Sitting around the table after Rosh Hashana, telling it the way you'd tell a friend who has never been.
It starts with the week before — a couple of hundred people and easy access to the tziyun on Sunday, harder on Monday, and by Tuesday you had to push your way through. Waves of people arriving every day until the whole place filled.
And then the question somebody asks that nobody ever really answers: why is he buried in Uman at all?
Thirty years before the Rebbe was born, Gonta came through, city by city. A fire in the square and a tzelem beside it — convert or jump. The mayor of Uman came out to surrender the city and offered his own daughter, Sophia, if the Jews would be spared. Gonta took the daughter and killed the Jews anyway. Thirty thousand of them. Twelve survived, and those twelve dug one pit on a mountain and made a kever achim.
Years later the Rebbe passes through Uman on his way to Breslov and stays two weeks — in a room overlooking that cemetery. These neshamos are waiting for me to be metaken them. And he says he wants to be buried there.
And another sicha, which is a hard thing to hear: he would have wanted Eretz Yisrael — but if I am buried in Eretz Yisrael, nobody will come. Here, everybody is going to come.
What else we go through:
• Berel and Aharon. Rav Aharon the Rav asks Erev Rosh Hashana whether to go back to his kehillah or stay — and gets yes to both questions. And Berel, a craftsman, a pshut'er Yid, an ones, does not make it. Reb Nosson tries to excuse him and the Rebbe will not take the excuse: "I said nobody should be missing. And Berela and Aharon are both missing."The greatest tzaddik of the generation and the simplest Yid, named in one breath
• The promise at the kever — a pruta l'tzedaka, ten Kapitlach Tehillim, shelo yashuv od l'ivlato — and the Yiddish: I will lay myself out, in the length and in the breadth, and by his peyos I will pull him out of She'ol Tachtis u'mitachtav
• What She'ol Tachtis actually means. She'ol is a bottomless pit — so what is tachtis? And then the Rebbe is mechadesh a place underneath it
• The man who went to Uman on a free ticket, partied the whole Yom Tov, never once went to the tziyun — and on the way to the bus called out Rabbeinu, todah. Months later, the car accident, the beis din shel maalah, few mitzvos and many aveiros — and a redheaded yungerman walks in and says "he is from my people." They object that he never even came to the kever. But he called me Rebbe
• Tikkun HaKlali is not only for tikkun habris. From Reb Yudel Kenig: it is the klali — the general remedy, for everything
• Why we really come: not for ourselves. He needs every neshama for the tikkunim the world needs. You go because he said to come. Everything else is bonus
• The ohr is always higher than you. Whatever level you are on, the light is above it — your lows in Uman are higher than your highest highs at home
And the part for anyone who just got back:
• The integration is the hardest part. You come home and reality hits you smack in the face, and it does not wait a second. And you think — all my tefillos were that reality should get better, and I came back and it hit me the other way?
• Surrender to that reading and the whole Uman was gornisht vert. Farkert. This is Hashem answering your tefillos. This is Him saying: here, I am giving you your challenge
• First know where you are. Then take the ohr you got there and channel it into everything you asked for — a better husband, a better father, a better friend, a better human being, a better Yid
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