a more authentic bearer of the Torah.
As follows:
Rabbi Baruch Ber was the leading disciple of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik. That itself was a unique position. But Rabbi Soloveitchik died in 1918. One cannot be a disciple of the dead, even though Rabbi Baruch Ber, if he devised a reading of the Talmud that differed from that of Rabbi Soloveitchik, trembled. Rabbi Baruch Ber had that balance of authentic discipleship: trembling before the master, but not to the extent of suppressing ones innovative findings.
After Rabbi Soloveitchiks death, Rabbi Baruch Ber sought to subjugate himself to another scholar, several years his senior. I dont remember his name. But he died in the late 1930s. By then, Rabbi Baruch Ber was well over 70 years old, and he was still looking for a mentor in Torah! He managed to convince the chief rabbi of Vilna, who considered Rabbi Baruch Ber a colleague of the highest order, to accept him as a disciple.
Rabbi Baruch Ber rejoiced.
In his heart, he never lost the designation, the spiritual station, the sense of fidelity, of disciple. There was always someone alive who knew more than he, who was closer to the revelation at Mt. Sinai than he, who could guide him.
This was not a shtick, a gimmick. Rabbi Baruch Ber, when it came to humility, and to fitting his life and ideas, innovative though they were, firmly into the chain of tradition, was the real deal.
You can see it written on his face in the few pictures of him that survive.
Perhaps that is why, 75 years after his death, there will likely be inscribed on his tombstone evidence of a real legacy, of a life that, when it ended, did not just summarize its own past, but reached into the future. The ultimate disciple becomes the ultimate mentor.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
