Hasidism, Suffering, and Renewal

SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Thought

———————
Richard A. Cohen, editor
Hasidism, Suffering, and Renewal
The Prewar and Holocaust Legacy of
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira

Edited by
DON SEEMAN, DANIEL REISER,
and ARIEL EVAN MAYSE
Cover: Passport photograph of Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira superimposed
on manuscript of Derekh Ha-Melekh, courtesy of Rabbi Avraham Hammer.
Photographed by Shalom (Matan) Shalom.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2021 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Title: Hasidism, suffering, and renewal : the prewar and Holocaust legacy
of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira / edited by Don Seeman, Daniel Reiser,
Ariel Evan Mayse.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series:
SUNY series in contemporary Jewish thought | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020056931 (print) | LCCN 2020056932 (ebook) | ISBN
9781438484013 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438484020 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: K.alonimus K.almish ben Elimelekh, 1889–1943—Influence. |
Rabbis—Poland—Piaseczno (Piaseczno)—Biography. | Hasidim—Poland—
Piaseczno (Piaseczno)—Biography. | Hasidism—Influence. | Holocaust, Jewish
(1939–1945)—Poland—Sources. | Suffering—Religious aspects—Judaism. |
Piaseczno (Piaseczno, Poland)—Religious life and customs.
Classification: LCC BM755.K2834 H37 2021 (print) | LCC BM755.K2834
(ebook) | DDC 296.8/332092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056931
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056932

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 ‫‪For our‬‬
‫‪For‬‬ ‫‪our children‬‬
‫‪children‬‬
‫‪And for all the children whose childhood was taken from them‬‬
‫‪And for all the children whose childhood was taken from them‬‬

‫ַעל ֹזאת ָבּאנוּ ֵאֶלי‪ֵ 0‬בּן ַיִקּיר‪...‬‬

‫ֵחן ַהְשִּׁכיָנה ַעל ָפֶּני‪ָ 0‬יִאיר‬
‫ֹמֲח‪ִ ,0‬לְבּ‪ְ 0‬וָכל ֵאָב ֶרי‪ַ 0‬לתֹּו ָרה ַוֲעבֹוַדת ה׳ ִיָפְּתחוּ‬
‫ִלְבּ‪ְ 0‬וַנְפְשׁ‪ְ 0‬בִּק ְרַבת ֱא‪ִH‬הים ֲאֶשׁר ַעל ָי ְד‪ַ 0‬י ְרִגישׁוּ‬
‫ְוֶאת ָכּל ַבָּקּשֹׁוֶתי‪ְ 0‬לָפָניו ִיְתָבּ ַר‪ְ L‬כִּלְפֵני אָב אֹוֵהב ִתְּשֹׁפּ‪L‬‬
‫ְוהוּא ְכּאָב ְלֶבן אָהוּב ַלֲענֹו ְ ת‪ 0‬וְּל ַרצֹּו ְ ת‪ָ 0‬יִחישׁ‪.‬‬

‫חֹוַבת ַהַתְּלִמי ִדים‪ֶ ,‬פּ ֶרק א‪.‬‬

 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part I: Hasidism and Renewal

1 The Place of Piety: Piaseczno in the Landscape of

Polish Hasidism 29
Marcin Wodziński

2 The Rebbe of Piaseczno: Between Two Trends in Hasidism 53

Moshe Idel

3 The Devotional Talmud: Study as a Sacred Quest 79

Ariel Evan Mayse

4 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw:

A Comparative Study of Goals, Structures, and Methods 107
Zvi Leshem

5 Self-Creation through Texts: Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s

Incarnational Theology 131
David Maayan

6 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity: Rabbi Kalonymus

Shapira’s Derekh ha-Melekh 153
Ora Wiskind
viii Contents

Part II: Text, Theodicy, and Suffering

7 A New Reading of the Rebbe of Piaseczno’s Holocaust-Era

Sermons: A Review of Daniel Reiser’s Critical Edition 179
Moria Herman

8 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death: Psychological and

Phenomenological Aspects of Rabbi Shapira’s Manuscript 191
“Sermons from the Years of Rage”
Daniel Reiser

9 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children: Human

Individuation at the Cusp of Persistence and Perishability 213
Nehemia Polen

10 Raging against Reason: Overcoming Sekhel in R. Shapira’s

Thought 235
James A. Diamond

11 At the Edge of Explanation: Rethinking “Afflictions of Love”

in Sermons from the Years of Rage 259
Erin Leib Smokler

12 “Living with the Times”: Historical Context in the Wartime

Writings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira 281
Henry Abramson

13 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 305

Shaul Magid

14 Pain and Words: On Suffering, Hasidic Modernism,

and the Phenomenological Turn 333
Don Seeman

Contributors 361

Index 365
 Acknowledgments

The editors would like to express their appreciation to the Polin Museum
in Warsaw for sponsoring a 2017 Research Workshop on “R. Kalonymos
Shapira: New Directions in Scholarship.” We also wish to acknowledge
the generous support of the Judith London Evans Director’s Fund of the
Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University and of the Laney
Graduate School.
Chapter 7, Moria Herman, “A New Reading of the Rebbe of Pias-
eczno’s Holocaust-Era Sermons: A Review of Daniel Reiser’s Critical Edi-
tion,” was first published in Yad Vashem Studies 46: 1 (2018).
Chapter 13, Shaul Magid, “Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in
Esh Kodesh,” first appeared in Shaul Magid, Piety and Rebellion: Essays on
Hasidism (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019).

ix
 Introduction

ATTENTION!!

Blessed is God. I have the honor of requesting the esteemed

individual or institution that finds my enclosed writings . . . to
please exert themselves to send them to the Land of Israel to
the following address. . . . When the Blessed One shows mercy
so that the remaining Jews and I survive the war, please return
all materials to me or to the Warsaw rabbinate for Kalonymus,
and may God have mercy upon us, the remnant of Israel, in
every place and rescue us, and sustain us, and save us in the
blink of an eye.

On the first of December 1950, Warsaw construction workers unearthed

two aluminum milk canisters from an excavation site at 68 Nowolipki
Street. Like a message in a bottle from a destroyed world, they were
found to contain a treasure of previously unknown documents from the
clandestine “Ringelblum archives” documenting the lives, deaths, and mass
murder of Warsaw Jewry.1 A similar cache of ten metal boxes (containing
some 25,540 pages of documentation) had been discovered in the same
location in 1946, and a third (that we know of), buried elsewhere, has
never been found.2 The two canisters discovered in 1950, containing 9,829
pages of documentation, were better preserved than the previous cache.
It is our good fortune that the handwritten manuscripts of R. Kalonymus
Kalman Shapira (1889–1943), otherwise known as the Piaseczner Rebbe,
were among the documents preserved.
Rabbi Shapira was the scion of a relatively minor Hasidic dynasty, but
he founded one of the largest Hasidic academies in interbellum ­Warsaw.

1
2 Introduction

He experimented with new literary forms, and his influence among a

wide variety of readers has only continued to grow. Before the war, he
had already published one innovative tract on Hasidic pedagogy (Hovat
ha-talmidim, published in English as A Student’s Obligation) and had
distributed a handbook on mystical fraternities (Benei mahshavah tovah,
published as Conscious Community) among his close disciples.3 A volume
of sermons from the 1920s and 1930s was published posthumously under
the title Derekh ha-melekh (The King’s Way).4 His students also separately
published his Yiddish-language sermon for the Sabbath before Yom Kip-
pur in Piaseczno in 1936.5 The buried Warsaw archive brought several
additional manuscripts to light. These included mystical and pedagogical
tracts devoted to students and devotees at different developmental levels:
Hakhsharat ha-avrekhim (The Young Men’s Preparation), Mevo ha-she’arim
(Entrance to the Gates), and his personal journal, Tsav ve-zeruz (Command
and Urging). It also included a one hundred page handwritten manuscript
of wartime sermons, Hiddushei torah mi-shnot ha-za’am 5700–5702, orig-
inally published under the title Esh kodesh (translated as Sacred Fire) by
Piaseczner Hasidim who survived the war.6 The sermons were all com-
posed in Warsaw between September 1939 (Hebrew year 5700) and July
1942 (5702). Reiser has shown that R. Shapira consigned his manuscripts
to the underground archive for safekeeping in January 1943, coinciding
with the beginning of armed Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto;
they were buried at 68 Nowolipki that February. By the middle of May,
the last of the Jews in Warsaw (estimated around four hundred thousand
at the Ghetto’s most populous phase) were dead or facing almost certain
death under deportation to various camps. It is believed that R. Shapira
was sent to the Trawniki work camp, whose surviving prisoners were
marched into the forest and shot on or around November 3, 1943. He
would have been just fifty-four years of age.
Since their discovery, R. Shapira’s texts have been published, repub-
lished, and in several cases translated for a broad popular audience. They
have engendered a dedicated readership across a wide range of religious
communities, from ultra-Orthodox to New Age and Neo-Hasidic, and have
contributed to a public renaissance in appreciation for Hasidic ideas and
texts. They have also engendered a significant and growing body of scholarly
research. Our own volume, Hasidism, Suffering, and Renewal, was made
possible by the recognition that a critical mass of such scholarship now
invites reflection across a wide variety of methods and disciplines. This
interdisciplinary volume thus includes contributions from scholars whose
 Introduction 3

interest in Hasidic studies has been inflected by social history, literature,

anthropology, modern Jewish thought and theology, phenomenology of
religion, and the history of ideas. This generates some degree of incom-
mensurability among the approaches taken by our writers, but it also allows
the volume as a whole to explore some of the more important tensions
and controversies raised by the study of R. Shapira’s legacy. What is his
relationship to the different spiritual and intellectual genealogies of Hasi-
dism and, later, Neo-Hasidism? How insistent must we be about locating
his activity in the context, not just of Hasidism, but of interbellum Poland
or modern Jewish thought? What literary techniques did he employ, and
how are they related to the various registers in which these texts might
be read—theological, literary-aesthetic, phenomenological? What light, if
any, can the prewar and Holocaust writings shed upon one another? Or, to
frame this in more existential terms, to what extent do the Warsaw Ghetto
sermons bear witness to the resilience of faith in extremis or to the final
rupture of meaning and human subjectivity? While academic scholarship
must have its due, none of these are exclusively academic problems or
concerns, nor are academics the only audience for these debates.
One reason for our decision to publish this volume at this time was
our recognition that this field has been changed irrevocably by the pub-
lication of Daniel Reiser’s groundbreaking critical edition of R. Shapira’s
wartime sermons. These were originally published in 1960 by survivors
of the Piasezcno Hasidic community under the title Esh kodesh (Sacred
Fire), but the title of Reiser’s volume, Derashot mi-shnot ha-za’am (Sermons
from the Years of Rage), is closer to the author’s description of his own
work (no consistent title appears in the original manuscript), and we use
it throughout. For the first time, thanks to Reiser, we can now encounter
the text as R. Shapira apparently intended it to appear, free of inadvertent
distortion by editors who may have had difficulty deciphering his hand-
writing (written under almost unbelievable duress) or the numerous notes
and symbols that he left as guidance for some future editor.
No less important, Reiser also demonstrates that R. Shapira contin-
ued to edit his work, including the Sermons from the Years of Rage, until
the very end of his capacity to go on doing so. Reiser devotes an entire
volume to clarification of the handwritten corrections, marginalia, and
even additions or deletions of whole passages, which sometimes reflect
the author’s ongoing and emergent experience of the genocide unfolding
all around him. This collection of sermons may well have been the last
work of traditional Hasidic scholarship ever composed on Polish soil, and
4 Introduction

it remains one of the only surviving rabbinic works of any kind composed
directly under Holocaust conditions (i.e., not composed by an author who
had already escaped or had yet to suffer the full force of Nazi brutality).
All of our authors used Reiser’s new edition for their reflections upon
Sermons from the Years of Rage, and this alone constitutes an advance
over previous efforts to leverage these texts for our understanding of life
in the context of almost unimaginable suffering.
Our decision to divide this volume into two sections, “Hasidism
and Renewal” followed by “Text, Theodicy, and Suffering,” reflects our
conviction that while the prewar and Ghetto-era writings each deserve
dedicated and detailed attention, the wartime sermons should no longer be
read in a vacuum. While early scholarship on the Hasidism of Piasezcno
understandably emphasized radical suffering and Holocaust experience, it
has more recently become clear just how essential the prewar writings are
for any honest appraisal of R. Shapira’s contribution. These interbellum
writings portray a Hasidic leader working hard to develop new literary
strategies for communication with a diversifying and, in many cases,
secularizing urban audience, focused particularly on youth.
After the terrible upheavals and dislocations of World War I, even
faithful Hasidim were increasingly drawn to what Marcin Wodziński here
calls “à la carte Hasidism,” whose effect on the conditions of R. Shapira’s
work may have been decisive.7 Newly urbanized interbellum Polish Hasi-
dim had the option not just to secularize or leave the Hasidic community
but also to draw, in eclectic and individualizing ways, upon a variety of
Hasidic schools and masters simultaneously. This was the context in which
R. Shapira developed some of his most interesting prewar teachings on
pedagogy and new forms of visionary-contemplative technique. It was also
the context for his distinctive interpretation of Jewish modernity through
the lens of both prophetic renewal and the contemporary psychothera-
peutic discourse of nervous disorder. Both of these were common themes
in early-twentieth-century Jewish writing, but R. Shapira brings them
together in exceptionally powerful and suggestive ways. It has already
been noted that Abraham Joshua Heschel’s later work on biblical prophecy
may best be understood in light of Hasidic motifs very similar to those
R. Shapira develops.8
We are gratified that Hasidism, Suffering, and Renewal will appear
in a prominent series devoted to contemporary Jewish thought. This
only serves to underscore a growing appreciation for the importance of
 Introduction 5

Hasidism—including “late” and not just allegedly pure or authentic “early”

Hasidism—to the spiritual and intellectual contours of modern Jewish life.9
Study of Piasezcno Hasidism should mediate against any claim that later
Polish Hasidism as a whole had stagnated, was uninterested in the project
of spiritual self-renewal, or had essentially given up on the potential for
ecstasy and mystical experience.10 Indeed, along with his unprecedented
depiction of suffering, which pushes theological expression to its very
limits, R. Shapira’s emphasis on sociospiritual renewal, mystical technique,
and literary outreach to a mobile and diversifying urban community all
underline his potential relevance to contemporary spiritual life.

What Is Hasidism, and Who Is R. Shapira?

The movement of mystical renewal that came to be known as Hasidism

grew out of the teachings of R. Israel ben Eliezer of Miedzhybozh (Ukr.
Medzhibizh, d. 1760), popularly known as the Besht or Baal Shem Tov
(“Master of the Good Name”).11 This enigmatic and creative mystic lived in
Podolia (modern Ukraine) near the Carpathian Mountains.12 There are few
historical sources that shed light on the Baal Shem Tov’s life, but Hasidic
hagiography tells of humble beginnings followed by periods of solitude
and mystical study. After “revealing” himself in the 1730s, he began to
preach an approach to religious life that foregrounded the values of divine
immanence, human joy, and ecstasy through prayer.13 Hasidism has tended
to reject the rigorous self-mortification of some earlier pietistic schools in
favor of a more psychological and, in many cases, broadly pantheistic (or
panentheistic) approach. Beshtian Hasidism typically emphasizes devekut,
or cleaving to the divine, through the spiritual uprush of ecstatic prayer,
performance of the commandments, and avodah ba-gashmiyut, or devotion
through apparently mundane acts such as eating or drinking with proper
intent.14 Sometimes, Hasidism described the goal of devotional practice
not just as personal devekut but also as “freeing the sparks” that had been
trapped, according to Lurianic kabbalah, within the phenomenal world at
the time of creation.15 In some schools, this might even be described as a
sort of divine ecology, with vitality “drawn down” through some activities
(such as fasting, prayer, or even ritual weeping, identified with tzimtzum),
then “raised up” again through others—especially acts of enjoyment or
pleasure accompanied by correct intention.16 These teachings frequently
6 Introduction

focused on the activity of the tsaddik, or rebbe, whose activities rendered

him a veritable “axis mundi”17 or channel for divine vitality and ritual
efficacy, including what Moshe Idel has described as “magic.”18
There is no evidence that the Baal Shem Tov sought to establish a
new religious movement, though later Hasidic schools unanimously relate
to him as a founder. It was only in the decades after his death that a social
movement known as Hasidism began to crystallize, particularly under
the leadership of “the Maggid,” R. Dov Ber of Mezritsh, who was already
a talmudic scholar and ascetic before he met the Baal Shem Tov.19 The
Maggid’s own disciples included scholars from some of the most illustri-
ous families in eastern Europe, who quickly began to develop their own
distinctive devotional styles and to spread their diversifying schools, or
“courts,” through all the Jewish population centers in the region.20 Among
the Maggid’s direct disciples was R. Shapira’s paternal ancestor Elimelekh
of Lizhensk, who did much to develop the centrality of the tsaddik to
Hasidic devotion. Some of these developments were alarming to established
rabbinic leadership, engendering more than a generation of bans and
counterbans until the two sides attained some degree of rapprochement.
Ultimately, Hasidism became the dominant form of Jewish traditionalism
in the Jewish communities of the former Polish commonwealth (Galicia
and Western Russia) before the Holocaust.
Some Hasidic leaders were clearly aware of the western European
Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) by the early 1770s. Over the next four
decades, however, those modernist ideals grew from a sporadic trickle to
a steady stream of modernizing and, in many cases, secularizing influ-
ence, which also took new forms, such as socialism and various types of
Jewish nationalism, as they traveled east. In this context, Hasidism had
little choice but to join forces, to some degree, with its old opponents,
the mitnagdim, who also opposed at least some forms of secularization.21
Meanwhile, the position of Hasidic tsaddik developed into a hereditary
office whose holders could not always match the charismatic force of their
predecessors.22 The deaths of the Maggid’s immediate disciples by the first
decade of the nineteenth century have been described as a turning point
toward greater social and theological conservatism.23 This century also
saw the Hasidic movement reach the apogee of its demographic reach,
its political influence, and its ability to selectively resist some unwelcome
features of modernity.24 Though possibly overemphasized by romanticizing
scholars, there is evidence that some nineteenth-century Hasidim, such
 Introduction 7

as R. Nahman of Bratslav, did seek to revitalize what they had come to

perceive as an ossifying religious traditionalism.25
Anti-Jewish legislation and the pogroms that began during the 1880s
helped to stimulate mass emigration from eastern Europe and brought
any sense of a Hasidic golden age crashing down. Worsening conditions
also increased the resonance of explicitly secularizing platforms such as
socialism or Zionism, both of which tended to identify Hasidic piety with
a kind of quietism that persecuted Jews could no longer afford. Soon
enough, World War I and the fall of multiethnic empires would come
to dislocate hundreds of thousands of Jews, forcing newly urbanized
Hasidim now living in places like Warsaw and Vienna to find their way
economically and politically within an unstable and frequently hostile
constellation of European states.
This is the context within which R. Shapira’s own life as a descendant
of major figures in the Hasidic movement (on both his father’s and his
mother’s side) begins to take shape.26 Kalonymos Shapira was born on
July 13, 1889,27 to R. Elimelekh Shapira (known as the Grodzisker Rebbe,
1824–1892) and Hannah Berakhah, the daughter of R. Hayyim Shemuel
Horowicz of Chęciny.28 His father passed away before his third birthday,
leaving him to be raised in the home of R. Yerahmiel Moshe Hopstein
(the Kozhnitser Rebbe, 1860–1909), his father’s grandson through a prior
marriage. Hopstein later became Shapira’s father-in-law when, at the age
of sixteen, Shapira married the rebbe’s daughter, Rahel Hayya Miriam,
after an engagement that began when he was just thirteen.29 Rahel Hayya
Miriam was renowned for her erudition and took an active role in Kalon-
ymus’s writing before her untimely death in 1937. It is likely that she was
memorialized in her husband’s later sermons on the prophetess Miriam,
but there is as yet no sustained study of her own possible stylistic or
conceptual influence on her husband’s teaching.30
Shapira was appointed rabbi of the city of Piaseczno in 1913, at
the age of twenty-four. Following the Great War in 1917, he moved to
nearby Warsaw but continued to visit Piaseczno frequently. In 1923, he
founded a Warsaw yeshiva for boys, named Da’at Moshe in memory of
his father-in-law, which became one of the largest Hasidic academies in
the Polish capitol.31 His Hasidim and students described R. Shapira as a
person of elegant countenance, projecting an air of gravitas and nobility
and evincing remarkable concern for the education of children.32 His rela-
tionship to the world around him was complex and nuanced. In addition
8 Introduction

to his sacred studies in Hasidism, Jewish law, and Bible, he taught himself
about medicine and other secular subjects.33 He wrote Hasidic melodies
and learned to play the violin like his wife’s father but stopped playing
when Rahel Hayya Miriam died at a young age.34 R. Shapira served as a
mohel (ritual circumciser)35 and was an active member of the Orthodox
Jewish political alliance Agudath Israel,36 though he favored a section of
the movement that was more positively disposed toward settlement in the
land of Israel than most, and even purchased property there. His brother,
Rabbi Yeshayahu Shapiro, “the Pioneer Rabbi,” joined the religious Zionist
movement Mizrachi and moved to an agricultural settlement in the Land
of Israel before the war.37 R. Shapira’s only son, Elimelekh Ben-Zion, died
a lingering death from shrapnel wounds during the festival of Sukkot on
September 29, 1939. His daughter-in-law and sister-in-law—the latter a
religious Zionist pioneer who had helped to build the Kfar Hasidim set-
tlement—were also killed on September 26, when the hospital at which
they were visiting Elimelekh came under German artillery fire. Not long
after, his elderly mother passed away as well, and he recited Kaddish on
her behalf.38 Many of his own most intimate losses therefore occurred
even before German troops had secured Warsaw.
The Warsaw Ghetto was established in October 1940 (its borders
encompassed R. Shapira’s home at 5 Dzielna) and sealed off from the rest
of the city in November. Four hundred thousand Jews from Warsaw and
surrounding towns were incarcerated there in an area of just 1.3 square
miles. During the first two years of its existence alone, 83,000 people
died of disease and starvation, and by late 1942, Ghetto governance had
moved to an explicit policy of genocide through direct killing, starvation,
and gradual deportation. Between late July and mid-September 1942,
265,000 Jews were sent to their deaths at Treblinka.39 These realities, and
the dawning realization of the annihilation of European Jewry, provide the
background against which Sermons from the Years of Rage was composed.
R. Shapira apparently had a number of opportunities to leave the
Ghetto before its liquidation in 1943 but “declared that it was unthinkable
that he should save himself and leave his brothers to moan.”40 The Amer-
ican Joint Distribution Committee sought to procure him and some other
Jewish leaders an exit visa from Poland but was rebuffed. A contemporary
journalist cited him as saying, “I will not abandon my Hasidim at such
a difficult time.”41 He continued to serve as a spiritual leader throughout
his time in the Ghetto and even survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
which led to its final “liquidation” after Passover 1943. Scholars are not
 Introduction 9

sure about the place and circumstances of his death, but it is believed, as
we have already mentioned, that he was among a group that was marched
into the forest and shot in early November 1943.

Renewal, Vitality, and the Human Subject

The theme of renewal that dominates the first half of this book raises
important questions about R. Shapira’s relationship to the genealogy of
Hasidism, past and present. Marcin Wodziński (chapter 1) sets the stage
by locating R. Shapira within the context of newly urban “à la carte” Pol-
ish Hasidism between the wars. If the number of documented followers
and shtiblekh (prayer houses) identified with Piaseczno Hasidim serves as
any guide, Wodziński concludes, R. Shapira should be thought of as “a
minor tsaddik but a major Hasidic innovator, who long after his death
became one of the most prominent figures of Polish Hasidism.” R. Shapira’s
innovations took several forms, including the development of extensive
contemplative techniques grounded in earlier Hasidic and possibly even
medieval kabbalistic practice but also taking on new “cinematic” qualities
of sustained narrative visualization that go beyond earlier Jewish mys-
tical writers.42 Moshe Idel (chapter 2) identifies close parallels between
certain passages in R. Shapira’s pedagogic tracts and those in Abulafia’s
thirteenth-century ecstatic Kabbalah, though he notes that R. Shapira also
wrote under the influence of more proximate Hasidic writers as well as
modern psychological and therapeutic discourse related to mesmerism,
hypnosis, and nervous disorder.43
Indeed, although the majority of his citations are to R. Shapira’s
immediate Hasidic forbears, Idel provocatively suggests that his phenom-
enological style—his emphasis on contemplative technique and mystical
experience rather than the power of the tsaddik—betrays a kinship with
other branches of Hasidism entirely, the diverse “spiritualizing” trends
identified with the Maggid, Chabad, or Kotsk-Izhbits. More suggestive still
is Idel’s claim that these features of what Seeman (chapter 14) refers to as
“Hasidic modernism” may have been influenced by growing familiarity
with figures such as Swami Vivekananda, who had recently visited east-
ern Europe. At the same time, in his evaluation of R. Shapira’s handbook
for mystical fraternities, Benei mahshavah tovah, Zvi Leshem (chapter 4)
offers an unprecedentedly detailed account of connections and parallels
to the mystical fellowship of the Zohar and to nineteenth-century Hasidic
10 Introduction

fraternities established in the Galilean city of Tiberius. Collectively, the

writers of this volume demonstrate the inadequacy of treating the search
for intellectual genealogies in R. Shapira’s oeuvre as if it were a simple
taxonomic project. It should be viewed instead as a means of opening up
the text in all of its potential keys and registers, including some that may
not yet have been discovered. Rigorously establishing the contours of R.
Shapira’s own socioreligious context and taking his potential contempo-
rary relevance as seriously as that of any other great author requires an
openness to possibly unforeseen juxtapositions as well as resistance to any
delimiting academic paradigms, including an overemphasis on historical
“proximism.”44
Hasidic renewal must be understood on a number of different lev-
els simultaneously. On page after page of R. Shapira’s text, it refers not
only to the infusing of Hasidic life with a renewed sense of purpose or
charisma in the Weberian sense but also to the literal repair of blocked
or desiccated channels for the flow of divine vitality into human life and
awareness. Kalonymus Shapira precedes Gershom Scholem in noting that
Hasidism transformed the theosophy of medieval Kabbalah into a kind
of mystical psychology that both describes and shapes the contours of
human subjectivity—which is also, not insignificantly, where the locus
of devotional activity has moved.45 R. Shapira only sharpens this trend
through his emotionally evocative sermons and pedagogic manuals as well
as his handbook for mystical fraternities described by Leshem. Perhaps
more surprising is that R. Shapira applied the same paradigm to the study
of legal and talmudic texts, which were, after all, the strong backbone of
the traditional rabbinic curriculum. A crucial hub of R. Shapira’s teaching,
made explicit by Ariel Evan Mayse in chapter 3, is that the flow of divine
vitality—the “pulsing core of Torah”—is itself identified with the free flow
of charged subjectivity, emotion, or feeling, “thus fusing the nomian with
the emotive in order to generate a fully integrated religious experience.”
Personalism is manifest everywhere in R. Shapira’s work, deeply
imbricated with his monistic appreciation for the sheer corporeality of
human life, mediated and underwritten by sacred text and language
through which, according to Beshtian Hasidism, the world is continually
renewed. In slightly different ways, David Maayan (chapter 5) and Ora
Wiskind (chapter 6) each analyze R. Shapira’s striking focus on the religious
legitimacy of the unique, embodied subjectivity of each individual (not
just the tsaddik), that emerges from the prewar writings. Maayan claims
that this “incarnational theology” mediates against the adoption of bittul
 Introduction 11

or any other form of self-annihilation as a central motif in Piaseczno, as

it is, for example, in Chabad.46 Since all existence is underwritten by the
vitality conveyed by the sacred letters, no aspect of corporeal life should
be considered irredeemable. Wiskind, meanwhile, breaks new ground by
attending to the nuanced and delicate literary strategies through which
R. Shapira approaches these themes in order to promote particular forms
of modern Hasidic “mindfulness” and emergent religious subjectivity in
his still insufficiently studied prewar sermons. These themes would later
be tested in the Warsaw Ghetto’s crucible.

Rupture, Efficacy, and the End of Meaning?

Some of the most generative debates in this volume concern the problem
of meaning in R. Shapira’s oeuvre. There are at least two parts to this
problem, the first of which is a general one (what sort of hermeneutic
best reveals the significance of Hasidic texts?), while the second calls
attention to the specific question of rupture and continuity in light of the
Holocaust. With respect to the first problem, writers in this volume might
be broadly divided between those who emphasize a theological-discursive
paradigm seeking to clarify some area of R. Shapira’s thought and a cluster
of alternative readings that focus on textual practice through the prism of
literary, psychological, or ritual efficacy: “how Hasidic authors do things
with words.”47 The latter might include the literary-aesthetic evocation
of existential drama and concern, the shaping of a distinctively Hasidic
religious and ethical habitus, or the channeling of divine vitality and
blessing. While any of these textual effects might also invoke particular
Hasidic “doctrines” such as divine immanence or acosmism, scholars in
this group emphasize the emergent properties of textual effects that are not
easily abstracted from the particular literary and ritual contexts in which
they appear. To take just one debate that resonates through this volume:
Should “faith” be treated as belief in a set of propositional contents that
can be stated abstractly or is it better understood as a kind of experience
related to ritual efficacy and channeling of vitality? In the latter case, the
medium really cannot be meaningfully separated from the message.48
Each of these two broad approaches offers certain advantages. One
benefit of the intellectualist “Hasidic thought” paradigm (which remains
dominant in contemporary Hasidic studies) is that it encourages readers
to focus deeply on the specific theological content the texts avowedly
12 Introduction

convey, their intellectual genealogies and specialized terminologies. In the

best cases, this approach makes the discursive content of Hasidic texts
available for analytic comparison with other schools of Hasidism as well as
other religious and intellectual traditions. Scholarship in Hasidic thought
has rendered insupportable the views of earlier writers who once treated
Hasidism as little more than an eruption of Dionysian irrationality and
superstition, or who portrayed it as a shallow aberration from the sober
rabbinic, philosophical, or emancipatory-secular forms of Jewish life to
which scholars themselves may have been committed.49
A significant though not always realized concomitant of this intel-
lectualist approach is that the translation of labyrinthine homiletic or exe-
getical literature into repositories of discursive content or doctrine might,
under the right circumstances, accord to “Hasidic thought” the implied
dignity of ideas that would allow it to be taken seriously in communi-
ties of readership outside of its native ritual or sectarian context. Daniel
Reiser’s painstaking archaeology of the Sermons from the Years of Rage,
described in chapter 8 (and ably reviewed by Moria Herman in chapter
7), is therefore noteworthy for drawing R. Shapira’s wartime sermons into
conversation with recognized figures of Western thought, such as Franz
Rosenzweig, Ernest Becker, even Socrates. Reiser nonetheless signals his
own view that scholars should go beyond the philosophical “content” of
the sermons by attending to the phenomenological contradictions that
defined their composition in the face of genocide. Herman’s and Reiser’s
accounts of the technical work involved in Reiser’s critical edition are
crucial here, because several of the subsequent chapters argue about the
significance of textual features that would have been impossible to address
without this painstaking research.
Nehemia Polen was one of the first scholars to treat Sermons from
the Years of Rage (or Esh Kodesh, as it was popularly known) seriously
on an intellectual level, so it is especially gratifying that he has taken
the opportunity of his essay in chapter 9 of this volume to reexamine
his own methodology in light of Reiser’s critical edition. By analyzing
a complete June 1942 sermon, available for the first time in its original
layering and paragraphing, Polen demonstrates the emergent quality of
themes such as gender and mortality, the desperate human “thirst” for
God, and “the divinity of children” as bearers of human continuity in the
face of death. These are not easily identifiable as “doctrines,” inasmuch
as they are said to depend upon an “architectural integrity” that emerges
from the unfolding movement of the original sermon. Rather than mining
 Introduction 13

the sermon for abstract ideas to be unearthed and carried away, in other
words, Polen treats it like a musical score whose significance can only be
appreciated through engagement with the context in which it unfolds.50
Indeed, music, ritual, and homiletic writing are all arguably intractable
to systematic formulation precisely because they have in common this
temporal dimension of unfolding over time.51 The tension (it probably
should not be thought of as an outright contradiction) between these two
paradigms runs throughout this volume, but become more explicit in the
chapters dealing with R. Shapira’s Holocaust-era sermons.
Even under duress, it is obvious that R. Shapira engaged broad
dimensions of the Jewish literary and intellectual tradition. James A.
Diamond (chapter 10) provocatively argues that Sermons from the Years
of Rage invokes Maimonidean philosophical language precisely in order
to establish a distinctively Hasidic, and determinedly nonphilosophical
response to radical suffering, beyond all reason and intelligibility. In this
reading, the Aristotelian unity of the knower and the known allows for
the mystical identification of the divine with human suffering. Erin Leib
Smokler (chapter 11), similarly, traces R. Shapira’s daring use of a well-
known talmudic concept, yissurim shel ahavah or “chastenings born of
love,” to engage and ultimately transcend any possible Jewish theodicy
of justice and intelligibility under Ghetto conditions. Extraordinary in
both chapters is the sense of a deep, possibly inevitable rupture in Jewish
thought occasioned by the Holocaust yet conveyed in the language of the
exegetical tradition.
Despite its considerable power, critics of the traditional academic
emphasis on Hasidic “thought” argue that this focus threatens to overin-
tellectualize religious life. Moshe Idel has critiqued the “theologization” of
Hasidism and points in this volume (chapter 2) to the “conceptual fluidity”
he associates with R. Shapira’s approach, calling for a more phenome-
nological analysis of how Hasidic texts function. Several other authors
also offer implicit or explicit critique of the intellectualist paradigm. Ora
Wiskind (chapter 6) calls for a holistic literary analysis of the prewar and
wartime sermons, attuned to the ways in which they consistently thematize
“self-awareness, emotion, the need for inner psychic unity, empowerment,
the urgency of communication, and an endless desire for divine presence.”
Don Seeman (chapter 14) endorses this formulation in the context of an
expansive, anthropologically informed understanding of textual practice.
Seeman focuses on the relationship between what he calls literary and
ritual efficacy—the ways in which these texts are both written and read in
14 Introduction

attunement with urgent projects such as renewal, healing, and the defense
of human subjectivity against collapse. These are contingent and quotidian
goals that can only be appreciated against the backdrop of potential failure,
to which R. Shapira was extraordinarily sensitive.
While these issues can be raised with respect to virutally any Hasidic
text, they arise here with special force because of the extreme conditions
under which R. Shapira labored. In his provocative essay (chapter 13), Shaul
Magid argues that by the time R. Shapira consigned his manuscripts for
burial, he had already been forced to acknowledge the apparent success of
the Nazi genocide and with it the apparent collapse of Judaism’s covenantal
framework. While the sermons themselves may remain equivocal, Magid
claims he can show on the basis of a late postscript that the author of
Sermons from the Years of Rage suffered a crisis of faith profound enough
to establish him as a “missing link” between traditional Judaism and
radical post-Holocaust theology. This is a claim that has, not surprisingly,
engendered some spirited public debate (mentioned in chapter 14), but
on a scholarly level, Magid raises issues that must be addressed, and he
does so with admirable clarity. Implicitly or explicitly, most of the authors
in the second half of this book relate to the issue of rupture and faith
that Magid raises.
With a few exceptions, R. Shapira typically makes only oblique ref-
erence to contemporary events in his Warsaw sermons. Henry Abramson
(chapter 12) argues plausibly that historical research into the dates on which
particular sermons were first composed can therefore shed significant new
light on their meaning. He associates the intensifying urgency of sermons
beginning in mid-February 1942, for example, with the eyewitness testimony
of mass murders that a Jewish refugee from Chelmno had recently brought
with him to Warsaw. Without such contextualization, we may fail to grasp
the “original and primary purpose” of these sermons, which was ostensibly
to address the fear, grief, and demoralization of Ghetto inhabitants. By
the same token, Abramson insists that R. Shapira’s own faith was never in
question. “At no point does R. Shapira ever despair of God’s existence and
omnipotence, even up to his final will and testament. . . . He maintains
an active, passionate relationship with God . . . sometimes raising his
voice in anguish and fear but always confident in God’s ability to save the
Jewish people.” While he may have come to despair of history, Abramson
asserts, “even a cursory reading of the wartime writings demonstrates the
absurdity of attributing a loss of faith to their author.” Magid counters
that he finds the proposed distinction between faith in God and faith
 Introduction 15

in history untenable given the long Jewish commitment to covenantal/

providential thinking.
Responding to Magid’s challenge that his critics rarely define precisely
what they mean by “faith” in these disputes, Seeman brings this volume
to a close (chapter 14) by arguing that R. Shapira almost always refers to
this term (Heb. emunah) in terms of ritual efficacy and unimpeded flow of
divine vitality rather than “belief ” in a propositional sense. Such efficacy is,
to repeat, never a foregone conclusion; vital flow may be halting, susceptible
to blockage, or to desiccating disconnection from its source. The identifi-
cation between vital flow and the experience of affect in Hasidic thought
therefore contributes to R. Shapira’s phenomenological turn, inasmuch as
the literary description of experience and its ritual modulation are deeply
intertwined. With that, Seeman brings radical suffering and the problem
of meaning that are emphasized in the second half of this volume back
to the analysis of Hasidic renewal with which our volume began.

Hasidism, Neo-Hasidism, Hasidic Modernism

A few final words of context are in order. Very few Piaseczner Hasidim
survived the second world war. The small group of followers who did
survive were unable to reconstitute themselves in the manner of larger
groups like Satmar, Ger, Belz, and Vizhnits, whose leaders all left Europe
before the Holocaust, or Chabad, whose remarkable resurrection began
with the escape of its leadership to the United States in 1940. Nevertheless,
the last several decades have witnessed a surge in interest in the Hasidism
of Piaseczno among a diverse group of scholars, seekers, and admirers.
Among the contemporary institutions laying claim to the Piaseczno
legacy is a synagogue in Ramat Beit Shemesh, Israel, whose rabbi is the
grandson of R. Shapira’s younger brother Yeshayahu, who joined a religious
agricultural settlement in Palestine before the war.52 This synagogue and
its associated study hall are located in a heavily Orthodox neighborhood,
but its visitors are not necessarily Hasidim in any classical sense. The
synagogue promotes the study of R. Shapira’s writings, including his peda-
gogical tracts, and uses some of the niggunim, or melodies, that he wrote.
Nevertheless, the fact that R. Shapira left no dynastic successor may have
allowed his teachings to be perceived as the joint possession of the whole
Hasidic, or even larger Jewish, community rather than being too closely
identified with any contemporary “court.” His books have been published
16 Introduction

and republished by a variety of Orthodox and Ultraorthodox publishing

houses, have begun to engender commentaries of their own, and have
been invoked in public reckoning with Jewish suffering and resilience in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Piaseczno has played a role for
some time now in the “spiritual renaissance” of the Ashkenazi Haredi
world (Yiddish-, Hebrew-, and English-speaking), as these communities
grapple not only with the still-devastating losses of the Holocaust but
also with a growing demand for broad access to spiritual resources.53
This includes a return to the study of early Hasidic works that may have
been underutilized in recent generations as well as the addition of a few
important later works, including R. Shapira’s own relatively accessible
guides to contemplative practice and cultivation of inner life.
In recent years, R. Shapira’s books have played an increasingly
prominent role in both the “national religious” (dati le’umi) and “national
Ultraorthodox” (hardal) wings of Religious Zionism in Israel.54 His teachings
are featured prominently in the libraries of many of the yeshivot hesder,
which combine Israeli military service with Torah study for young men
and where, together with select other works of Hasidism—such as those
of Bratzlav, Izhbits-Radzin, and Chabad—they provide a counterbalance
to the once nearly exclusive focus on Talmud and Bible in the Zionist
yeshiva curriculum.55 This has been less true of institutions with a close
historical connection to the early-twentieth-century mystic and chief
rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, or whose “Lithuanian” focus on the absolute
primacy of Talmudic study remain undisturbed, but these institutions
are also not nearly as dominant in the broadly Zionist yeshiva world as
was once the case. Smaller yeshivot with a variety of different intellectual
and ideological agendas, including the diversication of the curriculum
to include Hasidic studies, have multiplied. The late R. Shimon Gershon
Rosenberg (“Shagar”), who was known for his attempts to bridge Hasidic
and postmodern thought, became an important conduit for the study of
Piaseczno and other Hasidic teachings in this world.56
Piaseczno has also figured prominently in North American Jewish
Renewal and Neo-Hasidism in its Orthodox and liberal Jewish varieties. R.
Shapira’s works were, for example, an important resource for the charismatic
teachers Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994) and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
(1924–2014), both of whom had Hasidic roots.57 Carlebach’s adaptation,
which emphasized R. Shapira’s resilience in the face of tragedy, emphasized
Jewish solidarity and offered a classically Orthodox portrait of the Piasec-
zner Rebbe. Carlebach’s possibly apocryphal story “The Holy Hunchback”
describes a chance encounter with a former student of the Piaseczner who
 Introduction 17

survived Auschwitz and had become a Tel Aviv street sweeper. He tells
Carlebach that the only thing keeping him from suicide is his childhood
memory of the Piaseczno Rebbe’s voice. “Remember children, the greatest
thing in the world is to do somebody else a favor.”58 Schachter-Shalomi,
by contrast, emphasized the devotional aspects of R. Shapira’s legacy,
focusing for his mostly non-Orthodox audience on the remarkable array
of contemplative techniques the Piasezcner Rebbe taught. We should also
note that Schachter-Shalomi was the first to suggest Sermons from the
Years of Rage as a dissertation topic for Nehemia Polen (author of chapter
9 of this volume), whose 1994 monograph, Holy Fire, ushered in a wave
of English-language scholarship whose distant reverberations include the
current volume.59
Several writers in this volume, including Marcin Wodziński, Moshe
Idel, Ariel Evan-Mayse, Ora Wiskind, and Don Seeman, have noted R.
Shapira’s importance for contemporary Neo-Hasidism, a loosely defined
movement with both Orthodox and liberal Jewish manifestations. Though
he is not alone within American Orthodoxy, special mention should
be made of R. Moshe Weinberger, who was the founding rabbi of a
Piaseczno-inflected synagogue called Aish Kodesh in Woodmere, New
York, in 1992. Weinberger draws upon the teachings of many different
Hasidic masters along with those of Rav Kook (whose contribution to
Neo-Hasidism deserves special analysis, inasmuch as he was not, strictly
speaking, a Hasidic leader at all), but R. Shapira occupies a special place
in his spiritual library and lineage.60 Weinberger’s appointment in 2013 as
mashpia, or “spiritual guide,” of Yeshiva College in New York was widely
understood as testimony to the growing influence of Neo-Hasidism among
modern or centrist Orthodox youth in America.61 Perhaps predictably,
popular Neo-Hasidism tends to blur what we take to be important dis-
tinctions among different schools of classical Hasidic thought and prac-
tice.62 A somewhat different but related blurring of historical boundaries
is also apparent in the non-Orthodox world, where the Neo-Hasidic turn
self-consciously blends Hasidic, Buddhist, and other contemplative forms.
An example might be the work of James Jacobson Maisels, a rabbi and
popular meditation teacher whose University of Chicago dissertation
focused on the Piaseczner and who acknowledges that his own Neo-Ha-
sidic mindfulness practice has been shaped by various Buddhist teachings
as well as by R. Shapira.63
Proper ethnographic and sociology of knowledge analysis of R. Sha-
pira’s multifaceted “afterlife” remains an important desideratum.64 During
the Second Palestinian Intifada, in October 2000, a child of American
18 Introduction

immigrants named Esh Kodesh Gilmore, who was raised at Shlomo Carle-
bach’s Moshav Modiin, was shot and killed while working as a security
guard at the Israeli National Insurance Institute in Jerusalem.65 Within a
few months, an unofficial Israeli outpost or small settlement named Esh
Kodesh was erected in his name near the West Bank community of Shvut
Rachel, itself named for Rachel Drouk, the victim of a terror attack on a
civilian bus in 1991.66 The temptation to omit these troubling nontextual
events from a scholarly account of R. Shapira’s reception history is to be
resisted; one way or another, he would have been the first to acknowledge
that the fate of his teaching and the concrete, sometimes catastrophic
destiny of his people cannot be disentangled.
At the time of this writing, a group of more than nine hundred
people, including rabbis, academics, spiritual “tourists,” Neo-Hasidim, and
spiritual fellow travelers meet in a “virtual beis midrash” on Facebook “to
share the teachings, inspiration, and anecdotes of the holy Piaseczno Rebbe
Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira.”67 There are very few Hasidic personalities (let
along twentieth-century Hasidic leaders) who can claim this kind of public
recognition and significance. While Hasidism, Suffering, and Renewal is
intended for academic scholars of religion, Hasidism, and Jewish thought
therefore, we also hope that this work will engage readers outside of the
academy among those who seek intelligent but accessible scholarship on
Hasidism in general or Piaseczno in particular. We are inspired not just
by the enormous growth in scholarly writing on R. Shapira’s legacy, well
exceeding the scope of this volume, but also by the vitality and serious-
ness of readers (some of them also academics!) who look to Piaseczno
for wisdom and inspiration—for the emergence of what Buber might have
called a teaching that can “address the crisis of modern men and women.”68
Readers outside the academy should be aware that the choice of indi-
vidual authors to use or not use the honorific R. (“rabbi”) for addressing
R. Shapira in this volume may reflect debates about the conventions of
academic writing that are not necessarily intended to convey any par-
ticular religious or spiritual sensibility (or lack thereof). All our authors
have shown R. Shapira the ultimate respect of devoting their time and
expertise to understanding his legacy.
Rather than claiming to have offered a final, authoritative account,
we are hopeful that this collection of essays will help to forestall prema-
ture closure on disquieting questions about the intellectual and existential
significance of Piaseczno, Hasidism, or suffering and the Holocaust. To
choose just one example from among many, authors in this volume have
 Introduction 19

described R. Shapira alternately as a precursor to radical Neo-Hasidism

(Idel, Mayse, Leshem, Wiskind) or post-Holocaust theology (Magid); as
the purveyor of an essentially conservative retrenchment (a kind of “Jew-
ish counter-Reformation” [Wodzinski]);or as the initiator of a distinctive
“Hasidic Modernism” (Seeman) adopting strategies parallel to those of
modernizing Buddhist groups confronted by the crisis of colonialism, as
well as the challenges of modern science and psychotherapeutic models.
Piaseczno stands for the tenacity and resilience of faith (Reiser, Polen,
Abramson) as well as the rupture of faith and meaning (Diamond, Smokler);
for spiritual renewal (Mayse, Maayan) as well as catastrophic failure that
may never be repaired (Magid, Seeman). Do we need to choose decisively
among these views? Perhaps. Certainly, each author has made their best
case, and much is at stake. As editors though, we prefer to conclude with
the words of Rashi (the only medieval commentator mentioned by name
in Sermons from the Years of Rage) on the plenitude of scripture, which
also represents perforce the plenitude of life. Writing around the time that
Franco-German Jewry was convulsed and nearly destroyed by the First
Crusade, Rashi affirmed multiple—even apparently contradictory—readings
of the same scriptural texts, citing a midrash on the prophecy of Jeremiah:
“Is not my word like fire, says the Lord of hosts, or like a hammer that
splits a rock (Jer. 23:29)?” Just as the rock is split into many pieces, in one
version of the midrash that Rashi cites, so the word of God “is divisible
into many different understandings.”69

Notes

R. Shapira’s cover letter is reproduced in Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons

from the Years of Rage [in Hebrew], ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog
Academic College, 2017), 1:328. Translation by Shaul Magid, this volume.
1. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of
Emmanuel Ringelblum (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958); and Samuel D. Kassow,
Who Will Write our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the
Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
2. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:27.
3. See Leshem, “Between Messianism and Prophecy,” 5n15. One copy of
Benei mahshavah tovah is found in the New York Chabad Library, MS 1192:27,
and another, signed by Shapira (who notes that it is forbidden to copy the work
without his permission), is the property of R. Avraham Hamer in Bnei Brak.
This copy was given to his father, R. Eliyahu Hamer, who was one of Shapira’s
20 Introduction

main disciples and one of the first copiers of his sermons. R. Kalonymus Kalman
Shapira, Conscious Community, trans. Andrea Cohen Kiener (Northvale, NJ: Jason
Aaronson, 1977); idem., A Student’s Obligation: Advice from the Rebbe of the
Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Micha Odenheimer (Oxford: Roman and Littlefield, 1991).
4. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Shalosh derashot (Tel Aviv: Merkaz hasi-
dei Koźnic, 1985); idem, Derekh ha-melekh (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei Piaseczno,
1995); and, on the process of editing these sermons, Sermons from the Years of
Rage, 1:26–53.
5. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Derashah (Warsaw: Hevrei ha-kehilah
ha-Ivrit de-Pi’acetsna, 1936).
6. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Esh Kodesh (Va’ad hasidei Piaseczno, 1960);
idem, Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939–1942, trans. J. Hershey Worch
(Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 2000).
7. See also David Biale et al., Hasidism: A New History (Princeton: Princ-
eton University Press, 2018), 587.
8. Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’
in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological Review 101 (2008): 465–505; see Idel,
this volume.
9. See Moshe Idel, Old World, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and
Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
10. It is worth noting that Benjamin Brown, “Substitutes for Mysticism: A
General Model for the Theological Development of Hasidism in the Nineteenth
Century,” History of Religions (2017): 248–88, specifically excludes R. Shapira from
his consideration of mysticism’s decline. See, however, Biale et al., Hasidism, 615.
11. The only single-volume history of this religious movement is Biale et al.,
Hasidism. For a recent anthology of Hasidic sources from the eighteenth century
to the present, see Ariel Evan Mayse and Sam Berrin Shonkoff, eds., Hasidism:
Writings on Devotion, Community, and Life in the Modern World (Waltham, MA:
Brandeis University Press, 2020). The following summary of Hasidism draws on
the introduction to that volume.
12. For two important biographies of the Besht, see Moshe Rosman, Founder
of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996); and Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic,
and Leader, trans. Saadya Sternberg (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press,
2005).
13. See Etkes, The Besht, 113–51. Scholars have noted the similarity between
the Baal Shem Tov’s emphasis on religious ecstasy and the devotional attitudes of
some Christian mystics living in the same region. For a recent study, see Moshe
Idel, “R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov ‘in the State of Walachia’: Widening the Besht’s
Cultural Panorama,” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern
Europe, ed. Glenn Dynner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 69–103.
 Introduction 21

14. Gershom Scholem, “Devekut, or Communion with God,” in The Messi-

anic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken,
1971), 203–27.
15. Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem debated Hasidism’s complicated
relationship to the material world for many years. For a nuanced analysis of this
controversy and an insightful new reading of the Hasidic sources, see Seth Brody,
“ ‘Open to Me the Gates of Righteousness’: The Pursuit of Holiness and Non-Du-
ality in Early Hasidic Teaching,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 89 (1998): 3–44.
16. See, for example, Gershon Hanokh Henikh Leiner of Radzin, Sha’ar
ha-emunah viysod ha-hasidut (Bnei Brak, 1996), 154–55, where this is explicit.
17. Arthur Green, “The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,” Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 45 (1977): 327–47.
18. On ritual efficacy, see Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy”; Moshe Idel, “The Tsa-
dik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism,” Jewish Quarterly Review
103 (2013): 196–240; idem., Hasidism between Ecstasy and Magic; Jonathan Garb,
Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism from Rabbinic Literature to Safedian
Kabbalah [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2004).
19. See Ariel Evan Mayse, Speaking Infinites: God and Language in the
Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2020).
20. For a study of the debate in early Hasidism regarding the ideal form
of spiritual leadership, see Arthur Green, “Around the Maggid’s Table: Tzaddik,
Leadership, and Popularization in the Circle of Dov Baer of Miedzyrzecz,” in
The Heart of the Matter: Studies in Jewish Mysticism and Theology (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 2015), 119–66; and Ariel Evan Mayse, “The Voices of
Moses: Theologies of Revelation in an Early Hasidic Circle,” Harvard Theological
Review 112, no. 1 (2019): 101–25.
21. See Marcin Wodziński, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland:
A History of Conflict (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005).
22. On the emergence of these dynasties, see Nehemia Polen, “Rebbetzins,
Wonder-Children, and the Emergence of the Dynastic Principle in Hasidism,” in
The Shtetl: New Evaluations, ed. S. Katz (New York: New York University Press,
2007), 53–84.
23. See Arthur Green, “Hasidism: Discovery and Retreat,” in The Other
Side of God: A Polarity in World Religions, ed. Peter L. Berger (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1981), 104–30.
24. This point is made with eloquence in Biale et al., Hasidism, esp. 257–90.
25. Ibid.
26. For additional biographical details, see Wodziński (this volume) as
well as Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kal-
man Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1994),
22 Introduction

1–14; Esther Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah, and

Leadership During the Holocaust, trans. Deborah Stern (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav
Kook, 2007), 479–88; Ron Wacks, The Flame of the Holy Fire: Perspectives on the
Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalmish Shapiro of Piaczena (in Hebrew) (Alon
Shevut: Tevunot, 2010), 21–33; Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:13–24; Biale et
al., Hasidism, 614–16, 660–62.
27. According to Grodzisk Mazowiecki birth registry book of 1889, reg-
istration no. 53.
28. Elimelekh Shapiro’s marriage to Hannah Berakhah was his second, so
Kalonymus Kalman Shapira had many siblings on both sides.
29. Shapira’s father was also the great-grandfather of Hayyah Rahel Miriam.
30. See Polen, this volume; idem., The Holy Fire, 6; idem., “Miriam’s Dance:
Radical Egalitarianism in Hasidic Thought,” Modern Judaism 12 (1992): 1–21; and
Uziel Fuchs, “Miriam the Prophetess and the Rebbe’s Wife: The Piaseczner Reb-
be’s Sermons on Miriam the Prophetess” [in Hebrew] Masekhet 3 (2005): 65–76.
31. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:14, 337.
32. Polen, Holy Fire, 6.
33. See Leibel Bein, From the Notebook of a Hassidic Journalist [in Hebrew]
(Jerusalem, 1967), 31–32; Polen, Holy Fire, 160n17; and Sermons from the Years
of Rage, 1:15–16.
34. See Malkah Shapiro, The Rebbe’s Daughter: Memoir of a Hasidic Childhood,
trans. Nehemia Polen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), xxii, 27,
51–52, 152. Regarding Shapira’s violin playing, see Bein, From the Notebook, 30.
Shapira remained in Hopstein’s home until the age of twenty and witnessed him
play every Saturday night, perhaps learning the craft from him. Also see Polen,
Holy Fire, 6; Ya’el Levin, “Ha-Admor she-nigen be-kinor ve-hadal im histalkut
ra’aiyato,” Daf le-tarbut Yehudit 273 (2007): 39.
35. Ibid.; Der Moment, May 27, 1927, 10.
36. See Ha-derekh, Zurich, vol. 6–7 (February-March 1920): 1–3 (Shapira’s
signature on p. 3). He appeared again in Kovets histadruti shel Agudat Yisra’el,
5672–5683 (Vienna: Lishkat ha-merkaz shel Agudat Yisra’el ha-olamit, 1923),
24–32 (Shapira’s signature on p. 29).
37. H.ayyim Frankel and David H.ayyim Zilbershlag, eds., Zikharon Kodesh
le-Ba’al Esh Kodesh (Jerusalem: Va’ad H.asidei Pi’asechna-Grodzhisq, 1994), 15–20;
Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:25–26.
38. Polen, Holy Fire, 12. R. Shapira’s sister-in-law, Hannah Hopstein, the
daughter of Yerahmiel Moshe Hopstein, immigrated to Mandatory Palestine as
a single woman in 1920. She was visiting R. Shapira at the time of the German
invasion. This female pioneer, whose life came to a tragic end, has not yet received
historical attention, and her fascinating journal and letters, which contain enough
material for an excellent historical biography, currently reside in the Kfar Hasidim
archive.
 Introduction 23

39. Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,

s.v. “Warsaw,” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/warsaw.
40. Bein, From the Notebook, 34.
41. Polen, Holy Fire, 7; According to the Yiddish newspaper Forverts,
March 30, 1940.
42. Daniel Reiser, Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2018).
43. Ibid.; Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy”; Reiser, Imagery Techniques.
44. See Idel, this volume and idem., Hasidism between Ecstasy and Magic,
6–9; Old World, New Mirrors, 215–16.
45. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schoken,
1941), 341; for sources in Piaseczno, see Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy.”
46. See, for example, Rachel Elior, The Theory of Divinity in Hasidut Habad
[in Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1982), 178–243; Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating
the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), 180–86; Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism
and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009).
47. This is of course a play on the title of J. L. Austin’s famous essay How
to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).
48. Though almost all of the authors in this volume are dedicated to the study
of a Hasidic textual tradition, this approach would also resonate with studies of
visual culture and certain forms of media studies. See Maya Balakirsky Katz, The
Visual Culture of Chabad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Birgit
Meyer, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2015).
49. See Jonathan M. Elukin, “A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mys-
ticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 135–48.
50. Not incidentally, see Nehemia Polen, “Niggun as Spiritual Practice,
with Special Focus on the Writings of Rabbi Kalonymus Shapiro, the Rebbe of
Piaseczna,” in The Contemporary Uses of Hasidism, ed. Shlomo Zuckier (New
York: Yeshiva University Press, 2020), 261–82.
51. Don Seeman, “Martyrdom, Emotion, and the Work of Ritual: R. Mordecai
Joseph Leiner of Izbica’s Mei Ha-Shiloah,” AJS Review (27): 253–80.
52. See Beit Knesset and Beit Midrash Aish Kodesh, http://www.aishkodesh.
org.il/newsite.
53. Jonathan Garb, “Towards the Study of the Spiritual-Mystical Renaissance
in the Contemporary Ashkenazi Haredi World in Israel,” in Kabbalah and Con-
temporary Spiritual Revival, ed. Boaz Huss (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University
of the Negev Press, 2011), 117–40.
54. See Yair Sheleg, “The Extinguishing and Rekindling of the Holy Fire,”
Haaretz, April 19, 2004, available at https://www.haaretz.com/1.4782199.
24 Introduction

55. See Nehemia Stern, First Flowering of Redemption: An Ethnographic

Account of Contemporary Religious Zionism (PhD diss., Emory University, 2014).
56. See for example Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Kelim shevurim: Torah
ve-tsiyonut-datit bi-svivah post-modernit: Derashot le-mo’ade zemanenu (Efrat,
2003), 134–40.
57. For two examples of Schachter-Shalomi discussing R. Shapira’s leg-
acy and importance, see the following 1997 lectures found in the Zalman M.
Schachter-Shalomi Collection at the University of Colorado Boulder: https://cudl.
colorado.edu/luna/servlet, identifiers RRZ0001S0017 and JRRZ0001S0017N0019.
Examples of Carlebach’s use of R. Shapira’s legacy appear in Magid’s essay in the
present volume.
58. See the discussion of this story in Arthur Green and Ariel Mayse, A
New Hasidism: Roots (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2019), 185–87.
59. See Polen, Holy Fire, x.
60. His lectures have been collected and revised as Moshe Weinberger,
Warmed by the Fire of Aish Kodesh: Torah from the Hilulas of Reb Kalonymus
Kalman Shapira of Piaseczna, ed. Binyomin Wolf (Nanuet, NY: Feldheim, 2015).
61. Barbara Bensoussan, “Rekindling the Flame: Neo-Chassidus Brings the
Inner Light of Torah to Modern Orthodoxy,” Jewish Action, 2014, available at
https://jewishaction.com/religion/jewish-culture/rekindling-flame-neo-chassidus-
brings-inner-light-torah-modern-orthodoxy/. The Yeshiva University affiliated Torah
U-Madda book series will soon publish a volume on Neo-Hasidism primarily in
the Modern Orthodox world.
62. Don Seeman, “The Anxiety of Ethics and the Presence of God,” in A
New Hasidism: Branches, ed. Arthur Green and Ariel Mayse (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 2019), 73–103.
63. See his reflections in James Jacobson-Maisels, “Neo-Hasidic Meditation:
Mindfulness as a Neo-Hasidic Practice,” in A New Hasidism: Branches, ed. Green
and Mayse, 251–70.
64. For the term afterlife in this context, we draw on Samuel Heilman and
Menachem Friedman, The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
65. Charlotte Halle, “Disproportionate Number of Anglos Slain; Olmert
Praises Families’ Dignity,” Haaretz, August 23, 2001, https://www.haaretz.com/
1.5406131, accessed May 18, 2020. See Shaul Magid, “A New History of Holy Fire,”
Tablet Magazine, Feb. 3, 2019, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/
a-new-history-of-holy-fire.
66. See Tamar El-Or and Gideon Aran, “Giving Birth to a Settlement:
Maternal Thinking and Political Action of Jewish Women in the West Bank,”
in Perspectives on Israeli Anthropology, ed. Esther Hertzog et al. (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2009), 316–31.
 Introduction 25

67. See https://www.facebook.com/groups/481394495537008/permalink/763

210847355370/.
68. Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955), xii–xiii. See Wis-
kind, this volume.
69. Rashi on Exodus 8:9. Perushei Rashi al-hatorah, edited by Harav Hayyim
Dov Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1986), 191. Also see Rashi’s glosses
to Genesis 33:20 and Shabbat 88b s.v. mah patish.
 Part I

Hasidism and Renewal

 1

The Place of Piety

Piaseczno in the Landscape of Polish Hasidism

Marcin Wodziński

Academic studies of Hasidism too often focus on the life, ideas, and
doctrines of great personalities and assume a kind of natural correspon-
dence between the intellectual achievements of Hasidic leaders (tsad-
dikim) and their social impact. This error is not unique to Jewish and
Hasidic studies but may be exacerbated by the continuing influence of
traditional yeshiva-style scholarship on academic research. At the same
time, the rapid development of academic Jewish studies and its embrace
of modern methodologies recapitulated the fascination with a privileged
corpus of texts and their mostly elite male interpreters, at the expense of
other concerns. The problem is especially egregious in Hasidic studies,
which has not until recently paid much attention to the hundreds and
thousands of rank-and-file Hasidic followers, focusing instead on the life
and, especially, the ideas of the tsaddikim. Historians have all too often
tended to forget about the vast majority of Hasidim, who lived outside of
the Hasidic courts in countless townlets of eastern and east-central Europe.1
The case of the Piaseczner Rebbe, R. Kalonymus Kalman Sha-
pira of Piaseczno, is no different in this regard. While there has been
impressive progress in the study of the doctrine and teaching of the
Piaseczner Rebbe, this very volume being the most impressive proof of
this development, there has been no comparable progress in research

29
30 Marcin Wodziński

on his social context and significance during his own lifetime. We

know surprisingly little about the scale of this tsaddik’s social influence
or the demographic characteristics and geographical distribution of his
followers. How many followers did he have? Where did they live? What
was their socioeconomic profile? How was the Hasidism of Piaseczno
positioned with respect to other contemporary Hasidic or non-Hasidic
groups? To what degree was Piaseczno representative—or atypical—of
interwar Hasidism in Poland?
In this introductory essay, I have neither the intention nor the
ability to respond to all of these major questions. Instead, I will focus on
outlining the essential contextual characteristics of the Hasidic presence
in Piaseczno and how it might have influenced R. Shapira’s activities, or,
to put it another way, the extent to which R. Shapira’s activities can be
understood as representative of wider trends characterizing the Jewish
community of interwar Poland. We will need to understand something
about the size and influence of Piaseczno Hasidism (i.e., the followers
of the Piaseczner Rebbe) and what these features can tell us about the
rebbe and his teaching. My observations will of necessity be somewhat
preliminary, as we are only at the beginning of this type of research into
Piaseczno and other Hasidic groups.

