By Larry Kaufman
From my first visit to Israel, some thirty-three years ago, one of my strongest memories is the  guide telling our group at the beginning of the tour, "You come to Israel as tourists; you will leave as pilgrims." And so it was.

We Jews have given new meaning to the phrase, the wandering Jew. Last year we went around the world - this year we want to go somewhere else. That's why you can walk off a cruise ship in Sitka, Alaska, into a jewelry store where you will be greeted by a Frank Meisler Chanukah menorah.

For that matter, that's why so many cruise ships have a resident rabbi among their amenities. We wander the world, in search of the exotic, the luxurious, the historic, the unfamiliar - although sometimes, when we begin to get homesick, it's the familiar that beckons to us. And many of us, wherever in the world we may travel, seek out the Jewish points of interest.

In addition to the places we travel on business, or to attend meetings, or as tourists, in recent years we have become habituated to a new mode of travel, the mission. I credit its development to our Jewish federations, but the idea has been widely emulated among other Jewish organizations, including those of the Reform movement.

Missions let us travel abroad, without appearing to be too self-indulgent. We still get the five-star hotels, the red carpet treatment, and a view of the key sights at the destination sites - but we also get off-the-record briefings from important officials, behind-the-scenes glimpses of places we are assured ordinary tourists don't get to see - and of course, the opportunity to make a contribution to the organization which is shepherding us.

But while we hear about individual travel, synagogue and other group tours, and missions, and despite what that Israeli guide told us in 1975, we don't hear very much about pilgrimages. Without going to the dictionary to see what Mr. Webster would say, I'm defining a pilgrimage as a trip with an overtly religious or sacred purpose. For the Muslim, it's the obligatory trip to Mecca; for the Catholic, the visit to Rome.

I believe it's time for serious Jews, regardless of denomination, to revive the idea of pilgrimage, as mitzvah, sacred obligation. We no longer have to go to Jerusalem three times a year to bring sacrifices to the temple. But it should be incumbent on each of us, at least once in our lifetime, to go to Jerusalem to encounter the sacred. And as we were reminded by JanetheWriter's moving account of her visit to Auschwitz, we should view that trip, too, as mandatory - as a sacred obligation - as a pilgrimage.

As it happened, my own visit to Auschwitz was my fourth camp. I had been to Dachau, Terezin, and Buchenwald, in an escalating sequence of horrors - and Buchenwald on a snowy November afternoon is about as depressing a sight as anything I can imagine. But Auschwitz stands alone in terms of the symbolic weight it carries.

You will not enjoy your visit - but that's the point. Not all of our personal travel should be for pleasure, or for intellectual stimulation. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem can have pleasure and intellectual stimulation as side benefits. That the journey to Auschwitz does not offer those side benefits doesn't make it any less obligatory. It is part of knowing who we are, and who we might have been.

At least we know when we pass under the words Arbeit Macht Frei, that we will be free to leave, pointed in the direction of better understanding and becoming who we should be. 

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