This summer I will be traveling to England and Germany for the first time since 1992. I have been invited to teach about Judaism and perform at an international interfaith gathering in Berlin in which six major world religions will be represented. Prior to the festival I will be leading a shabbaton for the Ruach Chavurah, a Jewish Renewal community in London.

In 1992 I was also invited to teach about Judaism and share my music throughout Germany. That trip was sponsored, in part, by the Juedische-Christliche Gemeinde (the Jewish-Christian Fellowship) of Kiel, Germany. A concert of mine in Freiburg was recorded during that tour and released shortly thereafter as a cassette entitled "Let the Healing Begin."

I have been wanting to return to Germany ever since my last visit. I was very anxious about going the first time. Like many Jews I hated the very thought of Germany, the people, and the language. Not only might I find it extremely unpleasant to be there, but I was also going to perform and teach groups of German Christians about Judaism. It was not going to be enough for me to simply have my experience, whatever that might turn out to be, and then deal with it the best I could - -  but how was I going to be able to stand up and teach people toward whom I might actually fee hatred. In fact, on the flight from London, as the plane began its descent into Hamburg, I looked down at the houses below me and began to feel intense rage welling up inside me.

That feeling passed once I was on the ground where smiling customs officials welcomed me and in a matter of minutes I was greeted by my friend Esther, the young German woman who had made the arrangements for my concerts and workshops in Germany.

We drove to her home in a little farming village in the far north of the country. When the time for dinner arrived and I put on my kipa and washed my hands before making Hamotzi and  was suddenly hit with this overwhelming feeling that I was raising sparks of light out of the depths of hell. Doing such affirming Jewish acts while being in a place of such impurity, such tumah, kindled a powerful flame in my heart. Throughout my travels in Germany I felt this profound sense of holiness more powerful than anything I had felt before, even in Israel. And it was this which gave me strength to sing, to teach, and simply to make friends.

And then there was my visit to Bergen-Belsen. Standing right next to long heather-covered mounds over mass graves filled with bulldozed bodies. Signs in German reading "Here lie ten thousand...five thousand...three thousand." A day never quite hot, never quite cold, never quite sunny, never quite cloudy...A disturbed murmur in the air of souls at peace yet endlessly troubled. I understood then, understand now, how important it is just to go and pray at a place like that. Actually, not exactly to pray - - simply to be, simply to witness and then let the place move me, pray me. The profound, utterly humbling work of lifting sparks, lifting souls...myself being sparked, myself being lifted.

I met young Germans who were deeply ashamed of their history. I think there were many who felt they might receive absolution from me, as if my being a rabbi and telling them they were all right, after all, would be the magic fairy dust to be sprinkled over them to remove their shame. Since I was not a victim and they were not perpetrators it was not possible for me to do that. I could only simply connect with them as people. And that turned out to be healing for me, as I hope it was for them. Many of my songs were translated into German and I found that, to my surprise, I quite enjoyed singing in that language. I had to admit that it can actually sound very beautiful. This opened me a little bit to the sense of betrayal I imagine German Jews must have felt when the language, the culture, the society they loved turned so viciously against them.

Of course, to be in Germany is to walk around inside one huge, gaping, eternally-painful wound. And it is this very pain that makes the connections with people who are seeking to heal, to fix whatever they can fix, so profound and so moving. It is similar to what I experienced when I led a group of twenty-one people on a journey to Israel this past May. Against the background of riots on the West Bank, the shelling of Israeli border towns by Hizballah, and the antagonism between Orthodox and Liberal/Secular Jews, the work that individual Jews and Arabs were doing together to make peace was inspiring, indeed. Many of the members of our tour group were brought to tears hearing the stories of some of these people.

Before I left for Germany eight years ago I fortified myself with two teachings which, perhaps, some of you have heard from me from time to time. The first comes from words spoken by Martin Buber in the course of a debate with a Christian theologian in Germany in January of 1933, a few weeks before Hitler came to power. Responding to a statement that Jews would ultimately have to accept Jesus as their savior, Buber said:

"G*d's gates are open to all. The Christian need not come to them through Judaism. The Jew is not obligated to go to them through Christianity to arrive at G*d. No man that is not of Israel understands the mystery if Israel, and no man the is not of Christianity understands the mystery of Christianity; but unknowing they may acknowledge each other in mystery. How it can be possible that mysteries exist alongside each other is G-d's mystery."

The second teaching is from a story I heard from Reb Shlomo Carlebach, of blessed memory, who, about twelve years ago, spoke to a large group of Christians in Cracow, Poland. An ancestor of his had been a rabbi there. Shlomo said: "My great-great grandfather had a message for you, but you weren't able to hear it in his day. Maybe you will hear it now. The message is that there is one G-d and G-d wants us all to love one another."

While both these teachings were very helpful to me in Germany in '92, I felt that, at times, I was too anxious about what I was going to be experiencing, too self-conscious simply about being in that place. This kept me a little too stuck in the past and unable to allow the fulness of what was possible in the present to emerge. As I think ahead to the upcoming journey, I have been praying to be filled with presence, simple love, and holy chutzpah. I have also been working with another statement by Reb Shlomo spoken during the same journey to Poland I referred to above:

"We have to keep  tragedy in our heart but keep it on the outside of our hearts. The inside of your heart is so Divine, it's like G-d.  If you don't fill it  with joy, you'll never make it."

So I'm praying that my heart will be filled with joy and that I will be blessed to communicate that joy directly to the hearts of people that I meet.  If I can do this, perhaps I will be able to make a small contribution to the long-term process of healing that I believe needs to occur.