Hasidism in Piaseczno

The town of Piaseczno was established in the thirteenth century as a

rural settlement. It received municipal charter in 1429 and started to
develop as a minor commercial center. The process was relatively slow,
as Piaseczno was, like many such settlements, repeatedly destroyed by
wars and fires, including the Polish-Swedish war of the mid-seventeenth
century and then the series of wars and uprisings that took place at the
end of the eighteenth century. At that time, about five hundred people
lived in the town.
It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that Jews appeared
in Piaseczno, since the town had previously enjoyed the right to exclude
Jewish residents. Of a population of 565 people in 1808, only 26 (5 per-
cent) were Jews. In the years following, the proportion of Jews in the town
grew rapidly, reaching 515 people, or 42 percent of the total population, in
1857.2 At that time, Piaseczno was not treated as an independent Jewish
 The Place of Piety 31

community but only as a filial branch of the kahal in nearby Nadarzyn.

Despite its constant efforts to gain communal independence, the Jewish
community of Piaseczno maintained its status as the filial extension of
Nadarzyn until the end of the nineteenth century.3
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Hasidim had become an
increasingly visible segment of the Jewish community and influenced
the flavor of religious life in the town. When the Polish government
introduced a ban on “Jewish attire” in the 1840s, the Hasidim in Pia-
seczno expressed strong opposition to the new law. Piaseczno had the
third-highest number of people seeking legal exemptions to the ban in
the whole province of Mazovia; it was surpassed only by the Hasidic
strongholds of Amshinov (Mszczonów) and Vorke (Warka).4 This is an
indirect but suggestive indication of the relative strength of the town’s
traditionalist community, including Hasidim. In addition, the ten kvitlekh
(petitionary notes) delivered by Piaseczno Jews to rabbi and semi-tsaddik
R. Eliyahu Guttmacher of Graydits (Grodzisk Wielkopolski; 1795–1874)
indicate a relatively high interest in Hasidic forms of religious life in
Piaseczno.5 Likewise, Jewish ethnological materials collected in Piaseczno
at the beginning of the twentieth century testify to rich Hasidic traditions
and bear witness to the strong cultural influence of popular Hasidic folk
culture in the town.6
The growth of Hasidism was not, of course, uncontested. One
non-Hasidic Jew complained that “in the good old times, Jews would
gather in the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) early
in the day and stay there until the afternoon. Now, on such holy days, the
Hasidim smoke their pipes till eight or nine in the morning, and when
they finally arrive [at the synagogue], they are done with their prayers in
an hour.”7 A report by missionaries from the London Society for Promoting
Christianity amongst the Jews, which was active in Poland, reported on
significant conflicts over the rise of Hasidism in the town:

In the town here, there exist two parties, the Hasidim and
the so-called mitnagdim, that is, the opponents of the former,
and they continually argue with each other. The former group
has its own rabbi, and they want him to be recognized in his
office by the rest of the Jews. Others brought a different rabbi,
closer to their way of thinking, and they demanded that he be
recognized as the town rabbi, while they persecute the other
32 Marcin Wodziński

one. The anger between these two sides supposedly reached

such a level of hostility that . . . the supporters of both parties
had a regular fistfight in the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, for
when one party demanded that their rabbi deliver a sermon,
the others shouted that their rabbi should do it instead.8

This picture is fairly typical for a town in which, having already gained at
least relative institutional and financial autonomy, the Hasidim sought to
increase their social power by exercising decision-making authority over
communal institutions.9
It is true that Hasidim had been appointed to rabbinical positions
since the earliest stages of the movement, but in earlier periods these
appointments were more frequently made on the basis of other criteria,
such as Talmudic knowledge, ties with influential families in a town, or
willingness to accept a position in a small town with little remuneration.
Appointments to the rabbinate became a subject of political controversy
only when local Hasidic communities proposed their own candidates
despite doubts regarding those candidates’ suitability for the post, or when
they opposed the non-Hasidic candidate only because of his views on
Hasidism. This only happened in situations in which the Hasidic group
felt strong enough to impose its views despite the lack of community
consensus, which was apparently the case in Piaseczno by the middle of
the nineteenth century.
Hasidim had many reasons for showing interest in the appointment of
communal rabbis, including, of course, the opportunity to spread Hasidic
values and thereby influence community norms. A second reason was
financial: rabbis received a salary from the communal budget, and even
if this remuneration was modest, it would typically be supplemented by
extra income for performing religious ceremonies. During the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, many tsaddikim found that their income
from donations by their immediate followers was insufficient, so they
had to seek other sources of income.10 Several Hasidic leaders, such as R.
Henokh Lewin of Aleksandrów (Alexander), became rabbis only in the
wake of bankruptcy following a business failure.11 Financial need, decreasing
numbers of followers due to secularization, and a sense of institutional
crisis may all have been reasons that someone like R. Kalonymus Shapira
would seek recognition as a communal rabbi during the first half of the
twentieth century.
 The Place of Piety 33

Tsaddikim in and of Piaseczno

Despite the significant development of its Hasidic community, nine-

teenth-century Piaseczno remained only a provincial center of the Hasidic
movement. The strongest local group consisted of followers of the tsaddik
of Grodzisk (father of the Piaseczner Rebbe),12 but despite significant local
influence, the town’s Hasidic community never had the importance of
those of neighboring towns such as Ger (Góra Kalwaria) and Amshinov
(Mszczonów). It was only with the appearance of charismatic Hasidic
leaders in the early twentieth century that this situation began to change.
It seems that the first Hasidic leader to settle in Piaseczno was R.
Israel Yitzhak Kalisz, son of the tsaddik Simhah Bunim Kalisz of Otwock
(Warka-Otwock dynasty). R. Kalisz came to Piaseczno around 1907 and
became a local tsaddik there, combining this function with serving as
tsaddik in Otwock. This was, however, only a short-lived leadership, as
R. Kalisz does not seem to have spent World War I in Piaseczno, and he
died in a typhus epidemic at the age of thirty-six, soon after the war.13
Another member of a prominent Polish Hasidic dynasty, R. Meir Israel
Rabinowicz of the Przysucha dynasty, son of the tsaddik of Szydłowiec,
Tsemah Rabinowicz, arrived in Piaseczno around 1909. After marrying
a daughter of prominent Ger Hasid and communal Rabbi of Piaseczno
Noah Sekewnik (1893–1913), R. Meir Israel also soon began to act as
a tsaddik. While not much is known about his particular activities, we
can assume that he acted like all other tsaddikim, leading a small group
of followers, providing spiritual guidance, arranging festive gatherings,
accepting petitions with requests for help, and so on. He continued in
this vein until his death, in 1926, after which the dynasty was continued
by his son, R. Ya’akov Rabinowicz. This brief dynasty was extinguished
when R. Ya’akov was murdered, along with his whole family, during the
Holocaust.14
This is the crowded field in which R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira
(1889–1943) emerged as one of three tsaddikim simultaneously active in
Piaseczno. He was the son of tsaddik Elimelekh Shapira of Grodzisk, an
offshoot of the Mogielnica-Kozienice dynasty. R. Shapira began his activities
as a tsaddik in 1909 and became communal rabbi in 1913, after the death
of the previous occupant of the position, R. Noah Sekewnik. This may not
have been a very prestigious position. Yekhiel Yeshaia Trunk writes that
Piaseczno replaced Chełm in Polish-Jewish folklore as the embodiment of
34 Marcin Wodziński

batlonut, or idleness. The previous rabbi had even been made a popular
laughingstock as the new incarnation of the well-known joke about the
foolish “wise man of Chełm.”15 So it may not be entirely surprising that
soon after rising to the position of communal rabbi, R. Shapira left Pia-
seczno. He moved to Warsaw toward the end of World War I and never
returned to Piaseczno for permanent settlement, although he continued
to own property there and to visit occasionally.16 Though his writings,
and especially his Holocaust sermons, made R. Shapira retrospectively
the most important tsaddik associated with Piaseczno, he does not seem
to have been considered the most important Hasidic figure to live there
during his lifetime. Though sometimes referred to nostalgically as “the
Rebbe of Piaseczno,” it is probably more accurate to refer to him as a
rebbe in Piaseczno.
R. Shapira’s relocation to Warsaw during World War I should also be
viewed in the context of a much wider “metropolitization” of Hasidic lead-
ership around that time. It is significant, however, that even after his move
to Warsaw, he continued to be identified with Piaseczno. Attachment to the
name of an originary town in the branding of different Hasidic groups was
a relatively new phenomenon. In nineteenth-century Poland, a tsaddik of
Vorke (Warka), Simhah Bunim Kalisz of Vorke (1851–1907), who moved
to Otwock, simply became the tsaddik of Otwock, and his followers were
then the Otwock Hasidim rather than Hasidim of Vorke. As late as the
beginning of the twentieth century, a tsaddik who settled in Boston could
start a dynasty that came to be known by the name of that city. It was only
around World War I that the dislocation of tsaddikim from small towns
to large cities led to a certain tension or competition over the “branding”
afforded by declarative connection to the seats of “traditional” dynasties. A
tsaddik such as R. Shapira, who had once lived in Piaseczno but moved to
Warsaw, could hardly become the “Warsawer Rebbe” alongside thirty other
such tsaddikim in similar circumstances. Rabbi Shapira was one of those
who heralded the change to a system wherein dislocated tsaddikim retained
the authority and aura of tradition associated with their towns of origin.
Today, some of the greatest conflicts in the Hasidic world revolve around
who is entitled to retain the name of an ancestral dynasty.17

Piaseczno in Warsaw

The scale and consequence of Jewish and Hasidic resettlement during

and after the war were incommensurate with anything that had come
 The Place of Piety 35

before. For example, while around fifteen thousand Jews had left Galicia
every year before World War I, some four hundred thousand Jews, or
half the Jewish population, left the province during the first year of the
war alone. The effects of this relocation on all aspects of Hasidic life were
considerable.18 Increasing urbanization of both Hasidim and their leaders
was one of the dramatic consequences of these mass dislocations, and R.
Shapira’s case is exemplary.19 The Piaseczner Rebbe’s life provides a clear
expression of this pivotal phenomenon and is, in fact, the best example
of the far-reaching consequences it had on the entire Hasidic movement
in interwar Poland.
While many rank and file Hasidim were present in big cities by the
nineteenth century, the tsaddikim by and large were not. Until the end of
the nineteenth century, those tsaddikim who had settled in large towns,
such as Czernowitz and Kraków, represented isolated and exceptional
cases.20 Until 1914, semi-urban small towns were clearly the settlements
of choice for Hasidic leaders. The outbreak of World War I changed this
situation drastically. First the panic-ridden escape from the battle zone
and the atrocities of the war, then the burdens of military occupation,
economic difficulties, and growing danger inclined an ever-growing number
of tsaddikim to move to the urban centers of eastern and central Europe,
especially Warsaw and Vienna. We do not have exact numbers, but it is
quite clear that the phenomenon reached mass proportions. Twenty-six
tsaddikim were living permanently in Warsaw alone during the interwar
years, and most of them had settled there during the war, R. Shapira
among them.21
Life in a large city was safer; it could also be more comfortable. As
Ita Kalish, the daughter of the tsaddik of Otwock, recalled: “The war had
lasted longer than had been expected. Jews began gradually to leave their
old-established homes in towns and villages and to flock to the capital of
Poland [Warsaw] in the hope of greater security and peace, and where
they hoped to find shelter from the common enemy, i.e., hunger, and
from the specifically Jewish fate, i.e., pogroms, expulsions, persecution.”22
For many tsaddikim, a move to the big city was an economic necessity.23
As Pinhas Tsitron explained in his reminiscences of Kielce: “During the
war, travel was restricted and the income of the tsaddikim suffered as a
result; therefore, they moved to the large cities, which had major concen-
trations of Jews. In the large cities, there was greater personal security,
as well as more readily available income.”24 However, economic success
in a large city was not guaranteed, and metropolitan life brought prob-
lems of its own. For one thing, city life often meant a radical change in
36 Marcin Wodziński

the status of Hasidic leaders. Before the Great War, Hasidim who lived
in modern cities were able to look to the Rebbe’s small-town court as a
sinecure of the premodern world that they had left behind, suffused in
their imagination with the moral values of tradition.25 Indeed, at a time
of dramatic modernizing, urbanizing, and industrial change, small-town
courts provided ideological frames of reference for big-city Hasidim.
As political struggles swept the Jewish world, these courts continued to
function as bastions against modernity.26 The flight to the big cities meant
that Hasidim were deprived of an important moral touchstone, in which
the tsaddik had often been a dominating personality and his court the
most important social institution.
Tsaddikim in a large city had to adapt to the conditions of big-city life,
which included openly and ostentatiously changing their relationship with
the communities they led.27 It suffices to recall that the visit of the tsaddik
to a small town was always a great cultural/social event that attracted the
attention not only of the Hasidim but of the whole town, including the
mitnagdim (traditionalist opponents of Hasidism), the maskilim (“enlight-
ened” Jews), and even Christians.28 It was different in a large city: several
different tsaddikim might live permanently within walking distance and
be available to Hasidim on a daily basis. The status difference between
a tsaddik and a Hasid was no longer so overt, for they lived in very
similar conditions in the same environment, rubbing shoulders with one
another.29 One consequence of this new social arrangement was what might
be called “à la carte Hasidism,” namely, the sampling of different courts
by young Hasidim who spent different festivals with different tsaddikim
depending on individual taste or, indeed, on the way different tsaddikim
enacted different elements of Hasidic ritual (see Seeman, this volume).30
One such “à la carte Hasid” who attended the Piaseczno shtibl
(prayer house) in Radom in the 1930s recalled that on various occa-
sions he would visit various tsaddikim and would not feel particularly
attached to “his” tsaddik, R. Kalonymus Shapira. Why? Simply because
R. Yosele of Wierzbnik would hold especially joyous Sabbaths, R. Arele
of Kozienice had an attractive tish (table celebration), R. Shaul Yedidiah
Taub of Modzhits was especially talented musically, and so on. At the
same time, he would not go to R. Yitzhak Zelig of Sokołów, whom he
considered too rationalistic, or R. Meir Shalom of Parysów, who was too
young.31 Equally unstable and inconsequential was his own identification
with the shtibl of Piaseczno. He attended this prayer house, as he later
recalled, without any particular emotional or ideological attachment to
 The Place of Piety 37

the Piaseczner Rebbe. In fact, his father (who was not a Hasid) moved
from the communal beit midrash (study hall) to pray in the Piaseczno
shtibl only because the beit midrash was too noisy, while the shtibl was
quiet and supportive of intensive studies. Several other people attending
the shtibl were equally non-Hasidic.32
Although such behavior, reflecting perhaps a hybrid religious identifi-
cation, had already been present in earlier Hasidism,33 urbanization during
World War I meant that this phenomenon became more widespread and
its effects deeper. The long-term consequence was an overall weakening of
institutional bonds and, often, of identification with Hasidism. I have no
doubt that many of the interwar activities of the Piaseczner Rebbe were
in direct response to the sense of crisis brought on by this new reality. I
will return to this issue in the closing section of this chapter.

Piaseczno in Hasidism

It is not easy to measure the size of Hasidic groups; we have no mem-

bership lists for different groups before the end of the twentieth century.
Elsewhere, I suggested that an optimal substitute for such records would
be the list of all the Hasidic prayer houses, or shtiblekh (sing. shtibl), in a
given region.34 Shtiblekh were usually associated with a particular tsaddik
and were the basic institution through which tsaddikim could maintain
links between their “court” and their followers in the provinces. Unlike
spontaneous prayer groups, the shtibl was a relatively stable institution with
a well-developed social structure and extensive membership requiring a
material infrastructure and economic backing. This means that the shtibl
is a reliable gauge of the relatively well-developed and enduring influence
of Hasidism. At the same time, the shtibl was a small enough institution
to reflect even minute divisions between Hasidic groups and is thus a rel-
atively accurate instrument. For both these reasons, shtiblekh are the best
basis for analysis of a great many phenomena, including the intra-Hasidic
hierarchy of influence and the distinctive ethos of each leader and group.
My analysis here is based on a database of 2,854 shtiblekh in Eastern
Europe from the end of the nineteenth century through the 1930s, most
of them from the interwar period, which was the time of R. Shapira’s
activity. Although the list is far from complete, it appears to be repre-
sentative enough, at least for some regions.35 Most important, it is highly
representative for central Poland (former Congress Poland, or Russian
38 Marcin Wodziński

Poland) and thus allows for a good estimation of the influence of the
Piaseczner Rebbe, whose influence was extended throughout this area.
Out of 2,854 shtiblekh known to us, only seven claimed allegiance to
R. Shapira, six of them in central Poland and one just outside, in Kraków
(former Galicia). This means that the Hasidim of Piaseczno made up only
0.2 percent of all the east European shtiblekh. Even in central Poland,
there were twenty-six groups larger than Piaseczno, which had only
0.5 percent of the shtiblekh in the province. By comparison, the largest
group in the area, Ger (Góra Kalwaria), had 294 shtiblekh, or 24 percent
of all the shtiblekh in central Poland; Aleksander (Aleksandrów) had 165
shtiblekh (13 percent); and Kock had seventy-four (6 percent).36 Among
the groups larger than Piaseczno, some were as small, unknown, and
relatively insignificant as Kromołów (twelve shtiblekh), Parczew (nine),
and Kołbiel (eight). Even within his family, R. Kalonymus Shapira did
not hold any significant position. His brother, the tsaddik of Grodzisk, R.
Israel Shapira, could boast as many as twenty-seven shtiblekh, or 2 percent
of the shtiblekh in central Poland. Other family-related groups included
Kozienice (sixteen) and Chęciny (twelve), also significantly larger than
Piaseczno. Groups of the same size as Piaseczno included, among others,
Rozprza, Pilov (Puławy), Kałuszyn, Pilica, Pińczów, Zwoleń, and Żarki.
Even if a few shtiblekh of Piaseczno Hasidim were not recorded,
it is unlikely that this would change the picture in any significant way.
Anecdotal evidence about shtiblekh of the Piaseczno Hasidim indicates that
they were never numerous and were hardly among the most important
Hasidic institutions of their towns. Interesting material can be found, for
example, in memorial books, a collection of over seven hundred volumes
produced after 1945. These volumes describe Jewish life in hundreds of
towns and villages of eastern Europe before the Holocaust as recalled by
their former Jewish inhabitants.37 The memorial books of Gritsah (Gró-
jec), Radom, and Żyrardów, for example, explicitly position the shtiblekh
of Piaseczno among the minor Hasidic groups with no wider influence
in their respective towns.38 It is only in Kielce that the activities of the
Piaseczno shtibl garnered some interest, but this was because of the sur-
prising political activity of the group there.39
Other supplementary materials support this picture. Among 1,022
Hasidic groups mentioned in the collection of 611 in-depth interviews
in the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazi Jewry, part of which also
deals with Hasidism and prayer rooms in 611 locations, Piaseczno Hasidim
are mentioned only once, in Warka.40 This emphatically confirms that in
 The Place of Piety 39

terms of social impact, the Hasidic group of the followers of the tsaddik
of Piaseczno was relatively small and insignificant.

Small Is Beautiful

At the same time, it should be emphasized that the existence of only a

small number of shtiblekh did not necessarily indicate failure. The differ-
ences between the small courts and the large ones should not necessarily
be seen as a result of lesser or greater success but as an expression of
different leadership models. Many “small” courts could and did compete
successfully with more dominant groups but did not wish to extend the
area of their influence beyond a small circle of one or two districts. The
Galician court of Bluzev (Błażowa), for example, had in total just as many
shtiblekh as well-known Bobowa (Bobov), but they were all concentrated
in a very small area around Rzeszów, where the Bluzever Hasidim were
the dominant group—perhaps surprisingly for those who never heard of
the Bluzever Rebbe, Tsevi Elimelekh Shapira.41 Similarly, among the twen-
ty-three shtiblekh in the Garwolin district, the largest number belonged to
the local court in Parysów, while in Będzin district (forty-eight shtiblekh),
the regional Radomsko and Kromołów courts successfully competed with
Ger for dominance. Why was this so?
The dominant courts, where the tsaddikim exerted mass leadership,
attracted tens of thousands of followers, which gave the group power and
was a source of pride and group identity. The inevitable cost, however,
was that contact between these tsaddikim and the overwhelming majority
of the Hasidim visiting them had to be minimal.42 Among the thousands
of followers of the tsaddikim of Ger or Bełz, a large majority never spent
more than a few holy days at their courts (always in the company of
thousands of other faithful), never studied with them, and rarely had any
more meaningful personal contact. Such tsaddikim did not know most of
their followers, or knew them only superficially.43
In smaller groups, by contrast, in which shtiblekh lay close to the
court of the tsaddik, almost every Hasid was able to reach his rebbe’s court
many times a year, remaining in close, intimate contact with his spiritual
leader. Numerous memoirs emphasize precisely this type of interpersonal
relationship—radically different from that at more dominant courts—and
point to the warm, intimate atmosphere of small Hasidic groups.44 The
tsaddik of Pińczów (six shtiblekh) made a point of knowing all his Hasidim
40 Marcin Wodziński

well and of having an intimate atmosphere at his court, while the minor
tsaddik of Sasów (seven shtiblekh) was renowned for “remembering [even]
the names of his Hasidim who came to him only rarely.”45
Piaseczno belonged, no doubt, to this latter category of small, inti-
mate groups, and it seems that R. Shapira consciously aimed to create
a small circle of intensive fellowship, as was expressed in his first book
Benei mahshavah tovah (see Leshem, this volume), which was dedicated
to the development of Hasidic confraternities. What is more, the Pias-
eczno shtiblekh were nearly all located in close proximity to the court in
Piaseczno (and then in Warsaw), namely in Grójec, Kielce, Piaseczno,
Radom, Warsaw, and Żyrardów. The median distance between the court
and the shtiblekh was only forty-five kilometers, a typical distance for
minor local courts, such as Kromołów, Kołbiel, or Chęciny. This is an
important parameter, as there were also relatively small groups of Hasidim
between the wars with high or extremely high median distances, which is
characteristic of alternative models of territorial expansion. The tsaddik
of Ostrowiec (median distance 165 kilometers), for example, applied an
alternative leadership model in which his position was based not on an
intimate relationship with the nearest Hasidim but rather on his fame as a
scholar and mystic.46 Similarly, the followers of a lesser tsaddik of Kapust
(Kopyś; nine shtiblekh) were dispersed over hundreds of kilometers, with
a median distance of 325 kilometers.
Given the extensive interest in R. Shapira and his teachings today
(see Idel, Seeman, this volume), it is noteworthy that he seems not to
have been particularly influential during his own lifetime as measured
by the number of shtiblekh and followers. His network of shtiblekh was
highly localized and his social influence, by this measure, surprisingly
meager, especially when compared with the most powerful tsaddikim of
his generation. To the extent that his writings or educational activities
were significant (more on this below), this significance does not seem—
according to the evidence we possess—to have translated into the social
structures of traditional Hasidic institutions such as shtiblekh, Hasidic
groups, and communal politics.

Limitations

There are some inherent limitations to the conclusions one can draw
from the kinds of data I have presented here. R. Shapira would have had
difficulty establishing new shtiblekh between the wars for demographic
 The Place of Piety 41

and circumstantial reasons unrelated to his relative skill or charisma.

World War I was accompanied by mass destruction and dislocation of
the Jewish community in Poland. Almost half of the Jewish population
left Galicia in the first two years of the war. Thousands of Jews in central
Poland were “evacuated” into the Russian interior, while many others were
relocated within central Poland and lost their social and economic base.
The social and spatial network of Hasidic communities was shattered in
vast areas of eastern Europe. Countless synagogues, batei midrash, and
prayer houses were destroyed. It was increasingly difficult under these
conditions to find a coherent network of supporters located in one place
for the creation of a shtibl.
According to contemporary testimonies, the proportion of Hasidim
among Polish Jews seems to have decreased to as little as 20 percent
during this period, an effect that was even more pronounced in large
cities. According to one of the chroniclers, “The Hasidic movement was
not very popular between the wars. Barely a trace of its former presence
was left.”47 This decline was quite rapid; Hasidism had been the dominant
social force in many areas of eastern Europe before the war.48 This helps
to explain the widespread sense of crisis in the Hasidic world at that time.
No matter how skilled or charismatic their leaders, emerging groups such
as Piaseczno would have had little chance to catch up with long-existing
groups whose surviving shtiblekh dated from the nineteenth century.
Given these realities, interbellum communities necessarily lacked
some of the homogeneity and coherence of their prewar predecessors,
contributing to the rise of “à la carte Hasidism” even among the remain-
ing faithful. Many urban Hasidim were no longer devoted to a single
shtibl or group, and many participants in the shtiblekh were now actually
non-Hasidim. These were, of course, related phenomena. “Hasidim and
half-Hasidim, followers of Mizrahi [a religious Zionist party], and follow-
ers of Agudah [an Orthodox party],” writes one observer, “were able to
pray side by side.”49 It became easier for Piaseczno Hasidim to pray with
other groups and simultaneously more common to attract congregants
who were only loosely affiliated to the group with whom a given shtibl
was identified. Taken together, the postwar demographic shift, the crisis
of Hasidism in general, and the rise of “à la carte Hasidism” make social
historical measures such as “number of shtiblekh” or median distance
from the dwelling place of the tsaddik less illustrative than when they
were applied to Hasidic groups of one or two generations earlier. More
important, these factors also help to explain the social limitations new
Hasidic groups and their leaders, such as R. Shapira, had to face while
42 Marcin Wodziński

trying to develop their social visibility at the time of the Great War and
in its aftermath. These factors do not just represent a methodological
limitation to my study, in other words, but also illustrate difficulties in
public activity that R. Shapira and others had to face.
At the same time, we should not overlook the new avenues for
success that opened up for twentieth-century Hasidim. We must consider,
for example, the undeniable influence of the Da’at Moshe yeshiva that R.
Shapira founded in 1923. At the peak of its popularity, more than three
hundred students would study there.50 It was, in fact, the second-largest
yeshiva in Warsaw, superseded only by the yeshiva of the Ger Hasidim.51
This was a novel and potentially ambivalent development. Shaul Stampfer
has shown that Hasidim were resistant to the idea of yeshiva education
throughout the nineteenth century. Only a small number of Hasidic
yeshivot were in existence by the end of the nineteenth century, and all
of these were closed during World War I. It was only when several of the
yeshivot reopened and experienced a rich regrowth after the war that the
idea of yeshiva education for Hasidic youth really took hold.52
For the Hasidic world, this represented a radically new situation, in
which a rosh yeshivah (head of school) became an alternate and possibly
subversive source of authority to the tsaddik and his dynasty. In the late
twentieth century, this fragmentation of power indeed resulted in several
heads of yeshivot challenging the traditional father-to-son succession of
Hasidic leadership.53 Although this was not yet the case in R. Shapira’s
day, R. Shapira clearly derived social influence from his role as one of the
more successful Hasidic educators and the head of a sizable yeshiva. Evi-
dence includes the position he was given at various rabbinical gatherings,
fundraising campaigns organized on behalf of his yeshiva, and attention
given to him by the Jewish media.54 The Warsaw-based middle-class
daily Unzer Leben, co-edited by Elchanan Zeitlin and Lazar Kahn, paid
disproportionate attention to the activities of R. Shapira and his yeshiva.
Thus, even though R. Shapira did not have a large number of full-fledged
followers or shtiblekh, he does seem to have gained influence beyond what
might have been expected for a traditional leader of a relatively small
Hasidic group.

Toward Counter-Reformation

Given these realities, what can we say about the impact of the social,
cultural, and political context on the shape and activities of interbellum
 The Place of Piety 43

Hasidic communities, including Piaseczno? How can we accurately distin-

guish Hasidic life during this period from its golden age in the nineteenth
century? And how can this context help us to better understand R. Shapira
himself, his life, ideas, and activities?
As we have seen, the crisis unleashed by World War I had demo-
graphic, material/economic, and ideological dimensions. The loosening of
social norms, a growing tolerance for hybrid positions, limited loyalty, and
behavior teetering on the border between the Hasidic and secular worlds
all became possible and even widespread, with increasing numbers of
“cold Hasidim,” “half-Hasidim,” Hasidim who did not visit their tsaddik,
and Hasidim who adopted an “à la carte” attitude.55 Many of the writings
and activities of the Piaseczner Rebbe may be seen as responding to these
phenomena and to increasingly fluid forms of social identification (See-
man, this volume). His call for creating Hasidic confraternities that would
revitalize participation in the Hasidic group by recalling the “founding
fathers” of the movement is just one example. As Leshem (this volume)
emphasizes, “it is important to understand that his work [of planning the
fraternities] was related to the deterioration of the Hasidic movement.”
By this call to “return to the sources,” R. Shapira and some other
contemporary leaders both diagnosed the crisis and attempted to resolve
it (see Evan-Mayse, this volume). This might even be described as a kind
of Hasidic “counter-reformation,” as it bears numerous parallels to the
paradigmatic case of an organized, militant—and successful—response to
the crisis of a once-dominant religious formation.56 Sometimes this took
the form of political activism meant to protect or revitalize the community.
Political activity had already constituted a form of Hasidism’s engage-
ment with modernity in the nineteenth century, with several tsaddikim
active as political intercessors as early as the 1820s.57 But it was only in
the interwar period that Hasidism entered the stage of mass electoral
politics, with thousands of followers involved in political activism and
tsaddikim as party leaders. R. Shapira became involved in the Agudat
Yisrael party, but some of his Hasidim made other choices. In Warsaw
in 1936, Piaseczno Hasidim, together with the followers of the tsaddikim
of Sokołów, Parysów, and Radzymin, formed an anti-Agudah block.58 In
Kielce, a group of Piaseczno Hasidim led by Hillel Oberman, together
with Aleksander, Radomsk, and Chęciny Hasidim, supported Mizrahi
(the religious Zionists) against Agudat Yisrael and Ger.59 The specifics of
political affiliation are less important for our purposes than the fact of
heightened involvement in mass political organizations as an attempt at
revival under modern conditions. R. Shapira also participated in various
44 Marcin Wodziński

attempts to create new institutional frameworks, including political or

professional organizations.60
More centrally, the core of the “Hasidic counter-reformation” was
educational: a defensive attempt to strengthen Hasidic self-awareness,
especially among young people, while urging more effective resistance to
secularizing tendencies. The tsaddik of Bobowa, R. Ben-Zion Halberstam,
voiced a powerful call for this sort of cultural resistance and succeeded
in recruiting numerous young followers to the network of yeshivot he
established.61 Similar work was carried out by tsaddikim of Radomsko, Ger,
and Aleksander.62 R. Shapira was also deeply involved in this educational
mission. His first such enterprise, the publication of his pamphlet Benei
mahshavah tovah, describing his plan to recruit secret Hasidic fraternities,
turned out to be a failure (at least by his own estimation), but it none-
theless testifies to his attempt to create new forms of engagement among
highly committed young cadres of Hasidim. As mentioned above, his next
major project, the Da’at Moshe yeshiva, turned out to be a major success.
The spread of such Hasidic yeshivot in Poland between the wars can be
compared to the Counter-Reformation efforts of Jesuit and Piarist schools
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.63 As in Counter-Reformation
Catholicism, a network of schools aimed at shaping groups of future elites
turned out to be the key tool for responding to crisis. Da’at Moshe was
certainly part of this educational vanguard.
The success of R. Shapira’s new school was accompanied by the
educational tracts and weekly sermons that he not only delivered on a
regular basis but also prepared for publication. There was nothing new
about the publication of Hasidic sermons, to be sure, but unlike his
predecessors, R. Shapira wrote these sermons with a clear diagnosis of
acute crisis and a goal of renewing the very fabric of Hasidic community.
As Ora Wiskind-Elper has noted (this volume), “Shapira’s promotion of
books here can be seen as the call of the hour. The old Hasidic world is
gone forever; communities have been uprooted, their faithful scattered
to the winds.” Renewal required a radical revaluation of old strategies.
“Despite everything,” she writes, “a living encounter with the tsaddikim,
a rebbe, a spiritual mentor, is still possible—now, paradoxically, through
the written word. This, to be sure, is a revision of traditional values suited
to the modern condition.”64 Traditional magical and miracle-working
elements of Hasidic life had been reduced (see Idel, this volume), while
new forms of spiritual leadership, mediated by modern print media and
formal educational institutions, came to the fore.65
 The Place of Piety 45

The new Hasidic community that R. Shapira envisioned was to be

deeply self-conscious, spiritually developed, well organized, and clearly
focused on long-term goals and objectives. If we want to view him from
the standpoint of later social and intellectual trends, I would argue that
he was as much the forerunner of Neo-Hasidism (see Idel, this volume)
as he was part of the “counter-reformation” turn toward contemporary
Hasidic fundamentalism. This is evidenced by his focus on institutional
aspects of new forms of Hasidic community (fraternity, yeshiva, publi-
cations as a form of virtual community), his political involvement, his
educational activities, and his communal vision. R. Shapira developed an
“antimodernist modernity” through the use of modern tools in defense
of premodern values and modes of life, a turn that eventually gave rise
to the Hasidism we know today.

Conclusions

Though he was neither the most important tsaddik of his time nor even
the only tsaddik active in the insignificant town of Piaseczno, R. Shapira
distinguished himself through his penetrating diagnosis of the crisis in the
Hasidic community and his tireless efforts toward revival. In this sense,
his ideas and activities heralded what later Hasidic leaders would attempt:
institutional revival and self-organization, a new emphasis on education
and political activism, the creation of virtual community via effective use
of mass media, and spiritual awakening. He also provides a representative
example of the new emerging form of Hasidic leadership, which was based
not only on a core group of followers but, increasingly, on the educational
authority of the head of the yeshiva. It seems right, therefore, that his
innovative writings have increasingly become the focus of both scholarly
and popular interest. In this sense, R. Shapira is a fascinating example of
a minor tsaddik but a major Hasidic innovator, who long after his death
became one of the most prominent figures of Polish Hasidism.66

Notes

I am most grateful to the editors of this volume, Don Seeman, Ariel Evan Mayse,
and Daniel Reiser, for their kind offer to include my contribution to this volume,
then their patience, and finally, their outstanding work on making this piece
46 Marcin Wodziński

r­ eadable. I also immensely appreciate their many queries, comments, and critiques,
which allowed me to sharpen and clarify the article and its thesis.
1. My programmatic introduction to the anti-elitist, egalitarian study of
Hasidism is to be found in Marcin Wodziński, Hasidism: Key Questions (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2018), xxi–xxxi; much of this essay is based on ideas and
interpretations offered in this volume. For an overview of the state of research
on Hasidism more generally, see the bibliographical essays in David Biale et al.,
Hasidism: A New History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 813–46;
David Biale, “Hasidism,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies, ed. Naomi
Seidman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Moshe Rosman, “Changing
the Narrative of the History of Hasidism,” in Hasidic Studies: Essays in History
and Gender, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish
Civilization, 2018), 1–19. See also Marcin Wodziński, “Ad fontes: Introduction,”
in Studying Hasidism: Sources, Methods, Perspectives, ed. Marcin Wodziński (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 1–17.
2. Unofficial reports gave an even higher number of 686 Jews in Piaseczno
in 1856, which would comprise 56 percent of the town’s population. See Archi-
wum Główne Akt Dawnych (henceforth: AGAD), collection: Centralne Władze
Wyznaniowe (henceforth: CWW), file no. 1761, pp. 159–209. For the general
history of Piaseczno and its Jewish population, see Tadeusz Jan Żmudziński, Pia-
seczno, miasto królewskie i narodowe, 1429–1933, vol. 1, Od XX. Mazowieckich do
odrodzenia Polski (Piaseczno: Zarząd Miasta Piaseczna, 1933); J. Antoniewicz, ed.,
Studia i materiały do dziejów Piaseczna i powiatu piaseczyńskiego (Warsaw, 1973);
Ewa Bagieńska and Włodzimierz Bagieński, Szkice z dziejów miasta Piaseczna
(Piaseczno: Oficyna Księgarska Mucha-Uchmanowicz, 2001); Ewa Bagieńska and
Włodzimierz Bagieński, Drugie szkice z dziejów Piaseczna i okolic (Piaseczno:
Oficyna Księgarska Mucha-Uchmanowicz, 2008).
3. AGAD, CWW, file no. 1761, pp. 4–266; Archiwum miasta Warszawy,
Oddział w Grodzisku, collection: Magistrat m. Piaseczna, file no. 16 (copy in
Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, HM3675).
4. See AGAD, collection: Komisja Rządowa Spraw Wewnętrznych, file
no. 6643, folio 144. See also Archiwum miasta Warszawy, Oddział w Grodzisku,
collection: Magistrat m. Piaseczna, file no. 155 (copy in Central Archives for the
History of the Jewish People, HM3680).
5. See Archive of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG27, Eliyahu
Guttmacher (1796–1874), box 12, folders 643–44. Ten kvitlekh represent some 5
percent of the Jewish families of Piaseczno. For more on this, see Marcin Wodziński,
Historical Atlas of Hasidism, cartography Waldemar Spallek (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2018), 95–103.
6. See Regina Lilientalowa, Pisma etnograficzne, ed. Piotr Grącikowski
(Kraków and Budapest: Austeria, forthcoming).
7. AGAD, CWW, file no. 1457, p. 579.
 The Place of Piety 47

8. Ibid.
9. For a broader analysis of this stage of Hasidic communal development
and the special role of the fight for rabbinical position, see Marcin Wodziński,
Hasidism and Politics: The Kingdom of Poland, 1815–1864 (Oxford: Littman Library
of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 233–40.
10. See David Assaf, “ ‘Money for Household Expenses’: Economic Aspects
of the Hasidic Courts,” in Studies in the History of the Jews in Old Poland, ed.
Adam Teller (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1998), 14–50; and David Assaf, The Regal Way:
The Life and Times of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, trans. David Lauvish (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 285–309 on pidyonot and ma’amadot (forms of
financial contribution by Hasidim to their tsaddik) and on the financial aspects
of the Hasidic courts more generally.
11. See Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, collection: Akta miasta Łodzi, file
no. 150–51; collection: Anteriora Piotrkowskiego Rządu Gubernialnego, file no.
2491. For the case of R. Shalom of Bełz, who was forced into bankruptcy by
his teacher, R. Ya’akov Yitzhak Horowitz of Lublin, so that he would become a
rabbi, see Moshe Menahem hakohen Walden, Sefer Nifle’ot ha-rabi (Bnei Brak,
2005), no. 33.
12. See Pinkas ha-kehilot: Polin, vol. 4, Varshah veha-galil (Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem, 1989), 346–47.
13. For essential biographical information on this tsaddik, see Yitzhak Alfasi,
ed., Entsiklopediyah la-hasidut: Ishim (Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-rav Kook, 2000),
2:597; Yitzhak Alfasi, Ha-hasidut mi-dor le-dor (Jerusalem: Makhon Da’at Yosef,
1995), 394; Avraham I. Bromberg, Mi-gedolei ha-hasidut: Ha-admorim le-veit
Vurke ve-Amshinov (Jerusalem: Mosad Bet Hillel, 1982), 184. See also Yekhiel
Kamiel, “Mayn ershte nesiye tsum reben,” in Seyfer kalushin: Gehaylikt der khorev
gevorener kehile, ed. Arye Shamri et al. (Tel Aviv, 1961), 287.
14. See Alfasi, Entsiklopediyah la-hasidut, 3:73–74.
15. See Yekhiel Yeshaia Trunk, Poyln: Zikhroynes un bilder (New York:
Farlag Undzer Tsayt, 1949), 4:155.
16. I am indebted to Daniel Reiser for bringing to my attention documents
related to the houses possessed by R. Shapira in Piaseczno. For a brief biography
of R. Shapira, see the introduction to this volume.
17. On this phenomenon, see Samuel C. Heilman, “What’s in the Name?:
The Dilemma of Title and Geography for Contemporary Hasidism,” Jewish History
27 (2013): 221–40.
18. For more on the metropolization of the Hasidic leadership in the time
of the Great War, see Wodziński, Hasidism, 259–65.
19. See also Marcin Wodziński and Uriel Gellman, “Towards a New Geog-
raphy of Hasidism,” Jewish History 26 (2013): 171–99.
20. For such comments on the settlement of Ya’akov Yitzhak Horowitz in
Lublin, see, e.g., Moshe Menahem Walden, Nifle’ot ha-rabi (Warsaw, 1911), 13, 75,
48 Marcin Wodziński

86; Tsevi Meir Rabinowicz, Bein Pshiskha le-Lublin (Jerusalem: Kesharim, 1997),
110–12. For documents on the opposition to Yitzhak Meir Alter’s activities in
Warsaw, see Zofia Borzymińska, “Sprawa Rabiego Icchaka Meira Altera,” Biuletyn
Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 52 (2001): 367–77; Hasidism in the Kingdom
of Poland, 1815–1867: Historical Sources in the Polish State Archives (Kraków:
Austeria, 2011), 429–39.
21. See, e.g., Efraim Shedletski, “Dem rebes ‘letst-gelt,’ ” in Seyfer Minsk-Ma-
zovietsk: Yizker bukh nokh der khorev-gevorener kehile Minsk-Mazovietsk, ed. Efraim
Shedletski (Jerusalem, 1977), 157–60.
22. Ita Kalish, A rabishe haym in amolikn Poyln (Warsaw: Gmina Wyznaniowa
Żydowska w Warszawie, 2009), 94. There is an inaccurate English translation in
Ita Kalish, “Life in a Hassidic Court in Russian Poland toward the End of the
Nineteenth Century,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 13 (1965): 277.
23. Yehiel Poznanski, “Zikhroynes fun der fergangenhayt,” in Sefer-izkor
li-kehilat Radomsk veha-sevivah, ed. L. Losh (Tel Aviv, 1967), 58–59.
24. Pinhas Tsitron, Sefer Kielts: Toledot kehilat Kielts mi-yom hivasdah ve-ad
hurbanah (Tel Aviv, 1956/1957), 176.
25. See Aharon Zeev Aescoly [Eshkholi], Ha-hasidut be-Polin, ed. David
Assaf (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1998), 126–27.
26. On modern strategies for defending premodern values in Hasidism,
see Marcin Wodziński, “How Modern Is an Anti-Modernist Movement?: The
Emergence of Hasidic Politics in Congress Poland,” AJS Review 31, no. 2 (2007):
221–40; Wodziński, Hasidism and Politics, 165–265.
27. On traditional relations between the Hasidic movement and the Jewish
community and its institutions, see Shmuel Ettinger, “Hasidism and the Kahal
in Eastern Europe,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London:
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 63–75; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern,
“Hasidism, Havurot, and the Jewish Street,” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 2 (2004):
20–54; Marcin Wodziński, “The Hasidic ‘Cell’: The Organization of Hasidic Groups
at the Level of the Community,” Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia 10 (2012): 111–22.
28. For examples of accounts stressing the collective nature of interest in
the tsaddik visiting the town, which typically involved all Jewish and non-Jewish
segments of the local community, see, e.g., Israel Joshua Singer, Of a World That
Is No More: A Tender Memoir (New York: Vanguard, 1970), 135–36; Martin D.
Kushner, From Russia to America: A Modern Odyssey (Philadelphia: Dorrance,
1969), 10–12.
29. See Isaac Even, “Chassidism in the New World,” in The Jewish Communal
Register of New York City, 1917–1918 (New York, 1918), 341–42.
30. This phenomenon, in different contexts and in its radical form, has been
called “à la carte religion” or “religious bricolage” and is one of the most typical
phenomena of contemporary religious life; see Reginald Bibby, Fragmented Gods:
The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Irwin, 1987).
 The Place of Piety 49

31. See Ben-Zion Gold, The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 103–16.
32. Ibid., 91, 93.
33. See, e.g., Shaul Miler, Dobromil: Zikhroynes fun a shtetl in Galitsye in di
yohren 1890 biz 1907 (New York, 1980), 11; Joseph Margoshes, A World Apart:
A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia, trans. Ron Margolis and
Ira Robinson (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 159.
34. For more on this, see Wodziński, Historical Atlas of Hasidism, 115–37.
See also Wodziński, “Space and Spirit: On Boundaries, Hierarchies, and Leadership
in Hasidism,” Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016): 63–74.
35. See Wodziński, Historical Atlas of Hasidism, 115–37. Representativeness
at the level of ca. 70 percent, more than adequate for any analysis, has been
confirmed by several control data.
36. See Wodziński, Historical Atlas of Hasidism, 118–19.
37. For a general analysis of limitations of memorial books as a source
for historical research, see Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Adam Kopciowski,
and Andrzej Trzciński, “Księgi pamięci jako źródło wiedzy o historii, kulturze
i Zagładzie polskich Żydów,” in Tam był kiedyś mój dom . . . Księgi pamięci
gmin żydowskich, ed. Adamczyk-Garbowska, Kopciowski, and Trzciński (Lublin:
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie Skłodowskiej, 2009), 11–86; see also Avra-
ham Wein, “Memorial Books as a Source for Research into the History of Jewish
Communities in Europe,” Yad Vashem Studies 9 (1973): 255–72; Jack Kugelmass
and Jonathan Boyarin, “Introduction,” in From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial
Books of Polish Jewry, 2nd ed., ed. Kugelmass and Boyarin (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993), 1–48. The newest bibliography of the memorial books
is to be found in Adam Kopciowski, ed., Jewish Memorial Books: A Bibliography
(Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie Skłodowskiej, 2008). Many of
the books are available online at http://yizkor.nypl.org.
38. I. B. Alterman, ed., Megiles Gritseh (Tel Aviv, 1955), 31; Meir Shimon
Geshuri, “Khsidim shtiblekh,” in Seyfer Radom, ed. Yitzhak Perlow and Alfred
Lipson (Tel Aviv, 1961–63), 46; Mordekhai V. Bernshtayn, ed., Pinkes Zhirardov,
Amshinov un Viskit; izker-bukh tsu der geshikhte fun di kehiles: Zhirardov, Amshinov
un Viskit; fun zayer oyfkum biz zayer khurbn durkh di natsis, yimakh shemam
(Buenos Aires, 1961), 93, 192–96.
39. See Tsitron, Sefer Kielts, 109.
40. The interviews have been recently digitized and are now available online;
see https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/lcaaj.
41. See, for example, Arye Mencher, ed., Sefer Pshemishl (Tel Aviv, 1964),
141; Eliezer Sharvit, ed., Sanok: Sefer zikaron li-kehilat Sanok veha-sevivah (Tel
Aviv, 1970), 103–108.
42. See, for example, Arthur Ruppin, Pirkei hayyai (Tel Aviv, 1944), 1:217–19.
43. See, for example, Leo Baeck Institute Archives, MM93, pp. 160–61.
50 Marcin Wodziński

44. See, e.g., Zeev Rabinowicz and Nahman Tamir, eds., Pinsk: Sefer edut
ve-zikaron li-kehilat Pinsk-Karlin (Tel Aviv, 1966), 1:352–53, on the lesser dynasty
of Horodok; David Shtokfish, ed., Sefer Pshitik: Matsevet-zikaron li-kehilah yehudit
(Tel Aviv, 1973), 45, on the tsaddik of Opoczno.
45. See Meir Shimon Geshuri, ed., Undzer shtot Volbrom (Tel Aviv, 1962),
197; Hayim Volnerman, Aviezer Burshtin, and Meir Shimon Geshuri, ed., Sefer
Oshpitsin (Jerusalem, 1977), 95.
46. On R. Meir Yehiel Halshtok of Ostrowiec, famous for his intellectual
sharpness and ascetic practices, see M. Grosman, “Zikhroynes fun Ostrovtse,”
in Ostrovtse (Buenos Aires, 1949), 43–44. For a more extensive analysis of these
other models, see Wodziński, Hasidism, 190–97.
47. Mordechai V. Bernshtayn, “Di geshikhte fun Yidn in Pulav,” in Yisker-
bukh Pulav, ed. Mordechai V. Bernshtayn (New York, 1964), 31.
48. On demography of interwar Hasidism, see Wodziński, Hasidism, 156–58.
49. Menakhem Baynvol, “Basey-medresh, khsidim shtiblekh un politishe
organizatsye,” in Kehilat Sherpts: Sefer zikaron, ed. Efraim Talmi (Wloka) (Tel
Aviv 1959), 168.
50. We do not know enough about the yeshiva beyond the fact that it was
a major educational success. For the basic information, see Nehemia Polen, The
Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the
Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), 6; Daniel Reiser, Introduction,
in Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in Hebrew], ed.
Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017), 14, 337. For
the number of students see, e.g., Unzer-Ekspres, January 11, 1932, 7. Interesting
information on the fundraising activities, publicity, and educational practices can
be found in the Jewish press of interwar Warsaw, e.g., Der Moment, May 27, 1927,
10; Haynt, August 7, 1937, 11; Unzer-Ekspres, September 16, 1931, 5; January 11,
1932, 7; April 21, 1933, 7; February 27, 1935, 9; March 1, 1936, 10; February 4,
1937, 7 (all available at Historical Jewish Press).
51. Shimon Huberband, Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural
Life During the Holocaust (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1987), 175–76.
52. As noted by Shaul Stampfer, creation of Hasidic yeshivot was usually
an expression of a consciousness of crisis. See Shaul Stampfer, “Hasidic Yeshivot
in Inter-War Poland,” in Stampfer, Families, Rabbis, and Education: Traditional
Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Oxford: Littman Library of
Jewish Civilization, 2010), 252–74.
53. On such a conflict in the Bobov dynasty, see Samuel C. Heilman, Who
Will Lead Us?: The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America (Oakland: University
of California Press, 2017), 96–151.
54. See, e.g., Unzer-Ekspres, September 16, 1931, 5; January 11, 1932, 7;
March 1, 1936, 10; February 14, 1936; February 16, 1936; February 4, 1937, 7.
 The Place of Piety 51

55. See Yitshok Zandman, “Gostininer Idn,” in Pinkes Gostynin: Yisker

bukh, ed. Y. M. Biderman (New York, 1960), 174; Aaron Diamant, “Kolbushov
a mokm khsides,” in Pinkes Kolbushov, ed. Y. M. Biderman (New York, 1971),
389; “Khsidim un misnagdim shtiblekh,” in Sefer Bialah-Podlaskah, ed. M. Y.
Feigenbaum (Tel Aviv, 1961), 260.
56. For a broader explanation of the parallels between fundamentalization
of Hasidism at the beginning of the twentieth century and the Catholic Count-
er-Reformation, see Wodziński, Hasidism, 269–75. For more on the Counter-Refor-
mation itself, see, e.g., Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700:
A Reassessment of the Counter-Reformation (Washington, DC: Red Globe, 1999).
57. See Wodziński, Hasidism and Politics, esp. ch. 5.
58. See Haynt, August 7, 1937, 11. On controversy between Ger and Pias-
eczno, see also Unzer Leben, September 16, 1931, 5.
59. See Tsitron, Sefer Kielts, 109. The wider context of this political conflict
is unknown to us.
60. See, e.g., Der Moment, May 27, 1927, 10.
61. See, e.g., Yehudah Kinderman, “Khsides in Ushpitsin,” in Sefer Ushpitsin,
261.
62. On this, see Moria Herman, Ha-yahas li-venei no’ar ba-hasidut bi-tekufah
she-beyn milhamot ha-olam: Ha-hidushim ha-hagutayim veha-ma’asiyim be-hasidut
Polin li-venei ha-no’ar ki-teguvah le-azivat ha-dat 1914–1939 (PhD diss., Bar Ilan
University, 2014).
63. Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 121–46.
64. Ibid.
65. See Daniel Reiser, Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism, trans.
Eugene D. Matansky (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 191–94. See also Moshe Idel,
“The Rebbe of Piaseczno, or Two Lines in Hasidism,” this volume.
66. In Piaseczno, however, few traces of R. Shapira remain. The rundown
building of the former synagogue was demolished and turned into a parking
lot in 1978. Except for a fragment of one brick wall, R. Shapira’s house and his
prayer house on 15 Niecała Street no longer exist. At the cemetery, only several
dozen tombstones survive. Former prayer houses at 1 and 4 Nadarzyńska Street
are still standing but bear no traces of their past function. Only the small building
housing the nineteenth-century mikveh commemorates its former function with
a modest plaque. For a brief description of the Jewish sights in Piaseczno, see
https://sztetl.org.pl/en/towns/p/593-piaseczno; http://www.studnia.org/piaseczno/
historia.htm; accessed: 12 Iyar 5779. For more, see Marcin Wodziński, Chasydzki
szlak Mazowsza (Warsaw: Fundacja Chai, 2019), 86–87.
 2

The Rebbe of Piaseczno

Between Two Trends in Hasidism

Moshe Idel

Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, known as the Rebbe of Piaseczno, has become

more closely identified with the Holocaust. He experienced it firsthand,
reflected on its horrors and reacted to it from inside the catastrophe
until he was killed with many of his followers. His sermons from the
Warsaw Ghetto, originally published as Esh kodesh, represent one of the
few attempts to understand the problem of suffering in real time, from
the midst of the Holocaust, in light of kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions.
Sermons delivered orally in Yiddish and then committed to writing in
Hebrew were probably the most important genre by which Hasidic lead-
ers communicated with their disciples. Like many other forms of Jewish
mystical writing, these sermons tend to demonstrate a certain “conceptual
fluidity,” less concerned with intellectual coherence than with articulating
a particular way of life or coping with perennial human questions (see
Reiser, Seeman, this volume). Daniel Reiser’s new critical edition of Der-
ashot mi-shenot ha-za’am (Sermons from the Years of Rage) dramatically
illustrates the process of ongoing elaboration, hesitation, and thematic
development that accompanied these sermons during the last three years
of R. Shapira’s life, before the liquidation of the ghetto and the murder
of its inhabitants.1

53
54 Moshe Idel

Despite their obvious importance, however, these ghetto sermons

should not be allowed to eclipse R. Shapira’s distinctive prewar literary
corpus, which was devoted to a Hasidic revival that is reminiscent, I will
argue, of modern Neo-Hasidism. Unlike sermons, whose themes are to
some extent forced upon the writer by circumstance or by the liturgi-
cal calendar, some of these prewar tracts focus in a systematic way on
questions of Hasidic education, renewal, and spiritual practice that can
be difficult to discern in the ghetto sermons.2 My goal in this chapter is
therefore to situate some of the ideas and ideals described in these ear-
lier works within the historical context of Hasidism and kabbalah more
broadly. Since most of these prewar tracts are devoted to the training of
younger disciples rather than accomplished Hasidic adepts, it is possible
that there were other dimensions of Rabbi Shapira’s teaching that he did
not commit to writing.

Between Ecstasy/Prophecy and Magic

Though considered the founder of Hasidism, Israel Baal Shem Tov did not
operate as a tsaddik, despite the fact that he embraced a mystical-magical
model.3 He did have several followers, but he was best known in popu-
lar circles as a wonder worker, popular healer, or magician, as we learn
from the famous hagiography Shivehei ha-Besht. However, it is possible to
discern in the testimonies about his life—some of them legendary, to be
sure—two types of activities: the preaching of an intense religious life on
the one hand and his profession as a magician on the other. Both seem
to be related to the historical Baal Shem Tov, despite many exaggerations
in the available testimonies. The two types of activities, different though
they are, should not be understood as wholly distinct, as it is possible
to detect throughout his teachings the vestiges of magical terminology
inherited from the Kabbalah of Moshe Cordovero and his followers, which
deals with the process of drawing down supernal power and distributing
it to the community.4 In my opinion, we should speak of a “mystical-mag-
ical model” alongside the more practical magical activities related to
the Baal Shem Tov’s profession.5 The mystical element, which can have
ecstatic valences, is expressed in some cases by the term prophecy, which
was already common among Jewish writers from the Middle Ages and
from time to time in Hasidism.6 It is my opinion that some of the most
extreme testimonies concerning the Besht’s dual forms of activity were
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 55

downplayed in Hasidic writings from the generation following his death,

due to controversies with the mitnagdim, whose main target of criticism
in the 1770s was the Besht himself.7 They resurfaced only after the 1790s,
when Hasidic masters felt more secure. The publication of the Besht’s
hagiography and the extreme mystical teachings preserved by Aharon
Hakohen of Apta are both examples of his new confidence.8
It is undeniable that the development of Hasidism as a movement
was predicated on the emergence of the institution of the holy man,
the tsaddik, or “righteous one,” as the leader of a specific group who
cultivates an intense religious life but is also responsible for helping his
constituency with more concrete matters. Operating between heaven
and earth, a pontifical or Janus figure, the Hasidic leader was conceived
of as essential for the well-being of his group, since he was deemed to
constitute the channel, or pipeline, for the descent of divine power, which
he distributed after ascending to the source of power.9 This model entails
devotion to the tsaddik, pilgrimages to the Hasidic courts on the Jewish
holidays or other occasions, financial contributions, and the emergence of
a new and important dimension to the figure of the rebbe: that of spiritual
and economical counselor, combined in some important instances with
magical qualities. Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, his grandson Moshe Chaim
Ephraim of Sdilkev (Sudylkov),10 Elimelekh Weisblum of Lizhensk,11 his
two main disciples, Israel ben Shabbatai Hopstein, known as the Maggid
of Kozhnits,12 and Jacob Isaac Halevi Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin,13 and,
in a more theoretical manner, Kalonymus Kalman Halevi Epstein of
Kraków, are only outstanding examples of this wonder-worker model of
the tsaddik. The practice of blessing by the Hasidic leader was another
important facet of this magical activity, which has continued through
most of the main phases of Hasidism to this very day.14 Unlike regular
magicians, who developed a transient clientele, the Hasidic rabbis created
a generally consistent group of followers, or a “court,” who sought both
spiritual guidance and material blessing.
Alongside this well-known wonder-working or magical model, how-
ever, the landscape of Hasidic leadership also included a more “spiritual”
model, represented by tsaddikim such as R. Dov Baer (the Great Maggid
of Mezritsh), R. Nachman of Bratslav, R. Shneur Zalman of Liady, R. Jacob
Isaac of Pshiskhe (the Holy Jew), R. Menahem Mendel of Kotsk, and R.
Mordechai Leiner of Izhbits, who were better known for their distinctive
teachings than for their powers of blessing. The diversity and flexibility of
Hasidic devotional forms allowed different tsaddikim to adopt distinctive
56 Moshe Idel

paths and to attract Hasidim based on spiritual or intellectual proclivities

as well as family affiliation. The institution of the tsaddik innovated by
Hasidism and expressed in most cases by a living charismatic figure was
thus more responsible than any other single factor for the continuity and
diversification of Hasidism between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
Rabbi Shapira’s place within this admittedly somewhat schematic
typology of Hasidic leadership is fascinating. On the one hand, he was
a direct descendent of the most magically oriented tsaddikim in Poland,
whom he cites by name many times in his books. Moreover, he married
a woman from the Kozhnits dynasty and was proud of his relation to the
Hasidic master Israel of Kozhnits. Yet in his own leadership, he seems
to have had more in common with the spiritual school or with later
Neo-Hasidic figures I will mention below. He tended to emphasize spiritual
guidance or techniques and to relegate some of the more magical and
institutional aspects of Hasidic leadership to the margins.15 This tendency
may have begun with his father, R. Elimelekh of Grodzisk, whose books
seem, on perusal, to downplay the ability of the tsaddik to draw down
blessing relative to other Polish Hasidim.16 R. Elimelekh does not, however,
seem to have shared his son’s strong interest in spiritual techniques or
cultivation of prophecy. Careful analysis of the various factors that might
have contributed to R. Shapira’s model of leadership—such as his father’s
influence or the influence of other members of the more introversive
“spiritual” school mentioned above, or indeed the maskilic critique of
Hasidism with which R. Shapira would have had to contend17—remains
an unfulfilled scholarly desideratum.

Spiritual Techniques and Prophecy

Naturally, the attenuation or even elimination of certain magical aspects of

Hasidic leadership would have heightened the importance of the devoted
spiritual life and the need to forge specific paths to its realization. Steps in
this direction can already be found in late-thirteenth-century Kabbalah,
especially in the ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia and his followers.18
Such texts and were later taken up by kabbalists in early-sixteenth-century
Jerusalem,19 along with other techniques related to imagining colors in the
context of letters of the divine name during prayer,20 and in the Safedian
Kabbalah of Moshe Cordovero and Hayyim Vital,21 and thus also in early
Hasidism. Some of the techniques mentioned above—Abulafia’s combi-
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 57

nation of letters,22 the drawing-down technique,23 and the technique of

visualizing colors24—are well represented in the same major compendium
of Kabbalah, Cordovero’s Pardes rimmonim, but the kabbalists practiced,
de facto, only the first two.25 Kabbalists also associated prophecy with the
technique of drawing down divine influx.26
Despite this background, the early Hasidic masters did not forge a
detailed and widely accepted technique for the attainment of peak expe-
rience, and much of their practice was related to intensification of oral
rituals, especially prayer.27 Though discussions of practices designated as
hitbodedut, hishtavut, devekut, hitpashut ha-gashmiyut, or hitbatlut (soli-
tary concentration, equanimity, cleaving, divestment of corporeality, and
self-nullification, respectively) stemming from earlier kabbalistic sources28
abound in Hasidic writings, they were not elaborated into a stable mystical
path. Few instructions from Hasidic works have been preserved and claims
of having achieved prophecy were also extremely rare.
Nevertheless, Rabbi Shapira was certainly aware of spiritual tech-
niques, including visualization.29 He was acquainted, for example, with
Moshe Cordovero’s book and twice quotes a passage about visualizing
colors, though he probably did not adopt it.30 Parallels between Abraham
Abulafia’s discussions of prophecy and spiritual techniques and those in R.
Shapira’s writings have also been suggested.31 More specifically, in his study
of Shapira, Ron Wachs has pointed out a specific parallel to ecstatic Kab-
balah, on which I would like to elaborate.32 Wachs refers to a passage from
Shapira’s Benei mahshavah tovah (see Leshem, this volume)33 describing a
person’s visualization of himself standing before the divine throne, which
may be compared with two passages from prophetic Kabbalah: one from
Yehudah Albotini’s Sullam ha-aliyyah and another, shorter passage from
Abulafia’s Hayyei ha-olam ha-ba.34 All three sources use the verb tsayyer
to refer to the exercise of envisioning oneself standing in the presence of
supernal beings.35 However, while Albotini’s book, written in Jerusalem
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, is extant only in a few Eastern
manuscripts not available in Europe,36 Abulafia’s book is extant in dozens
of manuscripts, including some dated to eighteenth-century Poland,37 a
few of which belonged to the libraries of Hasidic rabbis.38 Moreover, an
important figure in the late eighteenth century, Pinchas Eliyahu Horowitz,
who belonged to the camp of the mitnagdim, wrote a short commentary
on this book in his youth, a copy of which is still extant.39
Abulafia’s Hayyei ha-olam ha-ba is a detailed description of a tech-
nique for attaining prophecy. It begins with a poem whose first line is:
58 Moshe Idel

“Send a created hand in order to attain prophecy.”40 In this book, various

forms of the root TSYR, referring to visualization, occur no fewer than
two hundred times.41 For example:

Prepare your true thoughts to visualize [le-tzayyer] the Name,

may he be blessed, and with it the supernal angels. And visualize
them in your heart as if they were human beings standing and
sitting around you, and you were among them as a messen-
ger. . . . And after you have visualized this entirely, prepare
your mind and your heart to understand the thoughts whose
matters are brought to you by the letters you have thought of
in your heart.42

There is no doubt that this is an outstanding case of active imagination.

Moreover, according to this book of Abulafia’s, the final aim of the mystical
path is to attain a state of union with God. No drawing down of divine
power is mentioned in this context.43
However, while in this passage from Albotini’s book one has to
imagine oneself sitting on high—indubitably reflecting the influence of
Abulafia—Abulafia himself repeatedly speaks about standing before God,44
as does Shapira, bringing Abulafia’s and Shapira’s books much closer to
each other. Moreover, another passage in Shapira’s book also seems to be
close to Abulafia: “In a flash you will see yourself standing before his glory,
amidst the great camp of the fiery angels; you are one of them.”45 Thus,
we may speak of at least four instances in this one small book (Shapira’s
Benei mahshavah tovah) that deal with a type of visualization close to
Abulafia’s. This means that it is difficult to separate the ideal of prophecy
from the techniques that may induce it, according to both the kabbalist
and the Hasidic master. Reiser has also pointed out a possible impact
of Abulafia’s visualization of the divine name on Shapira.46 It should be
mentioned that Abulafia’s attitude toward divine names was related to a
critique of magical uses of those names.47
Shapira’s emphasis on prophetic experiences is reminiscent of the
prophetic ideals cultivated by Abraham Abulafia, and to a certain extent
also by Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi.48 These ideals could, at least in
principle, have been known to a kabbalist and Hasidic master in the twen-
tieth century, especially via Hayyim Vital’s influential Sha‘arei kedushah,
which deals with visualization and prophecy.49 A few passages influenced
by this treatise can be discerned in early Hasidism.50 A description of
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 59

prophecy that is strongly related to Abulafia’s Kabbalah and was prob-

ably directly influenced by Hayyei ha-olam ha-ba appears in a popular
Hasidic commentary on the Pentateuch entitled Or ha-ganuz la-tsaddikim,
by Aharon Hakohen of Apta. In this commentary, only the prophetic/
ecstatic experience is mentioned, without any magical implication.51 This
is the context in which we should view the efforts of Shapira in his early
treatise Benei mahshavah tovah to create a small elite group of Hasidism
with prophetic pretensions (see Wodziński, Leshem) whom he refers to
as benei aliyah,52 which is reminiscent of Abulafia’s studying with his
companions in Messina in the early 1280s.53 While it would be overly
simplistic to reduce Shapira’s interest in spiritual techniques and prophecy
to an assumed encounter with one specific book, the impact of Abulafia’s
discussions of prophecy and visualization on Shapira, whether direct or
indirect, seems to have been significant.
Interesting parallels to Shapira’s concern with techniques and prophecy
can be seen in Gershom Scholem’s practicing Abulafia’s techniques while
writing his first PhD thesis in Munich in 1919, and in David Hakohen
(Hanazir)’s interest in these techniques during the same period.54 Though
Gershom Scholem and David Hakohen knew each other since 1923, their
interest in these techniques started somewhat earlier and probably inde-
pendently. I assume that Shapira was unaware of these parallel interests
of his contemporaries, and unlike them, he never mentions the prophetic
thirteenth-century kabbalist or any of his writings, though a few of them
had already been in print for several generations due to Aharon Jellinek’s
editions. These seem to be manifestations of a much more longstanding,
if somewhat vaguely conceived, interest in prophecy in Jewish thought,
especially in the Ashkenazi provinces.55
I wonder whether, in the case of Shapira, we can separate the initial
yearning for prophecy from the subsequent search for a technique for
attaining it. Perhaps the two originate in the same book: Abulafia’s Hayyei
ha-olam ha-ba.56 Abulafia, like Shapira after him, was not interested in
magic at all, and, thus, Abulafia’s approach is much closer to Shapira’s than
to that of Hayyim Vital in Sha’arei kedushah. The latter wrote, in the vein
of the mystical-magical model:

He should imagine himself as if his soul departed [from the

body] and ascended on high, and he should visualize the
supernal worlds as if he stood within them. And if he performs
a yihud, he should ruminate on it in order to draw light and
60 Moshe Idel

influx by it in all the worlds and should direct [his thought]

in order to receive his share at the end as well.57

Let me point out, however, that the ideal of prophecy, including discussions
of visualizations and the ascent on high culminating in drawing down
divine effluence, is central to Vital’s treatise. Both the drawing forth of
this vitality and the mention of the share someone receives thereof are
part of what I have called the mystical-magical model. Abulafia was much
more concerned with individual redemption or perfection by means of
intellection, following the more universalist path of the Greek, Muslim,
and Jewish philosophers.58 The mystical-magical model is also very much
concerned with perfecting others, including the community, divinity, and
the worlds, by means of particular deeds, that is, the commandments.
To what extent this surge of interest in spiritual techniques had to do
with the visits of Swami Vivekananda to Europe and the dissemination of
forms of Yoga less than a generation before remains an open question.59
In any case, Hillel Zeitlin, Shapira’s contemporary and compatriot, was
acquainted with Buddhism (see Seeman, this volume), as were his older
contemporary Abraham Yitzhak Hakohen Kook, who became interested in
Buddhism at the beginning of the twentieth century while still in Eastern
Europe, and Kook’s companion David Hakohen.60 It should be mentioned
that some acquaintance with Tibetan religion is evident in a Hebrew
text published in 1814, by the very same publisher as the hagiography of
the Besht.61 We may thus surmise a more complex explanation for the
emergence of an unparalleled interest in paranormal spiritual phenomena
induced by a technique sometimes referred to as prophecy: there was
not only a feeling of independence from critiques that inhibited claims
of prophecy earlier in the history of Hasidism62 but also a general rise in
interest in cultivation of spiritual techniques.63
In any case, this surge of interest in spiritual techniques and proph-
ecy in traditional circles beyond academia, which began in the late 1920s,
reached its apex at the end of the twentieth century with the publication
of Abraham Abulafia’s writings and those of his followers. The printers and
publishers rooted in traditional circles in Jerusalem were in most cases
connected to Hasidic camps. Again, one may ask whether this interest had
to do with the surge of interest in India among modern Israelis. But the
possible influence of Hindu material on twentieth-century Judaism relates
to Shapira’s work only in that it contributed to the cultural ambiance of
the time; it did not influence Shapira directly, as Abulafia’s book did.
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 61

On Hasidism before and after Shapira: Some Observations

The Holocaust—and the murder of almost the entire Piasezno commu-

nity—coincided with the end of several decades of dramatic growth of
Hasidism in many communities in eastern Europe, especially in Poland
and in Warsaw (see Wodziński, this volume). The Ger and Aleksander
courts, in particular, were flourishing, as to a lesser extent Hasidism in
general was thriving beyond its previous boundaries. Hasidism had con-
fronted new intellectual and social challenges, from the older Lithuanian
mitnagdim and the maskilim to the newer Bundist ideology and Zionist
movement.64 But the various Hasidic courts managed to conquer vast
parts of the Jewish population in a relatively short period of less than
two centuries.65 The widespread embrace of Hasidism was not limited to
abstract faith in the various tsaddikim, changing modes of prayer, and
enthusiasm for the ideal of union with God. It also involved concrete
attachment to the leading figures of Hasidism.
We can extrapolate from the immense success of the first two centuries
of the history of Hasidism, in which it attracted ever-larger segments of
the Jewish population into its orbit, to what might have happened if the
Holocaust had not violently cut off the growth of the movement. Today,
Hasidism would represent the largest religious group in Judaism. The
main effect of Holocaust was the extermination of large parts of European
Jewry, and the cruelest blow was inflicted on the members of Hasidic
groups. The Polish, Hungarian, Bukovinian, and Bessarabian forms of
Hasidism were much more severely affected than other parts of the Jewish
population in those areas. Even those who survived were dislocated and
had to rebuild everything. In other words, the Nazi and Fascist crimes
against the Jews not only inflicted genocide but changed, at least for a
while, the direction of a religious development that might have generated
a spiritual renaissance for a major part of modern Judaism. This aspect
of the Holocaust still calls for further investigation, and here I can only
delineate some of its major points.
First and foremost, the Holocaust destroyed not only the most
important demographic Jewish centers but also the most creative centers
of Jewish spirituality that had developed in the two centuries preceding
the Holocaust. This included not only the proliferating Hasidic courts but
also many forms of secularist Judaism found in centers such as Warsaw
and Odessa. This change was, unfortunately, final. The total destruction of
the many small rural centers of Hasidim, and of all its urban centers in
62 Moshe Idel

eastern Europe, generated a new sociology of postwar Hasidism: almost

completely urban and active in the new centers of Israel, the United States,
and, to a lesser degree, western Europe.
My speculation regarding the growth of Hasidism and the potential it
would have had to become one of the most vital trends in modern Judaism
is supported by developments that occurred after the Holocaust. Many
Hasidic groups were decimated by 1944, with some actually reduced to
ashes, but they reemerged, like the phoenix, in the generations after the
Holocaust. Hasidism proved capable of reestablishing some of the destroyed
courts in Israel, the United States, and even western Europe, and it attracted
large numbers of believers. Since the 1970s, some of these groups have
attracted even greater numbers. These include Satmar, Ger, Belz, Vizhnits,
and Lubavitch, as well as, more recently and dramatically, the followers
of Nachman of Bratslav.66 This is evident not only from the numbers of
members of these groups but also from the construction of luxurious
buildings, yeshivot, and synagogues; more conspicuous involvement in
public life in Israel; and the new role of Chabad emissaries (sheluhim) in
many centers throughout the world and on numerous American university
campuses. The new role played by women, as sheluhot, in the activities of
this Hasidic branch is also significant.
More recently, the massive pilgrimages of tens of thousands to Nach-
man of Bratslav’s tomb in Uman, Ukraine; hundreds of thousands to Meron
in the Galilee, in which Hasidic groups play quite a substantial role; and
huge numbers to Brooklyn, the home of the last Rabbi of Lubavitch, before
and after his death, are another indication of the revival of some aspects of
Hasidism on the contemporary scene. The participation of Hasidic groups
in Israeli elections since 1988 and the seating of Hasidic members of the
Israeli parliament in government offices have become regular phenomena.
The role of Jacob Litzman as the minister of health—though he formally
refuses to participate in a secular government—is a sign of the growing
influence of Hasidic groups on Israeli politics since the early 1990s.
Even after the growth mentioned above, the various Hasidic groups
constitute only a small part of the Jewish people, perhaps less than 5 per-
cent.67 However, to extrapolate again: the growth of the Hasidic population
is incomparably greater in comparison to that of secular Jews, which is
an aspect of the vitality of this movement. Hasidic groups have entered
urban centers and started to dictate a new form of traditional life, as in
the case of the Ger Hasidim in the Israeli town of Arad, with the help
of the above-mentioned cabinet minister Litzman. The demonstrations of
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 63

Hasidic groups, especially Satmar and Toledot Aharon, against showing

movies on the Sabbath in Jerusalem ended in the victory of the Hasidim.
It culminated in an anti-Zionist rabbi of a branch of Satmar, Rabbi Aaron
Teitelbaum, flying from New York to Jerusalem (on Lufthansa, not EL AL)
to celebrate the demolition of the theater and the construction of a complex
of dozens of apartments for the growing Satmar Hasidic community. This
is only an individual incident, but it is emblematic of a much broader phe-
nomenon: the transformation of the small Hasidic groups from persecuted
entities into organizations that are able to confront—efficaciously, from
their point of view—larger audiences and eventually prevail, due to their
dedication, tenacity, fanaticism, and sometimes even violent behavior.68
This is part of the zealous fight to preserve traditional modes of
spirituality and identity, conceived of as more important than knowing
or even practicing the details of Hasidic ways of life (communal customs
and garments aside). Though it would be simplistic to portray entire
communities as engaged in purely mimetic behavior, it appears to me
that the new emphasis on institutionalization has become more prom-
inent in the last two generations at the expense of spiritual aspirations
and conceptual innovation. With the major exception of the leadership
of the last Rabbi of Lubavitch, what we see is stark routinization of the
charisma of Hasidic rabbis.69
Major recent concerns of some Hasidic groups relate to problems of
succession of leadership and continual schisms and quarrels, as in the cases
of the Satmar Hasidism and Shomer Emunim/Toledot Aharon, as well as
heated controversies and competitions among the various Hasidic courts.
Though certainly not a new phenomenon in the history of Hasidism, these
conflicts seem to be more frequent in the present day. Moreover, the rise of
ascetic behavior, which was not characteristic of early Hasidism, in some
forms of contemporary Hasidism, especially Ger and Satmar, is part of
an effort to counteract the impact of the strongly secular environments
in which the Hasidic groups are living; this is akin to the emergence of
nineteenth-century Jewish Orthodoxy.
Quite different, however, is another development related to the
Hasidic movement: so-called Neo-Hasidism. Here we have an inverse
process: the institutionalization that was so central to the emergence of
Hasidism—along with the spiritual creativity intended for both the elite
and the masses—has been abandoned in favor of a search for a more
experiential type of Judaism for a relatively small number of elite young
intellectuals, most of them educated in other areas of culture and religion
64 Moshe Idel

(see Seeman, this volume). This is part of the more recent New Age turn
to various forms of mysticism (be they Buddhist, Hindu, or kabbalistic)
in an eclectic and syncretistic manner, while avoiding traditional Hasidic
institutions, especially the tsaddik, as much as possible. In many cases
the New Age turn fails to emphasize the centrality of Yiddish or Hebrew,
even sometimes preferring English. Diminishing emphasis on belief in the
magical power of language as well as that of the extraordinary human
leader, is evident in depictions of early Hasidism by Neo-Hasidic scholars.70
These developments have much to do with the earlier attenuation
of the role of the Hasidic leader as the quintessential center of a well-de-
fined group of Hasidim and the total, though implicit, rejection of his
magical powers in modern theologies that emanate mainly from scholars
dealing with Hasidism, as mentioned above. This rejection is character-
istic of some of the writings of Hillel Zeitlin,71 Martin Buber, Abraham
Joshua Heschel,72 Elie Wiesel,73 and, more recently, the various activities
of Shlomo Carlebach,74 Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Arthur Y. Green.
Even Rivka Shatz Uffenheimer, a scholar who was also a critic of Martin
Buber’s understanding of Hasidism, has, implicitly at least, discounted
the role of magic in early Hasidism. There is an evident leaning toward
some forms of philosophy in some of these writings, as part of an effort
to distill a central spiritual “message” in Hasidism capable of inspiring
modern audiences beyond the traditional Hasidic groups, with the goal of
igniting a Jewish renewal movement in the future.75 On the other hand,
both the magical aspect of a leading person and the violent behaviors
of some Hasidic courts are totally absent. In a way, the role of a close-
knit community as the main locus of popular aspects of Hasidism has
been attenuated in comparison to earlier forms of Hasidism, though it
does not totally disappear. On the other hand, these writers believe that
traditional Hasidic sources are a major resource for the revitalization of
Jewish life in modern times, the decadence evident in some traditional
Hasidic developments notwithstanding. It should be emphasized that
though the major developments of Neo-Hasidism—not to mention Jewish
Renewal—took place in the United States, its beginnings were, as Arthur
Green has noted, in Europe, that is, in the Ashkenazi communities from
which some of its main figures came, including Hillel Zeitlin, Abraham
Joshua Heschel, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Shlomo Carlebach, and Elie
Wiesel.76 In many cases, these individuals came from urban backgrounds.
Had Shapira survived the Holocaust, he would likely have contributed to
Neo-Hasidism, even though he was not a universalist per se.
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 65

Let me emphasize that I have no problem with the existence of

Neo-Hasidic phenomena, since I do not reify Hasidism or reduce it to a
primary message. My concern here relates only to the Neo-Hasidic type
of scholarship, which reshapes, sometimes anachronistically, the earlier
forms of Hasidism in the mold of Neo-Hasidism, for example, turning the
eighteenth-century Hasidic masters into contemplative mystics.77 Scholars
may, perhaps, strive to reshape the future, but it is less advisable to reshape
the past by relegating the uncomfortable, magical, or miraculous Hasidic
beliefs to the margin.78
To return to the proposal articulated above: the different forms of
twentieth-century Hasidic renewal do not stand alone, and they should
be viewed in much wider contexts, not merely as internal developments.
This is also true of the growing interest in Kabbalah, which has turned
global, in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles, as the astonishing success
of Philip Berg’s and Michael Laitman’s propagandist forms of Kabbalah
amply demonstrates. The translation of Berg’s and Laitman’s biased pre-
sentations of Kabbalah into many languages is another indication of this
economic success. The same can be said of the renewed interest in topics
such as constellation of ideas, legends, and techniques relating to the
“Golem.” In fact, we may speak of a global “re-enchantment” concerning
mystical, mythical, and magical phenomena, as is found, for example, in
practical Kabbalah.79 Max Weber’s famous concept of “disenchantment”
described a relatively narrow development that took place in middle
and western Europe and affected the attitude of only a small part of the
global population there, and even fewer elsewhere.80 We may now speak
about the recent re-enchantment of the world, after disillusions of both
elite figures and larger masses from the optimism of the Enlightenment,
with its reliance on reason, and of modernity, as well as the dissipation
of some dominant ideologies.
This phenomenon is even more fascinating since it coincides with a
long series of major developments in a variety of sciences, related to both
the cosmos and human beings, which evidently did not dissipate earlier
myths, anxieties, or expectations. As far as Judaism is concerned, this
re-enchantment is evident and takes many forms, including the abrupt
renaissance of interest in Hasidism, Kabbalah, and magic, as well as massive
pilgrimages and intense cults of religious personalities encompassing much
wider audiences than ever before in modern times, a massive return of the
repressed, which reiterates and appropriates, mutatis mutandis, medieval
and early-modern types of behavior.81
66 Moshe Idel

To put it in even broader terms, the renascence of Jewish mysticism on

the global scene comes immediately after the similar interest in Hinduism
and Buddhist forms of religiosity, including techniques like the various
Yoga practices during the first part of the twentieth century and also, later,
Transcendental Meditation. In fact, in some cases, as, for example, in the
English writings of Aryeh Kaplan and Pearl Epstein relating to Kabbalah,
technical elements of Jewish meditation have been expressly presented as
an antidote to the surge of interest of young American Jews in Eastern
forms of religiosity.82 In this case, it is not a matter of conjecture regarding
the vagaries of possible osmosis, as mentioned in the context of possible
Eastern influence on Shapira. Here, there is more concrete and verifiable
contact, considered positive by some and negative by others. On the other
hand, the Jewish Renewal movement strove for a more ecumenical type
of religious dialogue, as is evident in Schachter-Shalomi’s approach, as
metamorphosed in the Penei ’or (lit. “faces of light”) phase. The difference
between the two modes of Hasidism is between a being world apart and
being part of the world.
In a way, the distinction between ecstasy and magic, which is also
evident in some traditional Hasidic circles, influenced Neo-Hasidism and
thus also the Renewal movement, but the nexus between the two has
remained in the traditional forms of Hasidism operative today. They are
two different Hasidic reactions to the challenges of modernity and to the
urban situation, or two ways of shaping identity: one more universalist,
opening toward fresh developments and adapting, and the other particu-
laristic, with the concomitant insulation and inertia.83 Let me emphasize
that by using terms such as “opening,” “insulation,” and “inertia,” I neither
stake a claim in one of these Hasidic alternatives nor pass judgment on
these different attitudes. Neo-Hasidism and its reverberations are more
concerned with a community that shares ideas, attitudes, and a richer
and more variegated intellectual and spiritual life, while the older forms
of Hasidism represent a community that is more interested in producing
what I call “performing bodies,” with a lesser emphasis on belief and
striving for an intense spiritual life.84 The difference between the numbers
of children belonging to these communities is an important criterion for
predicting their future. The intense communal religious life that developed
in the early history of Hasidism is related to life in small communities in
modest shtetlekh, prayers in small shtiblekh, and celebrating the Sabbath
and holidays together, including the widespread Hasidic custom of tish
and the presence of the tsaddik. It differs from the mode of life prevalent
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 67

in Neo-Hasidism, though both Hasidic modes share the religious and

experiential importance of songs and singing. In this last case, the contri-
bution of Shlomo Carlebach’s music is outstanding. The divergence between
these modes of contemporary Hasidism is the reason why the question
of how long such a dichotomy in the phenomenology and sociology of
Hasidism will last is hard to answer, given such an accelerated progres-
sion of history, especially in the case of modern Jewry, as it evolves both
in Israel and in the United States.85 Traditional forms of Hasidism lasted
for more than two and one-half centuries, and the question is how long
Neo-Hasidism will remain a viable, and not merely theoretical, option for
modern-oriented minds.
The above discussions should be seen as part of a more comprehensive
effort to understand Hasidism not only in the wider context of the history
of Kabbalah since its beginning, or as merely a continuation of Lurianic
Kabbalah or Sabbateanism, or as a reaction to them—a methodological
approach that I call “proximism”86—but also as emerging and operating
in much wider contexts. Such contexts—the plural is essential—would
include Sufism, Christianity (especially Orthodox Christianity), and Altaic
tribes (Turks or Tatars),87 not to mention some elements that stem from
Hinduism.88 This global situation is not entirely a product of recent decades
but was already reflected in movements that have been accelerating since
the Middle Ages.
Given these realities, no single method of research and analysis can
be considered sufficient. This includes the classical historical/philological
method that was applied in a quite unilinear manner with respect to the
sources of Hasidism as well as their later development.89 A fresh history
of Hasidism that considers questions related to the oscillation between the
mystical-magical and the purely mystical, as mentioned above, remains
a desideratum. Such a history would also consider other religious top-
ics, such as the religious dimension of magic, to which some parts of
the population—Jewish and non-Jewish—who believe in the miraculous
are attracted. Shapira would be viewed as a complex figure who stands
at the crossroads of the two tendencies in Hasidism, as a descendent
of the wonder-working Hasidic leaders who was himself much more
concerned with an experiential type of spirituality and prophecy and
with the techniques for attaining it. Modern scholarship must operate
with a more phenomenological analysis and a greater appreciation of
historical complexities stemming from multiple religious contexts. At
the same time, researchers considering Hasidism must attend to the
68 Moshe Idel

different types of interaction—intellectual, social, and economic—which

are constantly changing. These have not yet been taken sufficiently into
consideration.90

Notes

1. See Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in
Hebrew], ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017).
2. See Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hassidic Mysticism, and ‘Useless
Suffering’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological Review 101 (2008): 465–505;
and Isaac Hershkowitz, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, the Piasechner Rebbe:
His Holocaust and Pre-Holocaust Thought, Continuity or Discontinuity? [in Hebrew]
(master’s thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 2005), 17–18. On Shapira, see, e.g., Nehemia
Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (North-
vale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1999); and Shaul Magid, Piety and Rebellion: Essays in
Hasidism (Boston: Academic Studies Press 2019), 237–62.
3. On this model as far as the Besht is concerned, see Moshe Idel, Vocal
Rites and Broken Theologies: Cleaving to Vocables in Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov’s Mys-
ticism (New York: Crossroad, 2019, forthcoming), ch. 9; Moshe Idel, “The Besht
as Prophet and Talismanic Magician” [in Hebrew], in Studies in Jewish Narrative:
Ma’aseh Sippur, Presented to Yoav Elstein, ed. Avodov Lipsker and Rella Kushelevsky
(Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006), 122–33; and in more general terms,
Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic, 103–45. On the magical stories
about the Besht, see Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader, trans.
S. Sternberg (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005); Gedalyah Nigal, Magic,
Mysticism, and Hasidism [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Yaron Golan, 1992); and Jonatan
Meir, “Marketing Demons: Joseph Perl, Israel Baal Shem Tov, and the History of
One Amulet,” Kabbalah 28 (2012): 35–66. My point is that in addition to the Besht’s
functioning as a magician, there is a magical component to some of the teachings in his
name and to the way the role of the Hasidic tsaddik has been imagined.
4. See Idel, Hasidism, 147–208.
5. On this model, see also Phillip Wexler, Holy Sparks: Social Theory,
Education, and Religion (New York, 1966), 125–29; Phillip Wexler, The Mystical
Society: An Emerging Social Vision (Boulder: Westview, 2000), 35–39; Jonathan
Garb, Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2011), 75–77, who prefers the term shamanic to mystical-magical (89); Uriel
Gellman, The Emergence of Hasidism in Poland [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Merkaz
Zalman Shazar, 2018), 85.
6. See, e.g., H. W. Hines, “The Prophet as a Mystic,” American Journal of
Semitic Languages and Literature 40–41 (1923–24): 37–71; Robert Wilson, “Proph-
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 69

ecy and Ecstasy: A Reexamination,” Journal of Biblical Literature 98, no. 3 (1979):
321–37; Benjamin Uffenheimer, Classical Prophecy: The Prophetic Consciousness
[in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2001), 59–61, 71–79. Compare, however, the
somewhat different approach of Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York:
JPS, 1962), who prefers to separate prophecy from ecstasy. In the Middle Ages,
prophecy was a vague category that sometimes included ecstasy. See, e.g., Moshe
Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, trans. J. Chipman (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1987), 73–78; Moshe Idel, “On Prophecy
and Early Hasidism,” in Studies in Modern Religions, Religious Movements, and
the Babi-Baha‘i Faiths, ed. M. Sharon (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 48–49, 58–64, 68–69;
Haviva Pedaya, Vision and Speech: Models of Revelatory Experiences in Jewish
Mysticism [in Hebrew] (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2002), 47–89.
7. See Idel, “Prophecy and Early Hasidism,” 64. Let me remark that the
available descriptions of early Hasidism hardly reflect the wild, anarchic nature
that I assume it had, which was tempered in most of the available descriptions
stemming from Hasidic sources, but which is still evident in the testimonies of
the mitnagdim.
8. See Moshe Idel, Vocal Rites, appendix A. On problems with the use of the
category of prophecy in the Middle Ages, see Moshe Idel, “Lawyers and Mystics
in Judaism: A Prolegomenon for a Study of Prophecy in Jewish Mysticism,” Straus
Working Paper 10/10 (New York: New York University Law School, 2010), 14–18.
9. See Idel, Hasidism, 189–207, 211. The institution of tsaddik in Hasidism
has been addressed by many scholars. See, e.g., Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical
Shape of the Godhead, trans. J. Neugroschel (New York: Schocken, 1991), 120–39;
Arthur Green, “Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq,” in Jewish
Spirituality, ed. A. Green (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 2:127–56; Arthur Green,
“The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy
of Religion 45 (1977): 328–47; Samuel H. Dresner, The Zaddik: The Doctrine of
the Zaddik According to the Writings of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoy (New York:
Schocken, 1974); Rachel Elior, “Between Yesh and Ayin: The Doctrine of the
Zaddik in the Works of Jacob Isaac the Seer of Lublin,” in Jewish History: Essays
in Honor of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven Zipperstein
(London, 1988), 393–455; and Ada Rapoport-Albert, “God and the Zaddik as the
Two Focal Points of Hasidic Worship,” History of Religions 18 (1979): 296–325. See
also Shaul Magid, Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction
of Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); and Shaul Magid,
“The Case of Jewish Arianism: The Pre-Existence of the Zaddik in Early Hasi-
dism,” reprinted in Shaul Magid, Piety and Rebellion, 23–36. See also below, n. 78.
10. Alan Brill, “The Spiritual World of a Master of Awe: Divine Vitality,
Theosis, and Healing in the Degel Mahaneh Ephraim,” Jewish Studies Quarterly
8 (2001): 27–65.
11. Idel, Hasidism, 54.
70 Moshe Idel

12. See Simon Dubnov, History of Hasidism (Tel Aviv, 1927), 217–18 [in
Hebrew]. See also Idel, Hasidism, 190–91.
13. See Gellman, Emergence of Hasidism, 146–62; David Biale et al., Hasidism:
A New History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 152–53.
14. On blessing as magic, see Idel, Hasidism, 425, index, under “blessing/
berakhah.”
15. See Daniel Reiser, Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism, trans.
Eugene D. Matanky (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 191–94; Zvi Leshem, Between
Messianism and Prophecy: Hasidism According to the Piazecner Rebbe (PhD diss.,
Bar-Ilan University, 2007), 118–28.
16. See Elimelekh of Grodzisk, Divrei ’Elimelekh and ’Imrei Elimelekh.
17. Justin Jaron Lewis, “ ‘Such Things Have Never Been Heard of ’: Jewish
Intellectuals and Hasidic Miracles,” in Vixens Disturbing Vineyards: Embarrassment
and Embracement of Scriptures; Festschrift in Honor of Harry Fox leVeit Yoreh, ed.
Tzemah Yoreh et al. (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 480–95; and Marcin
Wodziński, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland: A History of Conflict,
trans. S. Cozens and A. Mirowska (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005).
18. See Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1988), 74–111; Idel, Mystical Experiences, 13–72, which is a translation of a
chapter of my 1976 PhD thesis, “On the Metamorphoses of an Ancient Technique
to Attain a Prophetic Vision in the Middle Ages” [in Hebrew] Sinai 86 (1980):
1–7; and Idel, Enchanted Chains, Techniques, and Rituals in Jewish Mysticism (Los
Angeles: Cherub, 2005).
19. See, e.g., Jonathan Garb, “Techniques of Trance in the Jerusalem Kab-
balah” [in Hebrew], Pe’amim 70 (1997): 47–67.
20. Idel, Kabbalah, 103–11; Moshe Idel, “Kabbalistic Prayer and Colors,” in
Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, ed. David Blumenthal (Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1984–1988), 3:17–27; Moshe Idel, “Kavvanah and Colors: A Neglected Kab-
balistic Responsum” [in Hebrew], in Tribute to Sara: Studies in Jewish Philosophy
and Kabbalah Presented to Professor Sara O. Heller Wilensky, ed. Moshe Idel,
Devorah Dimant, and Shalom Rosenberg (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1994), 1–14; Moshe
Idel, “An Anonymous Kabbalistic Commentary on Shir hayihud,” in Mysticism,
Magic, and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, ed. Karl Erich Grözinger and Joseph
Dan (Berlin, 1995), 147–48. See also below, nn. 21, 28.
21. See J. Zwi Werblowsky, Joseph Karo: Lawyer and Mystic (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1962), 38–83.
22. See Cordovero, Pardes rimmonim, Gate 21, especially ch. 1, where a
passage of Abulafia’s Or hasekhel has been copied, and Gate 30. In this passage,
the visualization of letters is mentioned, using the verb TZYR. For more on this
verb, see below.
23. It is discussed in several instances in this book but especially in Cor-
dovero, Gate 32, ch. 3.
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 71

24. Cordovero, Gate 10.

25. The mystical-magical, which is related to prayer, and that of Abulafia.
See Moshe Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1988), 139–40.
26. Cordovero, Pardes rimmonim, 21, ch. 1; and see Moshe Idel, “Prophecy
and Early Hasidism,” 53–54.
27. See Moshe Idel, “Adonay Sefatay Tiftah.: Models of Understanding
Prayer in Early Hasidism,” Kabbalah 18 (2008): 7–111; Moshe Idel, “Prayer,
Ecstasy, and Alien Thoughts in the Besht’s Religious World” [in Hebrew], in
Hasidism and the Musar Movement, vol. 1 of Let the Old Make Way for the New:
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Eastern European Jewry Presented to
Immanuel Etkes, ed. David Assaf and Ada Rapoport-Albert (Jerusalem: Merkaz
Shazar, 2009), 57–120.
28. See Idel, Hasidism, 55–56, 60–62, 64; and Garb, Shamanic Trance.
29. For techniques of active visualization in modern Jewish mysticism,
see Reiser, Imagery Techniques; Ron Wachs, The Flame and the Holy Fire: Per-
spectives on the Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira of Piaczena [in
Hebrew] (Alon Shevut: Tevunot, 2010); Jonathan Garb, Kabbalist in the Heart of
the Storm: Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University
Press, 2014), 112–13; Garb, Shamanic Trance; Tomer Persico, Jewish Meditation:
The Development of Spiritual Practices in Contemporary Judaism [in Hebrew] (Tel
Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2016). On R. Shapira in particular, see Reiser,
Imagery Techniques, 133–37.
30. See Hovat ha-talmidim (Tel Aviv, ND), 23; and Mevo she’arim (Jerusalem,
1962), fol. 25a. See Reiser, Imagery Techniques, 235n132.
31. See Reiser, Imagery Techniques, 439, under “Abulafia, Abraham.”
32. See Ron Wachs, Holy Fire, 235–37.
33. Benei mahshavah tovah (Tel Aviv, 1989), 19.
34. Hayyei ha-olam ha-ba, ed. A. Gross (Jerusalem, 2001), third edition, 67.
On this passage, to be translated immediately below, see Idel, Mystical Experience,
31.
35. Compare, however, Reiser, Imagery Techniques, 235.
36. See Gershom Scholem, Kitvei yad be-kabbalah (Jerusalem: National
Library of Israel and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1930), 225–30; Gershom
Scholem, “Chapters from Sullam ha-aliyyah, by Yehudah Albotini” [in Hebrew],
Qiryat sefer 22 (1945–46): 162–71.
37. Idel, “Prophecy and Early Hasidism,” 66–67.
38. Ibid., 68.
39. Ibid., 67. See also See also Moshe Idel, “Menahem Mendel of Shklov
and Avraham Abulafia” [in Hebrew], in THE VILNA GAON and His Disciples,
ed. Moshe Hallamish, Yosef Rivlin, and Raphael Shuhat (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan
University Press, 2003), 173–83.
72 Moshe Idel

40. Hayyei ha-olam ha-ba, ed. Gross, 3. See also ibid., 114, “The spirit of
prophecy teaches masters of knowledge,” which is the first line of the closing poem
of this book, as well as ibid., 5, 10, 16, 20–21, 22, 27, 33, 59, 69, 77, 112, etc.
41. Let me point out that this verb is also used in another kabbalistic school
as part of another technique of visualizing letters of the tetragrammaton, in dif-
ferent colors. See my “Visualization of Colors, 1: David ben Yehudah he-Hasid’s
Kabbalistic Diagram,” Ars Judaica 11 (2015): 31–54.
42. See Hayyei ha-olam ha-ba, ed. Gross, 67; Idel, Mystical Experience, 31.
43. See Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, 16.
44. Hayyei ha-olam ha-ba, ed. Gross, 68, 73, 82.
45. Benei mahshavah tovah, 25. See also ibid., 18, 42. Compare also to ibid., 32.
46. See Reiser, Imagery Techniques, 239–40.
47. Moshe Idel, “Between Magic of Divine Names and the Kabbalah of
Names: Abraham Abulafia’s Critique” [in Hebrew], Mahanayyim 14 (2002): 79–96.
This does not mean that he did not assume the possibility that the prophet could
make some changes to reality, but he considered such changes far inferior to
spiritual attainment and not a necessary outcome of cleaving to the supernal
world. See Idel, Ecstatic Kabbalah, 63–65.
48. Idel, Enchanted Chains, 228–32.
49. For the significant influence of Vital’s booklet on Hasidism, see Idel,
Hasidism, 38, 99, 105, 297–98, 303, 339, 346, 378. This book deals also with
visualization, mainly under the influence of Abulafia, and it is quoted by Shapira.
See Sermons from the Years of Rage, 251, 261, 309. However, none of these refer-
ences from Vital’s book refer to visualization. On visualization in Vital’s book, see
Werblowsky, Joseph Karo: Lawyer and Mystic, 69–70; Elliot R. Wolfson, Through
a Speculum that Shines (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 320–23;
and Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders
(Budapest: CEU, 2005), 52–53; Idel, “Prophecy and Early Hasidism,” 54–55.
50. See Idel, “The Besht,” 122–33, and “Prophecy and Early Hasidism,” 41–75.
51. See Idel, “Prophecy and Early Hasidism,” 68–69; Garb, Shamanic Trance,
87–88, 122; Reiser, Imagery Techniques, 215–17.
52. Leshem, Between Messianism and Prophecy, 76–91; Wachs, Holy Fire,
210–39; Daniel Reiser, “ ‘To Rend the Entire Veil’: Prophecy in the Teachings of
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piazecna and its Renewal in the Twentieth
Century,” Modern Judaism 34 (2014): 334–52; Reiser, Imagery Techniques, passim.
53. See Moshe Idel, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism: On Secrets and Doubts
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, forthcoming), ch. 5.
54. See Moshe Idel, “Abraham Abulafia, Gershom Scholem, and David
Hakohen (Hanazir)” [in Hebrew], in Derekh ha-ruah: Jubilee Volume in Honor
of Eliezer Schweid, ed. Yehoyadah Amir (Jerusalem: Hebrew University and Van
Leer Institute, 2005), 2:787–802.
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 73

55. See Moshe Idel, “Prophets and Their Impact in the High Middle Ages:
A Subculture of Franco-German Jewry,” in Regional Mentalities and Cultures of
Medieval Jews, ed. J. Castano, T. Fishman, and E. Karnafogel (London: Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, 2018), 285–337. For a survey of the various phenom-
ena described as prophecy in twentieth-century Judaism, most of them in central
Europe, see Eliezer Schweid, Prophets to Their People and Humanities: Prophecy and
Prophets in 20th Century Jewish Thought [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999).
56. Compare to Reiser, Imagery Techniques, 248–49.
57. Sha’arei kedushah 3:8; Sefer sha’arei kedushah ha-shalem, ed. A. Gross
(Israel, 2005), 128.
58. See Idel, Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism, ch. 9.
59. Christopher Isherwood, Meditation and Its Methods According to Swami
Vivekananda (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1976). On the significant affinity between
Abulafia’s tripartite techniques of breathing and Yoga, see Idel, Mystical Experience,
14, 24–25, 39. See also Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New
York: Schocken, 1974), 139, 144, 146. On the history of interest in Buddhism
among Western philosophers, such as Hegel, since the late eighteenth century
and especially in the nineteenth century, see Roger-Pol Droit, Le culte du néant:
Les philosophers et le Bouddha (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
60. See Amir Mashiach, “Rabbi Kook and Buddhism” [in Hebrew] Daat
70 (2011): 81–96.
61. See Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the
Artificial Anthropoid, An Augmented Edition (New York: Ktav, 2019, forthcom-
ing), 407–12. See also Moshe Idel, Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (London:
Continuum, 2007), 575–76n69.
62. Reiser, “To Rend,” 345.
63. In any case, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s strong interest in biblical prophecy
and its possible reverberations in the Middle Ages is well known. See his collec-
tion of articles on this topic: Abraham J. Heschel, Prophetic Inspiration after the
Prophets: Maimonides and Other Medieval Authorities (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1996).
In my opinion, it is not accidental that scholarship dealing with prophecy was
initiated by a Neo-Hasidic thinker with profound familiarity with Hasidism. See
Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 465–505.
64. Let me clarify that my assumption is not that Hasidism emerged as a
response to modernity but that the various Hasidic denominations emerged for a
variety of different reasons, including to confront various forms of modernity. See
Moshe Rosman, “Hasidism: Traditional Modernization,” Simon Dubnow Institute
Yearbook 6 (2007): 1–10.
65. See, e.g., Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish
Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Gellman, Emergence
of Hasidism; or Gellman, Hasidism, 272–82.
74 Moshe Idel

66. Zvi Mark, “The Contemporary Renaissance of Braslav Hasidism: Ritual,

Tiqqun, and Messianism,” in Kabbalah and Contemporary Spiritual Revival, ed.
Boaz Huss (Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2011); Eliezer Baumgarten,
“Between Uman and Morocco: Ethnic Identities in Bratslav Hasidism” [in Hebrew],
Pe’amim 131 (2012): 147–78.
67. Marcin Wodziński, Historical Atlas of Hasidism, cartography by Waldemar
Spallek (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 192.
68. See Stephen Sharot, Messianism, Mysticism, and Magic (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 189–205.
69. See Ibid., 155–88.
70. Nicham Ross, A Beloved-Despised Tradition: Modern Jewish Identity
and Neo-Hasidic Writing at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century [in Hebrew]
(Be’er Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2010); Joanna Steinhardt, “American
Neo-Hasids in the Land of Israel,” in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and
Emergent Religions 13, no. 4 (2010): 22–42; Tomer Persico, “Neo-Hasidic Revival
Expressivist Uses of Traditional Lore,” Modern Judaism 34 (2014): 287–308; Perisco,
Jewish Meditation, 244–71.
71. Arthur Green, “Three Warsaw Mystics,” in Kolot Rabbim: Essays in
Honor of Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, ed. Rachel Elior (Jerusalem, 1996), 1–58
[English section].
72. Arthur Green, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting Hasidism for
Moderns,” Modern Judaism 29, no. 1 (2009): 62–79; M. Idel, “Abraham Joshua
Heschel on Mysticism and Hasidism,” Modern Judaism 29, no. 1 (2009): 80–105.
73. Arthur Green, “Wiesel in the Context of Neo-Hasidism,” in Elie Wie-
sel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives, ed. Steven T. Katz and Alan Rosen
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 51–58; Nehemia Polen, “Yearning
for Sacred Place: Wiesel’s Hasidic Tales and Postwar Hasidism,” in Elie Wiesel,
ed. Katz and Rosen, 69–82.
74. See Yaakov Ariel, “Hasidism in the Age of Aquarius: The House of
Love and Prayer in San Francisco, 1967–1977,” Religion and American Culture
13, no. 2 (2003): 139–65.
75. Arthur Green, “Renewal and Havurah: American Movements, European
Roots,” in Jewish Renaissance and Revival in America: Essays in Memory of Leah
Levitz Fishbane z”l, ed., Eitan P. Fishbane and Jonathan D. Sarna (Waltham, MA:
Brandeis University Press, 2011), 145–64. See also Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and
Aaron Huges, eds., Arthur Green: A Hasidism for Tomorrow (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
76. Regarding the encounter between Zeitlin and Shapira, see the newspaper
report in Davar, November 11, 1931, 2.
77. See, e.g., Rivka Schatz, “Contemplative Prayer in Hasidism,” in Studies
in Mysticism and Religion Presented to Gershom G. Scholem, ed. Efraim Elimelech
Urbach, J. Zwi Werblowsky, and Chaim Wirszubski (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967),
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 75

209–26; Arthur Green, Your Word Is Fire: Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1977); and see my discussion of this trend in Idel,
Vocal Rites, ch.13.
78. See also Lewis, “Such Things.” En passant, my attitude toward magic,
including Hasidic magic, is not positive, as Lewis assumes (487), nor is it negative;
I am attempting to do justice to religious phenomena of the past.
79. Yuval Harari, “Three Charms for Killing Adolf Hitler: Practical Kabbalah
in WW2,” ARIES 17 (2017): 171–214; Jeffrey H. Chayes, “Rabbis and Their (In)
Famous Magic: Classical Foundations, Medieval and Early Modern Reverbera-
tions,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority,
Diaspora, Tradition, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 58–79, 349–58; Gideon
Bohak, “How Jewish Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World,” ARIES
19 (2019): 7–37.
80. Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic,
Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017). See also Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Cul-
ture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1998).
81. See Jeffrey H. Chajes, ‘“Entzauberung’ and Jewish Modernity: On ‘Magic,’
Enlightenment, and Faith,” Jahrbuch des Simon Dubnow-Instituts 6 (2007): 191–200.
82. To what extent Neo-Hasidism is reactive to the vivid interest in Hindu
and Buddhist practices among some Jews requires more investigation. However,
in any case, Schachter-Shalomi’s longstanding involvement with Buddhist and Sufi
meditation is well known. See Don Seeman and Michael Karlin, “Mindfulness
and Hasidic Modernism: Towards a Contemplative Ethnography,” Religion and
Society 10 (2019): 44–62.
83. To be sure, intellectual and spiritual background does not always
dictate a particular reaction. So, for example, the two major forms of Hasidism
coexisted in Warsaw and the United States, and to a certain extent in Israel. This
does not mean that the particularistic attitude does not undergo some changes
or adaptations after its dislocation from eastern Europe. It should be mentioned
that even in the strictest Hasidic camps, such as Satmar, there are conversions
to Christianity, as we know from recent news. The complexity of life does not
allow for simple answers.
84. See Moshe Idel, “On the Performing Body in Theosophical-Theurgical
Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Remarks,” in The Jewish Body: Corporeality, Society,
and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ed. Maria Diemling and
Giuseppe Veltri (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 251–71.
85. See, e g., the picture offered by Shaul Magid, American Post-Judaism:
Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington: Indiana University
76 Moshe Idel

Press, 2013); and Magid, Piety and Rebellion, 263–310. How “postethnic” Amer-
ican “society” actually is, with the “renewal” of what is called primavera latina
and the intensification of the white supremacy movement, to take just two more
recent examples, is quite a difficult question that only the remote future may be
able to answer. Not being a prophet, I have my doubts, especially regarding the
will or capacity of most of the traditional Hasidic groups in the United States to
transcend ethnic divisions and embrace a new American “postethnic” identity
that would flower in neighborhoods like Boro Park and Williamsburg. See Janet
S. Belcove-Shalin, ed., New World Hasidim: Ethnographic Studies of Hasidic Jews
in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
86. See Idel, Hasidism, passim, especially 4, 6–9. The nonlinear histories
of Hasidism have not considered the possible impact of a series of pre-Lurianic
forms of kabbalah, which is why I have called for a panoramic understanding
of the sources of Hasidism, taking a much greater variety of such sources into
consideration. See, e.g., the discussions of the material that comprises Sefer raziel
hamal’akh, a collection of mainly magical texts from a variety of kabbalistic schools
that do not include Safedian forms of kabbalah at all, and its influence on early
Hasidism, in Moshe Idel, “R. Nehemiah ben Shlomo’s Commentaries on the
Alphabet of Metatron: Additional Inquiries” [in Hebrew]; Tarbiz 85 (2018): 549–52;
Moshe Idel, “Sefer razi’el hamal’akh: New Inquiries,” in L’eredità di Salomone la
magia ebraica in Italia e nel Mediterraneo, Testi e Studi del Meis, ed. Emma Abate
(Florence: Giuntina, 2019), 143–68; and see also Jonatan Meir, “Enlightenment
and Esotericism in Galitzia: The Writings of Elyakim Getzl Milzhagi,” Kabbalah
33 (2015): 306–308. Likewise, Cordoverian types of kabbalah, which add much
complexity to existing scholarly analyses, have hardly affected scholarship of
Hasidism and deserve to be taken into serious consideration.
87. Moshe Idel, “Early Hasidism and Altaic Tribes: Between Europe and
Asia,” Kabbalah 39 (2017): 7–51. To what extent the emergence of some aspects
of the institution of the tsaddik in late-eighteenth-century Hasidism also owes
something to the confrontation with the Tatar shamans, who were active in the
immediate vicinity of some of the earliest small Hasidic groups, deserves addi-
tional consideration and differs from the more Eurocentric interpretations of the
emergence of early Hasidism.
88. Moshe Idel, “R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov ‘In the State of Walachia’: Widening
the Besht’s Cultural Panorama,” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in
Eastern Europe, ed. G. Dynner (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2011), 104–30.
Compare also to Reiser’s observations in Imagery Techniques, 401–5.
89. See, e.g., Garb, Shamanic Trance; Moshe Idel, “ ‘The Besht Passed His
Hand over His Face’: On the Besht’s Influence on His Followers; Some Remarks,”
in After Spirituality: Studies in Mystical Traditions, ed. Philip Wexler and Jonathan
Garb (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 79–106. On the influence of Mesmerism on
 The Rebbe of Piaseczno 77

the interwar Hasidic mystic in the case of Menahem Mendel Ekstein, see Reiser,
Imagery Techniques, 348–59, 369–73. On the need for more complex academic
methods for investigating Jewish mysticism, see Idel, Ascensions on High, 1–13.
90. Compare to the more factual thrust of the narratives in the essays in
Biale et al., Hasidism.
 3

The Devotional Talmud

Study as a Sacred Quest

Ariel Evan Mayse

When I was a tender youngster, seeking the wisdom of Torah, I

learned the ways of casuistry (pilpul) from my teacher. At the age
of ten, I was coming up with my own creative interpretations (hid-
dushim). But later on, after I entered the sacred beit midrash of the
Kotzker Rebbe, the source of wisdom and understanding, I learned
the ways of penetrating insight (iyyun). He helped me understand
true creativity in Torah, for not all sophistry is truly novel.
—Rabbi Avraham Borenstein, Eglei tal

In studying Torah, we become attached to the Teacher of the Jewish

people—to the God of Israel. But one must know how to study Torah!
—Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, Hovat ha-talmidim

This chapter explores Talmud study as a devotional practice and a search

for mystical self-expression in the teachings of Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira
of Piaseczno. I will argue that Rabbi Shapira sought to inspire his read-
ers—and listeners—to see the Talmud, the backbone and core of rabbinic
Judaism, as a vital textual gateway through which to explore the infinite

79
80 Ariel Evan Mayse

expanse of the heart’s kingdom. Shapira’s teachings reframe the study of

Talmud as a spiritual quest, one undertaken by the scholar in order to
reveal the deepest elements of the self and to attain an intimate vision of
the Divine.1 This may be seen as part of a broader attempt at religious and
spiritual renewal among Hasidim and others in interbellum Warsaw (see
the preceding essays of Idel and Wodziński).2 The simultaneous flourishing
of mussar yeshivot may have been viewed as both competition and inspi-
ration for the relatively new Hasidic yeshivot, including the one Shapira
founded. This might even suggest a pointed—if subterranean—polemical
edge to Shapira’s teachings on the necessity of integrating positive emotive
and spiritual experience with scholarly pursuits.3
Talmudists often cloak innovation and creativity in the mantle of
tradition. Recent scholarship has challenged the view of the great talmudic
academies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Europe as bas-
tions of antimodernizing Orthodox traditionalism. The embrace of highly
abstract conceptual analysis in Lithuanian talmudism may, for example, be
understood as a revolutionary break with the patterns of study cultivated
hitherto in Eastern Europe.4 Similar arguments have been made regarding
the talmudists of Central Europe and Galicia, many of whom bespoke a
traditionalist ideology but were highly creative in their formulation of new
modes of interpretation and legal formulation. Although these scholars
were staunchly opposed to all religious or communal reform, their works
evince strikingly original and innovative intellectual positions.5 It is thus
noteworthy that the talmudic methodologies of the mostly Hasidic scholars
in Congress Poland have received significantly less scholarly attention.
The legal writings of central figures such as Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter
of Ger (1847–1905), Yosef Engel (1858–1920), Yosef Rosen (1858–1936),
and Aryeh Tsevi Frumer (1884–1923), to name but a few, have yet to be
the subject of any sustained critical analysis.6
This is the context in which I seek to examine Kalonymus Kalman
Shapira’s attempt to integrate Talmud study with the mystical teachings
and contemplative techniques for which he is better known.7 My par-
ticular focus will be his stirring depictions of studying rabbinic texts as
a spiritual quest to reveal the innermost creativity of the individual self
and as a journey toward the Divine sparked by the encounter with the
folios of the Talmud. In this I hope to contribute to a broader, more
phenomenologically compelling narrative than the one that views his-
torical-critical styles of scholarship and unflagging secularization as the
exclusive harbingers of modernity.8
 The Devotional Talmud 81

Renewing the Talmud

Shapira’s thinking on the study of Talmud represents a jostling eddy of

cultural and intellectual contexts. Polish talmudism had long struggled
against pilpul, a form of legal sophistry that many Polish scholars accused
of doing violence to the talmudic text and swiftly collapsing into baseless
casuistry.9 Shapira was also shaped, in part, by descriptions of Talmud study
found in some kabbalistic texts in which preference is given to experiential
devotion in studying the “inner dimensions” (penimiyyut) of Torah—that
is, mystical theosophy—rather than talmudic dialectics.10 Some of these
texts, including the significant Lurianic corpus that emerged from the
hand of Hayyim Vital, describe studying the casuistic patterns of Jewish
law as useful only in order to break through the “husks” (kelippot) that
obscure and surround the holy sparks, or divine wisdom, hidden deep
within Scripture.11
Hasidism absorbed many elements of the kabbalistic approach to
engagement with Torah, though in doing so, Hasidic thinkers subtly
shifted their orientation away from mystical metaphysics or theosophy
and toward the devotional elements of sacred study.12 Teachings from the
Baal Shem Tov on immersion in Torah study underscore the experiential
and affective dimension of religious scholarship.13 To a certain degree, this
impulse flattens the distinctions between various kinds of sacred texts.
“The entirety of our Torah, both written and oral, includes nothing—not
even a single letter—that speaks of anything other than sacred service of
God,” claims one source. “I heard my holy teacher the Maggid [of Zlotshev]
say that he saw absolutely no difference between the books before him;
whether [studying] Talmud or Kabbalah, he saw nothing other than how
to serve God.”14 Hasidic thinkers also seem to have understood that not
only Talmud but Kabbalah, too, could become the focus of arid, dry, and
soulless scholarship.15 Rather than isolating and prioritizing the study of
one particular corpus, whether rabbinic literature or mystical texts, these
early Hasidic leaders argued that the devotional “how” of sacred study
should outweigh the question of “what” corpus forms the subject of inquiry.
The Hasidic emphasis on devekut as the pinnacle of religious service,
in study as well as in prayer, sparked the ire of the Lithuanian rabbin-
ate.16 Their polemics criticized the Hasidim for disdaining scholars and,
in more extreme cases, for neglecting and even deriding Talmud study as
a hindrance to the true goals of the spiritual life.17 This backlash might
have inspired the Hasidim to reinforce their study of halakhah and tighten
82 Ariel Evan Mayse

up on certain matters of ritual practice, though they maintained their

critique of narcissistic scholars and abstract sophistry.18 By the nineteenth
century, however, a significant number of Hasidic thinkers who were
also poskim (rabbinic jurists) emerged in Galicia, Congress Poland, and
White Russia.19 The Hasidic world had, to a large degree, joined forces
with the traditional rabbinate and staked out a fiercely antimodern stance,
refusing to compromise on issues of changing customs, including dress
and language, and utterly resisting all forms of educational reform. In
many communities, this focus on performance of the law and the study
of halakhah took pride of place over mystical quest.20
Shapira was a direct descendent of Rabbi Yisra’el Hapstein (c.
1734–1814), the Maggid of Kozhnits, an early Hasidic leader whose fame
for charismatic piety and wonder-working was complemented by his repu-
tation for rabbinic erudition and legal prowess.21 Sacred study of a variety
of religious texts was, for Shapira, a crucial element of the spiritual path.
Some of his teachings highlight the devotional potential of all such study,
regardless of the topic or genre;22 such homilies seek to inspire Shapira’s
students to embrace the affective, emotional elements of study together
with its intellectual component.23
Suggesting that studying rabbinic literature allows for a singular kind
of encounter with God, Shapira notes that talmudic scholarship also pres-
ents unique challenges. In his effort to highlight the spiritual dimensions
of reading Talmud, Shapira did not in any way depreciate the power and
authority of Kabbalah; rabbinic sources along with Jewish mystical texts
represent a coherent and complementary literary inheritance.24 This par-
adigm follows that of late medieval and early modern Jewish intellectuals
such as Rabbi Isaiah Horowtiz (c. 1555–1630), whose classical book Shenei
luhot ha-berit sought to reintegrate the esoteric and exoteric dimensions
of Jewish thought into a coherent whole. But Shapira’s nuanced approach
separates him from more recent thinkers such as Hayyim of Volozhin
on one hand and from the more cognitively inclined talmudic study of
Hasidic groups like Kotsk and Ger on the other.
In 1923, Shapira founded a yeshivah called Da’at Moshe (see
Wodziński, this volume), which, with perhaps some three hundred students,
represented a significant institution of talmudic learning in interbellum
Warsaw.25 The educational philosophy outlined in Hovat ha-talmidim makes
it clear that holistic spiritual education was the purpose of this institu-
tion, but the heart of the curriculum of Da’at Moshe was the Babylonian
Talmud.26 Shapira also evidently formed an advanced group of talented
 The Devotional Talmud 83

students, apart from the younger disciples in the yeshivah, to study the
intricate laws required for ordination as a rabbinic judge (dayyanut).27
Shapira also encouraged one of his disciples to establish a beit midrash
for the study of Talmud and Hasidic sources in Lodz.28
The decision to establish a yeshivah was a deliberate step in Shapira’s
project of reforming Jewish education to contend with modern challenges.29
Da’at Moshe was to be an insulated space for spiritual development, an
environment in which the students were to focus on communion with
the Divine in single-minded devotion to study and on their own personal
religious journeys.30 In a fundraising address on behalf of the Council for
Aid on Saving the Yeshivot of Poland and Lithuania, he noted that times
had changed: “The salvation of Israel, in spiritual and physical matters,
depends on the yeshivah. The yeshivah will receive your children, and after
some years it will return them to you—full of Torah and fear of heaven.”31
Yet the point of the yeshivah was not simply to protect its students from
the changing times while allowing the rest of the generation to flounder.
Shapira hoped that his students would become the heart of a religious
revival, eventually producing a new cadre of intellectually talented and
spiritually engaged rabbinic leaders.32
In his role as founder and rosh yeshivah of Da’at Moshe, Shapira
was an Orthodox thinker, a Hasidic leader firmly committed to providing
a spiritual alternative to the draws of secular culture and political life
in twentieth-century Warsaw.33 Key to this were creating a new way of
approaching traditional texts and training a new generation of students—
and teachers—who saw the study of Talmud as an immersive spiritual
experience. Shapira understood that for many people, including some
individuals within the Hasidic fold, Talmud study had lost its ability to
command the heart and mind. His development of meditative techniques
was one strategy for suffusing the modern world with an élan of spiritual
renewal, but so was his attempt to re-envision talmudic study as a quest
to unearth the mysteries of the human soul and to stand in the presence
of God.

Sacred Study

Rabbi Shapira understood that Hasidic theology had sometimes been

viewed as supplanting the study of Talmud with an exclusive emphasis on
reading kabbalistic or ethical-spiritual literature. Such devotional works
84 Ariel Evan Mayse

inspire the mind and heart more easily than intricate rabbinic dialectics.
Shapira tackled this issue head-on, noting that the intent of Hasidic
spirituality is to fundamentally change the student’s relationship to any
element of Torah they might study:

O Jewish student, do not think that with our words in this

book we wish to exempt you from studying Talmud, Midrash,
the Shulhan arukh, and the other holy works that instruct us
in the holy way of ascending to God—heaven forfend that
we say thus!
On the contrary, our intention is to correct you (le-takken
et atsmekha), so that you may look into them and imbibe their
holy words into your soul and into your body, drenching all
of your limbs with the font that emerges from the house of
God and the holy palaces.34

The goal of Hasidism is not to supplant the traditional centrality of Talmud

and other rabbinic sources. The aim of Hasidic piety, argues Shapira, is to
cultivate such a rigorous sense of spiritual attunement that the study of
these texts cannot fall into mental sophistry, abstraction, and dry intel-
lection. Instead, Talmud study reveals the bodily practices and intellectual
gateways through which a serious student might step into the presence
of the Divine. According to this view, Hasidism seeks to enliven scholars
and whet their longing for God, thus revealing the Divine precisely within
the intricacies of legal exegesis.35
Attaining communion with the Infinite is the ultimate goal of all
sacred learning, claims Shapira, but this rung cannot be reached through
intellectual immersion in talmudic texts alone. One must also be prepared
for the experiential dimensions of this scholarship.

According to one’s degree of preparation, becoming fit (mit-

kasher) for God’s revelation, so will be one’s faith, awe, and love
and the arousal (hitpa’alut) of one’s character traits (middot) to
God. So too will be one’s understanding of Torah—each per-
son grasps some sense of the Divine in exoteric and esoteric
[subjects] (nigleh ve-nistar), for the Blessed One is found in
the Torah.
When one understands a page of Talmud, such as “two
individuals are holding onto a garment,”36 one grasps the
 The Devotional Talmud 85

portion of divine illumination in that page,37 even though his

external mind (da’ato ha-niglah) thinks that these are matters
of this world—Reuven, Shimon, a garment, a disagreement,
and so forth.38

To the untrained eye, the study of Talmud is nothing more than dialecti-
cal attention to the boring and mundane elements of human life. But for
the individual who has undergone spiritual preparation, cultivating the
soul and developing the emotional faculties, the Talmud comes alive as
a soul-document revealing a unique portion of the Divine.39 Moreover,
Shapira emphasizes that the student of rabbinic literature must come to
see that the intricate details of the talmudic deliberations actually disclose
God’s presence. Just as the seemingly ordinary phenomena of the physical
world reveal the divine majesty in palpable and almost tactile terms, so
too do the concrete details of the talmudic page.
The nuanced spiritual message of a 1942 sermon, for example, is
a tender meditation on the power of talmudic aggadah to bring people
together by illuminating the teacher as well as the student. Unlike some
elements of religious experience that are irretrievably personal and incom-
municable, attentive study of rabbinic aggadah alongside halakhah opens
the mind and heart. This spiritual openness, Shapira says, is the pulsing
core of Torah, its deepest and innermost essence.40 Accessing the “secret”
of Torah (sod, raz, or sitrei oraita), long understood by the Jewish mystics
as the highest mode of Torah study, does not necessarily entail opening
up the Zohar or works of Safed Kabbalah.41 These books have long since
been printed and their once esoteric ideas await the eager scholar (see
Seeman, this volume). For Shapira, the greatest mysteries to be unlocked
in study are those hidden within the human soul. Many of these cannot
be accessed except through the penetrating study of rabbinic texts.
A related, but distinct, conception of Talmud study appears in a short
essay that was evidently a sort of prolegomenon to Shapira’s commentary
(or notes) on the Zohar.42 The essay begins with the story of the biblical
leader Ezra, who, upon returning to the land of Israel, sees that many
of the Israelites—including priests—have abandoned the Torah (Ezra
9:1–15). Only a few righteous individuals have remained faithful to God.
Immediately, Ezra understands that the Torah has become foreign to them;
they have been standing outside of it, without internalizing its spiritual
and moral message. Ezra therefore realizes that in addition to cognitive
Torah study, he needs to find a new way of drawing Torah down into their
86 Ariel Evan Mayse

emotional and spiritual lives. The answer is the project of the Oral Torah:

How is it possible to bring the Torah, its soul and spirit, which
are broader in measure than the earth, into the gateway of the
heart of the human being, when the aperture is not that of a
wide hall, as it is for the few elites of great spiritual stature? . . .
God instructed him [Ezra], awakening him with the
holy spirit—as well as the other tsaddikim who were with
him—to reveal the Oral Torah. [He sought not just to share]
the concise laws and decisions (dinim ketsarim u-maskanot)
but, from the Torah, to reveal intellect and emotion that fit
those of the human being. This enables [the Torah] to cross
the threshold of the person and dwell within him, becoming
one with him. . . .
They taught them not only the laws, but the reasoning
(pilpul) and dialectics (shakla ve-tarya), so that each person—
according to his state—could understand it and bring it into
his mind.43

It would have been misguided for Ezra to simply condemn his generation
for their spiritual ills and disobedience—they were alienated from the
written Torah’s teaching, which had seemed to have become irrelevant.
Talmudic dialectics and the quest to understand its intricate textual work-
ings, approached properly, allow the very essence of Torah to penetrate
into one’s being and to stir one’s mind and heart.

Perhaps this is how we are to understand [the question]: why

has the Gemara of the times of the Mishnah not remained? In
giving us the Gemara, they [i.e., Ezra and the sages] intended
to give us the intellectual [element] of Torah so that we might
grasp ahold of it. When the reasoning (pilpul) of the Gemara
was revealed by the Amoraim, that of the Tannaim was hidden.
And when one delves deeply into the intellect of the Torah,
the knowledge and will of God . . . then Torah has already
entered one’s mind. Y-H-V-H, God of Israel, dwells within one.
But if the sages spoke to the mind through the Gemara
[i.e., the legal sections of the Talmud], bringing the Torah
into the person, through midrash and aggadah [they spoke]
to the emotions. . . . The sages focused (tsimtsemu) their own
 The Devotional Talmud 87

feelings into these words, into the words of the midrash; [these
teachers shared] how they attained uplift in each and every
mitzvah, and in all the other words of Torah, so that every
person—each according to his state—might reach [this same
type of] ecstasy and feeling, becoming ignited when studying
and speaking aloud the words of the Midrash.44

The Talmud of the Tannaim (the sages of the Mishnah) is no longer nec-
essary, suggests Shapira, because the explanations of the Amoraim—full
of complexities and conceptualization as well as details—come alive for
the reader in an immediate sense as they are recited aloud and inter-
rogated. These rabbinic teachings, he claims, are vessels that hold the
spiritual experiences of generations past, and connecting to them unites
the Torah with the quality of the Divine that dwells within the human
being. Rather than privileging either halakhah or aggadah, Shapira notes
that the intellectually challenging legal sections of the Talmud awaken
the mind (sekhel), while the rabbinic legends and theological musings
arouse the heart or “feeling” (hargashah). The nomian or praxis-oriented
domains of Talmud are thus fused with the emotive in order to generate
a fully integrated religious experience.
Earlier generations, Shapira claims, needed less cerebral instruction
because the deeper reasons and meaning that undergird the life of devotion
were grasped more easily. The integration of the self was more organic,
the human connection to the Divine more intuitive, and practices were
observed spontaneously—though consistently—in response to the imme-
diacy of the divine command. By the time of Ezra’s return to the land
of Israel, however, the community had reached a point of crisis. Leaders
and teachers were thus required to adopt new strategies for meeting the
spiritual challenges of the hour, which they did by joining “each murmur
of the whispering of their soul to the details of every verse in the Torah.”45
The greatness of rabbinic exegesis, thus construed, lies in their attempt
to translate what had once been an intuitive connection to God into an
active interpretive and ritual journey. The present-day student may access
spiritual uplift through traversing the verdant exegetical canopy of practices
rooted in the fertile ground of the sacred text.
Reframing the discourse of halakhah as a spiritual quest of self-dis-
covery and divine revelation is a central feature of Shapira’s innovative take
on Talmud study, although his approach surely demands equal sensitivity
to the abundant sections of aggadah. He has no truck with the claim that
88 Ariel Evan Mayse

such texts are only for those whose minds are not keen enough for hal-
akhah. “Should a disciple of Torah (ben torah) who studies Talmud skip
over this homily?!,” he asks. “Even were we all sages, all knowledgeable
in the Torah, it is a commandment for us to study these words . . . [for]
it is aggadah that draws forth the heart.”46 Talmudic aggadah can no
more be eliminated from religious study and practice than the throbbing
heart can be excised from the human body; without the theological and
spiritual core, the skeleton of legal structures and the mind to which they
adhere are doomed to become ossified and desiccated. The attempt to
imbricate aggadah and halakhah should be seen as an important part of
Shapira’s approach to Talmud study, a step that is necessary—though not
itself sufficient—for sparking a spiritual awakening through scholarship.
This process of expanding the reach of Torah through both legal and
theological interpretation, thus overcoming the rift between the reader and
the sacred texts, stretches beyond the Talmud and classical midrashim.
For Shapira, at least in this essay, the process reaches its zenith in the
exegesis of the Zohar.

Through the words of midrash, the sages sought to bring the

Torah, along with its master—the Master of the world—into
a Jew’s innermost realm through the gateways of their hearts
and emotions. They accomplished this by focusing their pas-
sionate excitement and holy spirit, derived from every verse
of commandment, into the words of ordinary people, making
“handles” (oznayim) [through which to grasp] their ecstasy
and the sacred visions that they witnessed, such that the heart
could understand.
In the Zohar, by contrast, their ecstasy and prophetic spirit
appear nearly unclothed, just as they are. . . . Even the exegesis
(derush) in the Zohar is different from that of the aggadah and
Gemara. It goes beyond the walls of human understanding;
the fiery holy spirit that burns within it is naked, untethered
by the person’s intellect or understanding. This is a matter of
the heart, but so are the intellectual matters that we find from
time to time in the Zohar or Kabbalah; they, too, are matters
of the heart and the spirit.47

The playful spirit of Zoharic exegesis, claims Shapira, amplifies the cre-
ative, evocative impulse of the Midrash; the study of kabbalistic texts
thus reminds one of the soulful form that all religious study must take.
 The Devotional Talmud 89

In the Zohar, he notes, the reader witnesses an uninhibited fire of textual

interpretation that is passionate and nearly erotic in its intensity. But the
Talmud and classical midrashim are able to reach a much wider audience
precisely because they do not speak this way. The quotidian concerns of
the rabbinic literature are an accessible lens through which the interior
dimensions of Torah and religious spirit may be projected and conveyed.
Therefore, properly interweaving halakhah and aggadah—law and theol-
ogy—arouses the mind and heart to the service of God and revives an
intuitive, even prophetic spiritual connection to the Divine that has been
lost. The disposition that results from enfolding aggadah back into hal-
akhah, Shapira argues, allows the reader to see even the most quotidian
debates in the Talmud and the most obscure kabbalistic theosophy as
spiritually relevant to one’s immediate situation and existential concerns.
In reading Shapira’s imagined historical narrative about Ezra’s quest
to make Torah relevant for his community, one cannot help but wonder
whether the rebbe is making a point about his own contemporary reality.
Many Hasidic leaders in interbellum Warsaw were content to wall them-
selves off within their courts and educational institutions, ignoring the fate
of those Jews for whom Torah and tradition were becoming increasingly
irrelevant. In this lies a subtle criticism of their routinized piety, performed
not out of intense conviction but because of political or social goals.
Shapira, by contrast, saw himself as duty bound to search for a
spiritual language that would bring the Torah into the hearts and minds
of a wide variety of listeners. There was a time, perhaps also imagined,
when the place of God in one’s life was easy to locate, when piety was
organic and devotion intuitive. This changed with the disenchantment
and secularization of the modern world, which widened the gulf between
humanity and the Divine like never before. The way to greet such a chal-
lenge, Shapira argued, was to reclaim the power of study through creative
and impassioned exegesis (see Wiskind, Polen, this volume). The Zohar
is the heart of this renewal, and aggadah is its right hand. But its legs
are the nomian practices of rabbinic Judaism and the talmudic text from
which they stem. The rabbinic corpus must be studied not as dry dialec-
tics of legal formalism but as a text suffused with divinity (see Maayan,
Seeman, this volume) that awakens the soul of the reader and commands
a response through sacred deed.
Shapira’s emphasis on aggadah as a means of enkindling the soul was
surely meant as a corrective to contemporaneous modes of Torah study
prevalent in Lithuania but also found in Poland, in which aggadah was
disregarded in favor of halakhah. Like other early-twentieth-century think-
90 Ariel Evan Mayse

ers, such as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, who
underscored the crucial place of aggadah in Jewish cultural and spiritual
development, Shapira saw rabbinic aggadah as linking together multiple
modes of devotional literature, seamlessly integrating the fires of Kabbalah
and the penetrating insight of talmudic discourse. Even in moments in
which he describes Kabbalah as the highest subject of study, the Piasec-
zner argues for a kind of midrashic simultaneity in which the various
strata of the Torah are all true, each speaking to different people—and
to different elements of the self within the same person.48 Among these,
the Talmud provides an intellectual thrust that illuminates the power of
the commandments and reveals deeper reservoirs of inspiration that are
drawn forth through their fulfillment.

Sacred Knowing

The study of Talmud is, for Shapira, an opportunity to glimpse the Divine
as visible in the seemingly mundane questions regarding practices and
law that concern much of rabbinic exegesis. This is true for all of the
scholarly disciplines of Torah study, but Shapira notes that the concrete,
mundane subjects of talmudic inquiry, reflecting the rabbinic sages’ con-
cern with the realm of the ordinary, particularly attunes scholars to seeing
all aspects of the world as manifestations of the Divine.49 The discourse
of rabbinic law represents divine wisdom precisely as translated into the
language of ordinary situations involving civil disputes between “lenders
and borrowers”; when unpacked correctly, the Talmud infuses the lived
human experience and daily life with sanctity and spirituality.
Studying Talmud demands that one bring together mind and heart,
because intellection and knowledge are necessary but insufficient grounds
for spiritual uplift. The complex embodied praxis of rabbinic Judaism,
derived from and joined to the study of legal precepts, has the power to
infuse ritual with new devotional energy:

This is an essential teaching of Hasidism (ikkar be-torat

ha-hasidut): do not be satisfied with the mind alone being
formed through worship. The connection [to God] that remains
in the intellect alone cannot endure. One can subjugate it
and know something with full cerebral clarity, [realizing] that
 The Devotional Talmud 91

one is serving only God in all the details of one’s thought,

speech, and deeds, and nevertheless one’s heart and entire
body are far.50
One must connect the entire soul and fullness of one’s
physical vitality, penetrating into the soul and raising it up,
arousing it to become like a flame—in every mitzvah, in Torah,
and in worship.51

Though knowledge alone is not enough to bind one to the Divine, the
contemplative mind links together various emotive faculties. Inspiration
that is compartmentalized, whether in the mind alone or in the emotions
alone, cannot endure. This integrative push is one of the fundamental
theological watchwords of Hasidism: one must unite all elements of the
self in the service of God. Doing so, Shapira argues, enables the worship-
per to see rabbinic texts as far more than manuals for practice or books
of obtuse casuistry. For scholars primed to search for unified, embodied
knowledge, the Talmud provides a critical key for transforming every
element of one’s spiritual praxis.
In this way, Shapira’s description of Talmud study is directly con-
nected to his many teachings on the role of halakhah and the centrality of
physical mitzvot to the spiritual life and cultivation of inner piety. Scholars
often paint Hasidism as an anomian—or even antinomian—movement of
renewal, but current research argues that Hasidism has, from the eighteenth
century to the present day, offered a wide variety of different models in
which the performance (and reformulation) of law, mystical eros, and
impassioned religious devotion have been fused in novel forms of Jewish
legal method and discourse.52 Shapira’s attempt to revive Talmud study
as a spiritual practice, inclusive of sections dealing with halakhah as well
as aggadah, should be seen against this backdrop of a Hasidic ethos that
engages with the study and performance of quotidian jurisprudence as a
devotional exercise.
Integration of mind and heart lie at the very core of a short essay
on the power of exegesis printed in Shapira’s prewar sermons, Derekh
ha-melekh.53 Shapira argues in that essay that Kabbalah and Hasidism reveal
that sacred study is not simply about amassing knowledge but rather about
“drawing forth, summoning a cascade” (hamshakhah ve-hishtalshelut) of
divine vitality and wisdom.54 The goal of this knowledge is to awaken the
emotive faculties and unite them with wisdom (hokhmah) and knowledge
92 Ariel Evan Mayse

(yedi’ah), thus allowing the intellect to function as a part of a whole being.55

As we engage in study [of Torah], a portion of God’s illu-

minated wisdom and blessed will are drawn forth from the
supernal worlds into our minds and our hearts. But this only
happens if one has transformed the different parts of one’s
very being into a “throne” (merkavah) [i.e., a dwelling for
the divine Presence].
If one has performed one’s divine service, taking strength
and eliciting a divine revelation through one’s form, then when
one approaches the Torah, studying [the subject of] “an ox
that gored a cow” [the fifth chapter of tractate Bava Kamma],
carefully examining it with one’s mind for some time, then
one will find oneself lifted up. God’s spirit will beat within one
[like a heart], for the divine dwells within one.56

The inner contemplative life, fostered within the heart as well as the mind,
shapes the manner in which a student approaches a sacred text. We might
do well to compare this passage with the fifth chapter of Shneur Zalman
of Liady’s Likkutei amarim—Tanya. This book, which had a significant
impact on Shapira, offers a spiritual vision that prizes the intellect above
the emotions and demands that the worshipper allow his mind to “rule
over the heart” and only thus propel spiritual uplift.57 For Shneur Zal-
man, the mind communes with God directly during study of halakhah.
Shapira, inheriting a very different stream of Hasidic thought, argued that
talmudic study can—and should—generate a holistic transformation, but
only if it includes the emotional faculties. The scholar achieves unity with
the Divine through engaging with the talmudic text to the extent that the
various dimensions of the self have become integrated.
Shapira claims that the talmudic sages attempted to draw the light of
Torah into the human intellect. This does not mean, however, that rabbinic
discourse should be misconstrued as the fruit of pure human reason. By
arguing that that the ancient rabbis sought to explain God’s laws in human
terms, Shapira charted an interesting third position that complements the
stance of several well-known Lithuanian talmudists.58 He argues that key
legal ideas or precepts, such as the rabbinic law requiring an oath from
one who admits part of a monetary claim, may indeed conform to human
reason, but they are not ultimately bound to it:59
 The Devotional Talmud 93

They [the sages] all knew that the Torah does not enjoin its
commandments because of human reason, God forbid. Even if
a dazzlingly brilliant person were to come along and give other
intellectual reasons, we will not alter, heaven forfend, even the
dot of the yod from the laws of the Torah as they are received.60

Why, then, should the sages struggle to express divine logic in terms of
human reason? Because doing so awakens the “intellect and mind, and
the light of prophecy in the Torah will thus be revealed.” 61 Talmudic
explorations of logic and reason bring prophecy out of abstraction and
into the embodied commandments, rendering the intellectual realm
more attainable.62 Moreover, Shapira claims, the concrete and mundane
subjects of talmudic inquiry, reflecting the Talmud’s overall concern with
the realm of the quotidian, attune us to seeing all aspects of the world as
manifestations of the Divine.
Shapira thus expands the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching on divine
immanence in the cosmos and in human language, a bedrock theological
message of early Hasidism, by turning it into a call to find God in the
most ordinary, recondite, and seemingly irrelevant talmudic discussions.
The matrix of the talmudic text represents an opportunity for revelation
in which the hidden self may disclose itself through encounter with the
Divine. The Baal Shem Tov renewed Jewish life at the beginning of the
Hasidic movement by expanding the theater of experience through sanc-
tification of mundane deeds such as eating, walking, or even sleeping, and
through a newly devotional approach to the study of both rabbinic and
kabbalistic literature. Surrounded by talmudic sophistry but also by waves
of promising intellects who were appalled at the aridity of contemporary
Orthodox talmudism in his own day, the Piaseczner Rebbe extended this
call to divine immanence even to talmudic discussions anchored in the
most mundane subjects of loans, oaths, and damages.63 Such quotidian
debates witness a unique manifestation of the divine revealed through
the contours of the text and in so doing reveal a unique element of the
student’s own spiritual self.

Sacred Self

Among the cornerstones of Shapira’s educational philosophy is the notion

that Torah cannot be well understood if the text is held at a distance
94 Ariel Evan Mayse

from the human being. This refers not just to apathy or disinterest but
also to holding Torah at arm’s length in order to maintain an avowedly
scholarly abstraction or objectivity. The student or scholar must invest all
parts of the self, with unadulterated intellectual and emotional presence,
in the encounter with the text in order to summon forth new meaning
from its words:

Not only was the Torah given to Israel, but Israel was given
to the Torah . . . there must be a mutual exchange in all acts
of commerce (kinyan). What must we give to the Torah? Our
very selves (et atsmeinu). We should not stand outside of it
and glance upon it but rather give all of our very essence to
the Torah; our souls must be brought into it. . . .
When one studies with the soul and thus comes to reveal
it, this is the study of the secrets of Torah, the secret of the
“pledge” (sod ha-eravon; Gen 38:20)—even when one studies
the laws “partial admission of claim” (modeh be-miktsat),
or [the laws] of an ox goring a cow . . . in this too one can
study the secrets of Torah, revealing the innermost soul that
is concealed and hidden.64

As we have seen, Shapira recasts the notion of esoteric study into a

devotional key. Even one who does not study Kabbalah must pay close
attention to the deepest riddles of the human soul. At times, these rise
to the surface through the study of Jewish mystical sources, and at others
they are unearthed through impassioned prayer.65 In this case, however, it
is the confrontation with the difficult and seemingly banal discussions in
rabbinic literature that are the key to unlocking the personal inner realm.
What is the “pledge” to which Shapira elliptically refers? This turn
of phrase reveals his capacity for deft and creative exegesis. Hearkening
back to the biblical account of Judah and Tamar, Shapira notes that Judah,
having just slept with the mysterious stranger at the crossroads in a fit of
lust, admits to at least partial wrongdoing by sending along his comrade
“to receive the pledge from the woman’s hand.” Shapira then suggests that
one who studies the talmudic laws of partial admission will reveal the
soul that has been vouchsafed within him by God, a mysterious “pledge”
deposited with a human being that must be developed and called forth
in the act of study.
The quest to grasp the ideational core of the talmudic text is in fact
a journey to come to know one’s innermost self. “All the holiness rests
 The Devotional Talmud 95

in the Torah, and in it you will become connected to the holiness of the
Infinite One,” writes Shapira. “But you must know how to study Torah.
First of all, you must reveal your soul that is hidden within you, sleeping
and faint, and enter the Torah with it.”66 Addressing his young disciples,
Shapira argues that to become a unique self is nothing less than a “duty
from which none of you can be exempted.”67 Through studying Hasidic
works, and through engagement in prayer and other devotional activities,
one is readied to meet the divine and the self in the act of reading the
Talmud. In this confrontation with the text, creativity and self-formation
go hand in hand.

When you first started to study Talmud, you were taught the
first chapter of Bava Metsia [beginning with the words]: “Two
individuals are holding onto a garment.” This subject is easy for
a child to grasp. But is it truly so simple? Haven’t the Tosafot
and the other sages, early and late (rishonim ve-aharonim),
toiled mightily [in the text] and plumbed its depths?
You, too, have a place to make your own. As you exert
yourself in study, more and more will be revealed. In every
place, in every subject, you can strive and delve deeply [into
its words], revealing a greater measure of your power, your
vital animating force (nafshekha), and your soul, connecting
them to the Torah and to the Infinite One who lies within.68

Some talmudic passages seem quite easy to understand, but this effort-
lessness is actually a sign that the student has not paid ample attention to
the processes of self-discovery and innovation. Indeed, as Shapira avers in
the continuation of this chapter, talmudic texts become threadbare when
read so many times that the illumination and intellectual engagement
fades away.69 Scholars throughout the generations have applied themselves
to tilling the canonical texts with discipline and aplomb, and thus sowing
seeds through exegesis, have yielded bountiful harvests of meaning. Every
person who confronts the text will find hidden ideas concealed therein,
and, perhaps of even greater importance, will conjure up and unveil new
elements of their own soul and spirit.
Talmud study, thus construed, is an intensely personal devotional
journey. “One can,” writes Shapira, “recognize one’s own spiritual state
in the new interpretations one finds in the Torah.”70 Ideas that are truly
novel and truly anchored in the divine nature of the text will illuminate
everyone who comes in contact with the scholar; these ideas raise up
96 Ariel Evan Mayse

students spiritually as well as intellectually. “When we study Talmud or

another work written by a holy person, even though we are learning the
laws of the ox that gored the cow, we feel the infusion of holiness long
afterward.”71 Other ideas may excite the listener for a short period, but
ultimately all textual interpretations—including talmudic ones—that are
not rooted in the exegete’s soul are no more than fabrications foisted upon
the text: “[N]o holiness, no extra soulfulness (neshamah yeterah) has been
drawn down. We do not feel the holy spirit lingering afterwards.”72
Studying Talmud with the intensity and presence needed to reveal
hitherto concealed dimensions of the self requires significant preparation.
It cannot be accomplished in a single moment, and the scholar cannot wait
until the talmudic source lies open on the table. The process begins with
awakening the self to the spirit of prophecy—that is, to the spark of inner
potential for spiritual growth, attunement, and actualization—and only
then training one’s eyes upon the talmudic text itself.73 Only thus, with the
search for the self, do the words of the talmudic rabbis begin to bear fruit.
Given this difficulty, Shapira acknowledges that one might be tempted
to turn to books whose spiritual message is easier to access. He was well
aware, as noted above, that one might interpret the legacy of the Baal
Shem Tov as a call to study the devotionally inclined books of Kabbalah
and Hasidism. Yet Shapira insists that this would not by itself elide the
fundamental issue at the heart of his concern: that the study of any text
must become a matter of sacred attention.

Sometimes one may feel that one has become a different

person, as if one has been joined to an angel, feeling that one
has ascended and been raised up from the body, enjoying the
most sublime delight and longing and becoming impassioned
to ascend heavenward toward God. This realization may even
come about after studying a page of Talmud, such as the laws of
partial admission, or “one who switches a cow with a donkey.”74
And so it is with the opposite: at times one may gaze
into all the ethical books and yet remain just as before—a rock
that cannot be overturned, sunken in corporeality without a
feeling of uplift.
The reason for this is that in truth, one’s holy essence has
not [yet] been born. The only essence that has been brought
forth is the same as before, [expressed] in those debased mat-
 The Devotional Talmud 97

ters, in the lowest of things. Holy matters are only a garment

without any essence or soul . . .
If one brings one’s self to the Torah and mitsvot with
all one’s soul, as a Jew, then the portions of one’s essence are
born through this.75

Shapira is speaking of Hasidic disciplines of reading and spiritual arousal

designed to reveal the soul through the encounter with rabbinic literature,
but his point is articulated in expansive terms: illumination in scholarship
is a product of focused attention, presence, and open-heartedness rather
than the particular subject of inquiry.
The broader context of the homily is critical for understanding Sha-
pira’s point. He describes Rosh Hashanah as more than a time of rebirth
for the cosmos. On this day, the worshipper is called to enter a new state
of being, making such great strides in the spiritual quest that he or she
is essentially reborn. Accomplishing this type of fundamental, qualitative
shift means more than collecting accolades or achievements—more prayer
or study in the same hackneyed modality—while the self remains in its
preexisting form. Rosh Hashanah, correctly approached, demands a radical
inner transformation, through which one’s authentic self is born.
Encountering and being shaped by the ethos of Hasidic texts is a
crucial part of this process of self-discovery. The same is true of Lurianic
Kabbalah and the Zohar, read for their devotional significance rather than
their theosophical speculation. But, Shapira says, spiritual uplift may be
gleaned from even difficult or seemingly irrelevant aspects of the Talmud.
One who cannot find a vision of God in rabbinic literature will be equally
blind to the divine presence in even the most spiritually rich and exciting
words. The key is approaching the text with a sense of openness, excite-
ment, and newness. Thus prepared, the reader may become transformed
and reborn in the encounter with the rabbinic text.
We have noted that Shapira refers to Talmud study as a journey that
is both intellectual and emotional, a quest requiring the integration of all
fundaments of one’s being. But it is also shot through with the thrill of
self-discovery:

Israel yearns for the Torah. One is pained if one does not
understand something [in one’s studies], and one rejoices
and delights in discovering its meaning. The search and the
98 Ariel Evan Mayse

previous suffering [in not knowing] are like, for example, a

person who is looking for a lost object. The Talmud says that
a person will strive to recover his lost item76—[in our case, the
student] is searching for a part of the self, and delights in the
union [when it is recovered]. The student is united [with the
lost aspect] of his own essence. . . .
If a person studies Torah with his mind alone, he will err
in his judgment and argue that an unclean creature is ritually
pure with 150 warped reasons [in support]—but in addition to
this, his comprehension will be no more than fleeting happen-
stance rather than true [integrated] knowledge. Such a person
will have tasted nothing of its deeper meaning.77

The study of Talmud with the mind alone is far worse than insufficient.
Cerebral exegesis that lacks the necessary counterbalance of the emotions
is skewed and distorted. Such interpretations cannot take root in the soil
of the soul, and the illumination—such as it is—is fleeting and transitory.
Torah study that is founded in yearning and love as well as intellectual
longing, by contrast, sparks a search for the Divine that is pleasurable
and full of delight, though it may indeed be unending. But the study of
Talmud is in fact two quests that appear to be coterminous: the search
for God among the ordinary markers of human experience expressed in
talmudic dialectics and the hunt for hidden elements of the self that are
revealed in this encounter with the ancient text.

Conclusion

Did Shapira’s spiritual approach to studying rabbinic texts influence his

mode of talmudic exegesis? Lacking any firm evidence in the form of
hiddushim, the kind of rabbinic novellae often published by talmudists,
we cannot say for sure.78 His sermons are peppered with references to
classical midrashim and talmudic discussions, which he interprets for
their devotional significance through a Hasidic lens rather than the tex-
tual acrobatics appearing in classical talmudic scholarship. The homilies
in his Ghetto sermons, in particular, are filled with rabbinic aggadah,
surely meant to open the heart and awaken the soul amid the sadness,
destruction, and pain of the Warsaw Ghetto (see Leib-Smokler, Abramson,
 The Devotional Talmud 99

Seeman, this volume). In this crushing environment, the spirit of talmudic

and midrashic sources—and of aggadah in particular—offered a way of
transcending time and entering the world of illuminated exegesis rather
than temporal suffering.79
Shapira’s remarks at a ceremony marking the completion of a cycle
of studying the entire Talmud certainly speak to this point. His homily
demonstrates his exegetical technique and his belief in the transformative
power of talmudic study when such scholarship emerges from spiritual
preparation. In a move characteristic of sermons at the end of a study cycle,
he joins the final lines of the Talmud with the opening words of its very
first tractate. In doing so, he highlights the transformative power of the
study of halakhah, noting, however, that one must be correctly prepared in
order for the study of Talmud to lift one beyond the confines of the world:

“One who studies (shoneh) halakhot [every day] is assured to

be worthy of the world to come (ben olam ha-ba).”80 We must
understand: don’t all Israel have part in the world to come?81
We have already discussed that the Torah becomes our intellect,
as our mind is garbed in it. What is this intellect? The divine
intellect, which becomes ours, for we, through our mind, enter
it. Thus, it is not that one who studies Torah will, in the future
and after his life, become worthy of the world to come—this
is attained as soon as he begins to study! . . .
Its end is embedded in the very beginning—the final
lines of ShaS [the Talmud] in the opening [mishnah]: “When
[do we recite Shema in the evenings?] From the time that [the
priests enter] to eat their terumah.”
The Mishnah is telling us how we must study the Torah:
with holiness and purification of body and soul. The allusion
is as follows: Thus shall you know when it is permitted to
recite Shema and study—when it is permitted for the priests to
enter and eat terumah. When is this? Once they have cleansed
themselves of any impurity.
You might object: Why do we require such purity when
studying [the mundane laws of] partial admission or an ox
that gores the cow, which is such and such?
You must know, however, that “one who studies halak-
hot . . . is assured to be worthy of the world to come”—such
100 Ariel Evan Mayse

a person immediately enters the Garden of Eden and must

therefore first become pure.
Understand this.82

Notes
1. On this question, see David Maayan, “The Call of the Self: Devotional
Individuation in the Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno”
(master’s thesis, Hebrew College, 2017), and Maayan’s essay in the present volume.
2. Glenn Dynner, “Replenishing the ‘Fountain of Judaism’: Traditionalist
Jewish Education in Interwar Poland,” Jewish History 31 (2018): 229–61.
3. My thanks to Glenn Dynner for suggesting this line of inquiry.
4. Paul E. Nahme, “Wissen Und Lomdus: Idealism, Modernity, and His-
tory in Some Nineteenth-Century Rabbinic and Philosophical Responses to the
Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 3 (2017):
393–420. See also Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of
Modern Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Chaim Saiman, “Legal
Theology: The Turn to Conceptualism in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Law,” Journal
of Law and Religion 21, no. 1 (2005): 39–100; and Shai Wozner, Legal Thinking
in the Lithuanian Yeshivoth: The Heritage and Works of Rabbi Shimon Shkop [in
Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2016).
5. Michael K. Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention
of a Tradition,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era,
ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992),
23–84; and more recently, Maoz Kahana, Me-ha-Noda bi-Yehudah le-ha-Hatam
Sofer: Halakhah ve-hagut le-nokhah etgare ha-zeman (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman
Shazar, 2015).
6. See Israel Ori Meitlis, “Scholarship (Lamdanut), Hassidut and Kabbalah:
On Hassidic and Kabbalistic Influences on the Scholarship of Joseph Rosen” [in
Hebrew], Sidra 30 (2015): 93–119.
7. See my remarks on this subject in Ariel Evan Mayse, “Like a Blacksmith
with the Hammer: Talmud Study and the Spiritual Life,” in The Quest for Meaning,
ed. Martin S. Cohen and David Birnbaum (New York: Mesorah Matrix, 2018),
369–409.
8. See the lucid and insightful discussion of the thorny terms secularism
and secularization in the editors’ introduction to Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz,
eds., Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 1–24; and, more broadly, Charles Taylor,
A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3–4; and the critique
in Susannah Heschel, “Religion and Its Discontents,” AJS Perspectives (Fall 2011):
6–7; Louis Dupré, “Spiritual Life in a Secular Age,” Daedalus 111, no. 1 (1982):
 The Devotional Talmud 101

21–31; and Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’ ” Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (2003): 273–302. In making this
point, I hope to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate regarding the multiple
pathways of Jewish modernity. See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities
(New Brunswick: Transaction, 2002).
9. Elhanan Reiner, “Changes in Polish Yeshivot in the 16th and 17th Centuries
and the Debate over Pilpul” [in Hebrew], in Studies in Jewish Culture in Honour
of Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky
(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993), 9–80.
10. Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mysti-
cal Experience in the Zohar, trans. Nathan Wolski (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2009), 155–228.
11. See Jacob Katz, “Halakhah and Kabbalah and Competing Disciplines
of Study,” in Divine Law in Human Hands: Case Studies in Halakhic Flexibility
(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1998), 56–87; Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer
of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 207–19.
12. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Hasidism as a New Approach to Torah,”
in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 33–39.
13. Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader (Waltham:
Brandeis University Press, 2005), 113–51.
14. Mushallam Feibush Heller, Yosher divrei emet, ed. Avraham Kahn
(Jerusalem: Toledot Aharon, 1974), no. 24, fol. 123b.
15. This idea is found in the early Hasidic story in which the Baal Shem Tov
refers to a kabbalistic explanation given by Dov Baer of Mezritsh as “utterly without
soul.” See Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, eds., In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov:
The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism (Northvale, NJ:
Jason Aronson, 1993), 81–84. See also Heller, Yosher divrei emet, no. 11, fol. 122a.
16. See Mordecai L. Wilensky, “Hasidic-Mitnaggedic Polemics in the Jew-
ish Communities of Eastern Europe: The Hostile Phase,” ed. Gershon Hundert
(New York: New York University Press, 1991), 261–66; Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer,
Hasidism as Mysticism, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 310–25; Norman Lamm, Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torah’s Sake in the
Works of Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin and his Contemporaries (New York: Yeshiva
University Press, 1989), 230–324; and Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim:
Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997), esp. 51–60, 151–53, 160–64.
17. See the summary in Wilensky, “Hasidic-Mitnaggedic Polemics,” 244–71.
18. Joseph Weiss, “Torah Study in Early Hasidism,” in Studies in East
European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism, ed. David Goldstein (London: Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), 66–67.
102 Ariel Evan Mayse

19. Scholem’s claim that Hasidism “developed independently of the rabbinic

tradition” for nearly a century requires serious revision; see Gershom Scholem,
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1974), 345.
20. See Benjamin Brown, “Substitutes for Mysticism: A General Model for
the Theological Development of Hasidism in the Nineteenth Century,” History of
Religions 56, no. 3 (2017): 247–88.
21. For one example of Hapstein’s legal work, see the controversial ‘Agunat
yisra’el (Warsaw, 1880).
22. See Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Benei mahshavah tovah (Jerusalem:
Va‘ad Hasidei Piaseczno, 1989), 52.
23. On this point, see Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism,
and ‘Useless Suffering’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological Review 101,
no. 3/4 (2008): 469–70. On the mystical dimensions of Shapira’s approach to
study more broadly, see Daniel Reiser, Vision as a Mirror: Imagery Techniques in
Twentieth-Century Jewish Mysticism (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2014), 145–46.
24. See Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Mevo ha-she’arim (Jerusalem: Feldheim,
2001), 186–87.
25. See Shimon Huberband, Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural
Life in Poland during the Holocaust (Hoboken: Ktav, 1987) 178; Nehemia Polen,
The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of
the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), 1–2. Estimating the
size of Shapira’s yeshivah remains a thorny problem. Daniel Reiser has published
a document preserved in the Yeshiva University Archive listing the income and
expenditures of Da’at Moshe, which lists three hundred students of ages ten to
twenty-five. See Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in
Hebrew], ed. Daniel Reiser (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017), 1:337.
However, according to The Mark Wischnitzer Papers housed at the YIVO Institute
in New York (YIVO RG 767), there were 176 students at Da’at Moshe in 1938.
26. See Aharon Sorski, Marbitsei torah me-olam ha-hasidut (Benei Berak,
1988), 6:182–86. See the advertisement placed in Der Moment, 26 Tishrei, 5695;
and the description of an opening ceremony (hanukat ha-bayit) published in
Haynt, 9 Heshvan, 5689 (October 23, 1928), no. 247, 6.
27. See Toledot yosef tsevi (Jerusalem, 2000), 347.
28. See Sippuro shel ha-hasid ha-aharon: Yisrael Yitzhak Kihn, ed. Shahar
Zeev Kihn (Jerusalem, 2017), 60–61.
29. Two all-Hasidic yeshivot with similar goals were established in interwar
Poland: the Metivta (or “Academy”) in Warsaw and Hakhmei Lublin in the city
of that name. See Shaul Stampfer, “Hasidic Yeshivot in Inter-War Poland,” Polin
11 (1996): 3–24; and David Biale et al., Hasidism: A New History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2018), 602–605.
30. Polen, Holy Fire, 3, describes the educational philosophy of Shapira’s
yeshivah as follows: “imbuing the child with a vision of his own potential great-
 The Devotional Talmud 103

ness and enlisting him as an active participant in his own development.” See
Shapira’s comment in his Derekh ha-melekh (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei Piaseczno,
1995), 441: “When you are in yeshivah, do not simply loiter around. Sit yourself
down in awe and dignity before the Divine, who is to be found there.” The short
Yiddish text in which this appears evidently served as one of the foundations of
Shapira’s book Hovat ha-talmidim.
31. Derekh ha-melekh, 461.
32. Ibid., 462. Compare the remarks in Mossad ha-yeshivah ha-gedolah
metivta (1922), no. 7, 5, as quoted in Biale et al., Hasidism, 602.
33. See also the remarkably bold statements by his students in the “To the
Reader” preamble of the first volume of Ha-kerem (Kislev 5691). This short passage
celebrates the power of talmudic exegesis—intellectual and evocative—as well as
the authors’ unwillingness to brook any compromise with modernity, revealing
the journal’s complicated commitments to twentieth-century Hasidic Orthodoxy
and rabbinic creativity.
34. Hovat ha-talmidim, ch. 7, 66.
35. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette
Aronowicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp.
5, 14, 32, 55.
36. B. Bava Metsi’a 2a.
37. See the formulation of the Kotsker Rebbe preserved in Amud ha-emet
(Bnei Brak: Pe’er, 2000), 210: “The light of a commandment rests within the
talmudic tractate in which it is discussed.”
38. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat bo 5702 (1942), 1:255.
39. See Zohar 1:103b; and Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat bo
5702 (1942), 1:254–55.
40. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat bo 5702 (1942), 1:255.
41. Here Shapira cites, and develops, the experiential understanding of
sod suggested by Kalonymus Kalman Epstein of Krakow (after whom he was
named). See Kalonymus Epstein, Ma’or va-shamesh (Jerusalem: 1992), parashat
tavo’, 2:629–30. See also Heller, Yosher divrei emet, no. 22, fol. 122a; Kalonymus
Epstein, Keter shem tov ha-shalem (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2004), no. 240b; and Moshe
Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1995), 174.
42. Nothing further from this work remains.
43. “Mesirat moda’ah,” in Derekh ha-melekh, 426–27.
44. Ibid., 427.
45. Ibid., 428.
46. Ibid., 429. This formulation of “even were we all sages” draws upon
the Passover Haggadah.
47. Ibid., 431.
48. Mevo ha-she’arim, 186, 188–89.
104 Ariel Evan Mayse

49. See, for example, ibid., 211–12.

50. On this element of Shapira’s project, see James Jacobson-Maisels,
“Embodied Epistemology: Knowing through the Body in Late Hasidism,” Journal
of Religion 96, no. 2 (2016): 185–211.
51. Introduction to Hovat ha-talmidim, 21–22.
52. For a recent study, see Maoz Kahana and Ariel Evan Mayse, “Hasidic
Halakhah: Reappraising the Interface of Spirit and Law,” AJS Review 41, no. 2
(2017): 375–408.
53. Derekh ha-melekh, “Derekh ha-iyyun ha-meyuhad,” 435–40. This essay
is evidently the only extant fragment of the projected Hovat ha-avreikhim.
54. Ibid., 339.
55. My own understanding of this passage as an integrated knowledge differs
slightly from that of Jacobson-Maisels, “Embodied Epistemology,” 188, who cites
it as an example of Shapira’s occasional emphasis on the power of the intellect.
56. Hovat ha-talmidim, ch. 5, 228.
57. See Schneur Zalman of Liady, Likkutei amarim–Tanya, revised bilin-
gual ed., trans. Nissan Mindel (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1998), fol. 9a–10a. Hillel Zeitlin
dismisses the influence of Schneur Zalman’s writings on Shapira, a surprising
move given the obvious affinities as well as Zeitlin’s own intellectual and spiritual
commitments to Chabad. See Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 472, n. 26.
58. Here I have in mind Hayyim of Brisk, who argued that halakhah operated
according to abstract and immutable divine principles, and Shimon Shkop, whose
writings emphasized the human logic of halakhah. Given the close links between
the Jewish communities of Warsaw and Vilna and their rabbinic leaders in the
interbellum period, it is certainly not beyond the pale to assume that Shapira was
aware of these thinkers and their intellectual legacies. In addition to the sources
cited above, see Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Be-torato yehegeh: Limmud gemara
ke-vakashat elokim, ed. Zohar Meor (Mekhon Kitvei Rav Shagar, 2009), 46–104;
Shai Wozner, “On the Duty to Obey the Law in Halakhik Thought: Reflections on
the Thesis of Shimon Shkop,” Jewish Law Association Studies 20 (2010): 353–60;
and Yosef Lindell, “A Science Like Any Other?: Classical Legal Formalism in the
Halakhic Jurisprudence of Rabbis Isaac Jacob Reines and Moses Avigdor Amiel,”
Journal of Law and Religion 28, no. 1 (2013): 179–224.
59. B. Bava Metsi’a 2a–3b.
60. Mevo ha-she’arim, 190.
61. Ibid., 192.
62. Ibid., 198.
63. Compare Mevo ha-she’arim, 214–15.
64. Derekh ha-melekh, rosh ha-shanah, 197. See also Shapira, Derekh
ha-melekh, parashat be-shalah 5690 (1930), 98.
65. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat ki tetse 5700 (1940), 1:150.
66. Hovat ha-talmidim, ch. 12, 118–19.
 The Devotional Talmud 105

67. Author’s introduction in ibid., 35. See also Shapira, Tsav ve-zeruz
(Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2001), no. 10, 331–32, where the cultivation of the self is
presented as an explicit alternative to philosophical notions of determinism that
were gaining traction in that time. There, Shapira further notes that the voice of
this unique self becomes embodied in one’s theological writings; this mode of
anchoring the spiritual quest in the text complements the argument of the present
study. My thanks to Don Seeman for bringing this crucial passage to my attention.
68. Hovat ha-talmidim, ch. 2, 126.
69. Ibid., 126–27.
70. Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh, parashat mikets 5730 (1929), 56.
71. Ibid., sukkot 5690 (1929), 280.
72. Ibid., 280.
73. Ibid., shavuot 2 5689 (1929), 406.
74. M. Bava Metsi’a 8:4.
75. Derekh ha-melekh, rosh ha-shanah 5686 (1925), 194–95.
76. B. Kiddushin 2b.
77. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat va’era 5689 (1929), 94.
78. In a 1926 letter, Shapira laments the loss of his hiddushim on the tractate
Berakhot, which took him the better part of a year’s labor. His choice to begin
with this tractate may suggest that Shapira wanted to author a commentary on
the entire Talmud, but I believe it more likely that he was interested in writing on
Berakhot because of the tight interweaving of its aggadah and halakhah. Reiser
cites the letter in Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:42. To my knowledge, Shapira’s
Talmudic novellae did not appear in the journal Ha-kerem, so in the theft of this
document, we lost whatever we might have had.
79. See his remarks on precisely this point in Sermons from the Years of
Rage, parashat bo 5702 (1942), 1:253–59. And yet, as Don Seeman, in “Ritual
Efficacy,” 465–505. has argued, Shapira’s Ghetto writings emphasize the element
of divine vitality that is identical with divine suffering far more than the quest to
reveal the self and soul that undergirds so much of his prewar corpus.
80. B. Niddah 73a.
81. M. Sanhedrin 10:1.
82. Derekh ha-melekh, siyyum ha-shas, 442.
 4

Mystical Fraternities:
Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw
A Comparative Study of Goals, Structures, and Methods

Zvi Leshem

Introduction

The first book of R. Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, Benei mahshavah tovah,

was probably composed in the early 1920s.1 It was a secret handbook for
the establishment and running of secret Hasidic mystical fraternities, a
work that both dealt with group guidelines and detailed various mystical
techniques and meditative exercises for expanding consciousness and
achieving prophetic inspiration. The book also served as a blueprint for
much of R. Shapira’s later writings, in which he expanded upon these ideas
and techniques. The idea of the group itself is discussed at length in some
of R. Shapira’s later works, although it was no longer veiled in secrecy.
I will explore the historical context of the Hasidic fraternity itself and
how earlier mystical fraternities may have influenced the Piaseczner’s plan
and program. I propose to analyze the “structural” aspects of the plan laid
out in Benei mahshavah tovah, including group meetings, study, confession,
and the relationships among members of the group, in comparison with two
prior examples and one contemporary one. First, I will examine testimonies
and documents pertaining to the Ahavat Shalom fraternity in the Bet El
Kabbalistic Yeshiva in Jerusalem in the mid-eighteenth century. Second, I

107
108 Zvi Leshem

will look at letters dealing with similar topics from the early Tiberius Hasidic
groups of R. Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk and R. Abraham of Kalisk. My
claim is that these letters, published early in the nineteenth century, probably
served as a direct source for R. Shapira as he planned Benei mahshavah
tovah. Additionally, I believe that he may have received oral and written
traditions pertaining to the above groups via his father-in-law, R. Yerah-
miel Moshe Hapstein of Kozhnits, who received them from the rebbes of
Karlin. The work Maor va-shemesh, by his great-grandfather R. Kalonymus
Kalman Epstein of Kraków, which placed great emphasis on the centrality
of community in Hasidic life, may have also inclined him in this direction.2
This should also be examined through the prism of earlier mystical
fraternities in Judaism, such as the group of R. Shimon bar Yochai described
in the Zohar, the students of R. Yitzhak Luria in sixteenth-century Safed,
and the students of R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto in eighteenth-century Padua.
These, however, are not a major focus of this research, since I wish to deal
only with historically documented fraternities that were in close historical
proximity to R. Shapira, although the others no doubt loomed large in his
imagination. My interest is to define and analyze the major components of
the mystical fraternities in Jerusalem and Tiberius and determine to what
extent they influenced R. Shapira’s vision. Furthermore, I wish to clarify in
what ways the goals and methods of Benei mahshavah tovah differ from
the earlier models and why. Finally, I will contrast R. Shapira’s model for
Hasidic fellowships with those of his Warsaw contemporary Hillel Zeitlin
and close with a chilling account of R. Shapira’s participation in a fraternity
of sorts prior to his martyrdom in November 1943.
In doing so, I hope to make a novel contribution to the under-
standing of the communal aspect of Hasidism. This is important in
light of the individualist and existentialist trend that has characterized
research on Hasidism in recent years.3 This more communal approach,
while significant in its own right as a counterbalance to much of current
research, has methodological implications as well, leading toward a more
interdisciplinary approach to Hasidic studies, in which the tools of “Jew-
ish thought” or “intellectual history” are combined with those of “social
history” (Wodziński, this volume).4

The Goals of Benei Mahshavah Tovah

Before addressing R. Shapira’s plan for renewal, it is important to understand

that his work was related to the deterioration of the Hasidic movement
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 109

(see Idel, Mayse, this volume). In his opinion, certain aspects of Hasidic
life had fallen into disregard, including the crucial institution of Hasidic
fellowship, the Hevraya qadisha, which first appears in the context of the
Zohar.5 Drastic educational reform and spiritual revolution were needed.
As part of his program, he strove to reinstitute spiritual societies, an effort
first outlined by R. Shapira in his short treatise Benei mahshavah tovah.
The book’s target audience was the Hasidic spiritual elite. Its goal
was to help engender small fraternities of like-minded Hasidim interested
in holistic spiritual service, the experience of intimacy with the divine,
and ultimately the soul’s “melting.” Members would seek to achieve a
heightened state of consciousness that went beyond special times of
prayer or Torah study. It was meant to be a total revolution in the reli-
gious persona of the individual, who would learn to think constantly of
God, living in a state of intense concentration and powerful emotion
bordering on prophecy.6 Much of this book, and of R. Shapira’s other
works, is dedicated to practical guidance in this area (see Idel, Seeman,
this volume).7 The fraternity would provide a framework within which
each individual member could learn how to properly serve God. Sig-
nificantly, the group was meant to serve the individual, and not the
other way around.8 R. Shapira gives practical instruction on the topic of
mahshavah (consciousness) and how to achieve the state of mahshavah
tovah, or heightened consciousness.9
Benei mahshavah tovah concludes with a list of “bylaws.” Each society
must maintain a notebook with the names of its members and its records.
Included in the notebook (in the script used for a Torah scroll) is the
nusah ha-kabbalah, a document in which the new member accepts upon
himself the terms of the group by affixing his signature.10 What follows
is the text of the agreement. Since I will be comparing it to similar doc-
uments, I quote it here almost in full:

In free will and volition, in alignment with the deepest desire

of my heart, life, psyche, and soul, I take it upon myself to
become a member of this devoted group . . . to clean and
clear my body and mind and to offer them in holiness to
the holy God. I devote to God’s holy purposes my intentions,
thoughts, speech, and deeds, in a binding and immutable
commitment. . . . I stand before God and declare myself holy
and devoted—body, heart, and mind—I am his. . . . May his
holiness enter my being. At every moment and at every level,
wherever I may be, there may I be surrounded by God. May
110 Zvi Leshem

the glory of his presence encompass me from this moment

on through eternity.
I pray to God with all my heart and soul: If my urges
overpower me . . . if I stray from the will of God in my inten-
tions, in my awareness, in my speech or deeds, please God, for
the sake of your great mercy, do not despise me . . . I know
your holy hand is always open wide to accept the strays who
return—accept me, for my remorse is sincere. When you are
in my heart, I am whole . . . I go forth to enter the presence
of God. I commit my 248 organs and limbs to the 248 positive
commandments. I accept the 365 negative commandments in
my sinews and my flesh. By this declaration, I accept upon
myself to carefully observe every aspect of my behavior,
intentions, and speech, in a manner appropriate for a person
who has made a commitment to holiness and elevation. . . . I
know that the Holy One will support me with his unflinching
­righteousness and guide me on his holy path. . . . Amen.11

It is worth noting R. Shapira’s repeated stress on a “holistic” service of

God. This is seen in phrases such as “body and mind” and “intentions,
thoughts, speech, and deeds.” The document also expresses a strongly
immanent worldview, in which the devotee not only is “surrounded by
God” but also longs to be entered by “his holiness” (on “incarnational”
themes, see also Maayan, this volume). Yet even as the text emphasizes
striving for spiritual perfection, the inevitable failure of the imperfect
human being is recognized and finds its place.

The Society: Structure and Activities

The fraternity is meant to remain egalitarian and apolitical, with no officers

or honors. Members are instructed to emphasize the biblical mandate to
love all fellow Jews (ahavat yisra’el), inflected with kabbalistic nuance,
and must not cause any conflict with those who are not members. The
members of the society must meet at least three times each week.12 During
meetings, they are told, it is crucial to refrain from frivolous discussion.
Each member can study whatever he pleases, such as Mishnah or Gemara.
At least once a week, however, all members must study together, especially
works of Hasidic guidance, including R. Shapira’s tract itself. In doing so,
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 111

they should “study slowly and in depth, applying the topic to themselves,
how they will fulfill the advice of the book . . . any member who thinks of
a good idea . . . should discuss it with his friends, and they should listen,
for even if the matter is insignificant nine times, the tenth time there may
be some importance.” R. Shapira continues with practical instructions:

It is proper for them to occasionally drink together, not to

get drunk and act frivolously, God forbid, but in the way
of Hasidim to connect with each other, and also to arouse
the animal soul from its laziness. . . . After they drink, they
should sing a spiritually arousing song . . . and if they are
inspired and wish to dance together, they should dance, so
long as they don’t spend all of the time just drinking, singing,
and dancing.13

Regarding relationships within the society, R. Shapira gives guidance

based on the idea that “the holy society is based on three principles:
the connection of friends, the love between friends, and the cleaving of
friends. . . . They must all love each other with powerful love.” Despite
the deep connection among them all, it is also important for each to have
a particular friend and study partner:

Each should choose one special friend, before whom he can

reveal all of the secrets of his heart, in both spiritual and
physical matters, his concerns and his joys, his failures and
successes. His friend should then comfort and advise him
and cause him to rejoice as much as possible, also in spiritual
matters, according to his understanding of the situation, and
then they should reverse roles.14

Nonetheless, there is collective responsibility for the needs of all mem-

bers: “If there is one member for whom no one wishes to be a spiritual
discussion partner, the fraternity must provide one for him.” It is also
crucial that the members hold each other in great esteem. It is, however,
completely forbidden to reveal matters of the society in public: “Do not
discuss or publicize matters of the holy society in the market or the streets;
don’t brag about it in front of others. . . . All of Kabbalah is called ‘secret’
(sod); so too, all service involving the revelation of the soul is opposed to
publicity, preferring secrecy.”15
112 Zvi Leshem

This short tract includes a complete and self-contained Hasidic system

in the service of God, education, and spiritual guidance. Since R. Shapira
later wrote openly of these societies in his other prewar works, Hakhsharat
ha-avreikhim and Mevo ha-she’arim, I surmise that he eventually decided
to open the ranks of the societies to the wider Hasidic community. Prac-
tically speaking, however, the groups that would coalesce around Benei
mahshavah tovah would no doubt remain the inner circle of the elite
Piaseczner Hasidism, those closest to R. Shapira.16 While the Holocaust
cut this noble experiment short, leaving us with little data with which to
evaluate its successes or failures, we must admit that no evidence has yet
been uncovered to indicate that the kinds of fraternities envisioned by
this book were ever widespread (see Wodziński, this volume).

Pre-Hasidic Mystical Fraternities

The phenomenon of mystical fraternities can be traced back to the bib-

lical institution of Benei ha-nevi’im, neophyte prophets who engaged in
mystical techniques, including music and meditation, in order to achieve
prophetic inspiration. This group directly influenced R. Shapira’s vision.17
In the early rabbinic period, furthermore, one encounters the story of R.
Akiva and his students entering the Pardes (“garden”); this was also when
the circles that produced the merkavah mysticism arose, as well as the
imagined circles described in merkavah literature.18 Yehuda Liebes has
pointed out that in the classic period of Kabbalah, the hevraya kedosha
of R. Shimon Bar Yohai and his students, the heroes of Zoharic literature,
may in fact have mirrored an actual mystical fraternity active in late
thirteenth-century Spain, centered around the personality of R. Moshe
de Leon. This circle, according to Liebes, may have authored the Zohar,
spiritually or imaginatively transplanting themselves in the land of Israel
of the second century.19
The tradition of mystical fraternities continued into the early modern
period, with the circle of the Safadian Kabbalists centered on R. Yitzhak
Luria (the Ari) in the sixteenth century.20 Following in the footsteps of the
Lurianic Kabbalah and its groups were the circles of Rabbi Moshe Hayyim
Luzzatto (Ramchal) in early eighteenth-century Padua21 and R. Shalom
Sharabi (Rashash) at Yeshivat Bet El in eighteenth-century Jerusalem.22 The
Bet El group is significant for this study, since we have the pact document
signed by its members. It will be instructive to compare this document
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 113

(shtar hitkashrut), signed in 1754 and 1758, with the document signed by
members of R. Shapira’s groups as well as with other instructions he gave
to group members. The original Hebrew document was printed by Moshe
Yair Weinstock and translated into English, published, and analyzed along
with another testimony by Louis Jacobs.23
Jacobs opens with a description of Bet El and its mystical inner
circle, Ahavat Shalom (whose members are also known as mekhavnim,
or “those with intentionality”), penned by Ariel Bension, the son of a
later member of his group.24 Bension describes the community as being
centered on the performance of the prayer intentions of the Ari and R.
Hayyim Vital as understood in the Sephardic tradition. Like R. Shapira,
Bension stresses the centrality of “brotherly love” within the community.
Concentration in prayer was to be attained through inner joy aroused
through introspection and the use of special melodies, interspersed within
the prayer services, “suggestive of the form which the meditation was to
take.” In Bension’s words, “under the magic of these tunes, mekhavnim
and listeners, animate and inanimate objects, became one in the true
pantheistic sense.” Bension also discusses the “pact of friendship,” which
he says is “filled with expressions of the deep and abiding love of man
for his neighbor . . . striving after complete union.”25
This document opens by positing the desire of the signatories to
“become as one man, companions, all for the sake of the unification of
the Holy One, blessed be he, and his shekhinah.” Thus, the pact is signed
with binding conditions. The initial group of signatories numbered twelve,
corresponding to the twelve tribes. They bound themselves to each other
with great love: “That all of us should love each other with great love, both
spiritual and physical.” The goal was that “the twelve of us will be as one
man” in order to provide mutual assistance out of a feeling of complete
identification. “Each of us will rebuke his associate when, God forbid, he
hears of any sin the latter has committed.” This mutual responsibility is
to continue even in the world to come, and the pact stipulates the relin-
quishment of any spiritual benefit that may have accrued to one member
at the expense of another.
The egalitarian nature of the fraternity is also stressed: “never to
praise one another even if it is clear to everyone that one associate is
superior. . . . None of us will rise fully to his feet before any other asso-
ciate. . . . We shall conduct ourselves as if we were one man, no part of
whom is superior to any other part.” Finally, it is important to note that
the pact also demands secrecy, just as R. Shapira’s did: “We further take
114 Zvi Leshem

upon ourselves the obligation never to reveal to any creature that we have
resolved to do these things.”26
At this point, it is crucial to note the comment of Israeli scholar
Meir Benayahu, who writes, “It seems, based upon this copy, that it was
disseminated by the Galilean Hasidim to the communities in Poland and
Ashkenaz.”27 Benayahu’s assertion, though unsourced, is highly signifi-
cant, because it points to a direct link from Jerusalem to Tiberius and
from there to the eastern European Hasidim. However, even if Benyahu
is incorrect, we have direct evidence of the presence and influence of a
different fraternal pact, that of the students of R. Hayyim Vital in Safed
in the sixteenth century after the death of R. Isaac Luria. In 1940, Zeev
Rabinowitz published descriptions of several manuscripts found in the
genizah28 of the Karlin-Stolin Hasidic masters in Stolin, Belarus. Among
them was a contract between the students of R. Isaac Luria and R. Hayyim
Vital, which was signed in Safed in 1565. In it, they pledge themselves
to serve God and study Torah as directed by Vital and not to reveal his
kabbalistic teachings without permission. In response, Gershom Scholem
discussed the document in detail and speculated as to how and when it
may have reached Stolin.29 Scholem states that he initially believed that
the Hasidic leader R. Abraham Kalisker purchased the document on a
visit to Safed and sent it to his friends in Russia, from where it reached
one of the early rabbis of Karlin. This theory, similar to Benyahu’s claim
regarding the Jerusalem document, was subsequently rejected by Scholem
based on information about the pact in R. Hayyim David Azulay’s Shem
ha-gedolim. Scholem ultimately speculates that “perhaps the document
arrived in Stolin at a later time, and one of the tsaddikim of the House
of Stolin purchased it in the nineteenth century from Italy.” As we shall
see, Scholem’s intuition was partially correct; the document was purchased
by a tsaddik of Karlin-Stolin in the nineteenth century, but directly from
Palestine, not via Italy.
Abraham Avish Shor has published two articles on the Luria-Vital
pact documents in the Stolin genizah.30 He cites a letter of R. Asher the
Second of Stolin to R. Shmuel Heller, the Chief Rabbi of Safed, dated 1861,
in which he discusses the purchase of such documents and their delivery
to Stolin and thanks him for documents already received. In addition to
the pact of Vital’s students, the genizah held a similar document from
the students of R. David ben Zimra (Radbaz) from Egypt dated 1565.
These documents were very beloved to the rabbis of Karlin-Stolin, as
Shor writes: “At opportune occasions the Young Rebbe [R. Asher] would
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 115

enjoy looking at these pact documents.” He also quotes from a notebook

penned by R. Yerahmiel Moshe of Kozhnits, stepson of R. Asher, who was
raised in Stolin in the presence of R. Asher and Asher’s father, R. Aharon
the Second of Karlin: “Once the rebbe showed the holy signatures on this
document to some people, pointing out the holy signatures of the Rad-
baz and the Ari’s students, and said, ‘That is the signature of the Radbaz
and eleven students who made a covenant to serve God with no ulterior
motives.’ ” The Karliner also made a point of showing them to another
well-known Hasidic personality, R. Yizchak Isaac of Komarno, on the
occasion of a journey that the two made together. This testimony is highly
significant, since R. Yerahmiel Moshe was R. Shapira’s [older] nephew
and later became his father-in-law. After R. Shapira was orphaned at a
young age, he was effectively raised in the court of R. Yerahmiel Moshe
in Kozhnits and trained by him to be a rebbe (see Idel, Wodziński, this
volume).31 When R. Yerahmiel Moshe died, R. Shapira became the new
rebbe for many of his Hasidim. It is thus reasonable to assume that the
traditions regarding fraternities and pacts of this kind would have been
passed on from R. Yerahmiel Moshe to R. Shapira. I thus posit a clear
chain of tradition regarding these fraternities. Their documents traveled
from Egypt and Safed to Stolin, in Poland, and from there on to Kozh-
nits, and finally to Piaseczno.32 Although we do not yet know of similar
mystical societies in Stolin or in Kozhnits, their absence would only make
R. Shapira’s activities even more remarkable, as it would mean that he
was not engaged in an act of continuity from his most proximate Hasidic
context but rather in a great restorative project stretching across time
and space to eighteenth-century Jerusalem and Tiberius, sixteenth-cen-
tury Safed, and, in his mind, even to the hevra kadisha of the Zohar in
second-century Galilee (see Idel, this volume). This is remarkable indeed.

Hasidic Mystical Fraternities

in Eighteenth-Century Tiberius

Returning to the early Hasidic community, much has been written about
the Baal Shem Tov and the Maggid of Mezritsh and their mystical circles.33
I will focus on the Hasidic mystical fraternities in Tiberius at the end of
the eighteenth century, which seem to have served as one model for the
Benei mahshavah tovah groups. Our information regarding these groups is
contained in letters from R. Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk and R. A ­ braham
116 Zvi Leshem

of Kalisk to their followers in Europe. These letters were published in the

early nineteenth century and were very likely read by R. Shapira.34
These two students of the Maggid arrived in Tiberius in 1777. Their
oeuvre includes the aforementioned letters as well as Hasidic sermons: Peri
ha-arets, by R. Menachem Mendel, and some material published in Hesed
le-Avraham, by R. Abraham, the son of the Maggid. The first scholar to
analyze the letters that are relevant to our discussion was Joseph Weiss in
his 1955 article “Kalisker’s Concept of Communion with God and Man.”35
R. Abraham stresses the importance of the state of ayin (mystical
“naught”). Unlike the Maggid’s system, in which ayin is a spiritual state,
for Kalisker, it is “an attitude of social humility.” Ayin “is divested by Abra-
ham of its mystical sense and is . . . self-annihilation in terms of human
relationships.” He writes that “the relationship between man and man is
the pivot round which the thoughts of Abraham revolve.” Of course, this
does not have to be a zero-sum game, and I question Weiss’s dichotomy
between ayin as a mystical state and ayin as a social attitude. It is equally
possible that the two can coexist and even strengthen each other. This
would, in fact, appear to be the attitude of R. Shapira, who writes that by
annulling one’s ego before one’s friends, one will succeed in doing so in his
relation with God as well. (For a somewhat contrary view, see Maayan, this
volume.)36 Kalisker’s approach, however, is predicated on his definition of
devekut (cleaving) and of the lower state of devekut be-qatnut, or cleaving
while in a limited spiritual state. Qatnut is recognized in Hasidism as the
condition in which one is not able to connect deeply with the divine.
R. Abraham presents an understanding in which katnut, the time when
concentration upon God is not possible, offers an opportunity for concen-
tration upon one’s fellowman, “the choicest opportunity for ‘loving one’s
neighbor,’ devekut with the neighbor.’ ” This serves two purposes: First,
connecting with God vicariously, via members of the fraternity who are
in a state of gadlut, and second, a degree of divine providence normally
available only when in a state of cleaving or devekut.37
Weiss entertains the possibility that Kalisker is referring to a relation-
ship of devekut with the tsaddik rather than directly with God, which, if
correct, would return R. Abraham’s perspective to a more common Hasidic
one. However, he rejects this possibility, stressing the egalitarian spirit of
the group: “This theory of devekut . . . proves to be a special case within
the general theory of dibbuk haverim, i.e. close association of friends
of equal stature . . . the tsaddik plays a very unimportant role . . . the
first time in the history of Hasidism that clear expression is given to the
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 117

idea of the value of the Hasidic community per se as distinct from its
dependence on the tsaddik . . . a new value: that of the contemplative
community whose members are bound together by the emotional values
of sympathy and brotherhood.”
Weiss compares R. Abraham’s letter to a letter of R. Menachem Mendel
to the community in Bieshika. The novelty here is “individual confession
between friends,” in which Weiss sees a break in “the exclusive tradition
of collective confession . . . so characteristic of Judaism.”38 He takes pains
to explain the difference between the confession recommended here and
confession before the tsaddik as an initiation rite, which was found in
early Bratslav Hasidism. What we have here is “between equals; neither
is it part of an initiation ceremony, but rather a daily custom.” Weiss
translates, “Let him hold converse with them every day for about half an
hour, and engage in self-reproof for the evil ways he sees in himself. His
companion should do likewise . . . and truth will begin to shine.” We are
not dealing with a confession before the group but rather “an individual
confession between two companions.” Another noteworthy point in the
letter of R. Menachem Mendel is the following instruction, similar to that
found in Benei mahshavah tovah: “have a set daily time for the study of
ethical works such as Reshit hokhmah, Sefer ha-yasher of Rebbenu Tam,
and Sefer haredim. And especially the Holy Zohar.”39
In contradistinction to Weiss, Zeev Gries sought to demonstrate the
mystical underpinnings of Kalisker’s approach and to show its antecedents
in earlier kabbalistic myth and practice, which culminated in the mystical
group centered on R. Abraham’s own teacher, the Maggid of Mezritsh. For
our purposes, it is interesting to note the comparison that Gries makes
between the mystical fraternities in Tiberius and those of Bet El. Gries
quotes R. Hayyim David Azulay, who had been a member of the Ahavat
Shalom group in Bet El, who states that “the holy Zohar strongly warned
regarding the love of friends, and so, too, our master the Ari (R. Isaac
Luria), of blessed memory.”40
In comparing Benei mahshavah tovah with Bet El, we encounter some
obvious differences but also many striking affinities. In Bet El, the main
focus was on prayer with Lurianic kavvanot within a full-time prayer and
study group whose lifestyle was both exclusivist and ascetic. R. Shapira’s
fraternities, on the other hand, were forbidden from withdrawing from
their regular synagogue communities. In Bet El, there was a hierarchi-
cal structure, led by the rosh yeshivah, whereas Benei mahshavah tovah
was completely egalitarian. Finally, the Bet El friendship pact includes
118 Zvi Leshem

otherworldly elements, such as the connection between living and dead

members. In Benei mahshavah tovah, these factors are not present.
On the other hand, both groups have a document that must be signed
by all members. Both groups also demand absolute secrecy regarding group
activities. Both groups stress the use of niggun (melody) in the context
of group activity. Both groups also place great emphasis on the spiritual
goal of devekut (cleaving) both to God and to the other members, who
aid each other in cleaving to God. In this context, the two groups use
similar language: Bet El has “ahavah rabbah, ahavat nefesh, ve-ahavat
ha-guf” (great love, spiritual love, and physical love). Benei Mahshavah
Tovah has “hithabberut haverim, ahavat haverim, hitdabbekut haverim” (the
connection of friends, the love of friends, and the cleaving of friends).
Both groups also emphasize ongoing dialogue among the members, but
Bet El stresses rebuke, whereas R. Shapira urges peer counselling. In Bet
El, furthermore, the members pledge not to lavishly praise one another
but rather to demonstrate moderate respect, as if they were all equal, while
in Benei Mahshavah Tovah, each member is urged to view the others
(and himself) as members of the spiritual elite (benei aliyah). The Bet El
agreement binds the members to follow any takkanah or good custom
that the majority agrees upon, while Benei mahshavah tovah instructs its
members to share and discuss ideas pertaining to divine service, with the
aim of applying them to practical observance.
Comparing Benei mahshavah tovah to the Hasidim in Tiberius, I
find both differences and similarities, with the similarities far outweighing
the differences. Among the contrasts is the absence of the two models of
devekut be-gadlut and devequt be-katnut in Benei mahshavah tovah. There,
devekut is always a vehicle for connecting with God, and the individual
member utilizes the group setting to achieve this devekut.41 R. Abraham’s
concept that one achieves constant devekut by cleaving to others who
are cleaving to God is also absent in Benei ahshavah tovah. In terms
of affinities, we should note that both the directives of the rabbis from
Tiberius and Benei mahshavah tovah place great stress on devekut between
fraternity members. Both groups are egalitarian, and the tsaddik is not a
central figure in the group.42 The stress on humility as a central character
trait is found in both. Both groups strongly emphasize the importance of
group discussions regarding personal issues and difficulties. According to
R. Abraham, the very act of verbal communication works to draw mercy
upon the individual.43 In the letter of R. Menachem Mendel, we find a
directive to engage in individual confession between friends within the
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 119

group. This is similar to the practice in Benei mahshavah tovah, although

the word confession is not used there. However, in Benei mahshavah tovah,
the focus is on mutual counseling and advice. Perhaps for both groups,
this practice also strengthens mutual dependence due to the sharing of
secrets. R. Menachem Mendel instructed his followers to set a daily time
to study sifrei mussar. Similarly, Benei mahshavah tovah ordains that the
group must study works of Hasidism, and both texts suggest the study
of the Zohar.
As I have demonstrated, significant parallels exist between the guide-
lines for Benei mahshavah tovah and those of both the Bet El fraternity
and the directives of R. Menachem Mendel and R. Abraham to their
followers. While according to Benayahu it is possible that Hasidim had
access to information regarding the Ahavat Shalom fraternity in Jerusalem,
it is unlikely that this information would have been known to R. Shapira.44
On the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that R. Shapira had read
the letters of R. Menachem Mendel and R. Abraham, which had been
published in early Hasidic works. It is certainly possible that these had
direct influence on the planning of Benei Mahshavah Tovah. Furthermore,
there is a good possibility that R. Shapira was exposed to the idea of these
fellowships and to pact documents originating from Safed via his father-
in-law R. Yerahmiel Moshe, who received this tradition from the rebbes
of the Karliner Hasidim. Even if it is not possible to demonstrate direct
textual influence connecting Warsaw to the antecedent in Tiberius, from
a phenomenological perspective the similarities are extremely significant.

Hillel Zeitlin and his Mystical Fraternities

There is at least one very important Neo-Hasidic parallel to Shapira’s

attempt to foster Hasidic mystical fraternities in Warsaw in the 1920s,
namely, the Benei Yavneh and Benei Hekhalah societies proposed by the
Warsaw-based author, publicist, and mystic Hillel Zeitlin in his work Safran
shel yehidim.45 This comparison is quite poignant, as both of these unique
visionaries of interbellum Warsaw were later martyred in the Holocaust.
Zeitlin was born in the Russian town of Korma in 1871 and mur-
dered in Warsaw on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 1942.46 He was raised in a
Habad Hasidic family, and as a youth, he studied Kabbalah and Hasidism
in addition to traditional talmudic studies. As a young man, he began to
study general literature and philosophy as well, undergoing a spiritual
120 Zvi Leshem

crisis. He later returned to his Hasidic roots, delving deeply into Kabbalah,
particularly the Zohar and Hasidism, focusing on the schools of Habad
and Bratslav. It is important to note that he published an enthusiastic
review of R. Shapira’s Hovat ha-talmidim when it appeared in 1932, under
the title Admor—Amon Pedagogue.47 In the 1920s and ’30s, Zeitlin tried
to establish several mystical fraternities under various names, including
Benei Yavneh and Benei Hekhalah, and his Sifran shel yehidim was ded-
icated to this topic. The project was by and large a failure, as is hinted
at by Zeitlin himself in various places and as discussed by his student
Simha Bunim Urbach.48
We can glean information regarding Zeitlin’s goals from two letters
that he sent to Palestine (1925 and 1938).49 The first was sent to Nehemia
Aminah, one of the leaders of the Ha-po’el ha-mizrahi religious labor
organization.

I think that there is a need to establish a small group of

“Yavneh” in Jerusalem, that is to say, a group of laborers who
live according to our guidelines50 . . . here in Warsaw there
already is a group like that, but I think that Jerusalem (or the
Land of Israel in general) is its true location. The members of
“Yavneh” can be affiliated with any political party they want, but
they must be cognizant of the holiness of Israel and the true
loftiness of Israelite religion and band together to according to
the religious rules I have established . . . and to gather at least
once a week for mutual study and discussion of true religion.
Here I mainly study the Tanya . . . Kuzari . . . Maharal.

Here, Zeitlin expresses his ambition to disseminate his idea of religious

fraternities in the Holy Land. He viewed the religious workers in Palestine
as prime candidates for the new type of socioeconomic Hasidism that he
wished to build. It is also instructive to note which religious tracts Zeitlin
studied with his group in Warsaw.
The second letter was written almost fourteen years later, on the eve
of World War II, to an unidentified recipient in Jerusalem.

Horrific judgments are descending but also great loving-kind-

ness. We must sweeten the judgements. . . . We need to join
together in apolitical groups, but not mere Torah groups . . . and
not even groups of regular kabbalists who engage in intentional
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 121

prayer and mystic unifications . . . rather, small groups of

individuals who feel all of the pain of the world at this terrible
time, all of the pain of this birth . . . groups of this sort are
as essential to us as air to breathe.

In this letter, we sense both Zeitlin’s acute awareness of impending catastro-

phe and his sense that the moment was pregnant with messianic potential.
He ends his letter by emphasizing that only the prayers of such special
groups in the Holy Land have the potential to save the Jewish People:
“certainly such prayer in the Holy Land will break through the heavens.”
Zeitlin quotes a wide variety of sources, including Kabbalah (mostly
the Zohar), Hasidism, “secular” Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, as well as
medieval Jewish philosophy and ethics. This stands in sharp contrast to
R. Shapira, who never mentions non-Jewish or secular sources and cites
only Hasidic works from the modern period.51
Recall that Benei mahshavah tovah was composed in the early 1920s
and distributed to a small group of Hasidim, who were prohibited from
disseminating it beyond their group. Sifran shel yehidim was published
openly in 1928. Thus, while R. Shapira was presumably aware of Zeitlin and
his activities, there is no reason to assume any influence from him.52 On
the other hand, Zeitlin was certainly influenced by R. Shapira, but perhaps
only at a later stage. While I cannot discount the possibility that Zeitlin
somehow saw a copy of Benei mahshavah tovah, this seems unlikely. It is
more reasonable to assume that both authors drew on common sources
and traditions from the kabbalistic and Hasidic tradition, which inspired
a kind of parallel evolution.
Both thinkers were acutely aware of the spiritual dangers facing
Orthodoxy in Poland from secularization and of the decline of the Hasidic
movement, which had strayed far from its original path. They both proposed
strategies to contend with this situation. R. Shapira’s work in this direction
was primarily educational. He served as a Hasidic rebbe, a local rabbi,
and rosh yeshivah of the yeshiva that he founded. He advanced a detailed
educational/spiritual path for young students and advanced avreikhim
alike. In Warsaw, he worked actively within the religious establishment to
combat Shabbat violation and to strengthen yeshivot.53 Zeitlin, on the other
hand, was a public figure and a polemicist who wrote concerning current
political, social, and religious issues. While both turned to the Hasidic
spiritual elite, proposing fraternities stressing (at least) weekly meetings
dedicated to common study and emotional service of God, there are
122 Zvi Leshem

s­ ignificant differences as well. Regarding the stated goals of the groups, R.

Shapira turns to the Hasid who is pained over his perceived distance from
God and offers him a clear and graduated program to purify his thoughts
and achieve closeness to the Divine. This takes place in a group setting,
together with others who face similar spiritual challenges and have similar
goals. While ultimately these elites would presumably have an impact on
the wider Hasidic community, the overt goal is that of individual spiritual
perfection, albeit achieved through work within the group.
Zeitlin expresses wider goals. Identifying his time period as that of
the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” he wants to hasten the final redemption.
He turns not to those who feel spiritually distant from God but rather to
those who feel the pain of “Israel in exile” in order to bring the messiah
and redeem the world. Zeitlin’s messianism seems to be more acute than
that of R. Shapira, for whom it is a less overt theme in his writings, and
certainly in Benei mahshavah tovah.54 Another significant difference is
Zeitlin’s emphasis on socioeconomic issues, a theme largely absent from
the writings of R. Shapira. The universal themes and openness to secular
studies that are central to Zeitlin’s writing are also foreign to his Hasidic
contemporary R. Shapira.55 Whereas R. Shapira demanded strict secrecy
regarding his fraternities and their handbook, Zeitlin published his book
as well as newspaper articles in which he urged interested parties to con-
tact him. Zeitlin also wrote to his followers in Palestine, urging them to
establish societies. In the published letters of R. Shapira to his Hasidim in
Palestine, this topic is not discussed. The literary styles of the two works are
quite different as well. Benei mahshavah tovah sets out a detailed program
for the groups, including bylaws. The main focus, however, is on practical
guidance in mystical practices and meditation. Sifran shel yehidim, on
the other hand, while opening with a call for people to band together in
fraternities, also discusses a wide range of philosophical topics, offering
little guidance as to the actual functioning of the proposed societies. If R.
Shapira offers us a practical spiritual handbook, Zeitlin provides us with
a work of philosophy and mystical thought.
While both thinkers aspire to renew and revitalize the Hasidic
community in light of their vision of original Beshtian Hasidism, their
long-term visions differ greatly. R. Shapira proposes a return to the earlier
Hasidic path of intense divine service predicated on kabbalistic panen-
theism and mystical practices as the path to ecstatic mystical experience
and even prophecy. Zeitlin’s vision is more modern, stressing universalism,
socialism, and the enrichment of Torah study by adding arts, sciences,
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 123

philosophy, and psychology to the religious curriculum. All of these themes

are absent from R. Shapira’s more traditional and particularistic worldview.
While both thinkers exhibit a certain radicalism in their methods and
visions, there remain significant differences as well. In the final analysis,
it is worthy of note that Warsaw’s Hasidic society in the interwar period
produced two outstanding Hasidic leaders and thinkers, both of whom
saw the importance of reestablishing mystical fraternities.56

Postscript and Conclusions

Before concluding, I would like to discuss a unique fraternity of sorts that

R. Shapira took part in at the end of his life. Nehemia Polen concludes his
book The Holy Fire with a riveting account of R. Shapira’s final months
after having been deported from the Ghetto.57 Based on the testimony
of survivor Simhah Rotem, Polen learned that representatives of the
Jewish Underground smuggled themselves into Trawniki in the summer
of 1943 in order to smuggle out prisoners, including R. Shapira. Instead,
they discovered that a group of some twenty prisoners, including “artists,
well-known physicians, communal leaders, leaders of various parties,”
had made a pact that none of them would leave the camp unless all of
them could leave. Thus, R. Shapira refused to leave, and he and most
or all of the others were murdered the following November.58 In Polen’s
view, this pact represents “mystically permeated solidarity” on the part
of R. Shapira.

The pious hasidic master joined hands with nominally secular

figures: political activists, lawyers, intellectuals, artists, and
others, sweeping aside all ideological differences in an act of
solidarity that reached the core of their shared Jewish iden-
tity . . . to turn down a rescue attempt in such circumstances
was a compelling act of faith, a concrete articulation of the
soul-to-soul binding that he had preached all his life, an ulti-
mate expression of the unity of Israel.

Building on Polen’s words, I believe that I can also add that the Trawniki
“fellowship” can also be viewed as a new and radical twist on the Benei
mahshavah tovah ideal as expressed in the ultimate absurdity of life in
the shadow of impending death (see Reiser, this volume). This, then, is
124 Zvi Leshem

perhaps the highest ideal of “Hasidic fellowship” that we have encountered:

commitment to group martyrdom together with one’s fellows.
Influenced by the fraternities of sixteenth-century Safed, the mid-eigh-
teenth-century Bet El Yeshiva, and late-eighteenth-century Tiberian
Hasidism, R. Shapira reworked all of these in a manner that he felt was
appropriate for his modern context. He had two main goals. The first was
to empower an elite cadre of Hasidic avreikhim (advanced students) as
part of his attempt to strengthen Hasidic society and fortify it against the
corrosive influences of secular modernity (see Wodziński, Seeman, this
volume). Second, as part of his messianic vision, he wished to enable these
elite devotees to deepen and intensify their spiritual experiences and to
achieve some level of prophecy. This was to be done within the setting of
the fellowship, for “the individual cannot achieve alone what he is capable
of achieving within the group.”59

Notes

This article is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Natan Siegel. R. Siegel was
one of the earliest teachers of Piaseczner Hasidism and the first to introduce
me to the works of R. Shapira. I wish to thank Professors Moshe Hallamish and
Nehemia Polen for suggesting this topic to me and the editors of this book for
their helpful comments.
1. See Zvi Blobstein (Leshem), “ ‘Iyyunim be-shitato ha-ruhanit shel
ha-’admor mi-Piaseczneh” (master’s thesis, Touro College, 2002), 38–39. See also
Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in Hebrew], ed.
Daniel Reiser (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017), 1:38–41. The first
official edition was published by the Piaseczner Hasidim, Tel Aviv, 1973.
2. See Kalonymus Kalman Epstein, Ma’or va-shemesh, at the beginning of
parashat Kedoshim.
3. This has been a very common approach to Bratslav Hasidism and in
research regarding Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izhbits. Regarding Shapira, the recent
dissertation of James Jacobson-Maisels, “The Self and Self-Transformation in the
Thought and Practice of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira” (PhD dissertation,
University of Chicago, 2014) is a good example.
4. See Zvi Leshem, “Questions and Cartography: Recent Trends in Hasidic
Historiography,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, 51, no. 2 (2019)
116–21.
5. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim (Jerusalem, 1966),
58b–63a. On R. Shapira’s attitude toward the Zohar, see Zvi Leshem, “Between
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 125

Messianism and Prophecy: Hasidism According to the Piaseczner Rebbe” [in

Hebrew] (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2007), 136–42.
6. On Prophecy in R. Shapira’s writings, see Leshem, “Between Messian-
ism and Prophecy,” 76–88; Ron Wacks, The Flame of the Holy Fire [in Hebrew]
(Alon Shvut: Tevunot, 2010), 209–39; Daniel Reiser, Vision as a Mirror: Imagery
Techniques in Twentieth Century Jewish Mysticism [in Hebrew] (Los Angeles:
Cherub Press, 2014), 194–221.
7. For a brief article on this approach, see Nehemia Polen, “Sensitization
to Holiness: The Life and Works of Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira,” Jewish
Action (1989–90): 30–33.
8. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Tsav ve-zeruz (Jerusalem: 1962), 52; and
Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim, 62b.
9. The literal translation of the phrase is “children of good (or positive)
thinking.”
10. Benei mahshavah tovah, 54.
11. Ibid., 54–55.
12. Shapira, 56. In Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim, 61a–61b, R. Shapira insists on
daily meetings as well as a communal “third meal” (se’udah shelishit) every Shabbat.
13. Benei mahshavah tovah, 56–57. On music, dance, and drinking in the
works of R. Shapira, see Leshem, “Between Messianism and Prophecy,” 167–69,
188–94.
14. Benei mahshavah tovah, 56–57. See Shalom Dov Schneersohn (Rashab),
Sefer Ha-ma’amarim tarna”t (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1984), 60–61, who also discusses
group work.
15. Shapira, Benei mahshavah tovah, 56–58.
16. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive options. R. Shapira probably
wanted to promote his ideal of Hasidic fraternity on two parallel tracks, with
parallel groups for the spiritual elite. His decision to write about them in a work
addressed to the wider community indicates a willingness to widen the ranks of
the groups to all interested parties.
17. Shapira, Benei mahshavah tovah, 58.
18. On the Pardes story, see Yehuda Liebes, Het’o shel Elisha: Arba’ah
she-nikhnesu le-fardes ve-tiv’ah shel ha-mistikah ha-talmudit (Jerusalem: Akada-
mon, 1990). On merkavah mysticism, see Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism,
Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological
Seminary, 1965); Rachel Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish
Mysticism (Oxford: Littman, 2004); and Peter Schafer, The Origins of Jewish Mys-
ticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
19. See Yehuda Liebes, “The Messiah of the Zohar: On Simeon bar Yohai
as a Messianic Figure” and “How the Zohar was Written,” in Studies in the Zohar,
trans. Arnold Schwartz, Stephanie Nakache, and Penina Peli (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1993), 1–84, 85–138.
126 Zvi Leshem

20. Regarding the Safedian group, see Emanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician,
Mystic and Leader (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 154–55. See also
Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His
Kabbalistc Fraternity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). For a more
psychological reading, see Jonathan Garb, “The Psychological Turn in Sixteenth
Century Kabbalah,” in Les mystiques juives, chrétiennes et musulmanes dans l’Égypte
médiévale (VIIe–XVIe siecles) (2013), 109–24.
21. See Meir Benayahu, Kitvei ha-kabbalah she-le-Ramhal (Jerusalem: Meir
Benayahu, 1979); Isaiah Tishby, Messianic Mysticism: Moses Hayim Luzzatto and the
Padua School (Oxford: Littman, 2008); Jonathan Garb, Mekubbal be-lev ha-se’arah
(Tel Aviv: Tel-Aviv University, 2014). The pact document of the group was published
in Mordechai Shriki, ed., Igrot Ramhal (Jerusalem: Mahon Ramhal, 2001), 5–11.
22. Pinchas Giller, Shalom Shar’abi and the Kabbalists of Bet El (Oxford,
2008). See also S. H. Kook, “Le-toledot havurat ha-meqqubalim be-Yerushalayim,”
Luah Yerushalayim (Jerusalem: Mosad HaRav Kook, 1944); and Joseph Weiss,
“The Kavvanoth of Prayer in Early Hasidism,” in Journal of Jewish Studies 9, no.
3–4 (1958): 163–92.
23. Moshe Yair Weinstock, ed., Siddur ha-ge’onim ve-ha-mekkubalim (Jeru-
salem: Shai Weinfeld,1970), 1:38–39. Jacobs used this version in preparing the
translation in Louis Jacobs, The Schocken Book of Jewish Mystical Testimonies (New
York: Schocken, 1996), 192–207.
24. Ariel Bension, The Zohar in Moslem and Christian Spain (London:
Routledge, 1932), 242–46. Bension had already published the Hebrew version in
his Hebrew work Sar Shalom Sharabi (Jerusalem: Zutot, 1930), 87–91. Yaakov
Shalom Gafner published the three extant pacts from Bet El in his Or ha-shemesh
(Jerusalem: Helkat Mehokek, 1970), 40–51. He also mentions the fourth docu-
ment, which is not extant.
25. In his use of the word introspection, Jacobs seems to be thinking of
the term hitbonenut, but this is speculative. Bension’s language is flowery and
dramatic, and his intention is not always clear. Another example is his use of
the word pantheistic.
26. Among the signatories are the Rashash himself, as well as the Hid”a,
R. Hayyim Joseph David Azulai (“the young”). According to Giller, the original
manuscript is in the Hid”a’s handwriting. Giller surmises that he was also the
driving force behind Ahavat Shalom. Giller, Shalom Shar’abi, 87. On this group,
see also Laurence Fine, Judaism in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 210–13.
27. Benayahu, “Shtere hitkashrut she-le-meqqubale Yerushalayim,” Asufot
9 (1995): 11–127. This quote is from p. 16.
28. A genizah is a storage space for sacred books and manuscripts that are
forbidden to discard.
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 127

29. Zev Rabinowitz, “Min ha-genizah ha-stolenit,” Zion, year 5, vol. 2,

125–26. Gershom Scholem, “Shtar hitkashrut shel talmide ha-Ari,” Zion, year 5,
vol. 2, 133–60. Scholem was very interested in this document, and through the
agency of Rabinowitz, he received a copy of the signatures on tracing paper. The
document had been published previously in R. Shlomo David Eybeschutz, Levushe
serad (Krakow: Druk and Verlag 1881), 15–16.
30. Abraham Avish Shor, “Shtare hitkashrut she-be-ginze hatser ha-kodesh
Stolin-Karlin,” Kovets bet Aharon ve-Yisrael 7 (1987): 85–105; and “Al ha-otsar
she-be-hatser ha-kadosh be-Stolin,” Kovets bet Aharon ve-Yisrael 7 (1997): 129–36.
Shor communicated to me that in the 1860s, Heller’s nephew, Moshe Leib Heller,
traveled to Karlin and Stolin to be in the presence of Aharon, thus strengthening
the connection between Safed and Stolin-Karlin.
31. On R. Yerhamiel Moshe and R. Shapira, see Aharon Surski, “The His-
tory of the Holy Rebbe Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira of Piaseczno” [in Hebrew],
appended to Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, Esh kodesh (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei
Piaseczno, 1960), 5–7, 12–13; Leshem, “Between Messianism and Prophecy,” 3;
Malkah Shapiro, The Rebbe’s Daughter: Memoir of a Hasidic Childhood, trans.
Nehmia Polen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002).
32. Thus, R. Shapira emerges as the last in a chain of Jewish mystics who
privileged the institution of spiritual fraternities in their spiritual systems.
33. Parallel to this time, one can mention the circle of the Gaon of Vilna,
and in the twentieth century, that of R. Abraham Issac Kook. On the Baal Shem
Tov, see (in addition to Etkes, The Besht) Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Circle of
the Baal Shem Tov (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985); Moshe Rosman, Founder
of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov (Oxford: Littman, 2013).
On the Maggid, see Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography (Urbana: University
of Illinois, 2001); and Ariel Even Mayse, “Beyond the Letters: The Question of
Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch” (PhD diss., Harvard
University, 2015). On the Kabbala of the Vilna Gaon, see Daat 79–80 (2015):
Lithuanian Kabbalah from the Vilna Gaon to Rabbi Kook. See also Yosef Avivi,
Kabbalat ha-Gra (Jerusalem: Kerem Eliyahu, 1993). On Rav Kook, see Semadar
Cherlow, Tsaddik yesod olam: Ha-shelihut ha-sodit ve-ha-havvayah ha-mistit shel
Ha-rav Kook (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2012).
34. Menahem Mendel Me-Vitebsk, Pri ha-arets (Kapust: Yafeh, 1814);
Menahem Mendel Me-Vitebsk, Sefer igrot kodesh (Lekutei amarim) (Lemberg: S.
Tzverling, 1911). The letters were reprinted in Yisrael Halpern, Ha-aliyot ha-rishonot
shel ha-hasidim le-Erets Yisrael (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1947); Yaakov Barnai, Igrot
hasidim me-Erets Yisra’el me-ha-mahzit ha-sheniah shel ha-me’ah ha-shemonah esre
(Jerusalem: Mahon Ben Zvi, 1980); and Yehiel Greenstein, Talmidei ha-Ba’al Shem
Tov be-Erets Yisra’el (Tel Aviv: Maor, 1982). Regarding the authenticity of the letters,
see: Raya Haran, “In Praise of the Rav: On the Question of the Authenticity of
128 Zvi Leshem

Hasidic Letters from the Land of Israel” [in Hebrew], Qatedra 55 (March 1990):
22–58; and Raya Haran, “On the Night of Each Letter: Regarding the Process of
Copying Hasidic Letters” [in Hebrew], Zion, year 56, no. 3 (1991): 300–20. See
also Yehoshua Mondshine, “The Authenticity of Hasidic Letters from the Land
of Israel” [in Hebrew], Qatedra 63 (April 1992): 65–97.
35. Reprinted as Joseph Weiss, “Kalisker’s Concept of Communion with
God and Man,” in Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism
(London: Littman, 1997), 155–69. Our citations are from the latter edition.
36. Shapira, Tsav ve-zeruz, 45.
37. On this point, according to Weiss, R. Abraham is following in the footsteps
of Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, part 3, ch. 51. Regarding R. Abraham’s
use of the Guide, see Yisrael Yaakov Deinstag, “The Guide for the Perplexed and
Sefer Ha-mada in Hasidic Literature” [in Hebrew], in The Jubilee Volume for
Rabbi Professor Abraham Weiss (New York: Vaad Sifrei HaYovel, 1964), 307–29.
38. While the Safed kabbalists had advocated confession by the individual to
a small group, Weiss is convinced that there is not a direct historical connection
between the two cases.
39. Gershon Hundert, “Toward a Biography of Abraham Kalisker” (master’s
thesis, Ohio State University, 1971) essentially follows Weiss, stating, “Kalisker has
created a kind of ‘mystical sociology.’ ” Hundert is more cautious in dismissing
the idea that Kalisker may in fact be focusing on cleaving to the tsaddik and not
only to the members of the group. See also Jeffrey Dekro, “Love of Neighbor in
Later Jewish Mysticism,” Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review, no 41–42, vol.
13, no. 1–2 (Fall–Winter 1982): 74–83.
40. Zeev Gries, Me-mitos le-etos: Kavim le-demuto shel Avraham me-Ka-
lisk, in Umah ve-toeldotehah: Be-ikvot ha-kongres ha-olami ha-shemini le-mada’e
ha-yahudut) Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1984), 2:117–46. For a parallel to this
idea in R. Abraham’s sermonic writings, see Hesed le-Avraham (Jerusalem: Siftei
zadikim, 1995), 110.
41. See Tsav ve-zeruz, 45, which emphasizes that the group exists to help
the individual in his spiritual path and not the other way around. I would also
like to question Weiss’s non-ecstatic reading of R. Abraham in light of his famous
practice of performing public somersaults. These acrobatics may have helped to
inspire those of the Piaseczner Rebbe in the twentieth century. See Zvi Leshem,
“Flipping into Ecstasy: Towards a Syncopal Understanding of Mystical Hasidic
Somersaults,” Studia Judaica 17 (2014): 1 (33), 157–84.
42. I should, however, note that in the later discussion of the groups, there
does appear to be a role for the rebbe within the group (Mevo ha-she’arim 45b).
43. Weiss calls this “an early attempt at group therapy.”
44. And certainly not the pact, which was first published well after the R.
Shapira’s death.
 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw 129

45. Warsaw 1928. For a detailed comparison of the two figures, see Leshem,
“Between Messianism and Prophecy,” 196–221. There were also additional attempts
to form spiritual groups in Poland at this time.
46. On Zeitlin, see Simha Bunim Urbach, Toledot neshamah ahat: Hillel
Zeitlin ha-ish u-mishnato (Jerusalem: Shem V’Yafet, 1953); Zvi Harkavi and
Yeshayahu Wolpsburg, eds., Sefer Zeitlin (Jerusalem: Mosad HaRav Kook, 1945);
Shraga Bar Sela, Ben sa’ar le-demamah: Hayyav u-mishnato shel Hillel Zeitlin
(Tel Aviv: HaKibutz HaMeuhad, 1999); Arthur Green, “Three Warsaw Mystics,”
in Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer Memorial Volume (Jerusalem: 1996), 2:1–58; and
Arthur Green, ed., Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings
of Hillel Zeitlin (New York: Paulist Press, 2012). See also Jonatan Meir, ed.,
Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav: World Weariness and Longing for the Messiah; Two
Essays by Hillel Zeitlin [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Arna Hess, 2006); and Arthur
Green and Ariel Even Mayse, “The Great Call of the Hour: Hillel Zeitlin’s Yid-
dish Writings on Yavneh,” Geveb (March 8, 2016), https://ingeveb.org/articles/
the-great-call-of-the-hour-hillel-zeitlins-yiddish-writings-on-yavneh.
47. Republished in the Jerusalem 1979 edition of Hillel Zeitlin, Safran shel
yehidim, 241–44.
48. Urbach, Toledot neshamah ahat, 168–69. For more on the groups, see
also Yitzhak Gush-Zahav, “Israel and the Nations in His Perspective” [in Hebrew],
in Sefer Zeitlin, ed. Harkavi and Wolpsburg, 80–96.
49. Harkavi and Wolpsburg, eds., Sefer Zeitlin, 128–29, 131–32.
50. Zeitlin refers to several religious and socioeconomic rules that he
published in an earlier article. They include engaging in physical labor, avoiding
luxuries, sexual and dietary purity, avoiding politics, remembering the “three loves”
of the Besht (God, Israel, and Torah), and propagating the activities of “Yavneh.”
51. The one exception is in Zav ve-zeruz, 45, where he mentions Aristotle
as quoted in Sefer ha-ikkarim in order to bitterly attack his position.
52. Recently, a newspaper article from the period has surfaced that gives
evidence that both were once present at a gathering of Warsaw rabbis. See “Kav
le-kav,” Dvar, Wednesday, November 11, 1931, 2.
53. See the speech given before the Committee to Save the Yeshivot in
Poland and Lithuania, Derekh ha-melekh, 418–20.
54. On the messianism of R. Shapira, see Ofer Schiff, Messianic Fervor and
Its Application in the Sermons of the Piaseczner Rebbe during the Holocaust Period
[in Hebrew] (master’s thesis, Tel Aviv University, 1987). For a comparison of the
messianism of the two figures, see Eliezer Schweid, Bein horban li-yeshuah (Tel
Aviv: HaKibutz HaMeuhad, 1994), 107–109.
55. The three themes of universalism, social justice, and secular studies
are central to Zeitlin’s vision of “futuristic Hasidism” delineated in Zeitlin, Safran
shel yehidim, 43–48.
130 Zvi Leshem

56. It is worth noting that Zeitlin’s writings influenced the development

of modern Neo-Hasidism, both in its Orthodox formulation in Israel and in its
liberal interpretation in the United States. On Israel, see Yoav Sorek, Shalhevet
be-terem or (master’s thesis, Touro College, 2006), 114. Regarding the United
States, see, for example, Green, Hasidic Spirituality, xi–xii; and Arthur Green and
Ariel Evan Mayse, eds., A New Hasidism: Roots (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 2019).
57. Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kal-
man Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson,
1994), 152–56, 185–86nn27–28. Polen assumes that R. Shapira was murdered
in Trawniki. This is a matter of dispute; see Leshem, “Between Messianism and
Prophecy,” 4n11.
58. This can be seen as a continuation of R. Shapira’s well-documented
earlier refusals to escape from the Ghetto. See Polen, Holy Fire, 7. See also Leib
Bein, Me-pinkaso shel itona’i hasid (Jerusalem: 1967), 34. However, from David
Zilbershag, ed., Zikhron kodesh le-va’al esh kodesh (Jerusalem: Vaad Hasidei
­Piaseczna–Grodzisk, 1994), 70, it seems that R. Shapira did want to escape from
Trawniki. Perhaps this was before the agreement with the other inmates.
59. Benei mahshavah tovah, 8.
 5

Self-Creation through Texts

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s Incarnational Theology

David Maayan

The Piasecnzer Rebbe, R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, articulated a vision

of reality as filled with divine immanency and called upon his readers to
recognize and live their lives in devekut, or “cleaving” to the Divine. As
Ariel Evan Mayse (this volume) makes clear with respect to his study of
Talmudic texts, however, Shapira also insisted on the imperative for each
person to articulate and make manifest his or her unique, human individ-
uality. For this reason, I will argue that Shapira rejects the model of bittul
(self-nullification) as the means to intimacy with God, articulating instead an
incarnational theology in which God enters into the articulated form of the
body and soul of the devotee.1 Rather than “saturating” reality, as in some
forms of Hasidism, causing the specific articulations of this-worldly reality
to fade or be dissolved into undifferentiated oneness, Shapira teaches that
God enters into and fills the unique forms, movements, and moments of
each individual. Needless to say, this incarnational theology carries significant
implications for Shapira’s textual hermeneutics as well as his interpretation
of lived experience in terms of objects, self, body, and other selves.

Holy Stones, Divine Bodies

In a lengthy sermon for the Sabbath of parashat vayyeshev, December 28,

1929, Shapira considers a biblical passage in which the future patriarch

131
132 David Maayan

Jacob “took from the stones of the place (vayyikah me-avnei ha-makom)”
while he was fleeing from his brother and placed them beneath his head
to sleep (Gen 28:11).2 Shapira begins by citing unnamed “holy books” that
ask why the verse does not more simply state that Jacob took stones from
the place rather than stones of the place. Then Shapira offers an answer
of his own: “The Holy One, blessed be he, is called makom (literally, “the
Place”), and our father Jacob took divine holiness and devotional service
even from stones.” This is possible because Jacob recognized that he
was taking stones from avnei ha-makom, now read as “the stones of the
makom,” that is, the divine. The first, “simple” meaning of this response is
that Jacob was able to take holiness from corporeal things (divrei ha-olam).
But Shapira also reminds us that the classical kabbalistic work Sefer yet-
sirah uses the term stones to refer to letters.3 Thus, in consonance with
a Hasidic teaching commonly attributed to the Baal Shem Tov (Seeman,
this volume), Jacob was able to “take holiness and devotional service also
from them, from the letters.”4
Shapira’s teachings affirm the irreducible value of corporeal reality
as well as the letters and forms of the Torah. These twin affirmations
depend upon one another: “In truth, these two are one matter. One who
is able to take in ‘light’ from the letters is able to receive light from the
things of this world as well, and if he receives light from the things of
this world, he receives light from the letters in themselves aside from the
words and the intention that is in the words of the Torah.”5 The letters in
themselves (be-atsmam) have (or, perhaps better, are) an inherent holiness
and intrinsic value that is not exhausted by the lexical meanings that can
be derived from them through words and articulable intentions.
Shapira grants supreme value to letters as well as embodied actions.
We must avoid seeing letters, or embodied actions, he teaches, as merely
means to an end rather than ends in themselves. He urges that “devotional
service (avodah) is not merely like service to a human king—may the
difference be preserved!—which provides only an intermediary (emtsa’i)
to the fulfillment of the king’s will, though the servant [herself] remains
at a distance. Instead, [the service of God] is in itself a cleaving to the
supreme King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be he!” And how does this
embodied service itself constitute a cleaving to God? Shapira immediately
explains: “For the Holy One, blessed be he, ‘alone has done, is doing, and
will do all actions.’6 All actions that are done, even now in the world—he
alone is the doer.”7
 Self-Creation through Texts 133

For Shapira, all activity in the world thus expresses divine vitality.
In botanical growth, he explains, “the power of divinity wants to expand,
and [therefore] the plant actively grows.” Human activities that are directed
entirely toward the person’s own expansion, including in the most literal
sense of eating “so that his body may grow and expand,” or engaging in
trade, also express divine vitality. There is also an additional level of divine
vitality, which is at work in the performance of the mitsvot (command-
ments) and devotional service.
Just as the “simple” divine vitality within a plant pushes it to grow,
so too a human being with “the vitality of holiness” within him engages
in bodily actions and performance of the mitsvot. God is the agent, the
doer, who acts through the person. The call to cleave to God cannot be
understood abstractly; rather, we must “cleave to his attributes—just as he
is compassionate, so you should be compassionate.”8 However, “it is not
in the feeling of compassion in the heart alone, but rather in the com-
passionate action: ‘Just as He visits the sick, etc.,’ as our rabbis (may their
memories be a blessing) have said.9 By giving a coin to a poor person,
[a person] cleaves to God’s attributes, because God is doing this action
through him, and holy vitality is revealed in this activity.”10
This is a far cry from the idea of imitatio dei explored by Maimonides,
for example, on the basis of the same rabbinic texts (see also Diamond,
this volume). In this formulation, Shapira has moved from the notion of a
person walking in God’s ways to that of God becoming incarnate through
human activity. Thus, the fundamental affirmation of God acting through
the person applies not only to the ethical precepts given as examples but
to the entirety of religious life. “The performance of the commandments
and the Torah engaged in by a human being alone would not cause such
supernal effects; rather, it is God who acts through the [person of] Israel.”
The person must “prepare himself ” for God to act through him. Shapira
notes the rabbinic claim that God fulfills the mitsvot of the Torah11 and
that this statement applies to all of the mitsvot. Even the mitsvot of “the
eating of matzoh and bitter herbs, God fulfills through [or by means of]
(al yedei) the [person of] Israel.” For Shapira, the opening word of the
Decalogue is the divine “I” (anokhi) because this “I” applies to all of the
Torah. It is as if God were saying that in “all of the Torah and the mitsvot,
I, the Lord your God, am the active agent.”
It is not that we wish to cleave to God and therefore God provides us
with the mitsvot as a means of achieving or earning this end. Rather, God
134 David Maayan

wishes to become manifest in holy activity. The mitsvot—and the Jewish

bodies that perform them—provide God with the material and locus for
achieving this goal. Thus, the activity prescribed by the commandments
has inherent value, because the purpose of eating matzoh is to make it
possible for God, as it were, to eat matzoh. This purpose is identical with
the very act itself. If cleaving and proximity to the divine remains a human
goal of the performance of the mitsvot, this incarnational understanding
asserts that it is in the act of performing a mitsvah that a person achieves
the greatest possible cleaving to the divine.

Irreducible Letters, Irreducible Bodies

As we have seen, Shapira contrasts the letters of the Torah with “the
words and intentions that are in the words of the Torah.” Just as the
physical performance of the mitsvot should not be seen as the means to
a transcendent, spiritual end, we should not view the letters of the Torah
as simply the means to an end that transcends them. In a remarkable
reading, Shapira presents the dispute between Joseph and his brothers
in Genesis 37 as relating precisely to this point. Citing Rashi’s comment
on Gen 37:3,12 Shapira notes that Jacob gave over “all of his Torah” to
Joseph, including his understanding of how to take holiness “not only
from the words and statements alone but also from the letters and their
combinations.” Joseph’s brothers were not, however, on this exalted level.
“Their entire service to God was only to receive statements and [articula-
ble] intentions from the words.” Joseph brought “dibbatam (their words/
reports) ra’ah (bad) el avihem (to their father)” (Gen 37:2). According to
Shapira’s reading, this means that Joseph understood his brothers’ words
as “bad to their father”—that is, for one on Jacob’s level of understanding,
the focus on words and lexical meaning alone and consequent devaluing
of concrete reality and letters was “bad.”13
Continuing in this vein, Shapira notes that Joseph’s reward for his
level of understanding was that his father gave him a ketonet passim, usually
understood as a striped or colored cloak. Shapira notes that the midrash
claims that passim is a way of conveying the meaning pass yad (the palm
of the hand), for the garment was so fine—so delicate and thin—that it
could be condensed and concealed in the palm of one’s hand.14 Shapira
asks how the midrash could see passim as standing for pass yad—after
all, the final letter is a mem, not a dalet. He answers that “it is known
 Self-Creation through Texts 135

that the form of the final mem letter is a dalet, a dalet which has been
doubled,” with the second dalet turned upside down and attached to
the other side. “Therefore, for one whose service is only in words and
statements, the [only] hint [in the word] is passim. But since they [Jacob
and Joseph] learned how to receive from the forms of the letters as well,
and the form of the final mem is a dalet, passim also hints at pass yad.”15
This unusual reading of a relatively obscure midrash discloses the
essence of Shapira’s hermeneutics. One who is focused on the meaning
of the words in the Torah is carried away from the concrete particularity
and physical form of the letters. However, when one contemplates the
very letters of the Torah in their embodied form, new meanings and
interpretations pour forth that are only available to one who approaches
the text in this way. Although Shapira does not make the point explic-
itly, it may be that the image of the subtle, fine, and hidden nature of
the cloak—which is itself the interpretation that emerges from the pass
yad reading—as that which emerges only from a concrete focus on the
visible, material form of the letters is illustrative of his view. The most
subtle and hidden interpretations, the finest garments of Torah, are what
emerge from a hermeneutic that insists on the intrinsic holiness of the
letters themselves as incarnational vessels for the divine.
A teaching in Shapira’s interbellum mystical tract Benei mahshavah
tovah (see Leshem, this volume)emphasizes the direct link between one’s
view of physical reality and one’s view of texts, particularly kabbalistic
texts.16 Shapira explains that a kabbalist sees the “truth and the essence”
of the things of the world, “that they are entirely [divine] names, and
souls.”17 In truth, this sense of the inherent holiness of the things of this
world must come prior to the proper learning of Kabbalah, because one
then turns to the Kabbalah not to gaze into some “other” spiritual world
but rather to understand the details of the holy structure of the very
world one sees and inhabits. However, one who is not awakened to the
inherent holiness of the world “and comes to learn Kabbalah—then only
confusion and contradictions will swirl within him.” This is because he
sees, for example, “physical bread—to eat and satisfy” the body, yet the
Kabbalah describes how three names of Y-H-W-H emanated down into
this aspect of “bread.”18 He then wonders: How could these spiritual,
transcendent realities have become so corporealized as to become physi-
cal bread? Recoiling from any incarnational thinking, he will resolve his
own confusion by supposing that the kabbalists intended only to “make a
hint” here. Yet, even so, he wonders, “Why did they even hint at supernal
136 David Maayan

matters with corporeal things? Why did they associate the name of the
King with a lowly and disgraceful thing?”19
Shapira’s “confused” would-be kabbalist sees conceptual meanings
and mystical intentions as higher realities than bread. But in truth, the
bread itself surpasses any meaning or intention that can be articulated. The
profound meanings that flow forth from the bread (which are disclosed
through the study of Kabbalah), and from the letters of the Torah, are
affirmations of the inherent holy essence of their source. However, just as
bodies remain irreducible, the letters of the Torah and the things of this
world remain inexhaustible, their meaning never fully plumbed or able
to be articulated in concepts or verbal intentions.

Engraving the Self

For Shapira, the essence of the Torah is the divine self. This idea has roots
in Nahmanides’s famous description of the Torah as composed entirely of
divine names20 and much subsequent kabbalistic speculation. In particular,
Hasidic authors are fond of quoting the rabbinic interpretation of the first
word of the Decalogue, the divine “I” (anokhi), as an acronym for ana
nafshay ketavit yehavit (see Wiskind, this volume).21 The simple reading of
this phrase is as an emphasis on God as the giver of the Torah: “I myself
wrote and gave [the Torah].”22 Hasidic authors often read the phrase as
“I wrote and gave myself [in the Torah]”—as teaching that the Torah is
divine self-revelation.
For Shapira, the “Torah” that expresses the divine self is not only the
words and intentions that can be derived from its study but also, indeed
primarily, the letters themselves, which embody this self (see, however,
Seeman, this volume). In fact, the greater revelation—and ultimate incar-
nation—of the divine self is in human embodied actions, particularly the
performance of the mitsvot: “And from the beginning of the giving of the
Torah, God said, ‘I (anokhi) am Y-H-W-H, your God,’ and the anokhi is
said in reference to all of the Torah, [e.g.,] ‘Remember the Sabbath day,
to sanctify it,’ etc., for ‘I, Y-H-W-H, your God, am the doer’ of all the
Torah and mitsvot.”23
Shapira’s emphasis here on the divine as the true agent or self that is
at work in human actions may seem to imply that the goal of the human
devotee should be bittul, or self-nullification, which allows this divine self
to manifest.24 However, just as the particular articulation of an individual
 Self-Creation through Texts 137

human body—or an individual Torah scroll—serves as the ideal locus for

divine incarnation, so too the uniqueness of the human self should by
no means be erased in his or her divine service. In fact, Shapira urgently
insists that every act of divine service should manifest the unique indi-
viduality of the human being who is performing it.25 There is a harmonic
interdependence in the revelation of the human and divine selves.
Shapira is also interested in the function of writing as a means of
transmitting the unique human self. In the opening reflection to his “spir-
itual journal,” Tsav ve-zeruz, Shapira contemplates the tragedy of human
mortality. After cultivating a unique self over the course of a lifetime, how
tragic it is that this person must cease to be! If only we had just one more
lifetime on this earth to live again, starting from the fully cultivated self
we had attained!26 He then turns with hope to the act of writing as an
attempted solution to this problem of death:

It is good for a person to record all of his thoughts. Not in

order to make a name for himself as an author of a book
but rather to engrave himself (laharot et atsmo) on paper, to
preserve all of the movements of the soul, its fallings and its
risings. All of its being, its form, its cognitions, and all that
it acquired for itself in the expanse of its lifetime should
remain alive.27

Through his writings, Shapira is striving to preserve the unique self,

the individual self in its full form, created through the narrative of its
particular experiences. This opening paragraph could have ended with
a declaration that a person should record his “pearls of wisdom,” those
thoughts and insights that occurred to him during inspired moments, for
future generations. Yet Shapira does not want merely to preserve wisdom
in an abstract sense; he wants to preserve the self he has cultivated. Thus,
the voice of the self ’s “fallings” must be recorded as well, for it is not
some impersonalized “highlights” that he wants to preserve but the full
force of his selfhood. Scholars who have worked on Shapira and who
feel moved (as I do) such that they wish for their work to contribute,
in some small way, to the fulfillment of Shapira’s stated wish to live on
through his work should reflect on his own stated intent to convey his
soul’s “fallings” as well as its ascents. The rabbi’s own words here can serve
as a reminder to his readers and interpreters that an overly hagiographic
approach (however understandable and well intentioned) may frustrate
138 David Maayan

his own deeply stated desire to be permitted to “live on” in the fullest,
richest sense possible after death.

Self-Creation through Writing

For Shapira, writing is not merely a means of conveying the self to oth-
ers but a process of self-discovery and ultimately of self-creation. Once
again, a primary source for this material is the 1929 sermon we have
been considering.
True thought, which focuses consciousness, is the coming into being
of a new aspect of self or essence. Shapira presents this in an innovative
discussion of mahshavot zarot (“strange” or “foreign” thoughts).28 The
Baal Shem Tov taught that “inappropriate” (archetypically, though not
exclusively, sexual) thoughts that arise during devotional service should
be viewed as “holy sparks” yearning to be reconnected to their source
through the “rectification” allowed by prayer and holy deeds.29 Some earlier
approaches had treated such thoughts as intrusions of the demonic upon
the world of sanctity.30
In marked contrast to both of these approaches, Shapira suggests
that mahshavot zarot reflect neither sin nor a craving for sin, nor indeed
anything supernatural, but simply a “natural deficiency” (hisaron tevi’i). It
is the nature of thought that it is “unable to rest,” states Shapira; thus, if
consciousness reflects for some time on a particular thought and sees no
newness in it, it leaves this thought aside and moves on to others. Idel’s
comments (this volume) on the importance of contemplative technique to
Shapira’s oeuvre would seem very apposite here. Shapira’s writings reflect
a constant urgent interest in increasing the ability of the human mind to
remain focused and cleave to a single thought.
In Shapira’s analysis, the problem at the root of the fleeting nature
of thought is captured well in the term mahshavot zarot. For “thought is
not able to be grasped by and made to cleave to a matter foreign to itself
(davar zar).” However, when a person exercises his human creativity and
produces a hiddush, a new Torah interpretation or teaching, “it is just
the opposite!”

He wants always to think of this matter, another time, and

another time—until he needs to turn his thought forcibly away
from it [if he wants to think of something else]. The reason for
 Self-Creation through Texts 139

this is that in every original intellectual insight (hiddush), a new

portion is born in the essence of the intellect of the originator,
only it is enclothed in the form of the understanding that he is
reflecting upon. And since the essence of his intellect is unified
with the matter that he is reflecting upon (in keeping with the
comment of Rashi, of blessed memory, on “and they became
one flesh”31 that in the child, they [the two parents] become
one flesh), his thought becomes bound to the matter that he
is reflecting upon and does not fly from thought to thought.32

Torah interpretation is thus not a matter of divine self-revelation alone but

also of human self-revelation and self-creation. This is not restricted to some
“elevated” manifestation of Torah study but applies even to the attempt
to study and interpret the simple meaning of a Torah text. “Every plain
meaning of the Torah (peshat ha-torah) that a person understands . . . is
not the essence of the Torah (in itself); rather, it is that which the Torah
hints to him, the Torah that is enclothed in his soul, his mind, and his will.
A person is [therefore] able to recognize the situation of his own soul in
his original Torah insights.”33 Shapira’s emphasis on Torah as self-revelation
means that Torah as divine revelation cannot demand the erasure of the
human individual. In fact, engagement in Torah here is the very process
of writing and birthing a unique self.

The Ingathering of Alterity

We have seen that, for Shapira, the new articulable insights that are born
in the creatively interpreting mind enclothe “a new portion . . . in the
essence of the intellect of the originator.”34 It is not only that the same
essence—or self—has brought forth a new articulation of itself but that
there is a new portion of self that has come into being. This new being
is not born naked but rather comes garbed in its expression as a new
insight or interpretation (hiddush).35 It is this that the mind is then able
to contemplate with focused attention—indeed, it requires effort to pry
its attention away—precisely because it recognizes that it is not a matter
foreign to itself but rather a new portion of its own being that has been,
or is in the process of being, born. This is a significant new interpretation
of the relationship between literary and psychic process described in this
volume by Wiskind and Seeman.36 The mind’s steady attention represents
140 David Maayan

the circular fascination of the self giving birth to itself, contemplating

its own being. How does Shapira articulate the relation between this
self-contemplation and other ultimate values—empathy, altruism, and
devotion to the divine?
In a teaching marked as being from Rosh Hashanah 5686 (correspond-
ing to September 19–20, 1925), Shapira introduces the centrality of the
ability to recognize alterity, and empathy, at the beginning of a discussion
of how thought (da’at) can actualize (po’el). He asks rhetorically, “If a person
thinks that day is night, is [the time] affected by his thought?” However,
thought that is itself a new “created essence” (etsem nivra) can indeed be
a creative force. For Shapira, this higher type of thought always has an
element of self-recognition (which is simultaneously a self-actualization)
to it—yet this very self-recognition is impossible outside a recognition of
that which is other than the self: “For example, when a person recognizes
something other than himself (davar zulato), it is not only the other that he
recognizes. He also recognizes himself by means of this, for the one who
recognizes (ha-ba’al makir) has also been revealed.”37 This rather abstract
philosophical point is immediately rendered by Shapira in terms of being
able to recognize, and empathize with, other human beings:

If a person wants to know whether he is wise, then he needs

to [demonstrate the capacity to] grasp the mind of another.
If he desires to know whether he is a compassionate person,
he is able to know this if he feels the suffering of another;
and if he does not grasp the other, then he fails as well to
apprehend himself. However, it is not only wisdom or com-
passion themselves which are revealed—rather, the one who
has wisdom and the essence of the soul of the one who has
compassion are revealed.38

Pursuing this thought further, Shapira urges that true self-knowledge

is defined precisely as the taking-in and ingathering of alterity: “For all
recognition is the ingathering of that which is other. When one knows
a matter, then there is found, now, in his mind a matter foreign to itself
(davar zar).” That which “was not in him before, he now has apprehended
and understood.”39 Now, it is possible to conceive of this process as a kind
of conquering of alterity, which has now become absorbed and incorpo-
rated into the self. However, this manner of thinking, which pictures self
 Self-Creation through Texts 141

and other as in a competitive rather than interdependent relationship, is

precisely what Shapira emphatically resists with his careful formulation.
Shapira describes that which has entered the mind as still retaining
its otherness (davar zar). In effect, the other truly enters one’s mind.
To the extent that it—or, more poignantly, he or she40—does not, one
is displaying not a capacious mind but rather a lack of self-realization.
Shapira explains that he speaks of the faculty of “recognition” (hakarah)
rather than of the intellect (sekhel) because “recognition encompasses
within itself both knowledge and feeling.”41 It makes no sense to speak
of empathy as taking in the other’s pain and “making it one’s own” if
this means that one feels the pain entirely as one’s own and forgets about
the other. Rather, the pain entering the self must be recognized as tran-
scendent, belonging to the other person. Shapira formulates this crucial
point: recognition is an ingathering of alterity. This true recognition of the
other is simultaneously a basis for creation and recognition of self. Any
other form of “self-realization” is actually nothing more than a counterfeit
masquerading under that term, like the supposed “wisdom” of one who
cannot apprehend the wisdom of others or the “compassion” of one who
cannot feel another’s pain.

Alterity and the Body

Shapira’s insistence on the cardinal importance of recognizing the alterity

of the other may also be tied to his positive evaluation of bodies and
physicality. His approach should be contrasted with that of R. Shneur
Zalman of Liady (1745–1812), the founder of Chabad Hasidism, whose
teachings are referenced in Shapira’s writings. In chapter 32 of Likkutei
amarim, R. Schneur Zalman writes:

Fulfilling that which was mentioned above—viewing his body

with scorn and revulsion and having his joy be only the joy
of the soul—is a direct and easy way to come to fulfill the
commandment “You shall love your fellow as yourself ” (Lev
18:19) toward every soul of Israel, both great and small. That
is, since his body is despised and loathed by him, while as for
the soul and spirit—who can comprehend their greatness and
excellence in their root and source in the living God? And
142 David Maayan

[considering] also that all [Israel] are of a kind and all have
one Father, such that all of Israel are truly called brothers in
terms of the root of their souls in the One God, and only the
bodies are separated . . . 42

For Shneur Zalman, the disparaging of the body is the surest road
to being able to love one’s fellow Jews. This is because the body is the
source of separation, distinction, and individual identity.43 Since the souls
of all Israel are all “of a kind” (mat’emot—a word related to the Hebrew
term for “twin”), one who values only the soul will be drawn to love his
fellows, for there will be nothing dividing him from them. However, one
who focuses upon the body will have no true basis for love. Shneur Zalman
continues: “For those who consider their bodies of principle importance
(ikkar) and their souls secondary (tafel), therefore, it is impossible for there
to be genuine love and brotherhood between them. [For such persons,
there can be] only that [love] which is dependent on a [transitory] thing.”44
The basis of love, in this model, is precisely sameness. Persons who
are focused upon their bodily difference and individuation are separated
from, and cannot truly love, their fellows. Even the lower level of “love”
that such persons may manifest is “dependent upon a thing,” that is, some
form of mutual interest or benefit, allowing only for a bond based upon
this sameness. But this sameness, being transitory and inessential, cannot
serve to produce true love. Eventually, the alterity between the two will
assert itself once again, and the temporary connection forged between
them will shatter.45
An essential difference between Shapira’s thought and Shneur Zalman’s
here is that Shapira does not see the body as that which distinguishes
between individuals. The lifetime project he advocates is one of continually
articulating a unique self, a unity of body and soul, that is as infused with
the divine as it is unique in its own particularity.

Self-Creation and the Divine Creator

I have shown that, for Shapira, a new “portion” of self is born together
with each new sacred insight. In fact, he goes farther and describes the
entirety of one’s self and even one’s body as being created anew through
one’s developing consciousness. Shapira writes that the “person of Israel
creates his own essence”46 and that through this process “his entire body
 Self-Creation through Texts 143

is created anew.”47 How does this vision of “self-creation” present itself

in Shapira’s thought, and how does he relate it to the concept of God as
Creator? A continued close reading of his 1925 sermon for Rosh Hashanah
may help to answer this question.
Shapira begins his transition to the more explicit terminology of
self-creation by making use of a phrase in rabbinic literature that he inter-
prets as introducing a role for the creature’s da’at in the process of his or
her own creation. Da’at, often translated as “knowledge,” can also denote
“consciousness,” “intent,” “opinion,” and “consent.” As this multiplicity of
meanings is at play in Shapira’s text here, I will leave the term untranslated:

The midrash hints that “all the works of creation were cre-
ated . . . according to their da’at.”48 That is, God asked each
one for its da’at as to how [it would like] to be created. We find
that their da’at is prior to their creation and that the essence
of each one was created according to its da’at.49

The rabbinic teaching that Shapira draws upon is talmudic, but his citation
is only partial, and his interpretation differs from that of the most prom-
inent previous Jewish commentators on the passage: “R. Yehuda ben Levi
said: All the works of creation were created according to their height,50
according to their da’at, and according to their form51 (le-tsivyonam), as
it says, ‘And the heavens and the earth were completed, and all of their
hosts (tseva’am)’ (Gen 2:1)—do not read ‘their hosts’ but rather ‘their
forms’ (tsivyonam).”52
Together with the suggestive phrase “according to their da’at,” the
original teaching also includes two other phrases: everything was created
according to its “height” and according to its “form.” Commentators on
the passage have seen it as teaching that God created the first living beings
already at their “complete” stage. Thus, Rashi comments that “the fruit
tree was ready to produce fruit immediately.”53 Similarly, Rashi explains
“their form” as implying that each thing was created, as it were, in its
“mold” (defus). God is in control, creating each creature in its appropriate
fullness, according to the archetypal form that God has in mind for each.
But what of the phrase “according to their da’at?” Although this phrase
is open to interpretation, most medieval commentators interpreted it along
similar lines to “height” and “form.” Thus, Rabbeinu Hananel (990–1053)
writes that this means “not like the da’at of children, but rather with the
da’at of those fully mature.”54 Similar readings are found in Maimonides and
144 David Maayan

the medieval Jewish philosopher Joseph Albo (1380–1444).55 Albo renders

the phrase “according to their da’at” as “with their consent,” framing this
reading as metaphorical. “If, metaphorically (al derekh mashal), they had
been asked whether they would consent to exist in the form, that is, the
beauty, stature, and excellence which is to be found in them, they would
have agreed to be created.”56
Rashi also interprets the phrase in terms of consent: “He [God] asked
them whether they desired to be created, and they said ‘Yes.’ ”57 This brings
us closer to Shapira’s reading, but the differences are crucial. For Rashi,
the form of the creature is predetermined by the Creator. The creature is
asked to consent to being created but is not consulted about its form or
attributes, which are determined by God. The consent determines whether
the creation will take place, but the how is determined entirely by God.
Shapira reads da’at quite differently here, as indicating that not only
the creature’s consent but the creature’s own opinion is being sought by the
Creator—and the form in which the creature is created is thus fashioned
by the creature itself in the realm of da’at. An interesting precedent for
Shapira’s reading is found in Levi Yitzhak of Barditshev’s (1740–1809)
influential early Hasidic collection Kedushat Levi, a work that is referenced
multiple times in Shapira’s own writings. There, we read:

Now we will expound upon a speculative question. It is known

that the Holy One, blessed be he, creates his world anew with
each and every breath. We perceive and see this each day (as
is formulated in the liturgical poem: “for like the clay in the
hand of the potter, so are we in your hand”), and the entire
world is likewise in His hand, and he creates them anew each
moment. Why, then, does it not happen that a [creature] trans-
forms from a human into an animal, or from an animal into
a human, or from a farm animal into a wild beast, and so on?
The matter must be as follows: Just as at the beginning of
the works of creation, “they were created in their likenesses,58
their da’at, and their forms”—as is found in Rosh Hashanah
11a, and see there Rashi’s commentary c.v. le-da’atan: “He [God]
asked them whether they desired to be created, and they said,
‘Yes’ ”—so it is always, certainly, that each and every creature’s
will is to remain thus, as it was created before, and not to
change from its [original] creation. Therefore, even though
it is true that the Holy One, blessed be he, creates his world
 Self-Creation through Texts 145

anew at each moment, since it is the will of the created crea-

ture that it stay [in its form,] thus it remains. For he renews
his lovingkindness and each moment fulfills for his creatures
their desire: that they should be as they were created. And for
this we praise him.59

Placing this teaching alongside Shapira’s, we can note some signif-

icant ways in which it is closer to his than the medieval interpretations
reviewed above. For one thing, this teaching reflects the notion, so
frequently emphasized in early Hasidic texts, that God’s generous act of
creation is a never-ending, constantly renewing process rather than a one-
time event. Reflections on “the works of creation” thus provide insight
into the workings of the present moment. In addition, Levi Yitzhak here,
although citing Rashi, clearly understands the “consultation” process with
the creature about to be created (or created anew) as involving not just
whether to be created but how and in what form to be created. Remark-
ably, Levi Yitzhak introduces this element of “self-creation” to explain and
establish a principle of continuity and sameness in the world rather than
to propose a possibility of change.
Shapira, by way of contrast, is proclaiming that human beings have
the possibility to inaugurate change in their very being, indeed to create
themselves (including their material reality) anew. By means of new acts
of “recognition”—those acts of consciousness that include both cognitive
awareness and depth of feeling—the human being provides the Creator
with a new da’at, and he or she is then created in accordance with this
da’at. Shapira recognizes the kind of radical freedom implied in this notion,
for one is not constricted even by one’s own essence: one’s da’at precedes
the creation of one’s essence.
This is a remarkable parallel to one of the famous slogans of French
existentialism, the claim that (at least in humans) “existence precedes
essence” (see Reiser, this volume). This view was given early and forceful
expression in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1945 lecture L’existentialisme est un human-
isme. Sartre explicitly presented his existential philosophy as dependent
upon his atheism. For Sartre, the theistic notion of God as creator meant
that God was seen as creating human beings based upon an essence, a
“certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding.”60 Even as
philosophic atheism emerges in the eighteenth century, claims Sartre, the
remnants of this notion of an essence linger on in philosophical assump-
tions about the existence of a universal “human nature.” For Sartre, this
146 David Maayan

notion deprives human beings of full freedom, as they are trapped by their
own essence, and of their individuality, since “human nature” is posited
as a universal essence. For Sartre, only “atheistic existentialism” declares
the human free (although thus also, as Sartre emphasizes, responsible),
able to create her own essence through her existence. That is, “he will be
what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there
is no God to have a conception of it.”61
Shapira draws on the midrashic expression that God created creatures
“according to their da’at” to grant each human being an indispensable
role in creating his or her own essence. God turns away, as it were, from
God’s own ideas and “asks each one for her own da’at.” Initially, Shapira
still explicitly names God as the Creator, who consults with the creature
regarding its own creation. However, summarizing the insight derived from
this reading, Shapira says only that “their da’at is prior to their creation
and that the essence of each one was created according to its da’at.”62 Two
paragraphs later, we find the following formulation: “The person of Israel
creates his own essence by means of holy recognition. We find that the [act
of] recognition is itself a holy essence, a reality unto itself, a holy form
(guf kadosh) with a holy essence in it—and this essence, this awareness,
has an active capacity.”63 Shapira’s passionate advocacy of human freedom,
manifesting in the active creation of one’s own unique self, comes through
in these passages.64

Conclusion

Although I have focused primarily on just two of Shapira’s many recorded

sermons, I hope that these have been sufficient to exemplify the range
and subtlety of his writings. I would like to conclude by noting one
characteristic tendency of his thought. The teachings I have cited here are
wrestling with the interrelationship of several commonly paired concepts,
including body and soul, word and meaning, physicality and spirituality,
self and other, human and God. Frequently, these are construed as having
a hierarchical and oppositional relationship to one another. Yet Shapira
does not follow this path. Instead, with remarkable consistency, he seeks
to articulate a notion of absolute interdependence between supposed
antipodes. At times, this leads him to emphasize the inherent holiness of
the body, the irreducible holiness of the letters, and the indispensable value
 Self-Creation through Texts 147

of the other person. The soul does not make use of the body, meanings
do not emerge from letters, and self neither overcomes nor frees itself from
other. In place of hierarchy, we have ontological interdependence. The
fundamental human religious activity in Judaism, the bodily performance
of the commandments, is attributed to divine agency. The most uniquely
divine activity of creation, on the other hand, is attributed to human
beings! Human and divine activity, human and divine being, cannot be
divided into compartmentalized realms.
However, we have also seen that rather than simply asserting the
unity of opposites, Shapira attempts to articulate and even prove the truth
of their interdependence. In addition to citing and interpreting earlier
sources, he advances rational arguments that attempt to convince the
reader of his views, appealing also to the reader’s ethical sense.65 These
expositions are at times highly abstract, concerned with nuances of defini-
tion and precise conceptual analysis, yet Shapira consistently intersperses
these with this-worldly parables and frequent appeals to the reader’s own
lived experience, resulting in a uniquely Hasidic religious phenomenology
(see Seeman, this volume). Shapira’s precise and nuanced descriptions of
the interrelationship of body and mind, awareness of self and other, and
divine and human agency are not just descriptive in intent but also seek
to instantiate a dynamic and radical unity of human experience.

Notes

1. On the question of the application of the term incarnational to Jewish

theologies, see Alon Goshen-Gottstein, “Judaisms and Incarnational Theologies:
Mapping Out the Parameters of Dialogue” in Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 39,
no. 3–4 (2002): 219–47; Shaul Magid, Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity,
and the Construction of Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2015); Elliot R. Wolfson, “Judaism and Incarnation: The Imaginal Body of God,”
in Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder: Westview, 2000); Moshe Idel, Ben: Son-
ship and Jewish Mysticism (New York: Continuum, 2007), esp. n180 on 99–101.
2. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei
Piaseczno, 1995), 5690 (1929), 47–55.
3. Sefer yetsirah, 4:16, where letters are termed “stones” and words (or
combinations of letters) are termed “houses”; thus, “two stones build two houses,
three stones build six houses, etc.”
4. Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyeshev 5690 (1929), 47.
148 David Maayan

5. Ibid.
6. Shapira is quoting here from the liturgical “I believe” (Ani ma’amin)
credo, itself based upon Maimonides’s thirteen principles of faith, found in many
traditional prayer books to be recited after morning prayers.
7. Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyeshev 5690 (1929), 47.
8. Ibid., 48. Shapira’s formulations here reflect a construction widespread
in earlier Hasidic literature. In b. Ketubot 111b, R. Eliezer is quoted asking and
answering the question of how we may “cleave to” God, whereas b. Sotah 14a
records R. Hama ben R. Hanina’s question and answer about how we may “walk
after God.” As here, R. Eliezer’s question was often combined with R. Hama’s
answer, thus rendering “walk after his attributes” definitional of devekut. Shapira
also draws on the teaching of Abba Shaul recorded in b. Shabbat 133b and the
top of y. Pe’ah 3a.
9. See previous note.
10. Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyeshev 5690 (1929), 48.
11. Shemot Rabbah 30:9.
12. Rashi is drawing on Bereshit Rabbah 84:8.
13. Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyeshev 5690 (1929), 54.
14. Bereshit Rabbah 84:8.
15. Ibid.
16. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Benei mahshavah tovah (Israel: Va’ad Hasidei
Piaseczno, 1999), 31–32.
17. This should not be taken to mean that the substantiality of the world
dissipates and is seen to be “only” names and souls, for in the same breath (and
in consonance with his teachings throughout his works), Shapira emphasizes that
names and souls are themselves more substantial than we sometimes imagine
them to be—thus, letters can be called “stones,” and that same sense of a chunk
of reality applies equally, as we have seen, to letters per se and to all corporeal
things.
18. This is because the Tetragrammaton is numerically 26 and lehem (bread)
is three times this, 78.
19. Shapira, Benei mahshavah tovah, 32.
20. In his introduction to his commentary on the Pentateuch.
21. B. Shabbat 105a.
22. See Rashi loc. cit. Of course, it is also possible to read the unnamed
reference more restrictively, that the “given” here refers to just the Decalogue,
for example. See Pesikta Rabbati 21 for such a reading. For obvious reasons
(including the pressure of the “heretic” who distinguished the divine revelatory
nature of the Decalogue from the rest of the Torah and its commandments, as
implied in b. Berakhot 12a), later Jewish exegesis tended to interpret the phrase
here more expansively. See Isaiah Horowitz’s Shenei luhot ha-berit (Jerusalem: Oz
ve-hadar, 1993), 3:57, masekhet Shavu’ot, perek Torah Or, 3:3, which interprets
 Self-Creation through Texts 149

ketavit as a reference to the Divine as author of the written Torah and yehavit as
a reference to the Divine as interpreter of the written Torah, through the giving
of the oral Torah.
23. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyeshev 5690 (1929), 48. For the idea that
the embodied Torah of Israel is superior even to the letters of a Torah scroll as
a locus of divine presence, see Derekh ha-melekh, parashat noah, 8–9, and the
discussion in my thesis, “The Call of the Self: Devotional Individuation in the
Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno” (Newton: Hebrew
College, 2017), 69–71.
24. Although Shapira’s critique of this understanding of bittul comes through
most clearly in his explicit rejection of it, as in the sources cited in the previous
note, he also engages in significant reinterpretation of the term in pieces in which
he does adopt it positively, such as in the sermon from parashat Vayyetse 1930
[5691]. In her discussion of this sermon in this volume, Wiskind’s emphasis on
its continuity with the teachings of the Maggid of Mezritsh about self-nullification
and ayin (nothingness) risks obscuring the innovation of Shapira’s deployment of
the Maggid’s teaching. By the time he is done, Shapira has shifted the Maggid’s
mystical teaching about ontology and nothingness to an existential key about
epistemology and radical self-doubt: “A person must establish times for himself
to extricate himself from all the forms of his divine service, standing like a naked
golem without a garment, and to doubt: ‘Perhaps, God forbid, I am mistaken
about everything. Who knows, it is possible that all of my devotional service that
I have engaged in for all the years of my life was in vain and for nothing, and
who knows whether after 120 years [when I die] . . . I will see that I have [lit.,
“there is here”] no Torah, no service; my entire life was a life of error, and what
can I do then? All was lost” (Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyetse 5691 [1930],
36). Shapira’s presentation of the positive uses of doubt here has much in common
with the great existentialist Polish line of the Hasidic schools of Pshiskhe-Izhbits/
Radzin-Kotsk, a subject that I hope to expand on in future work. At any rate,
I submit that the absence of this quote, or even the central term doubt, from
Wiskind’s summary of this sermon risks obscuring the originality of Shapira’s
teaching here, and particularly its discontinuity with the original context of the
teaching attributed to the Maggid that is his starting point.
25. Shapira, Tsav ve-zeruz, no. 10, in Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Hakhsharat
ha-avreikhim, Mevo ha-she’arim, Tsav ve-zeruz (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei Piasec-
zno, 2001), 331–32, and cf. my discussion and summary in my thesis (cited in
n. 23), 14–16.
26. Ibid., no. 1, 321. This yearning for more embodied life, and the sense of
the unmitigated tragedy of death, perhaps speaks more eloquently than any of his
more theoretical statements about Shapira’s true positive valuation of the corporeal.
27. Ibid.; emphasis added.
28. Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyeshev 5690 (1929), 49.
150 David Maayan

29. See the sources and discussion in Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer (New
York: Schocken, 1973), 104–20.
30. Indeed Jacobs, ibid., shows the relatively rapid retreat, even among
Hasidic authors, from the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching on this point to this earlier
model, which was declared as advice intended only for great tsaddikim. Rabbi
Yitzhak Ayzik Yehudah Yehiel Safrin of Komarno (1806–1874) stands out for
his forceful defense of the ongoing universal applicability of the Baal Shem Tov’s
approach; see the sources cited by Jacobs.
31. Gen 2:24 and Rashi there.
32. Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyeshev 5690 (1929), 49.
33. Ibid., 56. In the same paragraph, Shapira states this in terms of rec-
ognizing other selves as well: “So too, it is possible to recognize the soul [of the
person] in the hiddushei torah that each individual understands.”
34. Ibid., 49. The passage was quoted at some length in the preceding section.
35. Note that this formulation concords with the emphasis we have already
seen in Shapira on the inherent holiness of the letters (and physical reality). On
the one hand, it is true that the letters “garb” an essence, which we may therefore
legitimately construe as “deeper.” Yet, since the essence does not preexist the letters
(that is, the “new portion” of essence, in Shapira’s words), we cannot think of the
essence as having simply put on a garment, which may perhaps then be taken off
or switched for another. Rather, there is an intrinsic being-together of the letters
with the portion of essence that they garb. The next hiddush will not simply be
a new garment placed on the same essence but will announce instead the birth
of a new portion of essence, and so on.
36. See the masterful analysis of Shapira’s visionary practices in Daniel
Reiser, Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism, trans. Eugene D. Matanky
with Daniel Reiser (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), especially in relation to the process
of the revelation of the soul/self (hitgalut ha-nefesh), 209–13. On the interrela-
tionship between Shapira’s literary and psychic process, see Don Seeman, “Ritual
Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Har-
vard Theological Review 101, no. 3–4 (2008): 465–505. See also Don Seeman and
Michael Karlin, “Mindfulness and Hasidic Modernism: Towards a Contemplative
Ethnography,” in Religion and Society: Advances in Research 10 (2019): 44–62 on
Hasidic mindfulness practice. The authors explore the various conceptions of self
that underlie the approaches to such practice in both Hasidic and non-Hasidic
(e.g., Buddhist) contexts.
37. Derekh ha-melekh, rosh ha-shanah 5686 (1925), 193.
38. Ibid.
39. Loc. cit.
40. Shapira’s notion of the “ingathering” certainly includes the nonhuman
world, as his works attest. (See, e.g., his advice about finding times to commune
 Self-Creation through Texts 151

with nature, head into the woods and see oneself as “a simple creature amongst
the creatures of God” in Tsav ve-zeruz, no. 18, in Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim, Mevo
ha-she’arim, Tsav ve-zeruz, 331.) However, it is equally clear that, for Shapira, it is
the lived experience of other persons that calls for our deepest acts of empathy
and understanding. Note also his likening of creation itself to the image of a pro-
found tsaddik deep in contemplation of supernal mysteries, whose silent cleaving
to God inspires us to tremble in awe of the Divine and opens up possibilities for
our own intimacy with God. Ibid., no. 29, 346–47.
41. Derekh ha-melekh, rosh ha-shanah 5686 (1925), 193.
42. Shneur Zalman of Liady, Likkutei amarim—Tanya, 41a.
43. See the discussion of (Jewish) souls and bodies in Moshe Cordevero,
Pardes rimmonim 4:6. Cordevero states that human differentiation and uniqueness
is only possible due to the partnering of souls with bodies, for bodies exhibit
differences and variation of which souls are incapable. I am grateful to Eitan
Fishbane, whose paper “Personal Identity and the Ontology of the Soul in Six-
teenth-Century Kabbalah,” presented at the 2017 Conference of the Association for
Jewish Studies, brought this source to my attention. Accessed online February 12,
2019, at https://www.academia.edu/37120253/Personal_Identity_and_the_Ontol-
ogy_of_the_Soul_in_Sixteenth_Century_Kabbalah.
44. Loc. cit. The distinction to which Shne’ur Zalman refers between the
transitory love that is dependent upon a thing and the sustaining love that is not
is found in m. Avot 5:16.
45. In asserting this, I am drawing upon the emphasis in m. Avot 5:16
that a love that is dependent upon a thing will, in the end, cease to be. On the
interpretation of this passage from Likkutei amarim in Chabad Hasidism, see
the selections compiled in Yehoshua Korf, ed., Likkutei bi’urim be-sefer ha-tanya
(Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1968) [in Hebrew and Yiddish]), 1: 195–97.
46. Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh, rosh ha-shanah 5686 (1925), 194. This brief
quote will be explored in its fuller context below.
47. Ibid., 195. That this self-creation through consciousness has a corpo-
real dimension is evident, Shapira continues, for “we see: one who learns Torah
for a number of years, his entire body transforms, until ‘the wisdom of a man
illuminates his face’ (Eccl 8:1).”
48. B. Rosh Hashanah 11a, and B. Hullin 60a, in the name of R. Yehoshua
ben Levi.
49. Shapira, Derekeh ha-melekh, Rosh Hashanah 5686 [1925], 193.
50. Some have the text “in their height” here.
51. Or “beauty.” See b. Rosh Hashanah 11a, the commentaries of Rashi s.v.
be-tsivyonam and Tosafot s.v. le-qomatan.
52. b. Rosh Hashanah 11a. On the question of the justification for including
height and da‘at together with form when the homiletic reading seems only to
152 David Maayan

relate to the latter, see the commentary of Baruch Ha-Levi Epstein in his Torah
temimah ad. loc., who claims that the former two are encompassed in the concept
of the full “form” or “beauty” of that which is created.
53. B. Rosh Hashanah 11a, Rashi s.v. be-qomatan nivra’u. This interpreta-
tion of R. Yehoshua ben Levi’s words is in fact implicitly suggested by the flow
of the talmudic discussion, which sees his teaching as of use in interpreting the
apparently redundant phrase “fruit trees which produce fruit” in Gen 1:11.
54. B. Rosh Hashanah 11a, Rabbenu Hanenel ad. loc.
55. Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated and annotated by
Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), Vol. 2, 355; and Albo,
Sefer ha-iqqarim Ma’amar 2, 22:3.
56. Loc. cit.
57. b. Rosh Hashanah 11a, Rashi c.v. le-da‘atam.
58. The text has be-demutan in place of qomatan here.
59. Levi Yitzhak of Barditshev, Kedushat Levi (Warsaw: 1876), kedushat
purim, kedushah 3, 21.
60. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” trans. Philip Mairet,
in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Meridian, 1956), 290.
61. Ibid., 290–91.
62. Derekh ha-melekh, rosh ha-shanah 5686, 193; my emphasis.
63. Ibid., 194; my emphasis.
64. Obviously, given Shapira’s strong traditional Hasidic Orthodoxy, he
does not promote absolute liberty. Rather, he suggests, in the spirit of m. Avot
6:2, that the commandments graven (harut) on the tablets themselves provide
freedom (herut). If poorly developed, this rabbinic formulation may serve only
as Orwellian doublespeak. In Shapira’s thought, his emphatic insistence that each
individual cultivate an utterly unique approach to every aspect of Torah observance
and study reveals him to be an enthusiastic advocate of creative freedom, within
a Hasidic form; see the sources cited above in n25.
65. For example, Shapira’s impassioned definition of compassion as the
ability to truly grasp the pain of another, discussed above in section VI. This
functions not only as a logical definition of terms but also as a rhetorical appeal
to the reader’s ethical sense, urging her not to allow a vague and self-absorbed
feeling to pass itself off under this moniker.
 6

Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity

Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira’s Derekh Ha-Melekh

Ora Wiskind

Until now, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira has been best known to schol-
arship for his Warsaw Ghetto sermons, and secondarily for his important
prewar mystical and educational tracts, such as Hovat ha-talmidim (see
Mayse, Seeman this volume) and Benei mahshavah tovah (Leshem, this
volume). His collection of sermons from between the wars (1925–1936),
meanwhile, has been mostly neglected. These homilies were apparently
delivered orally (probably in Yiddish) on Sabbaths and festivals and then
recorded in Hebrew, in his own hand, shortly thereafter.1 They were pre-
served in manuscript form and later posthumously published as Derekh
ha-melekh, “The King’s Way.” Not surprisingly, these sermons display
important continuities with R. Shapira’s other, better-known works: an
acute historical consciousness, strikingly modern psychological and
phenomenological insights, a clear pedagogical orientation, and mystical
attunement. Yet they also deserve study in their own right, not least for
what they convey of his impressive exegetical and literary accomplishments.
This chapter (and this volume) therefore contribute to a partial shift in
focus from the radical, charged tropes of suffering and the catastrophic
end of meaning that dominate scholarly discourse on his Warsaw Ghetto
Sermons from the Years of Rage. I intend to underline some more nuanced
elements of his prewar thought and to offer some comparisons between his

153
154 Ora Wiskind

interbellum and later Holocaust sermons (see also Seeman, this volume).
Among the themes that recur in R. Shapira’s writings are self-awareness,
emotion, the need for inner psychic unity, empowerment, the urgency of
communication, and an endless desire for divine presence. There are strik-
ing consonances between these concerns and innovative trends emerging
in the same years in psychology, educational philosophy, phenomenology,
and nascent Neo-Hasidism.2 I will consider some of these in the following
pages and will also suggest certain lines of continuity between R. Sha-
pira’s two collections of commentaries or derashot. A closer look at the
early sermons collected in Derekh ha-melekh offers new perspective on
the relationship between hermeneutics and mysticism, and promises to
shed new light on R. Shapira’s conception of Hasidism and its mission of
redemption and renewal.

The Historical Backdrop

A circumspect reading of Derekh ha-melekh requires some attention to the

historical setting of the sermons. As Wodziński (this volume) describes
in greater detail, the period of R. Shapira’s creativity was in the aftermath
of the Great War that consumed Europe between 1914 and 1918, along
with “the revolutions, civil wars, and new nationalisms that came in its
wake.” These “shattered the world of the nineteenth century and ushered in
momentous ideological, cultural, and social changes that would shape the
interwar period and beyond.” Mass expulsions reduced millions of eastern
European Jews to homeless refugees and concentrated others in urban
areas. The traumas of war, relocation, poverty, and anti-Semitic violence
all took their psychic toll. The following passage, an entry in R. Shapira’s
spiritual diary, Tsav ve-zeruz (also cited by Seeman, this volume), reflects
his sense of the Jewish experience in interwar Poland. It was written in
the late 1920s in response to a wave of suicides in the Jewish community:

Mourn—but not only for those who have done away with
their lives. Weep bitterly for the walking dead. . . . They have
not killed themselves, yet they are dead all the same. Life is
cheap. To be or not to be, it makes no difference any more.
In former times, the evil inclination had to make an effort to
bring a person to apostasy, to lose faith in God—it was not
easy, and he did not always manage. But now, I look around
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 155

and I see people . . . whose selfhood [ha-anokhi] has become

worthless to them. Live or die, heaven or hell—for whom? Only
for their pitiful selves—what an utterly pitiful and meaningless
thing to care about. “So it happened, along the way”—he froze
your soul, chilled your whole being.3

Equally alarming, in R. Shapira’s eyes, was the rapid corrosion of the old
Hasidic world of faith. Wodziński outlines some major historical factors at
work: “The destruction of courts and shtiblekh and the deaths of tsaddikim
shook the very foundations of Hasidic socio-religious life and dealt an
incomparably heavy blow to the functioning of the tightly knit Hasidic
communities. With no access to the tsaddik, with no place for prayer and
daily gatherings, Hasidism lost much of its essential experience for many.”4
The dislocation and migration of huge populations, rapid urbanization,
poverty, revolution, and new intellectual currents were dramatically trans-
forming traditional Jewry.
Beyond Hasidic circles, however, questions of identity were central
to the modern Jewish experience as a whole: “The highly polarized Polish
Jewish community fought a vicious internal battle over the hearts and
minds of its young people and who could provide them with the best
means to cope with both their Jewish identity and the challenges of modern
society.”5 The educational theory and practice that R. Shapira developed
in the interwar period was therefore one tactic for confronting problems
of Jewish identity, especially with respect to young people (Evan Mayse,
Seeman, this volume).6 In a broader sense, R. Shapira’s oeuvre as a whole
evidences his desire to renew Jewish spirituality by way of Hasidic teaching,
an endeavor with clear messianic undercurrents. Yet alongside his other
works, his sermons constitute a unique medium with its own specific
social context and hermeneutical power. The homiletic is arguably the
classic and most enduring genre of discourse in Jewish literary tradition.
Preachers in all historical periods and places have served as agents of
culture: their sermons bring sacred texts to life by making them relevant
to contemporary concerns.7 And so R. Shapira’s interwar discourses can
yield important new insight onto his deepest convictions about Hasidic
teaching and the ethos it embodied at a crucial historical juncture; they
may also illuminate aspects of his own lived experience.
Derekh ha-melekh (to offer an associative gloss on the title of this
work, “The King’s Way”) addresses this core concern: How might a sense of
inner majesty be restored? Can some spark of honor be salvaged, enthroned
156 Ora Wiskind

again, within the Hasidic world? (See also Evan Mayse, this volume.)
Understood literally, “The King’s Way” might mean the “highroad,” or a
manner of living that befits true “sons of the King”—that is, every Jewish
soul.8 Kingship—a mien of dignity and quiet greatness—is manifest in R.
Shapira’s authorial persona as well. As a writer and as a religious leader,
he asserts himself in these discourses as an agent of empowerment. What
he teaches is a way to discover inner resources and unleash the power of
self-transformation, to break a path of religious authenticity, to struggle for
spiritual wholeness. In the midst of all this, a dialogue ensues. Traditional
Jewish sources, read imaginatively through the prism of modern culture
and contemporary discourse, speak in new voices for a new reality.9 My
aim is to explore that dialogue and its far-reaching implications.

Facets of the Self

The concept of the self and its emergence figures prominently in Derekh
ha-melekh. In many and varied contexts, R. Shapira stresses the impor-
tance of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and a sense of personal identity;
achieving them is posed as an ethical and religious imperative.10 The cypher
he uses to speak of selfhood is the biblical Hebrew term anokhi (as in
“I [anokhi] am the Lord your God”). Its negative counterimage is called
anokhiyut, meaning self-absorption, selfishness, an egotistical concern for
one’s own well-being, with an implicit defacing of others. Two discourses
on the portion vayyetse (Gen 28:10–32:3), dated to the winters of 1929
and 1930 respectively, probe the meaning and importance of selfhood
with striking originality (see also Maayan, this volume).11
The biblical scene that incites R. Shapira’s reflection follows Jacob’s
flight from his brother Esau: “Jacob departed from Beersheba and went
toward Haran. He came to the place and rested there, because the sun
had set. He took from the stones of that place and arranged them around
his head and lay down there. And he dreamt.” The vision of Jacob’s ladder
follows, with angels ascending and descending from heaven. God declares
his promise to Jacob: “I am with you; I will guard you wherever you go,
and I will return you.” Finally, Jacob wakes from his slumber and says,
“Surely God is present in this place and I did not know!” (Gen 28:10–16)
Let me highlight some of most innovative features of R. Shapira’s
sermon (1929) on these verses. He deconstructs Jacob’s admission “and I
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 157

did not know,” reordering its syntax to mean “for I was unaware of my
self (ve-anokhi–lo yadati).” He then describes a range of human expe-
riences called “knowing,” all of them related in one way or another to
self-knowledge and apprehension. (Maayan, this volume, explores the vital
role of da’at in self-creation.) One form is intellectual, abstract knowledge
of unrelated units of information—a disembodied, disinterested, and
essentially static mental state. A second is affective knowledge, linked to
the sensory organs. A third kind of knowledge, the most valuable and
all-encompassing, is bound up with actual self-awareness and interiority.
Significantly, though, it is incited by an external source, as R. Shapira writes:
“So, for instance, a new interpretation or Hasidic insight [eizeh derekh
hadash be-drush o be-hasidut] that one sees in a book: that knowledge
moves one profoundly . . . it strikes to the soul’s depths and reverberates
through one’s consciousness, affecting everything one already knew” (see
Diamond, this volume).
The exegetical lynchpin for all these reflections is the revelation at
Sinai: “Anokhi [I] am the Lord” (Exod 20:2), with its famous rabbinical
gloss to the effect that “I [God] have given you something of myself in
these words [the Torah].”12 More than a heteronomous force prescribing
instrumental action (the commandments) or voicing a theology, the Torah
is here conceived as a locus of intimate encounter with the Divine (Evan
Mayse and Maayan, this volume). On R. Shapira’s reading, anokhi thus
signals a deeply vulnerable, embodied mode of knowing. He concludes the
sermon with a bold analogy: In the human realm as well, words spoken
in holiness are a vehicle of self-revelation. The mandate, then, is to dis-
cover one’s own selfhood, to emerge from “not-knowing” as a conscious,
empowered individual.

Now, what Jacob really experienced—that is beyond our compre-

hension. But [from these verses we learn that] every Jew must
discern what the Torah hints about one’s own self and personal
state. Thus, Jacob said, “Truly, God is in this place”—that I
knew [intellectually]. . . . “But I, I did not know myself ”—that
knowing had not penetrated to my inmost being, had not yet
informed my own sense of self. . . . “And so he vowed: May
God be with me”—and grant me knowledge . . . not for my
benefit alone, but that I may convey my understanding to
others. For this is the essence of a Jew.13
158 Ora Wiskind

Note the uncommon rhetorical force of this passage, albeit presented here
in translation. With psychological acumen and rich emotional language,
R. Shapira charts a process of self-transformation. Its effects are meant to
radiate outward, beyond the personal dimension. These lines give voice
to an ethos of communication, empathy, and authenticity, to the social
concerns that underlie his grand vision of a unified spiritual community.14
Perhaps more strikingly still, in this sermon, R. Shapira performs the very
mode of being that he describes. His engagement with the biblical narrative
is a gesture of sharing his own “self ” with his listeners, enacted through
the sermon. I will return to this autobiographical facet of his writing later.
The second sermon on this same biblical passage, here from the
year 1930, begins with the same verse, “And I did not know. . . .” Jacob,
in the biblical narrative, falls asleep. Metaphorically, R. Shapira adds,
he is reduced or returned to a state of formlessness, becoming a golem
(literally, a lifeless lump). Drawing on a powerful kabbalistic motif, R.
Shapira refers to that surreal, unwilled state of slumber as dormita.15 It is
an essential, flickering moment of “ego-annulment,” a letting-go of the self
(bittul atsmuto me’at). Essential because only then can true change take
place: a metamorphosis that penetrates the core self. Here, the prooftext
that enables this exegetical leap from the mystical to the psychological
plane is an early Hasidic teaching, which R. Shapira cites in the name of
the Maggid of Mezritsh. Avot 5:9 reads, “Seven things characterize a wise
person . . . and as for a clod, all of them are the reverse (hilufeihen ba-go-
lem).” R. Shapira explains, “That is, for something to be transformed or
transmuted (hilufin) . . . it must first revert to being a golem. Its separate,
individual form has to be stripped away and voided, become nothing.”16
A series of metaphors illustrate the point. Among them are the
metaphor of a seed that must disintegrate in the earth for new life to
sprout from it, and the metaphor of silver that must first be smelted if new
vessels are to be forged. This sermon, in a basic sense, is about personal
development: it envisions self-transformation as the overarching goal of
religious life (see Maayan, this volume). Yet a subtext seems to inform this
discourse as well. Shapira notes the difficulties that trouble and confuse his
listeners and acknowledges their power to obstruct emotional and spiritual
growth. One ever-present factor is a destructive kind of self-absorption
that impedes any possible awareness of divine presence. He names it by
alluding to a teaching by the Baal Shem Tov: “On the verse ‘I [anokhi]
stand between God and you’ (Deut 5:5): self-centeredness [anokhiyut] is
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 159

what alienates you from God. And so, the more one casts off egotism,
the closer one can come to wholeness and to holiness.”17
A second problem, on an ostensibly opposite pole, is a terrifying
sense of emptiness, as if one’s soul were “arid or petrified, a heart of
stone that feels nothing, a hollow human being,” broken and bereft of
anything sacred. Both deficiencies, R. Shapira suggests, may be resolved
by a willful act: “To reach a higher level, one must first become a formless
golem, struggle free of all one’s presuppositions and conclusions, cast off
everything. This enables one to look at things objectively, with a ‘naked
intellect’ (sekhel arum), unencumbered. Then it is possible to see clearly and
to renew oneself as never before.”18 Personal growth, on this model, plays
out in an ongoing dialectic of fragmentation and mindful reconstruction.
It is a positive, yet profoundly unsettling, process. The final section of the
sermon addresses the sense of vulnerability and uncertainty that must be
endured for the work of self-renewal.
R. Shapira revisits the experience of the patriarch Jacob, superimposed
now on that of Moses. Both biblical figures were driven by a yearning
for divine presence. A midrash connects that yearning to the “pauses,”
or gaps, between moments of speech that punctuate any dialogue: “The
pauses (ha-hafsakot)—what role did they serve? To give Moses time to
reflect, in the silence between the words.”19 At issue is a paradox inherent,
in effect, in every act of communication. The “pause” connotes a tenuous
experience of absence. Here, God draws away, as it were, and addresses
Moses no more. Yet those moments of cessation are vital for any true
understanding to take place. In the silence, left alone with his thoughts,
Moses has time to contemplate and to internalize what he has heard. The
pauses, then, are a portal: they enable response and personal initiative, an
“arousal from below”—that is, from the human side. With this in mind, R.
Shapira returns to the opening scene of the Torah portion. Jacob journeys
to Haran. For fourteen years, he had been sheltered safely in “the tent of
Torah.” Now, thrust into a lonely, alien landscape, fear suddenly overcomes
him. How will he continue, even here, to strive for holiness? “And so he
vows: ‘May God be with me’—with my essential self—‘and guard me’
here as well—even in the silent spaces (ha-hafsakot). . . . Then, on his
way back home at last, he could affirm: ‘I dwelt with Laban,’ and I upheld
all the commandments—there, most of all, in the midst of the pauses.”20
I have framed these two derashot in implicit dialogue with con-
temporary concerns (see also Seeman, this volume). Indeed, R. Shapira
160 Ora Wiskind

himself reads traditional Jewish sources in that light. Biblical figures, on his
retelling, model the attentiveness to matters of the spirit that he recognizes
as vitally important. Through these readings, he urges his listeners and
his readers to discover their true, unique selves, to become autonomous
individuals invested with choice and will. The human experiences dra-
matized in these passages effectively reframe the sense of emptiness and
indirection that plagued many of his generation. When the suffering of the
present moment can be envisioned on a broader horizon encompassing
both “before” and “after,” a fuller narrative might emerge. Hope remains,
even now, of regaining a sense of divine presence. What is needed are tools
for the work to be done (see also Seeman, this volume). I turn now to
look more closely at the sensibility that R. Shapira sought to cultivate, as
well as the literary techniques he used to teach that sensibility to others.

Developing a Language of Mindfulness

A hasid exists beyond the margins (lifnim mishurat ha-din). . . .

He perceives the world, but not with the constricted vision of
someone who sees only base physicality. Rather, as we have
said in the name of the Baal Shem Tov, “When you contem-
plate the world, you will see God, and God sees you.”21 . . . A
hasid—he is totally unconfined by stricture (din), and so his
vision, too, reaches beyond all manner of restriction (tsimtsum).
The same is true of his study of Torah: the simple meanings
of the verses, or even of Kabbalah, are not enough for him.
In everything, he strives to apprehend with unlimited insight,
with a gaze that knows no boundedness.22

These lines describe a spiritual stance and a vital mode of being. Key
terms—din, tsimtsum, hasid—refer here to emotional and cognitive lim-
itation and gesture toward a way that such forms of boundedness might
be overcome. In rhetorical tone, this passage is infused with an aura of
promise, with the endless potential of existential freedom.
In a Yom Kippur sermon from 1925, R. Shapira urges his listeners
and readers to make an inner shift that might open them to a moment
of transformative vision. In subject matter, the sermon concerns Yom
Kippur. Its primary themes are traditional: return and repentance, asking
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 161

forgiveness for one’s wrongdoings, and pleading to be judged favorably,

“to be inscribed in the Book of Life.” The last section of the day’s liturgy
marks the culmination of a spiritual journey, the final stage when God’s
judgment will be “sealed.”

To understand something about Yom Kippur and the moment of

its “sealing” (hatimah) and our request to be not only “written”
but also “sealed” [in the Book of Life], and what this “seal”
has to do with worlds beyond:
Tikkunei zohar speaks of “the holy gate in which all
forms are visible.” The Assembly of Israel pleads: Master of
the universe, even though I am in exile, far away from you,
“Set me as a seal (hotam) upon your heart” (Song 8:6), and
may your image not be removed from me—that is, your seal,
your Presence—for this is what arouses remembrance in exile.
Now, the meaning of God’s seal, and our asking God to
be “as a seal upon your heart”—all that is beyond our under-
standing. But what it teaches us about serving him, as the
Baal Shem Tov revealed—this, perhaps, we can explain . . . 23

R. Shapira recalls one of the Baal Shem Tov’s most radical convictions,
a controversial, founding tenet of Hasidism: that traces of God can be
found everywhere in the world “as the image of the seal impressed upon
it,” an indwelling presence inscribed by absence.24 The next lines of this
sermon explore the nature of the “image” or “form” (tsurah) and how it
may be apprehended. Unlike the physical manifestation of a person or
of an object, the “form” is intangible and immaterial. Still, although it is
invisible to the eye, R. Shapira suggests, the form of that entity permeates
our awareness; it makes a mark on some level of consciousness. This
impression is what ultimately enables us to recognize others and to claim
our possessions—far more powerfully and convincingly than any external,
objectively defined sign of identity.25 At issue once again is an intuitive
mode of knowing, a nonintellectual, nonrational faculty. By analogy, R.
Shapira continues, a primary task of religious life is to contemplate the
world with that same essential capacity: to look beyond appearances—all
the disparate, partial, confusing phenomena that clamor for attention—and
discern the “image,” the traces of God that dwell secretly within it (see
also Seeman, this volume). “Just as we can gaze into the face of another
162 Ora Wiskind

and sense that person’s inwardness . . . so must we regard the world: not
with our eyes but through our souls—to distinguish and recognize the
Master of the seal in the impression left behind.”
In theosophical terms, these lines describe the concept of divine
immanence. R. Shapira names it otherwise. He recalls the kabbalistic
notion called memale kol almin, the emanation of divinity that infuses the
“vessels” and all of created reality.26 Far more than an abstract category,
it gives voice to a mystical sensibility charged with emotional resonances.
Implicitly, this idea responds to a radically opposite perspective: that
the world is a fractured place of limitation and darkness, in which the
countenance of the Holy One is utterly hidden, while the sacred letters
of creation have scattered chaotically, senselessly. That dialectic, Shapira
suggests, is contained in an emblematic flash of perception:

Adam, the first human, realized his failing: “I heard your voice
and I hid” (Gen 3:10). What a profound confession those
words utter! “Master of the Universe, I know, I see that it is
not you who have concealed yourself from me after my sin.”
No. “I hid”—“I myself am responsible.” Yet people imagine
that it is God who hides from them. Everything is different,
though, for one who discovers [or uncovers] one’s soul.27 Such
a person, looking at the world through the soul, can discern
the image of the Master impressed in the seal. Then, at last,
the divine letters will join together once again, and God’s holy
name fills all of reality.28

Sin, on this retelling, casts a veil or husk over the soul, cutting it off from
the light of holiness. To mitigate that state, one must first of all perceive
oneself as a moral agent; then, one must willfully rend the veil and cast
off the self-deceptions that separate one from God. Healing and repair,
recovering a natural sense of holiness—all that is predicated on inner
work. Its power is transformative, for the individual and for the world
itself. And yet, R. Shapira notes in rhetorical counterpoint, there are those
who ignore the summons, who would rather hide behind a false sense of
powerlessness and cavil: “This doesn’t have anything to do with me, it’s
beyond my power.” His response is that you don’t need to be a locksmith
to open a door; though you understand little, the keys are in your hand.
Anyone can unfasten the gates; the labor of every Jew has an effect above.29
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 163

This is an empowering message, to be sure. But R. Shapira concludes

his sermon with an even stronger claim. He recalls the second half of the
dialectic, that transcendent realm that kabbalists call sovev kol almin, which
surrounds or envelops all spheres of existence. On this concealed other
side, the same vital interrelationship between the seal and its impression
is manifest, only in a paradoxical reversed order.

Now the dimension called sovev [encompassment] is bound

up with the Jewish people. For God conceived of Israel pri-
mordially, before creation. As Rebbe Dov [Baer, the Maggid of
Mezritsh] taught, the world came into being “in the merit of the
forefathers, who engendered your will to create it.”30 . . . Thus,
in the very beginning, long before God’s image came to be
revealed in earthly reality, the impression—the essential soul
of Israel—was already manifest in the Master of the seal, so to
speak. . . . This, then, is the meaning of Tikkunei zohar. The
Assembly of Israel is saying to the Holy One, “Even when I
am far away from you, in exile, ‘Set me as a seal upon your
heart’—not only has your image been impressed on me, but
may my image remain forever imprinted in you, on your heart,
as it were, an eternal, present memory.”
And so Yom Kippur, a day that transcends all the worlds,
a day on which the encompassing light emanates forth, when
all the accusers are silenced and Satan cannot enter—this
holy day ends with a moment of “sealing” (hatimah), in the
sense of “set me as a seal upon your heart.” So, too, may God
become visible through his seal and bless us with all manner
of goodness, as we pray, “Seal us for Life.” Amen.31

The poetic metaphor of the “seal” here is richly allusive. It is rooted in

the rabbinical notion that the Jewish people “arose in divine thought”
(alu be-mahashavah) before the beginning of time—an abstract, virtual,
potential existence not yet realized. R. Shapira couples this concept with
a second, more tangible image drawn from mystical teaching. He signals
the radical nature of his contention with traditional cautionary phrases: “as
it were,” “so to speak.” Rhetorically, these lines return to the passage from
Tikkunei zohar with which the sermon began. Here, though, the focus is on
a hidden counterimage, the esoteric, second side of the dialectic. Israel—
164 Ora Wiskind

the Jewish people—is carved, inscribed, in God’s metaphysical essence, an

embodied presence that cannot be removed or erased.32 At issue, then, is
a double sense of being: “ ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart’—not only
has your [God’s] image been impressed on me [Israel], but may my image
remain forever imprinted in you, on your heart.” Through his sermon, R.
Shapira seeks to show a way to re-find that vital religious consciousness
and to integrate it into life.
In a broader sense, this discourse forefronts his program of cultural
and spiritual renewal by means of Hasidic tradition. That program has
much in common with other contemporary calls for Jewish renaissance
in a Neo-Hasidic spirit. One was Martin Buber’s quest “to recover from
historical Hasidism a message that might address the crisis of modern men
and women, a crisis he defined as the radical alienation of the profane
from the sacred.”33 Or, as Alan Brill describes Abraham Joshua Heschel’s
interwar agenda: he “sought to present the pre-modern texts on revelation
as a means of reawakening the religious sense of revelation, as mediated
through various modern idioms. . . . Rather than relying on traditional
hierarchy, Heschel provides a kabbalistic and Hasidic sensibility that is
mediated through his poetic imagination.”34 So, too, R. Shapira teaches
how an encounter with holiness might still come about. His is a redemp-
tive vision—a glimpse of the “light of the Messiah” soon to be revealed.35

Real Presence

R. Shapira’s sermons, as we have seen, are deeply self-reflective. At times,

he voices the awareness of a Hasid, guided and formed by his own religious
mentors; at other times, he takes on the persona of spiritual mentor, his
words suffused with the aura of tsaddikim of former days. In effect, Shapira’s
illustrious lineage burdened him with a heavy sense of responsibility: to
bridge between the old, lost world of religious faith and a new reality; to
communicate spiritual values to an estranged generation of Jewish youth;
somehow to carry on the redemptive mission of Hasidic teaching.36 He
takes up the challenge. Countless rhetorical gestures throughout his works
convey the sense that he has something momentous to bestow, that he
must entrust his listeners and his readers with a sense of ongoing reve-
lation. Beyond their clear dramatic force, the autobiographical aspects of
such gestures and their ars poetica demand closer attention, with respect
to the interbellum sermons in particular.
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 165

In the midrash Tanhuma, [parashat] vayyehi, on the verse “ ‘So

their father spoke to them . . . And then he instructed them:
I shall be gathered to my people’ (Gen 49:28–29): He said to
them: if you are worthy, take care of my bones; if not, when
I depart from this world, I shall leave you and go to my fore-
fathers.” . . . The tsaddikim—their light is not for themselves
alone but for the whole world. Like sunlight: anyone who opens
a window is illuminated; so, too, all who draw near to them find
holiness. The light of the tsaddikim expands their souls—while
the tsaddik lives and onward, after he is gone. But if people
distance themselves, heaven forbid, then, when the tsaddikim
die, the light of their souls leaves this world. For it is known
that no soul can exist here below without a body to contain
it, as we learn from the Ruzhiner Rebbe.37 . . . And so, when
we draw close to the tsaddikim, we come to be a “body” for
them: their souls and their light and their holiness dwell here
with us. Otherwise, their souls, disembodied, fade away and
disappear above. And so the midrash says: “If you are worthy,
take care of my bones/my essence (atsamay). If not, when I
depart from this world, I will leave you utterly.”38

The frank, emotional language of this passage has the poignancy of a

spiritual testament. On this retelling of the midrash, it is the (Hasidic)
tsaddik who, on his deathbed, appeals to the living, “Take care of my
bones.” At bottom, it is a plea for mercy. The dying, after all, are helpless;
they can only request that something of themselves be preserved and cher-
ished. Whether or not it will happen is a matter of choice, of will, and,
ultimately, a test of merit. Shapira dwells on this for some lines and then
countenances a second, alternative mode. No matter what, he avers, some
glimmer of spiritual brightness will always linger behind the tsaddikim.
It may also reappear without warning in secret ways.

Guided from the world beyond, a person walks an unknown

path, shrouded in deathly darkness. Suddenly, here—a flash
of illumination! Whence has it come? It is the soul-light of
a tsaddik. And so, in this world, any Jew might feel, from
deep within, a moment of ascent, an unexpected welling-up
of holiness and desire to serve God with all one’s being. Such
an awakening—this, too, comes about when a tsaddik of old
166 Ora Wiskind

reveals himself: an indwelling presence that augments one’s own

soul—as we learn from Joseph Sarug [a medieval kabbalist]
in the notion of ibbur ha-tsaddikim. For the holiness of Israel
is there, in every Jewish soul, although it lies concealed in a
matted shroud, covered over with gross corporeality. . . . Truly,
divine Presence is in exile, in our very midst. It can be aroused,
though, in a single moment. The souls of the tsaddikim can
set it free, can release it from its house of bondage.39

This passage resonates with esoteric allusions. Righteous individuals, long

dead, might truly manifest themselves in one’s inner life. They come in
times of need, to guide and enlighten those who hope for them. Sig-
nificantly, though, what R. Shapira portrays is not a rarified, mystical
encounter reserved for a spiritual elite but something that can happen to
“every Jewish soul.” R. Shapira performs this crucial message in many of
his sermons. (See also Maayan, this volume.) Consider, for instance, the
following passage, and note how the narrative voice shifts for a moment
from second to first person—a rhetorical gesture that seems to give voice
to R. Shapira’s personal experience.

As we know, “Three books are open on Rosh Hashanah. . . . The

wholly righteous are inscribed for life; the wholly wicked for
death; the mediocre, those in the middle—they hang in sus-
pense from the New Year until the Day of Atonement.”40 . . .
The Gemara, Pesahim 112b, says: “R. Akiva said to Shi-
mon bar Yochai: If you want to be strangled, go hang yourself
on a big tree.” Rashi explains: “If you want to say something
that people will hear and accept, say it in the name of a great
person.” . . . Then, although your understanding reaches no
higher than the lowest rung, even so, light from above, a ray
of true light—from Rebbe Elimelekh or from the [Kozienicer]
Maggid—is revealed to me when I join myself to their path,
a path of holiness. . . . And because the true light of a great
man speaks through you when you join yourself to him, if
only to the lowest aspect of his teaching, your words contain
holiness far more than you can know. As soon as they leave
your mouth, others can sense their holiness, and so do you.
Thus, “the mediocre”—they “hang themselves on tall trees”:
that is, on the tsaddikim and everything they have seen and
understood from their holy books.41
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 167

Tongue in cheek, perhaps, but Shapira has placed himself squarely in

the class of “those hanging,” figuratively sustained by the power of his
righteous forebears. Self-consciously, he voices the awareness of a receiver
[Heb. mekabbel], a Hasidic follower, a latecomer of meager understanding.
Listening more closely, however, what this passage really communicates is
an ethos of reciprocity.42 The soul-light of the tsaddikim endures in this
world as an imperceptible, still un-actualized force. To draw their presence
down, back into the phenomenal world, is the task of the living—a task
entrusted to all those willing to answer the summons, “If you are worthy,
take care of my bones.”

Readers and Authors, Bones and Books

There is one more dimension of ars poetica that needs to be addressed.

We have seen that “the holy books” of Hasidic masters from generations
past were a formative part of R. Shapira’s identity and self-awareness.43
Reflections on reading, writing, and the power of books pervade his own
works (see also Seeman, this volume). A sermon on parashat Shemot
(1929) forefronts these themes. I will read it as an ego-document or
self-revelation of singular importance.44
R. Shapira begins his discourse with some reflections on reading
practices. Books, he asserts, embody the whole essence of their authors,
and so dedicated readers must strive to discern the author’s unique spir-
itual form (shi’ur komah), which is revealed/concealed in his work. R.
Shapira then turns to the authorial persona, modeled here after the figure
of the Hasidic tsaddik. The author (mehabber, literally, “connector”) is an
emissary. Like prophets of times past, he is charged to draw divine light
and holiness, the word of God, down into the human realm; through his
writings, he must also try to restore channels that join earth with heaven,
to teach his readers how to serve God. True, prophets no longer have
the power to foresee the future, “but prophecy in the form of guidance,
bringing illumination—that has never ceased. Revelation continues: we
see it still, in the Oral Torah, the Zohar, the holy Ari, the Baal Shem
Tov, of blessed memory.” In the course of the sermon, the narrative voice
becomes more personal:

An author, then, must reveal his own spiritual form. He does

so limb by limb: one holy thought, another word of guidance,
a Torah insight, a moment of intent. Each is a part of himself;
168 Ora Wiskind

combined, they are his spiritual stature, and through him pro-
phetic insight, unencumbered by corporeality, may be revealed
to Israel. Such a person, then, must speak and write down his
thoughts, must share them with others. For this is not a private
matter; the holiness he has received is not meant for him alone
but for all of Israel. . . . Others, too, need to receive that light
and holiness from above, channeled through his being into
their hearts and souls. . . . He must shape it and give birth
to it. . . . And so, the book that contains this individual’s dis-
courses, insights, and novella is no mere collection of random
thoughts. Rather, his very essence and spiritual form, imbued
with holiness, comes to light through the book he has written.45

These lines seem quite transparently self-referential. I believe they

also require us to qualify Moshe Idel’s claim (this volume) that R. Shapira
turned away from the “mystical-magical” model of Hasidic leadership
practiced by some of his most illustrious forebears in favor of a more
contemplative “experiential type of spirituality and prophecy.” What we
see here (and in many other passages of his interbellum writing) is,
rather, that these two models were deeply intertwined in R. Shapira’s
portrait of the tsaddik, in terms of his spiritual force and teachings. R.
Shapira frames the act of writing as a religious imperative and an ethical
obligation, in part because the text serves as a literal conduit for spiritual
vitality (which Idel refers to as “mystical-magical”). Whatever has been
granted from above—prophetic understanding and experience as well as
vital potency—must be shared with others, preserved in lasting form.46
Beyond the words, books embody their authors’ spiritual form, and this
is their ultimate value.
In an immediate sense, R. Shapira’s promotion of books here can be
understood as the call of the hour. The old Hasidic world is gone forever;
communities have been uprooted, their faithful scattered to the winds.
Despite everything, a living encounter with the tsaddikim, with a rebbe,
a spiritual mentor, is still possible—now, paradoxically, through the writ-
ten word. This, to be sure, is a revision of traditional values suited to the
modern condition. By rhetorical means, R. Shapira fosters the vital sense
of presence that he describes. His discourses bear witness to his belief that
sharing of oneself is what engenders a community of faith. On a deeply
personal level, he adjures his listeners—present and future—to seek out
the undying vitality that lies hidden in his own works. R. Shapira’s ethical
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 169

will, a few simple lines, among his last, penned in the Warsaw Ghetto
(see Magid, this volume), attests cogently to this. He implores relatives
and friends in far-off Palestine to publish his manuscripts after the war,
to distribute them widely, and to preface every volume with this final
request, that “every Jew should study my books.”47 Books, like bones,
contain an impalpable essence. Words that an author has left behind still
have the power to transform others and to repair the world—if only their
readers are willing.

Notes

1. The earliest dated teaching is 1925 (Shavuot 5685), and the latest is 1936
(va’ethanan-nahamu 5696). On the transcription of R. Shapira’s interwar sermons
and the publication history of Derekh ha-melekh, see Kalonymus Kalman Shapira,
Sermons from the Years of Rage [in Hebrew], ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem:
Herzog Academic College, 2017), 1:36, 42–45.
2. Neo-Hasidism began at the turn of the twentieth century with the
works of Martin Buber and Hillel Zeitlin. In very different ways, each of them
aspired to engender a spiritual revival in European Judaism by reworking tradi-
tional Hasidic teaching to respond to contemporary needs. See Tomer Persico,
“Neo-Hasidic Revival: Expressivist Uses of Traditional Lore,” in Modern Judaism
34, no. 3,1 (October 2014): 287–308; Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse, eds.,
A New Hasidism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2019). Also see Idel
and Seeman (this volume).
3. Tsav ve-zeruz, 16–17, s. 25. A marginal note there links the wave of
suicides to an economic crisis in the Jewish community between 1926 and 1928.
See Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’ in the
Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological Review 101 (2008): 489.
4. Wodziński, “War and Religion,” 297–311. Shapira addressed many of
these issues in a public speech delivered before a meeting of Orthodox leaders that
took place in Warsaw in the early 1920s. It was published in Derekh ha-melekh
(Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei Piaseczno, 1995), 460–62. On the deterioration of the
traditional Hasidic world, see Benjamin Brown, The Haredim: A Guide to their
Beliefs and Sectors [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2017), 33–82. See also Wodziński, this
volume.
5. Gershon Bacon, “National Revival, Ongoing Acculturation,” Simon Dub-
now Institute Yearbook 1 (2002): 81. In this context, Bacon cites the pioneering
work by Max Weinreich, Der veg tsu undzer yugnt: Yesoydes, metodn, problemen
fun Yidisher yugnt-forshung (Vilna, 1935), one of the first “serious attempts at
sociological, cultural, historical and psychological work on Polish Jewry.” See
170 Ora Wiskind

Bacon, “Woman? Youth? Jew?: The Search for Identity of Jewish Young Women
in Interwar Poland,” in Gender, Place, and Memory in the Modern Jewish Experi-
ence; Sean Martin, “Jewish Youth between Tradition and Assimilation: Exploring
Polish Jewish Identity in Interwar Kraków,” The Polish Review 46:4 (2001): 461–77.
For a comprehensive review, see Glynn Dynner, “Replenishing the ‘Fountain of
Judaism’: Traditionalist Jewish Education in Interwar Poland,” Jewish History 31,
no. 3–4 (2018): 229–61.
6. See Natanel Lederberg, “Bein emet Kotska’it leharmonia ahdutit: gishato
hahinukhit shel ha-Imrei emet migur,” Akdamot 23 (2009): 181–97.
7. On the historical role of sermons as a vehicle for disseminating ideology,
see Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 1200–1800: An Anthology (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989), 44–63; in Hasidic tradition in particular, see Mendel
Piekarz, The Beginning of Hasidism [in Hebrew], 124, 163–70; Zeev Gries, “The
Hasidic Managing Editor as an Agent of Culture,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed.
Ada Rapoport-Albert (London, 1996), 141–55.
8. Melekh [king] is surely linked by association to R. Shapira’s own Hasidic
lineage—most immediately, to his father Elimelekh (whose name literally means
“God is King” and who died during his son’s youth); melekh also suggests the
profound spiritual connection he felt to his forbear R. Elimelekh (known as
“Rebbe Melekh”) of Lizhensk.
9. Other prominent figures of the time had similar projects, such as Aaron
Friedman (Ish Shalom), Hokhmat ha-nefesh (1909); Fischel Schneerson: see David
Freis, “Journey to the Centre of the Soul: Fischl Schneersohn’s Psycho-Expeditions
between Modern Psychology and Jewish Mysticism” (paper presented at the 17th
World Congress of Jewish Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, August 8,
2017); and Hillel Zeitlin: see Green and Mayse, A New Hasidism, 1–50. Reiser has
discussed theurgic aspects of “empowerment” (following scholar Jess Hollenback)
in R. Shapira’s notion of the mystic-prophet: “He is a mystic because his very
essence is defined by a mystical attachment with the Divine; and empowered,
since this personal, even individual, connection to God has a direct influence on
society.” Daniel Reiser, “ ‘To Rend the Entire Veil’: Prophecy in the Teachings of
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piazecna and its Renewal in the Twentieth
Century,” Modern Judaism 34 (2014): 338–39. I use the term empowerment here
in its more down-to-earth psychological sense.
10. The concepts of the self, self-annihilation (bittul), and self-actualization
and their relation to devekut have a complex legacy in Hasidic thought from its
early days and are pronouncedly present in Polish Hasidism. As David Maayan
notes, Shapira related to the traditional Hasidic notion of self-negation with
some ambivalence; throughout his works, he developed an innovative view of
the self in relation to the Divine. See Maayan, “The Call of the Self: Devotional
Individuation in the Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piasec-
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 171

zno” (master’s thesis, Hebrew College, 2017). For a contrasting approach to the
place of bittul in R. Shapira’s thought, see James Jacobson-Maisels, “The Self and
Self-Transformation in the Thought and Practice of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish
Shapira” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014), 558–82.
11. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyetse 5690 (1929), 29–33; ibid., parashat
vayyetse 5691 (1930), 34–38. Cf. Tsav ve-zeruz, no. 45, 51: “As the Baal Shem
Tov taught: ‘I [anokhi] was standing between God and you’ (Deut 5:5)—the
egotistical self-interest [anokhiyut] that people have, concerned solely with their
own needs—that is what stands between God and them. . . . But to overcome
this self-absorption—the only way possible is through love of others; a person
can’t achieve it alone.”
12. B. Shabbat 105a. The Rabbis decipher the word anokhi as an acronym
that reads ana nafshi katavit yehavet. Translated more literally, the phrase could
mean: “I myself write and give [the Torah].” An important pretext for this ser-
mon (which R. Shapira cites, p. 29) is R. Elimelekh of Lizhensk, No’am Elimelekh,
likkutei shoshanah, 105a.
13. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyetse 5690 (1929), 33.
14. I draw here on Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1991). Elsewhere in this sermon, R. Shapira cites Job
6:25, in which Job’s friends are denigrated for their hollow presence and the cold,
abstract comfort they proffered while withholding their emotions and inner “selves.”
15. The image of the golem originates in the midrashic imagination: R.
Shapira opens his sermon with a passage from Genesis Rabbah 24.2 on the
verse “Your eyes saw my unshaped form (golmi)” (Ps 139:16). The Latin word
dormita first appears in the Zohar (3.142b) referring to this primordial moment
of engenderment. Adam, in the biblical narrative on which the midrash is based
(Gen 2:21), is cast into slumber (tardemah/dormita), and a rib is removed and
formed into his female “other side.” The “mystery of dormita” develops further
in Lurianic teaching. The concept of the golem (as hylic matter and as locus
of transformation), however, stems from earlier kabbalistic sources; it is linked
with the theosophical world of the sefirot through a radical rereading of Job
28:12: “Wisdom is formed in nothingness (veha-hokhmah me-ayin timatseh).” A
more immediate source of influence here, though, linking the notion of ayin to
the sefirah of hokhmah—perceived as the locus of contemplative mediation as
well as inner transformation—is clearly the Maggid of Mezritsh. See Ariel Evan
Mayse, Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of
Mezritsh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 4–5, 62, 116–17,
272 n. 65. Finally, the ironic nuance of the Yiddish golem—a fool or klutz—was
surely not lost on R. Shapira’s audience.
16. A play on the root h.l.f., meaning to change, transmute, reverse; or
exchange; Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyetse 5690 (1929), 34. This reading of
172 Ora Wiskind

m. Avot 5:9 is cited in many early Hasidic works, more often in the name of
the Baal Shem Tov. C.f. Yitzhak Aizik Yehudah Yehiel Safrin, Otsar ha-hayyim,
kedoshim, fol. 158a; Notsar hesed, m. Avot 5.7.
17. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyetse 5690 (1929), 35. Compare Tsav
ve-zeruz, 45 (see n12 above), where he stresses the need to combat selfishness
and egotism by enhancing interpersonal relationships and building a united
spiritual community.
18. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyetse 5690 (1929), 35. Significantly, R.
Shapira notes: “Only a hasid is able to leap out of his skin, to throw off all his
worries along with his deficiencies and stand apart from them. . . . This is the
spirit of a hasid—in a moment, he can free himself of his own ego (ha-anokhi
shelo), of his very self.” Derekh ha-melekh, parashat yayyiggash 5690 (1929), 71.
For an earlier Hasidic reconception of the “Lurianic myth of restorative descent,”
as Zvi Mark puts it, see his “ ‘Katnut’ [Smallness] and ‘Gadlut’ [Greatness] in the
Teachings of Nahman of Bratslav and their Roots in the Lurianic Kabbalah” [in
Hebrew], Daat: Journal of Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah 46 (2001): 45–80.
19. Sifra, vayyikra 1.9; Bemidbar Rabbah 14:20.
20. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyetse 5691 (1930), 38.
21. It was Maimonides who first drew the link between the individual
called hasid and the mode of being “beyond the margins” or, on a more literal
translation, being before or beyond the letter of the law (lifnim mishurat ha-din);
see his Commentary on the Mishnah, Avot 6:1. R. Shapira cites this teaching in
the name of the Baal Shem Tov often in his writings.
22. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyehi 5690 (1929), 80–81.
23. Derekh ha-melekh, motsa’ei yom ha-kippurim 5686 (1925), 266. He cites
Tikkunei zohar, tikkun 1, fol. 18a). See also Zohar 2:114a; 1:244b; other notable
pretexts are Bemidbar Rabbah 5:6 (on Isa 48.9); b. Ta’anit 4b. R. Shapira revisits
the motif of the seal in his Sermons from the Years of Rage, shabbat hol ha-mo’ed
pesah 5700 (1940), 124.
24. Derekh ha-melekh, motsaei yom ha-kippurim 5686 (1925), 266. R. Shapira’s
formulation of this tenet, which I have translated nonliterally, is “the form of the
Maker is in the made, the form of the Sealer is in that which is sealed” (tsurat
ha-po’el be-nif ’al, ve-tsurat ha-hotem be-nehtam. Early Hasidic works, drawing on
kabbalistic sources, cite a slightly different key phrase. Its first half, “the power
of the Maker is in the made”—koah ha-po’el be-nif ’al—appears frequently in ser-
mons of the Maggid of Mezritsh. On the image of the seal in earlier kabbalistic
sources, see Michal Oron, “Set Me as a Seal upon Your Heart: The Poetics of the
Zohar in Sabba de-Mishpatim” [in Hebrew], in Masu’ot: Studies in the Literature of
Kabbalah and Jewish Thought dedicated to the Memory of Prof. Efrayim Gottlieb,
ed. M. Oron and A. Goldreich (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1994), 1–24.
25. Derekh ha-melekh, motsa’ei yom ha-kippurim 5686 (1925), 267. R. Shapira
alludes here to halakhic disputes concerning the optimal method of identifying lost
objects and beloved ones—whether by external marks (simanim) or by a subtler
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 173

means of recognition based on a general impression of their form, called tevi’ut

ayin. See b. Gittin 27b; b. Bava Metsia 23b; b. Hulin 96a. He rather consistently
uses the term nefesh to refer to what we would call “consciousness.” Thus, he
speaks of an impression that “permeates our consciousness” (over el nafshenu).
To illustrate the idea of parts forming a whole, he develops the kabbalistic notion
of language: the metaphysical nature of letters, devoid of semantic content, that
combine to form units of meaning. A possible influence here is R. Shneur Zalman
of Liady’s Likkutei amarim–Tanya, sha’ar ha-yihud ve-ha-emunah, ch. 1.
26. Cf., Zohar 3. 225a; the concept is developed in Lurianic teaching and
further in Chabad Hasidim; for sources, see Roman Foxbrunner, Habad: The
Hasidism of Shneur Zalman of Lyady (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1992), 292.
27. Mi she-megaleh et nafsho; translated literally, “one who reveals, or
uncovers, or bares one’s soul”; a second connotation of megaleh is “discover.”
Reiser remarks that the unusual terms giluy hanefesh or nefesh geluyiah, which
figure prominently in R. Shapira’s works, appear to be his invention. He cites
the Lurianic work Shaarei kedushah as a possible source of inspiration: Reiser,
Vision as a Mirror: Imagery Techniques in Twentieth Century Jewish Mysticism [in
Hebrew] (Los Angeles: Cherub-Press, 2014), 194–98.
28. Derekh ha-melekh, motsa’ei yom ha-kippurim 5686 (1925), 268. The
cypher at work here, of course, is the notion of hester panim—the hiddenness
of the divine countenance. The notion of the form tsurah reappears in Sermons
from the Years of Rage, shevi’i shel pesah 5701 (1941), 191.
29. Derekh ha-melekh, motsa’ei yom ha-kippurim 5686 (1925), 268–69.
30. “The forefathers, who engendered Your will (she-as‘u retsonekhah)” is a
creative reinterpretation of the phrase from the liturgy; its straightforward sense
is that the forefathers fulfilled or carried out God’s will.
31. Derekh ha-melekh, motsa’ei yom ha-kippurim 5686 (1925), 269. Compare
his reflections on or makkif—or penimi in Benei mahshavah tovah, 32. In other
sermons, R. Shapira explores the related motif of the trace or reshimu/roshem. See
Derekh ha-melekh, shavu’ot 5689 (1929), 391–96. On hotam and reshimu/roshem
in kabbalistic and early Hasidic sources, see Esther Liebes, “Reshimu (Imprint),
Hylic Matter and Kadmut HaSekhel” [in Hebrew], in The Latest Phase: Essays
on Hasidism by Gershom Scholem, ed. David Assaf and Esther Liebes (Jerusa-
lem, 2008), 277–79. A probable source of influence is Schneur Zalman of Liadi’s
reading of the verse “Set me as a seal upon your heart” (Song 8:6); See Likkutei
Torah 45a; 45d. For later developments in Chabad thought, see Elliot Wolfson,
“Nekuddat ha-Reshimu—The Trace of Transcendence and the Transcendence of
the Trace: The Paradox of S.ims.um in the RaShaB’s Hemshekh Ayin-Beit,” Kab-
balah 30 (2013): 75–112.
32. This idea is based on a midrashic trope: “the image of Jacob is engraved
in the Holy Throne.” See b. Hullin 91b; see also Zohar 1:301 and Zohar 2:114a;
Shneur Zalman of Liady, Likkutei torah, shir ha-shirim, and parallels.
174 Ora Wiskind

33. David Biale et al., Hasidism: A New History (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2018), 564. As Buber put it, “Hasidic teaching is the procla-
mation of rebirth. No renewal of Judaism is possible that does not bear in itself
the elements of Hasidism.” Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955),
xii–xiii. Ariel Evan Mayse and Arthur Green chart the history of this rebirth in
their two-volume A New Hasidism.
34. Alan Brill, “Aggadic Man: The Poetry and Rabbinic Thought of Abra-
ham Joshua Heschel,” Meorot 6, no. 1 (2006). On Heschel’s overarching project,
see Arthur Green, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting Hasidism for Moderns,”
Modern Judaism 29, no. 1 (2015): 62–79.
35. Derekh ha-melekh, motsa’ei yom ha-kippurim 5686 (1925), 268. R. Shapira’s
interwar theory of prophecy has also been compared with Heschel’s. See Seeman,
“Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering,’ ” 475–77.
36. R. Shapira’s paternal lineage stemmed from R. Elimelekh of Lizhensk, the
Maggid of Kozniece (Kozhenits); and R. Hayim Meir Yehiel Shapira, the “Seraph
of Mogielnica”; ancestors on his mother’s side include R. Jacob Isaac, the Seer of
Lublin; and R. Kalonymus Kalman Halevi of Kraków, author of Ma’or va-shemesh,
his maternal grandfather, after whom he was named. His father was R. Elimelekh
of Grodzisk Mazowiecki, an important Hasidic leader in nineteenth-century Poland.
37. The teaching he cites in the name of R. Israel of Ruzhin (on m. Avot
3:12) is based on the same analogy of container and contents. See Irin kaddishin
(Warsaw: 1885), 48b; Irin kaddishin Tinyana, pesah, 15b–16a.
38. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat yitro, 5690 (1930), 104. R. Shapira often
uses the word atsmut in the sense of “essence.” The double reading that I suggest,
although linguistically unorthodox, is supported by many other instances in his
writings.
39. Ibid., 106. He attributes the concept of ibbur ha-tsaddikim—literally,
“impregnation”—to Joseph Sarug, an early disciple of Rabbi Isaac Luria. An edi-
torial note on this sermon in the Feldheim edition (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2011),
153, refers to Emek ha-melekh, sha’ar 16:45, by Naftali Hertz Bachrach, a student
of Joseph Sarug. An indirect source may have been writings from the Chabad
school. See Nahum Grinwald, “Al kabbalat Mahari Sarug be-torat he-hasidut:
“Reshimu,” Malbush, vehatsimtsum she-lifne ha-tsimtsum ha-rishon be-hasidut
Habad,” Heikhal ha-Besht (2011–14).
40. B. Rosh Hashanah 16b.
41. Derekh ha-melekh, shabbat teshuvah, 5690 (1929), 255–56.
42. See also Derekh ha-melekh, parashat shelah (undated), 163–64.
43. R. Shapira’s many references to teachings from his father’s published
sermons testify to the vital role of books in his personal formation. R. Elimelekh
of Grodzisk, author of Imrei elimelekh (Warsaw, 1876) and Divrei elimelekh
(Warsaw, 1890–1), died when the rebbe was nearly three years old. Notably,
however, he sometimes argues the opposite: “The essence of Hasidism cannot be
 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity 175

engraved in a book, but only in the Hasidim themselves . . . they are the ‘book
of Hasidism,’ their journeys and their deeds, their selves and their feelings . . .’
Mevo hashe’arim, 39–40.
44. Ego-documents, in the widest sense, are sources that provide or reveal
privileged information about the “self ” who produced them. Writings of this
nature include diaries, memoirs, letters, and ethical wills, in which the writer
is continuously present, implicitly or explicitly, as a first-person “I.” In Hasidic
Commentary on the Torah (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civization, 2018),
191, I consider other aspects of this sermon; on the nature of Hasidic homiletics
and written texts, see my discussion in Hasidic Commentary, 16–22. Ariel Evan
Mayse and Daniel Reiser analyze the nexus between orality, language, and print
culture in Hasidism in their “Territories and Textures: The Hasidic Sermon as
the Crossroads of Language and Culture,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture,
Society 24, no. 1 (2018): 127–60.
45. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat shemot 5689 (1929), 89–91. The motif of
author/tsaddik connecting heaven and earth reappears in other works; c.f., Mevo
ha-she’arim 3a–b; 4a–5a; 29b, etc. See David Maayan’s insightful discussion of this
sermon in Call of the Self, 57–64.
46. For other instances and their role in furthering R. Shapira’s attempts
during the 1920s and 1930s to reanimate Hasidism and restore its power as a
living tradition, see Wiskind-Elper, Hasidic Commentary on the Torah, 174–77.
.
47. Sermons from the Years of Rage, unnumbered page; MSS, ZIH, Ring.
II/370. Reiser (ibid., 80) posits that R. Shapira’s writings, along with his last testa-
ment, were entrusted to the “Oneg Shabbat” Archives in January-February 1943.
 Part II

Text, Theodicy, and Suffering

 7

A New Reading of the

Rebbe of Piaseczno’s Holocaust-Era Sermons
A Review of Daniel Reiser’s Critical Edition

Moria Herman

There are no words with which we can lament our woes. There is no
one to chastise, no heart to awaken to the [divine] service and Torah.
How many attempts does it take for a prayer to arise, and how much
Sabbath observance exists even in one who truly wishes to observe
it? A fortiori, there is neither spirit nor heart to weep for the future
and the building of the ruins at such time as God in his mercy will
deliver us. There is only God, may he pity us and deliver us in the
blink of the eye, and may he build the ruins. Only through full
redemption and resurrection of the dead can the Blessed One build
and heal. Please, God, have mercy and do not be late in delivering us.
—From a note by the Rebbe of Piaseczno on his
sermon for portion ekev in 1941

The Holocaust-era sermons of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish (Kalman) Sha-

pira, the Rebbe of Piaseczno, are central to the study of Jewish thought in
the Holocaust context. Unlike other thinkers who interpreted and coped
with the Holocaust primarily in retrospect, the Rebbe reflected on and
wrote about the cataclysm as it was transpiring. His sermons, delivered in

179
180 Moria Herman

the Warsaw Ghetto between 1939 and 1942, are a fascinating and unique
historical and human document.
A community leader even before the Holocaust, R. Shapira made it
his goal to use Ghetto sermons to bolster the morale of his flock and of
others who might heed his teachings. On the nights following Sabbaths
and festivals, he set down his sermons in writing. In early 1943, these
texts, together with other documents, were placed in milk containers and
buried in the Ghetto. In 1950, construction workers digging in the former
Warsaw Ghetto area found the containers, which were then taken to the
Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The sermons were first published
in Jerusalem by several of the Rebbe’s followers who had immigrated to
Israel—Rabbi Eliahu Hammer and his son, Abraham; Rabbi Elimelech
Ben Porat; and Rabbi Elazar Bein—under the supervision of R. Shapira’s
nephew, Rabbi Elimelech Shapira in 1960. The editors titled the work
Esh kodesh.1
Dozens of studies have been written about R. Shapira’s Holocaust-era
sermons.2 All are based on this 1960 edition, despite its many flaws. R.
Shapira’s handwriting, difficult to decipher, caused many words to be
mislabeled. The editors also sometimes revised the internal organization
of the sermons, deleted words, and reordered a few sentences.
The two-volume Derashot mi-shenot ha-za’am (Sermons from the
Years of Rage), edited by Daniel Reiser, rectifies these defects. Reiser’s title
preserves the expression that R. Shapira used to describe the sermons in
a letter that he attached to his writings: “Torah innovations mi-shenot
ha-za’am (from the years of rage).”3
In Volume One, Reiser deciphers the manuscript of the sermons anew
by using high-quality scans and enlarging the text by hundreds of percent.
The result is an accurate scholarly edition that includes the expansion of
abbreviations and abridged words and the addition of numerous notes
that track down R. Shapira’s sources in Jewish literature, Bible, midrash,
Hasidism, and the Kabbalah, along with explanations of and elaboration
on kabbalistic concepts. At the end of Volume One is an index of sources,
names, and topics that may be useful to anyone interested in what the
Rebbe of Piaseczno had to say.
Apart from the painstaking deciphering and the notes in the new
edition, Reiser’s work is immensely important in an additional respect: R.
Shapira’s writings are hybrid texts, composed of many glosses and correc-
tions, which Reiser successfully brings to light. Not only did R. Shapira
 A New Reading 181

produce his sermons in the midst of the Holocaust while coping with
the many vicissitudes of Ghetto life, but he also continually proofed and
corrected several other manuscripts that he had written before the war.
Apart from the sermons that he delivered in the Ghetto, he revised his
other as-yet-unpublished writings during this time, including Hakhsharat
ha-avreikhim and Mevo ha-she’arim.4
R. Shapira sometimes erased entire sermons and augmented,
amended, and proofed others, transforming them over time. Hardly a
page in the manuscript version of the sermons is free of deletions and
comments. Even the last sermons, delivered in the summer of 1942,
shortly before the onset of transports from the Ghetto to the extermina-
tion camps, contain notes and deletions. Various kinds of proofing marks
appear in the manuscript—deletions in the text proper with words added
over them; arrows pointing to added text in the margins; and letters with
lines drawn to added text above and below, with the addition marked with
the same letter in boldface.
Some of the extra material was edited as well, evidently indicating
that R. Shapira reviewed the sermons several times and amended them
repeatedly.
These glosses were embedded without comment in the text of the
1960 edition. Those who study the accepted version therefore have no
way of knowing that it is composed of different layers of corrections by
the author. The 1960 edition rarely makes note of this. Furthermore, it
includes paragraphs and entire sermons that R. Shapira had deleted (by
crossing them out) from his handwritten manuscript.
In order to allow readers to appreciate R. Shapira’s revisions, Reiser
created a facsimile edition in Volume Two: a scanned image of the Rebbe’s
manuscript and, on the facing page, a deciphering of the handwriting
that identifies the stages in which the sermons were written. The various
proofing phases are highlighted in different colors, allowing researchers
to track easily the various deletions and additions that followed.
Apart from the scholarly edition and the facsimile of the manuscript,
Reiser begins Volume One with a far-reaching introduction that adds
an important contribution to the research on R. Shapira. It begins with
a series of milestones in the Rebbe’s life. This is a serious and probing
piece of research based on contemporary letters and newspapers, including
many sources relating to the life of R. Shapira and his family, his medical
training, his connections with the land of Israel, and his personality. The
Figure 7.1. Sermon for Parashat Yitro, February 1942. Manuscript no. ARG II 15
(Ring. II/370). Courtesy of ŻIH (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny).
 ‫גנזי‪ ,‬בחי ומהו מתן שכרה‪ ,‬והכל מודים דבשבת ניתנה תורה לישראל‪ ,‬דלולא השבת אף שקבלו התורה היתה נשארה‬
‫רק בחי׳ השראה‪ ,‬וע'י שבשבת ניתנה אז נובל חכמה נמשך להם נ תורה בחי׳ קבלת שכר של לך והודיעם כנודע שנובל‬
‫ממדרש שנובלת חכמה של מעלה תורה‪ .‬החכמה של מעלה היא בהשראה והנובלת נתן להם לך והודיעם‪ .‬ד ולמה‬
‫דוקא בשבת אין לנו השגה‪ ,‬אבל לפי מיעוט השגתנו אפשר מפני ששבת הוא בינה ומלכות ה ומלכות היא כנס'י‬
‫לכן מצטמצם האור לכל איש ישראל לפי ערכו‪ ,‬עוד אפשר דבששת ימי המעשה פעל ד׳ בעולם )ובשבת(‬
‫ומה הי׳ חסר מנוחה באה שבת באה מנוחה‪ ,‬כמו שפרש'י בבראשית‪ .‬ומה היא מנוחה‪ ,‬במשל האדם ָ‬
‫הש ַבת‬
‫הנפש אל קרבו‪ ,‬א'כ היא פעולה בתוך עצמו‪ .‬לכן בששת ימי המעשה המשכת הקדושה היא חוץ מחוץ לאדם‬
‫בין מלמעלה בין מלמטה‪ ,‬למעלה בהשראה ובשבת הוא בתוך האדם‪ ,‬וע״י שבשבת נתנה תורה יכול גם בכל‬
‫ימות השבוע למשוך אל קרבו‪ ,‬ותלוי בזה כמ עד כמה ממשיך את השבת לימות החול ‪ ‬וכמו שאומרים הצל‬
‫מאחרה לפרוש מן השבת לבלתי תהי׳ סגור מהם ששה ימים‪ .‬לא רק ‪ Z‬חוץ‬
‫מה שמשיגים חלק והנה על בחי׳ התורה שמשיגים פשט רמז דרוש וגם סוד )מהתורה( ממנה כ'א לפי שכלו‪ ,‬אמר )ד'(‬
‫ע'ז לא הי׳ צריך הקב'ה לאמור לך והודיעם‪,‬‬
‫כי כל התורה נתן להם שידבר אותה לבנ'י‪ ,‬ולא רק ידבר רק שתהא כשלחן ערוך לפניהם כמ'ש רש'י בריש פ׳ משפטים‪.‬‬
‫ג״כ‬
‫רק כוונתנו בזה היא לך והודיעם שגם מן הארה מן החמדה הגנוזה והשראה שלמעלה מהם שא'א להשיג בשכל ישיגו‬
‫ירגישו‪ .‬וכל איש ישראלי‬
‫מרגיש לפעמים זמנים א התרוממות‪ ,‬אם בעת התפילה או בשבתות וימים טובים וכן לפעמים בשאר זמנים‪ ,‬מרוממים‪,‬‬
‫שבשכל א'א לו אינו יודע מה לו עתה ‪ ‬ואסור לו לחקור בשעה זו אחר התרוממותו מה לו‪ ,‬כי החקירה בשכל‬
‫מקלקלת את ההתרוממות‪ ,‬ומ'מ מרגיש אותה‪ .‬והיא בחי' ב המשכה מן בחי׳ השראה‪ ,‬אל בחי׳ מתן שכרה של לך‬
‫והודיעם מתן שכרה להם ולעצמותם‪ .‬לדעת ולא בזמנים של התרוממות לבד‪ ,‬רק זאת צריכים לדעת‬
‫שכמו שאף שמדת הגאות רעה מאוד ואין אני והוא יכולין לדור כאחת‪ ,‬מ״מ אין הכוונה שירגיש האיש את עצמו‬
‫לרק ומנוול‪ ,‬כי מי שמרגיש עצמו לרק ומנוול מתנהג כרק ומנוול ועושה כמעשיהם‪ .‬צריך האיש‬ ‫לרק ֵ‬
‫ֵ‬
‫שלמעלה ממנו‪,‬‬
‫להרגיש עצמו לישראל‪ ,‬לחסיד‪ ,‬ולעובד ד׳‪ .‬ח והיא ג'כ ניצוץ והארה מן ההתרומ בחי׳ השראה שעליו‬
‫אל קרבו‪ ,‬שאע'פ ששפל הוא בעיני עצמו ותמיד רואה בחסרונותיו‪ ,‬מ'מ מרגיש בקרבו שהוא ישראל וחסיד‪,‬‬
‫בחי׳ ויגבה לבו בדרכי ד׳‪ .‬ולא בלבד ולא רק שלא יתגאה עי'ז בשביל זה‪ ,‬רק אדרבה בשביל‬
‫זה יהי׳ שפל בעיני עצמו ותמיד יראה בקרבו עוְ לות ופגמים‪ .‬כי ‪‬פשוט הוא שמי שמרגיש עצמו לריק ומנוול ר'ל‪ ,‬דומה לו‬
‫שרק עבירות גרועות ר'ל אסור לו לעשות‪ ,‬משא'כ מי וכשאינו מוציא כגון אלו בקרבו‪ ,‬כבר רם לבו ומתגאה‪.‬‬
‫משא'כ המרגיש א'ע עצמו לחסיד ועובד ד׳‪ ,‬כל אבק דאבק רע בעיניו‪ .‬ולא עוד אלא שיודע שאיש כזה באמת‬
‫יכול גם בדבר קל ליפול ח'ו לבירא עמיקתא‪ ,‬ולבו נשבר תמיד בקרבו‪ .‬ו לכן הצרות הקשות ר'ל חוץ מזה שרעים‬
‫לעצמם‪ ,‬עוד רע בזה מה שהאיש נופל בזה על ידיהן ואינו מרגיש את עמידתו הגב הרוממה‪ ,‬אבל צריכים‬
‫להתחזק גם בצרות להיות כבן מלך ז השבוי‪ ,‬שאף שמוכה‪ ,‬מ'מ הוא בן מלך המוכה‪ ,‬וד׳ ירחם ויושיענו תיכף‬
‫ומיד‪ Z.‬וחוץ מזה מי שמרגיש עצמו לך והודיעם לדעת כי‬
‫אני ד׳ מקדישכם‪ ,‬שגם הדעת עצמו‪ ,‬שבו מרגיש שהוא חסיד חלק דעת אלקים הוא ובו יודע‪ ,‬ונודע מהרמב'ם‬
‫ז'ל ומביאים אותו המקובלים על ידיעת שידיעת ד׳ היא בידיעת עצמו‪ ,‬וכבר דברנו מזה‪ ,‬נמצא שהא שהוא ית׳ יודע‬
‫מעבודת האיש וחסידות שלו ע'י ‪ ‬ג״כ בידיעת עצמו היא‪ .‬היינו כי כי בעבודת האיש וחסידותו‪ ,‬שלו ית׳ הוא‪ ,‬כי הוא הנותן לו‬
‫רצון וכח‪ ,‬דעת ומח ולב לעבוד‪ .‬וכשהאיש וכשד׳ נותן חלק מדעתו להאיש ובו יודע מעבודתו אז רואה שהכל ‪ ‬שאינה‬
‫שלו רק הכל של ד׳‪ ,‬ותמיד‬
‫דומה לו שהוא אינו עושה מאומה‪ ,‬ואדרבה ואת הפגמים רואה ששלו הם כיון שבאמת שלו הם והוא עשה אותם ולבו נופל בו ורוחו‬
‫היום‪,‬‬
‫נשבר‪ .‬והנה נודע שבמצרים הי׳ הדעת בגלות ‪ ‬ופרעה אותיות עורף המצמם את הדעת מלהתפשט ובגלות הזה‬
‫דעת של המדות בגלות‪ ,‬אבל והעבודה היא להוציא‬
‫את הדעת מגלות‪ ,‬אז לכן נאמר )ד'( וידע אלקים‪ ,‬ובצאתם ממצרים לך לדעת כי אני ד׳ מקדישכם‪ ,‬ובביאת‬
‫המשיח נאמר ומלאה הארץ דעה את ד׳‪ ,‬וכל היסורים אז במצרים ועתה לא ג וגם עתה אף שמעבירים על הדעת‬
‫ר'ל מ'מ הם לתכלית הזה‪ ,‬הם לכתש‬
‫ולהעביר את דעת האנושי שחושב האדם שבו יודע הוא וסומך עליו‪  ,‬בבחי׳ ויוסיף דעת יוסיף מכאב‪ ,‬כדי‬
‫לכתשו ולהעבירו‪ ,‬כדי שיוכל אח'כ דעת‬
‫אלקים להתגלה בפנימיות בכל אחד ואחד וגם ובכל העולם‪.‬‬
‫זכור את יום השבת לקדשו וכו׳ ע'כ ברך ד׳ וכו׳ ויקדשהו‪ ,‬אנחנו נזכור השבת ונקדשהו ואז נדע‬
‫שד׳ מקדשו לדעת לא מעשינו הוא‪ ,‬רק לדעת כי אני ד׳ מקדישם‪ ,‬שהוא ית׳ מקדשו‪ ,‬ונרגיש קדושתו ית׳ בנו‪.‬‬

‫‪Figure 7.2. Reiser’s decipherment for Parashat Yitro, February 1942. Reiser edition‬‬
‫‪volume 2, 99. Courtesy of Yad Vashem.‬‬
184 Moria Herman

systematic biographic presentation that Reiser’s effort yields elucidates

details that previously had remained vague. For example, Reiser refutes the
widely held claim among researchers that pharmacies in Warsaw accepted
R. Shapira’s autodidactic medical expertise and honored his prescriptions.5
Furthermore, in the introduction, Reiser describes the writings of
R. Shapira and the process that led to their discovery and publication.
His entire oeuvre is reviewed at length in terms of order of publication,
different versions and copies, when written, when published, and how
published. However, in this reckoning Reiser makes no reference, even
briefly, to the contents of R. Shapira’s prewar books, and this omission
is a drawback.
The introduction also contains much about the burial and discov-
ery of R. Shapira’s manuscripts. Until now the research has been vague
about the matter and has not examined it thoroughly. Some scholars state
without any foundation that R. Shapira interred his writings personally.6
Reiser rules this out, noting that the milk containers that held the Rebbe’s
writings were also found to harbor many additional documents belong-
ing to the Oneg Shabbat Archives, which had functioned in the Warsaw
Ghetto and had documented events during the Holocaust. Accordingly,
Reiser contends that members of the archive project (rather than R.
Shapira himself) buried the rabbi’s manuscripts along with their own
documents. The question, then, is how R. Shapira’s manuscripts came
into the possession of the Oneg Shabbat people in the first place. Some
postulate that they had been handed over by Szymon Huberband, the
Rebbe’s cousin and a member of the Oneg Shabbat leadership.7 Reiser
disproves this conjecture, showing that Huberband had been murdered
in August 1942, whereas R. Shapira’s writings include paragraphs of later
provenance. He suggests that it was another member of the Oneg Shabbat
administration, Menachem Mendel Kohn, who had been in touch with
the Rebbe and who had handed over the writings. He stresses, however,
that this is merely speculation.8
Reiser convincing argument that that R. Shapira did not inter the
manuscripts himself but somehow handed them over to the “Oneg Shab-
bat” people sheds light on his conscious intent to preserve his writings. It
also attests to his historical consciousness and conviction that his sermons
were important and meaningful not only to his congregation and his
contemporaries but also to posterity. The fact that R. Shapira continued
to edit and proof his writings during the Holocaust, even when it became
 A New Reading 185

unclear whether he and those around him would survive, lends support
to this proposition. He appears to have considered his writing a sort of
mission, as attested in a letter that he attached to his manuscripts:

Please try to publish [these manuscripts], either together or

separately, as in your beneficence you see fit. Please also try
to disperse them among the Jews. And please print on every
volume that I wish and beg every Jew to study my writings.
Surely, the merit of my holy forebears will be at his [the person
responsible for publication of the manuscripts] side and that
of his entire family in this world and in the afterworld. May
God pity us.9

The fact that R. Shapira delivered sermons, put them in writing, and even
bothered to correct and proof them repeatedly amid the spiraling horror,
and at a time when he was in no way confident that anyone would ever
read the works, evokes amazement. R. Shapira himself writes about a cop-
ing process of this kind in his sermon for the portion ha-hodesh in 1942:

Sometimes the man himself wonders about himself: Haven’t I

been broken? Do I not spend nearly all my time weeping and
sometimes sobbing as well? How can I learn Torah and from
where do I get the strength to produce Torah and Hasidic
innovations? Sometimes he wonders if it is mere courage that
I can strengthen myself and study [Torah] amid the so-nu-
merous woes, my own and those of Israel. Again and again
[he tells] himself: Am I not broken? How many are my sobs?
My whole life is despondency and darkness. He is perplexed,
this man, about himself.10

Although the passage is mostly written in the third person, its contents
indicate that the Rebbe enunciated them from his own experience. The
difficulty that he faced in continuing to engage in writing and studying
Torah while surrounded by ongoing horror only sharpens the question
of the meaning of this composition and its role in coping with suffering
and catastrophe.
Taking up this topic at the end of the introduction, Reiser expounds
on the meaning of writing in the shadow of death and presents several
186 Moria Herman

psychological models that may explain the phenomenon. One of them

describes creative endeavor in the shadow of death as a form of denial
or escape that allows the writer to disregard or distract himself from the
encroaching death. Another model portrays creative work as the triumph
of the spirit over death or, as Reiser writes, “the fulfillment of liberty in
a world devoid of liberty.”11 According to a third model, writers produce
texts for the sake of eternal life, because they have despaired of a reality
that has become meaningless to them. Reiser does not decide which of
these models, if any, fits R. Shapira’s corpus. Reiser contends that R. Sha-
pira’s literary and oral teaching despite the cataclysm around him lends
these sermons a universal significance in addition to their religious and
philosophical meaning.12
Many studies have been written about R. Shapira’s response to suf-
fering. Some writers argue that his outlook evolved during the course of
his torments.13 These studies are all based on the 1960 edition, however,
so that authors could not know about R. Shapira’s own constant glosses
and revisions. Reiser demonstrates the significance of this lacuna in sev-
eral instances
In his sermon for portion ki tavo in 1940, R. Shapira expressed his
expectation of supernatural intervention, such as miraculous deliverance.
He sketched a small arrow over these words and wrote an addendum in
the margins: “Even if a great supernatural deliverance comes afterward, do
the Jews have the strength to endure such woes?”14 This note attests that
no matter what hope he may have held out for miraculous deliverance, R.
Shapira was uncertain that the Jews could endure their afflictions. In the
1960 edition, this addendum appears in the sermon text proper, with no
indication that it was added after the basic composition of the sermon.15
Another example appears in the sermon for portion hukkat in 1942,
one of R. Shapira’s last, delivered several weeks before the beginning of
transports from the Ghetto to the extermination camps. In this address,
he writes about the cruelty shown toward children:

The cruelties of the haters of Israel always particularly targets

Jewish children, either to kill them, Heaven forbid, or to force
them into heresy, as is known from decrees imposed centuries
ago, Heaven forbid.

A letter marked next to this sentence refers to a gloss in the margin:

 A New Reading 187

As we see now, too, lamentably, the cruelties and murders

against young children surpass all the cruelties and ghastly
murders visited upon us, the House of Israel. Oh, what has
befallen us?16

Once again, this addendum appears in the text of the 1960 edition proper,
and is not marked in any way.17 Reiser conjectures, on reasonable grounds,
that the addendum is evidence of the immense suffering inflicted on
children at the time of the transports from the Ghetto.18 These examples
of revisions that R. Shapira made in his writings—meaningful changes
in reference to the topic of suffering—appear throughout the manuscript
and should propel new research on this theme.
Reiser himself finds it hard to detect that R. Shapira had a well-
formed and systematic outlook on coping with suffering and considers it
difficult to speak of evolution in his views. One might, he suggests, find
allegedly early views on coping with torment that recur later and allusions
to an allegedly later outlook in early sermons. “After reviewing all the
sermons,” Reiser concludes,

I think it correct to say that the Rebbe does not have a clear
and definitive statement to make, either about the essence of
the afflictions or even about the purpose of the sermons. The
sermons reflect a process and one who tracks them also tracks, as
far as possible, the personal process that the Rebbe underwent.19

As for the purpose of the sermons, quotations presented by Reiser

show that they were initially meant to encourage and comfort R. Shapira’s
listeners. Two years into the Holocaust, however, he admits that he no
longer finds his own soothing remarks and sermons to be convincing:

Particularly as the woes continue, even one who has strength-

ened himself and the rest of the Jews from the very start tires
of strengthening and laboring to comfort himself. Even if he is
willing to strain and offer whatever comforting and strength-
ening words he may, he cannot find the words because during
the lengthy days of woes he has already said and repeated
everything he can say. The words have grown old and can
have no further effect on him or his listeners.20
188 Moria Herman

Again, despite being written in the third person, these remarks imply that
R. Shapira is expressing his own experience. The change in his attitude
toward the purpose of the sermons reflects his general state of mind as
it comes through in the writings. The fact that, despite his corrections,
he left intact both his initial and his later remarks on the topic, which
express totally different approaches, is an example of his writing style. The
sermons do not reflect an explicit approach and systematic doctrine but
rather a personal process of coping.
Apart from researchers who deal with R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s
teachings, the many people who are interested in his philosophy may find
this new edition immensely useful. Volume One presents the sermons in
a manner that is accurate and loyal to R. Shapira’s guidelines for their
publication in their final unexpurgated and noncorrected form. Volume
Two introduces the revisions and deletions, displays R. Shapira’s actual
handwriting, and traces his states of mind and the immense thought that
he invested in his writings.
A larger and broader index at the end of Volume One, with additional
topics, might have been more useful to the reader. The index is insufficiently
detailed; it lacks important themes that recur in R. Shapira’s thinking
and sermons, such as gentiles, Hasidism, passion, happiness, prophecy,
non-Jewish thinking, creation, and destruction, to name only a few.
Furthermore, even though in his notes on the sermons Reiser
presents many sources from the Bible, the Kabbalah, and Hasidism, he
makes hardly any reference to R. Shapira’s earlier writings, even though
they presage many of the themes evoked by his Holocaust-era sermons.
Particularly conspicuous are many potential parallels from R. Shapira’s
interbellum collection, Derekh ha-melekh.21 R. Shapira often makes refer-
ence in these earlier sermons to the same topics, sources, and questions
that he would invoke in similar liturgical contexts during the war. In his
sermon on parashat mishpatim of 1938, for example, he asks exactly the
same question that would later arise in his sermon for the same Torah
portion of 1940.22 In his sermon for parashat naso in 1940,23 a question
raised in regard to the same portion, in 1930, is asked again.24
Given the lack of reference to R. Shapira’s other writings, one may
get the impression that his Holocaust-era sermons are unrelated to the
rest of his oeuvre. This is not so. R. Shapira’s distinctive voice is reflected
in all of his writings, as it is in his later Holocaust-era compositions. A
comparison of R. Shapira’s prewar refletions and those from the Sermons
from the Years of Rage, accurately rendered for the first time in Reiser’s
 A New Reading 189

edition, offers a vital context for ongoing research. To put it plainly,

Daniel Reiser’s edition of Sermons from the Years of Rage is an inspiring
achievement. The extensive labor invested in the accurate deciphering of
the Rebbe’s handwriting through use of epigraphy and new technologies
and the editor’s clear and edifying, evidence-based presentations lift the
study of this form of Hasidism to a whole new level. These volumes will
undoubtedly be critical for understanding Orthodox Judaism’s confron-
tation with the Holocaust.

Notes

We are grateful to the author and to the editors of Yad Vashem Studies for allow-
ing us to reprint this review essay. It appears here in translation from Hebrew
by Naftali Greenwood, with some emendations for style and consistency by the
editors of the current volume.
1. Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, Esh kodesh (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei
Piaseczno, 1960).
2. Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman
Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994);
Yitzhak Hershkowitz, “The Martyred Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman Shapira, the
Piaseczno Rebbe: His Thinking Before and During the Holocaust, Continuity or
Change?” [in Hebrew] (master’s thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 2005); Mendel Piekarz,
The Last Hasidic Literary Document on Polish Soil: The Warsaw Ghetto Writings of
the Rebbe of Piaseczno [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979); Esther Farb-
stein; Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah, and Leadership during
the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2007), 479–509; Eliezer Schweid,
From Ruin to Salvation: The Haredi Response to the Holocaust as It Occurred [in
Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994), 105–54.
3. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:328–29. A scanned image of the letter,
which researchers sometimes term a “testament,” is published as an appendix
in Reiser’s edition. It is also translated from Yiddish into Hebrew in the front
matter to Esh kodesh.
4. Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim, Mevo ha-she’arim,
Tsav ve-zeruz [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Va’ad Hasidei Piaseczno, 1962).
5. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:15–16.
6. Ibid., 1:26n66.
7. Ibid., 1:30.
8. Ibid., 1:32.
9. Ibid., 1:328–29.
10. Ibid., 1:293.
190 Moria Herman

11. Ibid., 1:78.

12. Ibid., 1:80.
13. Ibid., 1:59n206.
14. Ibid., 2:86–87, quoted in the introduction, 1:71.
15. Esh kodesh, 61.
16. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 2:236–37, also cited in the introduc-
tion, 1:71–72.
17. Esh kodesh, 186.
18. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:72.
19. Ibid., 1:57.
20. Ibid., 1:277, also cited in the introduction, 1:57.
21. Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei
Piaseczno, 1995).
22. Ibid., 108.
23. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:136.
24. Derekh ha-melekh, 148.
 8

Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death

Psychological and Phenomenological Aspects
of Rabbi Shapira’s Manuscript
“Sermons from the Years of Rage”

Daniel Reiser

Man should not cast aside from him the fear of the earthly; in his
fear of death he should—stay.
—Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption

Sermons from the Years of Rage

There are few extant documents of rabbinic thought composed under the
Nazi regime. As such, the collection of sermons authored by the Piaseczner
Rebbe, R. Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, in the Warsaw Ghetto1—effec-
tively the final Hasidic work to be written in Poland, as noted by Mendel
Piekarz—is among the canonical, if not the leading, work of Orthodox
thought written during this period.2 Like his prewar sermons (see Wiskind,
this volume), they were probably first delivered orally in Yiddish and then
recorded in rabbinic Hebrew.3 It should be noted that they contain no
direct references to current political or historical events, nor is there any
direct mention of Germans or other key Ghetto figures, though there are

191
192 Daniel Reiser

numerous indirect references to specific occurrences: “evildoers,” suffering,

tribulations, physical and spiritual distress, the pain of losing loved-ones,
and crises of religion and faith.4 The book is primarily concerned with
the religious and phenomenological significance of suffering.
These wartime sermons aimed to provide their audience with hope
and self-respect as well as offer counsel, forge a religious path, and per-
suade listeners that spiritual gains and human dignity were still attainable,
despite the German efforts to destroy them.5 But that was not their sole
purpose. One must recall that R. Shapira not only delivered the sermons
orally but also took pains to preserve them in writing. It is evident from
the sermons of the latter half of 1941 and onward that R. Shapira was
well aware that his chances of survival—and those of the people around
him—were steadily diminishing6 and that the destruction wrought by
war, including spiritual and religious crises, would never be fully healed:

Who is not pained as they behold the suffering of Israel, in

body and soul; and whose heart does not ache when they see
that there are no hadarim, no yeshivot, no place of Torah or
gathering of Torah scholars? This is not only the case at this
moment, as the houses of the Lord are destroyed, but the [con-
ditions of the] present will also be manifested in the future. For
young men who are students of Torah will be lacking: some
will be missing on account of unnatural deaths and starvation,
God save us, and others will be compelled by circumstances to
go out and seek sustenance for themselves. From where shall
we lay hold of lads who are students of Torah if now there
are none studying, and some of them have not withstood the
test and, driven by hunger, have gone out to the market on
the Sabbath in order to barter? Do we really think that such
lads and young men who have spent years wandering about
the marketplace and streets conducting business or begging for
bread, whether on a weekday or the Sabbath—the Torah and
Hasidic teachings acquired over several years in the hadarim
and yeshivot having been forgotten—[do we really think] that
when the opportunity arises, these ones will return to the
hadarim and yeshivot like before?!7

Given these circumstances, there is no doubt that the effort taken to pre-
serve this sermon in writing—particularly in light of the difficult physical
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 193

conditions prevailing at that time in the Ghetto—indicates a broader

objective.8 R. Shapira’s request in his final testament that these sermons be
published demonstrates that he did not perceive them as mere consolation
speeches, nor were they addressed solely to his ill-fated contemporaries.
R. Shapira understood his sermons to be religious writings of enduring
significance addressed to future generations and others not party to the
historical context in which they were originally delivered. One might even
suggest that he refrained from addressing particular historical events in
order that the significance of the sermons not be limited to any partic-
ular incident occurring within a specific context, time, and location. He
sought to preserve the sermons for all time, “to scatter them throughout
Jacob and divide them amongst Israel,” as indicated in his final testament.9
This collection, which he titled Sermons from the Years of Rage in
his handwritten manuscript, is distinguished by its willingness to confront
the experience of suffering:

When we studied the words of the prophets and of our sages

of blessed memory regarding the tribulations of the destruction
[of the temple in Jerusalem], we thought we had some grasp
of these tribulations, even crying on occasion at that time.
However, now we see how great the difference is between
hearing about tribulations and seeing them, and all the more
so suffering them—God save us—such that they are nearly
incomparable . . . and as much as we discuss the tribulations,
we are not able to describe them as they truly are, for knowl-
edge and discussion of tribulations cannot be compared to
experiencing them.10

R. Shapira shares his intimate doubts and misgivings with the reader,11
producing a unique and moving document. An examination of these ser-
mons does not reveal a clear and defined stance on either the meaning of
suffering or the aim of the sermons themselves. Instead, R. Shapira invites
the reader to join his own struggle to persist. In one of his first sermons,
R. Shapira declares his aim to provide strength and encouragement, “that
you [the future reader] might be strengthened through me”12 and “when
others see that I fortify myself despite my tremendous suffering, they too
might issue an a fortiori ruling regarding their own suffering—which is not
as bitter as mine—and be strengthened.”13 Yet two years later, R. Shapira
admits that he is no longer persuaded by his own words of consolation:
194 Daniel Reiser

Particularly when the sorrows are unceasing, then even the

one who had initially strengthened himself and the rest of
Israel now ceases to be strengthened and is weary of being
consoled. Even if he wanted to exert himself and utter some
remarks of comfort and strength, he would have no words to
say, for over these many long days of suffering he has already
spoken and repeated once more everything there is to say. The
words have grown old and have no further effect on him or
on his listeners.14

Such honesty has few parallels in rabbinic literature. For two and a half
years, R. Shapira preached, encouraged, and comforted. Now, as his sermons
draw to a close and “the sorrows are unceasing,” he publicly declares that he
no longer has the strength to fortify and console himself—or the strength
to fortify and console his readers. This obviously raises the question of
why he exerted such energy to complete his manuscript, correcting the
sermons and committing them to future publication.

A Philology of Suffering

A philological examination of the handwritten manuscript “Sermons from

the Years of Rage,” which I conducted for the critical edition, indicates that
the sermons were produced sequentially, one proof succeeding another.
Further evidence of this appears in a letter R. Shapira appended to the
manuscript with instructions for the reader and publisher, including a
system he had devised for proofing his text:

Figure 8.1. Manuscript no. ARG II 15 (Ring. II/370), page 4. Courtesy of ŻIH
(Żydowski Instytut Historyczny).
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 195

I note herewith that in the writings, wherever a mark such

as this ↓ appears, it means that what is written on the side of
the page at this line should be inserted at this location. And
also, when a letter such as alef or bet or the like appears,
then what is written above, below, or somewhere else on this
page should be inserted at the location where the notation is
recorded. And sometimes an alef is recorded and sentences
appear above, after which the letter bet is written. This indicates
that written elsewhere in the text marked by bet are remarks
that belong here. Then what is written at the letter bet should
be connected to the letter alef, and both should be inserted
together at the place where the letter alef appears. But if the
word hagaha [proofreading] is written, then the text should
not be inserted; it should only appear below in small letters
and should be marked by some letter.15

In fact, initial proofing appears in the body of the manuscript text itself:
words are deleted by being crossed out, and added words and sentences
are placed atop existing or deleted words. Further proofing is done by
adding arrows to indicate supplemental text in the margins of the page.
Sometimes the author decides to delete an old “add” mark by crossing
the words out; wherever this is done, the arrow is deleted in the same
manner. Such deletion is evidence of at least one additional round of
proofing, in which the author reviewed his comments and decided to
delete some of them.
A further stage of editing was accomplished by adding letters to
the body of the text: inscriptions in square (Assyrian) Hebrew letters,
and underlining for emphasis. Each such letter is a reference to a note
on the upper or lower margin of the page—not on the side margins, as
with the arrow marking. The reference in the text proper appears again
next to the added text (upper or lower), so that the proper location for
each added text may be identified.
In general, I concluded that the notes marked with arrows are
older than those marked with letters, because many marginalia that are
referenced by arrows end with the appending of a letter that leads to an
additional remark on the top or bottom margin of the page. Admittedly,
the opposite sometimes occurs as well—a comment marked by a letter is
added at the top or the bottom of the page, at which location an arrow
directs the reader to an additional supplemental text alongside the first
196 Daniel Reiser

comment. This represents yet another level of proofing, in which R. Shapira

reviewed the remarks that he had added and corrected them as well.16
I believe that careful investigation of the manuscript’s archaeology,
its layers and emendations over time, calls our attention to a human phe-
nomenon worthy of discussion. Many of the marginal notes were actually
written late in 1942, though R. Shapira was already aware by late 1941
(see Magid, this volume) that Polish Jewry was facing an unprecedented
catastrophe from which it might never recover. By the time these last notes
were added to the manuscript in 1942, in fact, the mass transports from
the Ghetto to the death camps had already begun. R. Shapira must also
have known that there was very little chance that he, his manuscript, or
any of his immediate followers would survive. Under these circumstances,
his commitment to painstaking, multilayered, and minute revision of his
already finished text should not be taken for granted.
R. Shapira knew that he was going to die and had already lost all
his family, and how did he occupy himself? With correcting and editing
his sermons! Moreover, all of this was done without any certainty that
these sermons would ever be found and published. Such literary activity
is testimony to a life lived at two extremes: the bitter reality of death and
the simultaneous vitality invested in writing, corrections, and stylistic
editing. On one hand, there is calamitous death that destroys everything,
while on the other hand, a new literary creation is produced that requires
a great deal of concentration. Even before we consider the actual content
of these sermons, their very existence should be treated as testimony to
an extraordinary human endeavor. R. Shapira was himself aware of this
tension, which sometimes provoked him to reflect on whether his own
ability to write under these circumstances was a sign of indifference or
apathy to his own suffering and that of others around him:

There are times when a person is astounded by himself,

exclaiming, “Am I not broken? Am I not nearly always in
a state of tears, crying from time to time? How can I study
Torah? By what means may I strengthen myself to produce
new teachings of Torah and hasidut?” At times, his heart
strikes him, as he declares: “Is it not my heartlessness that
allows me to fortify myself in the study of Torah while my
sorrows and the sorrows of the Jewish people are so great?”
He will once more answer himself, “Am I not broken? How
great are my tears; all of my life is woe and gloom.” This
person is perplexed by himself.17
Figure 8.2. Sermon for Passover 1940. Manuscript no. ARG II 15 (Ring. II/370).
Courtesy of ŻIH (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny).
198 Daniel Reiser

While this passage is framed in the third person, it is clear that the
author, who “strengthen[s himself] to produce new teachings of Torah
and hasidut,” is actually testifying about himself. If my reading is correct,
this passage represents a personal testament to the pangs of guilt that
seized him (“his heart strikes him”) because he was apparently able to
remain creative despite the torments of his fellows, which “are so great.”
On the one hand, he feels great discomfort about allowing his routine of
studying Torah and Hasidic teachings to continue as though nothing has
happened; on the other, he expresses deep awareness of pain and rupture,
so that he is “perplexed by himself.” The ability to live in between these
two opposing worlds—the world of literary creation and innovation, and
the world of total destruction—is testimony to a special kind of resilience
deserving description in its own right.

A Psychology of Suffering: Writing in the Shadow of Death

Beginning in the 1970s, a psychological theory was developed that was

concerned with the influence of awareness of death on human cognition
and behavior: terror management theory. The Jewish American writer and
cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker claimed that all creative activity is
directly related to the denial of death.18 For him, culture and creativity
supply a certain bulwark against the fear of death, while the denial of
death motivates man to write and create. In other words, human creative
activity is a form of escape from or ignoring of death, an attempt to prevent
the inexorable end. According to this model, writing may have offered R.
Shapira a mental reprieve from the bitter reality and death surrounding
him, despite the fact that his sermons directly address death and suffering.19
A different approach suggests that human creativity contends with
death and, rather than evading it, emerges victorious. There are matters
more important than life, and engagement with them represents the victory
of the spirit over death and the physical. When Socrates was sentenced to
death by the court of Athens in 399 BCE, he was faced with the possibility
of evading and changing his punishment. However, Socrates decided, for
philosophical reasons, to bear his punishment and drink the cup of poison
hemlock. His death was portrayed by Plato as a victory of the philoso-
pher and of philosophy.20 Socrates refused to desist from philosophy and
stated in his defense, “On this point I would say to you, men of Athens:
‘Whether you believe Anytus or not, whether you acquit me or not, do
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 199

so on the understanding that this is my course of action, even if I am to

face death many times.’ ”21 Also, “death is something I couldn’t care less
about.”22 His engagement with philosophy overcame his instinctive fear
of dying. This is a victory, not an escape.
It must be noted, however, that Socrates left behind no writings of
his own and that Plato’s dialogues were written as works of philosophical
fiction after his death. This being the case, it is worth noting an authen-
tic autobiographical work authored by an individual sentenced to death,
The Consolation of Philosophy, by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius,
which was written while its author was in prison awaiting his execution.23
Boethius was a Roman consul at the beginning of the sixth century who
was executed for treason in 524 CE, after two years of imprisonment.
The Consolation of Philosophy, written in the shadow of his impending
death, is not merely a depiction of his inner life but a manifestation of
the philosophy that is, in the words of Kabbalah scholar Yehuda Liebes,
“the triumph of the spirit of the individual over the reigning tyranny, and
the victory of reason over suffering and emotion.”24 Like Sermons from the
Years of Rage, this can be understood as a triumph of the spirit through
the writing of a text. In this understanding, the writing does not escape
or commemorate suffering—it overcomes it.
Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy, wrote about his experi-
ences in German concentration camps and maintained that he and his
fellow prisoners succeeded in actualizing their spiritual freedom in the
very place where they had been deprived of all human rights.25 Frankl
came to Auschwitz with a completed manuscript ready for publication,
which was confiscated upon arrival. Realizing that the manuscript was
lost, he began to reconstruct the work, an activity that gave meaning to
his life and endowed him with physical and spiritual strength. “Certainly,”
he testifies, “my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to
survive the rigors of the camps I was in. For instance, when in a camp in
Bavaria I fell ill with typhus fever, I jotted down on little scraps of paper
many notes intended to enable me to rewrite the manuscript, should I
live to the day of liberation. I am sure that this reconstruction of my
lost manuscript in the dark barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp
assisted me in overcoming the danger of cardiovascular collapse.”26 The
writing of notes on scraps of paper and the desire to rewrite his book
enabled Frankl to overcome his difficult surroundings and actualize his
spiritual freedom. According to this model, R. Shapira’s writing was an
actualization of freedom in a freedomless world.
200 Daniel Reiser

A third approach can be found in the writings of Martin Heidegger.

His Being and Time (1927) addresses the meaning of death at great length.27
According to him, death exposes the individual to his own mortality and
the lack of meaning in his life, but it is this very lack of meaning that
enables the individuation of the individual and is therefore true meaning.
Death is devoid of substance; it is a pure emptiness, which contains all
and hence brings forth the creation of the new. The mental renunciation
of the everyday world gives birth to the new, as the universal meaning
is abandoned and gives way to the personal creation of the individual.28
Similarly, Franz Rosenzweig utilized the existential fear of death to
criticize rationalist Western philosophy, opening his Star of Redemption
(1921) with the words, “in philosophos!”29 As an existentialist, Rosenzweig
positions existence as prior to all thought and places the earthly fear of
death—which philosophical idealism, and Hegel in particular, attempt to
deny—as the starting point of Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig wrote the
book in light of his encounter with the horrors of World War I. For him,
death establishes existence as prior to all thought. From the fear of death,
man realizes his being; this fear is the source of all life.30
Another modern writer, Lev Shestov—born Yehuda Leyb Schwarz-
mann (1866–1938)—argued that meaninglessness and despair are primary
human experiences (“Utter futility! All is futile!”),31 which, however, point
to an experience of faith beyond both knowledge and hopelessness.32
According to Shestov, the experience of doubt and the deepest
uncertainty are continuous with the experience of “faith.” The believer
begins his path in the depths of despair, but it is from these very depths
that he cries out to God: “Out of the depths I call you, O Lord.”33 What
does he call? “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”34 Faith
is not a sense of contentment but rather a struggle with bitterness and
a darkened spirit: “I say to God, my rock, ‘Why have You forgotten me,
why must I walk in gloom?’ ”35 The individual finds himself in a constant
struggle against reason and logic, against the “truth” thrust upon him; this
struggle is the state of faith. Shestov’s final work, Athens and Jerusalem,
concludes with these words: “Philosophy is not Besinnen but struggle. And
this struggle has no end and will have no end. The kingdom of God, as
it is written, is attained through violence.”36
Much like awareness of despair, which is the starting point of religious
experience, awareness of death also serves a central function in Shestov’s
thought. Only death can shake off from man the false enchantments of
knowledge and scientific truth.37 “[Shestov’s] philosophy seeks to instruct
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 201

man to contend with the horrors of his historical existence, to live authen-
tically with his despair without evasion, and to recognize the horrific reality
of mortality and the lack of importance of an existence bound to end.
All of these are meant to instruct him however in that spiritual strength
which is faith, to lead him to God who will provide him not only with
a primary meaning to his life, but with freedom.”38 Death exposes man
to the end, and consequent meaningless nature, of his life and reminds
him of his finality in order that he not be engulfed by a fabricated world
devoid of meaning.39 The fear of death shatters the illusion of our existence
as independent and distinct beings. The possibility of faith thus develops
in the very face of death.
The Neo-Hasidic thinker Hillel Zeitlin (see Leshem, this volume),
who was acquainted with R. Shapira and even wrote a glowing review
of his educational tract A Student’s Obligation,40 was also influenced by
Shestov. In an essay titled “From the Depths of Doubt and Despair (On
the Tremendous Striving of Lev Shestov),” Zeitlin addresses the extreme
negation of all values and meaning in the world, which found expres-
sion in Shestov’s thought.41 “Friedrich Nietzsche came and rejected all
that was human,” writes Zeitlin, “conceiving by this to make room for
the Übermensch. Lev Shestov . . . came and elevated the rejection of all
things human to a degree of shocking and wondrous perfection in his
recognition that the Übermensch too is but a ‘human, all too human’
conception.” For Shestov, according to Zeitlin, “all that is human—even
if it be decorated with the finest adornments of philosophy, science, and
verse—is nothing but futility and pursuit of wind.”42 However, Zeitlin
notes, Shestov’s negations must be understood as continuations of “Hume’s
efforts in the critique of human perception; Schopenhauer’s efforts in the
negation of any value to life; Nietzsche’s efforts in the critique of man and
all that he has; Rousseau and Tolstoy’s efforts in the negation of all that is
called culture and civilization; Dostoyevsky’s efforts in his groping about
and prodding . . . and [that] it is from that very depth of nothingness
that he calls out to God-Wonder.”43 Zeitlin puts all this into a familiar
Jewish idiom: “Through recognizing the nullity of all that is human, he
[Shestov] seeks ‘the One who spoke and the world came into being.’ ”44
According to this third model, R. Shapira’s writings are not a man-
ifestation of a polarized life led between a mode of innovative creation
and a reality emblematic of death and destruction. The bitter existence to
which he was fated had already lost all meaning, and the works he wrote
were a possession to bring before God, evoking the talmudic aphorism
202 Daniel Reiser

“Praiseworthy is he who comes here with his teachings in his hand.”45

R. Shapira did not record his sermons for others but rather for himself,
as he wrote elsewhere: “Behold, a person does not write solely for oth-
ers . . . but also notes for himself ”;46 “Every [personal] impression (roshem)
needs paper and space to be written (yirshemu) on.”47 The manuscript is
R. Shapira’s offering for eternal life: “Fix yourself in the vestibule so that
you may enter the palace.”48
In sum, the manuscript Sermons from the Years of Rage is a tes-
timony to the phenomenon of creation in the shadow of death. Three
philosophical and psychological explanations have been given above for
this phenomenon:

1. Ignoring the world: the attempt to prevent inevitable death.

2. Triumph over the world: the actualization of freedom in a
freedomless world.
3. Disillusionment with the world: through recognizing the
nullity of all that is human, he seeks “He who spoke and
the world came into being.”

A Phenomenology of Suffering

The attempts I have suggested above to explain R. Shapira’s “creative writing

in the shadow of death” should not be seen as three distinct approaches
that do not correspond. We should note that R. Shapira’s sermons do not
contain a clear and decisive doctrine, and R. Shapira does not hesitate to
acknowledge that he himself is perplexed, as we saw above.49 Therefore, it is
more likely that R. Shapira engages in all these three different approaches—
on different occasions. In practice, we can also approach this subject from
a completely different perspective: the phenomenological one. According to
this approach, his sermons are more of an attempt to refashion the question
of suffering in phenomenological terms, as a wandering journey rather than
a quest for “meaning” alone.50 Don Seeman has argued, convincingly, that
this collection of sermons should be “approached as it was written, with a
view to ritual and hermeneutic strategies rather than foregone ideological
conclusions, and to lived experience in suffering rather than doctrine.”51
Cultural anthropology tends to assume that ordered and coherent
meaning is the primary desideratum of social life. Both Max Weber and
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 203

Clifford Geertz associate religious rituals with the quest for meaning in
suffering. According to Geertz, the purpose of rituals is to make suffering
meaningful and therefore sufferable.52 In contrast, Seeman uses the phe-
nomenological account of Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that suffering
is inherently “useless” and therefore resistant to meaning’s claim. Seeman
demonstrates how R. Shapira’s Ghetto sermons constitute a denial that
the insufferable can be made sufferable and “urge ritual fidelity in spite of
meaninglessness, and not always as its antidote.”53 In a later article, See-
man expands and deepens his idea of “ritual in its own right” and deals
with R. Shapira’s quest for ritual efficacy in a reality of radical suffering.
R. Shapira’s response to crisis in the Warsaw Ghetto was not limited to
making suffering meaningful but extended to the problem of efficacy, which
precedes “meaning.”54 Seeman was the first to use this kind of language
and to develop categories of experience as a key method for reading R.
Shapira’s sermons.
Nonetheless, Seeman does find a kind of meaning—not in the
sense of meaningfulness with which anthropology remains preoccupied
but rather in the sense of a purpose, sometimes pragmatic, for suffering.
Such as: “bringing down blessing,” “defending the cosmos,” and “suffering
for the other,” which all derive from kabbalistic teachings: “I have argued
that the impossible weight of suffering in Warsaw pushed ritual practice
inexorably away from its meaning-making dimension and towards an
increased emphasis on the essentially ethical gestures of bringing down
blessing, defending the cosmos, and suffering for the other.”55
With this perspective, I would like to look into what I have described
as the tension of “writing in the shadow of death.” There is no doubt
that both preaching and writing down the sermons are ritual practices,
which have the highest priority in halakhah and the deepest significance
in Jewish mysticism.56 Studying and teaching Torah are rituals that carry
deep cosmological significance for Rabbi Shapira: “Innovative study and
teaching of the sacred texts in their traditional form is a ritual activity that
literally draws divine vitality down from above to support the integrity
and existence of the cosmos, including the community of believers.”57 R.
Shapira himself engages this problem through the study and teaching of
Torah: “It is certain that Rabbi Shapira refers not just to the text of Scrip-
ture when he says ‘Torah’ in this context, but to the whole interwoven
corpus of Jewish sacred textuality, including his own Hasidic sermons,
whose production and study are without a doubt meant to be ritually
efficacious in their own right.”58
204 Daniel Reiser

This concept of “ritual in its own right” can lead us to a more

extreme approach and at once a very simple claim: R. Shapira wrote
down his sermons as a plain act of learning Torah. He continued doing
what he always did in his lifetime: teach and write—rituals in their own
right—with no additional explanation, even not the pragmatistic one, and
a fortiori the mystical motive. This explains the feelings of guilt and per-
plexity he expresses over the very act of writing these sermons. But at the
same time, he expresses the feeling that he cannot put down his pen. To
be clear, I do not underestimate the value of the concept of ritual efficacy
developed by Seeman. However, I want to differentiate between teaching
Torah by preaching a sermon to the public and writing it down afterward,
especially given the layers of editing and proofreading explored above.
Rituals bring down divine blessing and defend the cosmos, according
to Jewish mysticism. However, writing down the sermons may be an action
of torah lishmah, learning Torah for its own sake, a value that has a long
history in Jewish tradition.59 The study of Torah outweighs, in Judaism,
all other precepts (mitsvot),60 hence we can approach it in a different
manner from all other rituals. R. Shapira writes his sermons, then he
proofreads them and writes corrections in the margins of a manuscript,
then he adds another layer of corrections and additions, and so on, all
alongside the bitter reality outside, because this is his way of learning
Torah. Obviously, there is no certainty that these sermons will ever be
found or published. However, this did not change R. Shapira’s sense of
obligation toward learning Torah, which became part of his DNA and
which he could not disengage from, even in times of crises, just as he
could not stop breathing oxygen.61
As Seeman points out, learning Torah in the Ghetto (like all other
religious rituals) was not done in order to “make suffering sufferable,” in
Geertz’s terms. It was a ritual efficiency, which, according to Ariel Evan
Mayse, was “surely meant to open the heart and awaken the soul amid
the sadness, destruction, and pain of the Warsaw Ghetto. In this crushing
environment, the talmudic and midrashic aggadah spirit offered a way of
transcending time and entering the world of illuminated exegesis rather
than temporal suffering.”62 This is true for learning the sources that con-
struct the homily and then teaching it aloud to the public. Nevertheless,
R. Shapira could have stopped here. Why did he need to write his ser-
mons, and why did he need to make changes—often very minor ones that
have no effect on meaning? Moreover, R. Shapira stopped preaching just
before the “Great Action,” which began on July 22, 1942. Major parts of
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 205

his proofreading were carried out after the Ghetto emptied.63 It is clear
that at that point, R. Shapira was not working on his Torah in order to
provide hope or self-respect or for the sake of “suffering for the other,”
or even for “affective strategies that would allow his followers—and the
cosmos itself—to resist collapse,”64 since there was no longer an audience,
or an “other,” or followers, and the cosmos did collapse. It seems to me
that his writing, under these circumstances, expresses the value of torah
lishmah in its most extreme form, as a “ritual in its own right.”65
We can never know with any degree of certainty how R. Shapira
himself viewed this tension of creativity in the shadow of death—if he saw
any tension at all—aside from the personal testimony that he recorded
for various audiences, both immediate and less proximate, in these ser-
mons. But I believe that critical examination of his manuscript together
with openness to the psychological and phenomenological dimensions
of suffering and creativity offers the best chance we have to do justice
to his torment.

Notes

This research was supported by Herzog College, to which I would like to express
my sincere and deepest gratitude. The present article is an updated and revised
version of an earlier Polish draft which appeared as Daniel Reiser, “Pisarstwo w
cieniu śmierci: rękopis rabina Szapiry ‘Kazania z lat szału’ w perspektywie psy-
chologicznej i fenomenologicznej,” Zagłada Żydów: Studia i Materiały 15 (2019):
62–88.
1. For more extensive biographical information, see Aharon Sorsky, “Rabbi
Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, of Blessed Memory,” in Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira,
Esh Kodesh [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei Piaseczno, 2008) 279–322;
Mendel Piekarz, The Last Hasidic Literary Document Written in Poland: The Teach-
ings of the Piaseczner Rebbe in the Warsaw Ghetto [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem, 1979). For biographical details focusing on the period of the Holocaust
derived from testimonial and archival material, see Esther Farbstein, Hidden in
Thunder, trans. Deborah Stern (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2007), 479–88;
Isaac Hershkowitz, “Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, The Piasechner Rebbe His
Holocaust and Pre-Holocaust Thought, Continuity or Discontinuity?” [in Hebrew]
(master’s thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 2005), 17–18; Zvi Leshem, “Between Mes-
sianism and Prophecy: Hasidism According to the Piaseczner Rebbe” [in Hebrew]
(PhD dissertation, Bar-Ilan University, 2007), 1–5; Ron Wacks, The Flame of the
Holy Fire: Perspectives on the Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalmish Shapira of
206 Daniel Reiser

Piaczena [in Hebrew] (Alon Shvut: Tevunot, 2010), 21–33; Kalonymus Kalman
Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in Hebrew], ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols.
(Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017), 1:13–24; Nehemia Polen, The Holy
Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw
Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), 1–14; David Biale et al., Hasidism: A
New History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 614–16, 660–62. Also,
see the recent extensive work in Polish, Marta Dudzik-Rudkowska, Pisma Rabina
Kalonimusa Szapiro (Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2017), ix–xxx.
2. Prominent works include Yissakhar Shlomo Teichtal, Eim Habanim
Semeichah: On Eretz Yisrael, Redemption, and Unity, trans. Moshe Lichtman
(Israel: Kol Mevaser Publishers, 2000), originally published in Budapest, 1943;
Ephraim Oshry, Responsa from the Holocaust, trans. Y. Leiman, rev. ed. (New
York: Judaica Press, 2001). For other Orthodox writings from the Holocaust, see
Esther Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder; Farbstein, ed., Leaves of Bitterness: Diaries,
Responsa, and Theology in the Holocaust: The Writings of Rabbi Yehoshua Moshe
Aronson [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2014); Steven T. Katz,
Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg, eds., Wrestling with God: Jewish
Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007). While the value of these works should not be minimized, it should
be noted that Em ha-Banim Semehah was largely written in Hungary prior to
the Nazi invasion of that country, while Responsa from the Holocaust was edited
following the Holocaust and is primarily concerned with issues of halakhah rather
than philosophy. Because it was written in the midst of the terrible suffering,
Sermons from the Years of Rage is a unique work entirely devoted to the subject
of suffering and tribulations.
3. The process of orally delivering the sermons on the Sabbath and recon-
structing and transcribing them afterward from memory is indicated by the text of
the sermons themselves. See, for example, Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:226:
“We said on the holy Sabbath at the kiddush,” and “Now, as I write this down, I
can add that other people told me so as well”; ibid., parashat mishpatim-shekalim
5702 (1942), 1:271: “As we said last week”; and ibid., parashat bo 5700 (1940),
2:33: “I do not remember what more we said on this matter.” (This last sermon
was later stricken out.)
4. Polen, Holy Fire, 17–20. Regarding the forced cutting of beards, see:
Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat toledot 5700 (1939), 1:92:
“They also cut off the beards of the elders of Israel, such that they are no longer
externally recognizable.” Regarding the closure of Jewish workplaces, see ibid.,
parashat be-shalah 5700 (1940), 1:103: “And similarly, when the workers are idle,
God forbid, they are in a very embittered mood, for your nation Israel needs
sustenance.” Regarding aid organizations, see ibid., parashat vayyikra 5700 (1940),
1:112: “When they give alms to one other and receive help from each other.”
Regarding hunger and the persecution or humiliation of Jews in the streets, see
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 207

ibid., 1:113: “For has an angel tasted the suffering of a Jew at the moment he is
beaten, the shame he feels as they pursue and debase him . . . or his hardship
when he lacks for food?” Regarding the Nazi justifications for killing Jews and
plundering their property, see ibid., parashat zakhor 5700 (1940), 1:115: “Now they
contrive rationales and explanations for why theft, burglary, murder, and all other
foulness are good”; and ibid., shabbat ha-gadol 5700 (1940), 1:118–20. Regarding
the killing of Jews, see ibid., pesah 5700 (1940), 1:125–26; on the prohibition of
public prayer, see ibid., parashat nitsavim 5700 (1940), 1:153–54; on the plundering
of Jewish property, see ibid., rosh ha-shanah 5701 (1940), 1:155–58. Regarding
the murder of Jews, see ibid., sukkot 5702 (1941), 1:226–30; ibid., parashat zakhor
5702 (1942), 1:275–82; and on the murder of children, ibid., hukkat 5702 (1942),
1:288–306. Regarding the spread of typhus in the Ghetto, see ibid., parashat tole-
dot 5702 (1941), 1:233–36. See also Esther-Judith Thidor-Baumel, “Esh Kodesh:
The Book of the Piaseczner Rebbe and Its Place in Understanding Religious Life
in the Warsaw Ghetto” [in Hebrew], Yalkut Moreshet 29 (1980): 173–87. For an
extensive study of the sermons in light of their historical background, see Henry
Abramson, Torah from the Years of Wrath 1939–1943: The Historical Context of
the Aish Kodesh (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017).
5. Polen, Holy Fire, 16. Regarding humiliation and threats to human dig-
nity from the beginning of the war, see Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat
toledot 5700 (1939), 1:92–93: “Now he is trampled and tread upon until he can
no longer sense whether he is a Jew, a human being, or an animal that has no
sense of self.” R. Shapira next offers words of consolation and support.
6. For example, see Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat shoftim 5701
(1941), 1:214: “For amid all of our suffering, we see that if everyone were to be
suddenly informed that they were to be saved the next day, a great share of the
hopeless would still find strength. Regrettably, however, they perceive no end to
the darkness, and many have no means of fortifying themselves and are filled with
despair as their spirits collapse, God forbid.” It is worth mentioning that rather than
hiding this fact from his Hasidim, R. Shapira discusses their dire circumstances in
his sermons and may have thus allowed them to process the experience together
within the dignified, spiritual framework of the Hasidic gathering.
7. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat ekev 5701 (1941), 1:209–10.
See his note from the end of ibid., 5702 (1942), 1:212 on the destruction of Polish
Jewry: “For the holy community is nearly in a state of complete destruction.”
8. Polen, Holy Fire, 23–24.
9. See Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:55–56.
10. Ibid., shabbat hazon 5702 (1942), 1:313–14.
11. See below, for example, on his feelings of guilt over the very act of
writing these sermons.
12. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat vayyeshev 5700 (1939), 1:97.
Although he paraphrases biblical verses, it is clear that R. Shapira’s remarks
208 Daniel Reiser

allude to both his personal circumstances and his task, as a Hasidic tsaddik, to
arouse divine mercy. See ibid.: “The blessed Holy One said, ‘It is not enough for
the righteous, that which is prepared for them in the world to come.’ It truly is
not enough for it be good in the future—mercy must be aroused now [by the
tsaddikim].” Regarding the theurgical quality of these sermons, see Don Seeman,
“Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,”
Harvard Theological Review 101, no. 3–4 (2008): 480–502; James A. Diamond,
“The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe: Diverting God’s Gaze from a Utopian End to an
Anguished Now,” Modern Judaism 30, no. 3 (2010): 299–331.
13. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat ki tavo 5700 (1940), 1:152.
14. Ibid., shabbat zakhor 5702 (1942), 1:277.
15. ŻIH (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny) Archives, manuscript no. ARG
II 15 (Ring. II/370).
16. See Daniel Reiser, “Esh Kodesh: A New Evaluation in Light of a Philolog-
ical Examination of the Manuscript,” Yad Vashem Studies 44, no. 1 (2016): 65–97.
17. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parshat ha-hodesh 5702 (1942), 1:293.
See also Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism, and ‘Useless Suffering’ in
the Warsaw Ghetto,” 488–89.
18. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973).
19. The need to write as a type of promise for eternal life is already expressed
by R. Shapira in 1928: “It is best for a person to write down all his thoughts.
Not to earn fame by writing a book, but rather to engrave his soul on paper. By
that he will sustain his soul’s worries, its successes and failures . . . and grant it
an eternal life within the lives of his readers” (Tsav ve-zeruz, 1).
20. See Plato’s dialogues “Apology,” “Crido,” and “Phaedo” in Plato: Complete
Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
21. Ibid., 28.
22. Ibid., 30.
23. See Yehuda Liebes, “The Consolation of Philosophy: An Introduction to
a Translation of the Opening Fragments of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy”
[in Hebrew], Alpayim 21 (2001): 215–23.
24. Ibid.
25. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square
Press, 1984).
26. Ibid., 126–27. For more on art and creative activity as a means of con-
tending with pain and suffering in Jewish culture, see B. Kahana, C. Deutsch, and
Redman, eds., The Enigma of Suffering [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth
Books, 2012), 319–48.
27. The irony of discussing Heidegger together with R. Shapira is not lost
on this author. Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for his affiliation with
Nazism, for which he neither apologized nor publicly expressed regret.
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 209

28. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson
(San Francisco: Harper, 1962), 285–311. See also William Large, Heidegger’s Being
and Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 73–79.
29. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 9.
30. Ibid., 9–31.
31. Eccl 1:2 (NJPS).
32. Such a philosophical approach had already been developed by Arthur
Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and in numerous works of Russian literature,
but Shestov brought it to a climax. See Adir Cohen, “Thinking Your Life: The
Personal Story Meets the Philosophical Story” [in Hebrew], Iyun u-Nehkar be-
Hakhsharat Morim 10 (2006): 191–219; Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, “Lev
Shestov i Kirkegaard,” Sovremennye Zapiski 62 (1936), 376–82 [English trans. by
Fr. S. Janos, http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1936_419.html]. See also
Elliot Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 156–74.
33. Ps 130:1.
34. Ps 22:2.
35. Ps 42:10.
36. Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. B. Martin (Athens: Ohio Uni-
versity Press, 1966), 489. Besinnen in German means to think about something.
37. Shestov did not reject scientific truth or technological advancement, but
he did not think that science could endow man’s life with meaning.
38. Cohen, “Thinking Your Life,” 201.
39. Ibid., 202. A similar perception, without the element of faith, appears in
the philosophy of Heidegger. For him, death must by necessity lead to life, to the
powerful longing to live life to the fullest and actualize the potential latent within
us. Death “attracts” us in order that we might thrust it aside, in order that we put
an end to that routine that transforms us into creations engaged in evading being
rather than being itself. Our escape from death is the escape from life into the
“safe” hands of “them,” who endow us with false meaning and security and take
away from us our most precious possession—our selfhood. See the summary in
Heidegger, Being and Time, 311.
40. Hillel Zeitlin, “Rebbe: Craftsman and Pedagogue” [in Hebrew], in Zeitlin,
Sifran shel Yehidim (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1979), 241–44.
41. Hillel Zeitlin, “From the Depths of Doubt and Despair (On the Tre-
mendous Striving of Lev Shestov)” [in Hebrew], Ha-Tekufah 20 (1923): 425–44
and 21 (1924): 369–79. I am grateful to Sam Glauber for drawing my attention
to important differences between Hillel Zeitlin’s original words, which were pub-
lished in his lifetime, and his edited books, which were published after his death.
42. Ibid., 427.
43. Ibid., 428–29. See further ibid., 442–43.
210 Daniel Reiser

44. Hillel Zeitlin, “L. Shestov” [in Hebrew], Ha-Me’orer 2, no. 5 (1907): 177.
45. B. Bava Batra 10b. See Zeitlin, “L. Shestov,” who observes that the dis-
cussion pertains to martyrdom: “Martyrs—no other creation can stand in their
company.” See also Midrash Zuta Kohelet 9:10 [Buber]; Kohelet Rabba 9:1 [Vilna].
46. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Derekh ha-Melekh parashat vayyeshev 5690
(1929), 51. The word roshem in Hebrew has two meanings: “impression” and “to
write.” R. Shapira makes clever use of the word, implying both meanings.
47. Ibid., 53. See also ibid., 433: “I am writing notes (reshimot) on Sefer
ha-Zohar, that these notes will, with God’s help, inscribe the holy Zohar within
me (ve-yirashem be-Zohar ha-kadosh).
48. M. Avot 4:16.
49. However, see an attempt to indicate a gradated doctrine: Polen, Holy
Fire; Hershkowitz, “Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira.”
50. See Don Seeman, “Sacred Fire (Review),” Common Knowledge 9, no. 3
(2003): 547; Seeman, “Otherwise Than Meaning: On the Generosity of Ritual,”
Social Analysis 48, no. 2 (2004): 55–71; Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 465–505.
51. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 505.
52. Seeman, “Otherwise Than Meaning,” 57–59.
53. Ibid., 67.
54. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 480.
55. Ibid., 501.
56. See Elliot Wolfson, “The Mystical Significance of Torah Study in Ger-
man Pietism,” JQR 84 (1993): 43–78; Moshe Idel, “Torah: Between Presence and
Representation of the Divine in Jewish Mysticism,” in Idel, Representing God
(Boston: Brill, 2014), 31–70. Regarding Talmud study as a devotional practice
and a search for mystical self-expression in the teachings of R. Shapira, see Ariel
Evan Mayse’s article in this volume.
57. Seeman, “Otherwise Than Meaning,” 66.
58. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 498.
59. See Norman Lamm, “Pukhovitzer’s concept of Torah lishmah,” Jewish
Social Studies 30, no. 3 (1968): 149–56; Lamm, Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torah’s
Sake in the Works of Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries (New
York: Yeshiva University Press, 1989); Roland Goetschel, “Torah Lishmah as a
Central Concept in the ‘Degel mahane Efrayim’ of Moses Hayyim Ephraim of
Sudylkow,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London: Vallentine
Mitchell, 1996), 258–67.
60. M. Peah 1:1: “The study of Torah exceeds them all.”
61. I want to emphasize that R. Shapira’s depiction of writing as a natural
obligation was already expressed in his prewar Tsav ve-zeruz, 42: “When will I
pay my debts to my soul, after I promised her [my soul] to deliver from within
her books and other writings . . . with which she is pregnant.” Emphasis added. I
would like to thank Shalom Matan Shalom for bringing this passage to my attention.
 Creative Writing in the Shadow of Death 211

62. See Ariel Evan Mayse, this volume.

63. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:52, 70–72.
64. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 467.
65. In contrast to that of R. Shapira, R. Teikhtal’s writing during the Holo-
caust (the work Eim Ha-Banim Semehah) is a clear example of writing that is
done declaredly as an active mystical ritual. Teikhtal writes his book as an act
of mystical activity in order to attract the merit (zekhut) of the Land of Israel to
the Diaspora and thereby be saved. See Eliezer Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation
[in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1994), 100–104.
 9

Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children

Human Individuation at the
Cusp of Persistence and Perishability

Nehemia Polen

Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira’s teachings in occupied Warsaw and

the Warsaw Ghetto, 1939–1942, have been examined for their views on
theodicy, suffering, the destiny of the Jewish people, and the challenge of
spiritual leadership in a time of acute collective and personal crisis. This
volume is testament to those efforts. Furthermore, thanks to the publi-
cation of Daniel Reiser’s new edition of Shapira’s Sermons from the Years
of Rage (previously published under the title Esh kodesh), we now have
a fully accurate presentation of these wartime sermons (derashot) that
faithfully reflects the author’s intentions. Reiser’s new edition, arguably
the best critical edition of any Hasidic text from any period, allows us to
focus on the derashot as carefully crafted compositions and to see how
they were written, revised, augmented, and updated by the author. I have
written about these homilies in the past on the basis of the first edition
(1960), but Reiser’s new publication provides the opportunity to examine
more closely the crystallization of Shapira’s thinking and writing. Reiser’s
meticulous editing affords us nearly unprecedented access to Shapira’s
carefully laid-out structure, revealing luminous creativity from impene-
trable darkness. We now see the original manuscript in its rich layering,
and on facing pages we have an eminently readable transcription that

213
214 Nehemia Polen

preserves the strata while bringing clarity to the homilies in their entirety.
Of special interest is the paragraphing that indicates the major sections
of the pieces. As Reiser notes, the first edition did not always accurately
reflect Shapira’s own paragraphing. This is particularly significant in light
of the fact that Shapira himself took great care to graphically indicate and
preserve his divisional schema.
I take this opportunity to focus on one sermon, parashat hukkat
5702 (June 27, 1942).1 By any measure, this sermon is a large and sub-
stantial composition, which is notable and rather surprising in light of the
historical circumstances in which it was composed. In spite of the chaos
and utter collapse of the Ghetto at the precipice of annihilation after three
crushing years, we have before us not fragmentary notes or haphazard
jottings but a complex, cohesive effort, reflecting sustained and penetrating
deliberation about ultimate theological matters. The sermon was written
in the summer of 1942, at a time when the violence directed against the
defenseless and starving Ghetto residents had reached a shocking level
of intensity and most of the remaining Jews were soon to be deported to
their deaths. Just at this moment, when the total scope of the catastrophe
must have been coming into clear view for R. Shapira, we find several
sermons that are the most complex, deeply reflective, movingly written,
and tightly constructed in his entire Ghetto corpus.2 Evidently tapping
new resources of insight and creativity, Shapira deploys familiar texts and
sacred themes in boldly provocative and penetrating ways.3 This derashah
is worthy of fine-grained analysis not only because it is one of the last
homilies he wrote but also because it is an extraordinary example of the
author’s power in adversity, his astonishing originality, his emotional and
intellectual range, and his depth of penetration into the human condition.
My analysis aims to show that these extended derashot bear an inner
coherence not immediately evident in a piece that ranges widely over
different ideas, motifs, moods, and images. The architectural integrity of
the piece reveals Shapira’s compositional control, and this recognition of
structural coherence—how the parts and the whole fit together—will enable
us to grasp his message more securely, with firmer comprehensiveness.
Unlike the earlier printed edition, Reiser’s edition faithfully preserves
Shapira’s paragraphing, revealing six individual sections. Most paragraphs
are indicated by blank spaces in the manuscript, either at the beginning
of a new line or at the end of a line. These sectional divisions were quite
important to Shapira, as evidenced by the fact that the open spaces were
preserved throughout the stages of revision and markup. That is, the man-
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 215

uscript reveals successive stages of correction, amplification, augmentation,

and updating, all meticulously presented in the Reiser edition. In order
to find room for additional words, Shapira wrote on the margins of his
paper and devised a system of letter-keys, enabling him to add sizeable
new blocks of material at the top or bottom of the sheets (see Reiser, this
volume). Paper was at a premium, and it often took ingenuity to find an
appropriate area of sufficient amplitude on the page to hold the added
words. With all that, Shapira never compromised the paragraphing schema
by utilizing the readily available blank lines in his layout. (In one case,
he indicated the end of a section with a markup sign equivalent to our
letter “Z,” reproduced faithfully by Reiser.) All this indicates that Shapira
considered the design of his derashah, its divisions and overall structure,
to be essential to his message and crafted them with care and attention to
the finest detail. We would do well, therefore, to follow his lead by paying
attention to this structure, holding the parts and their relationship with
one another in our consciousness as we attempt to grasp it in its entirety.
What follows is a presentation of each of the six sections, including
key passages in translation, as well as a summary of each section.

Introduction and Section One

The derashah for parashat hukkat 1942 focuses on a text in Numbers 20, so
it will be helpful to briefly review the main points of this biblical chapter.
Near the end of their long wilderness trek, the Israelites are camped at
Kadesh, about to begin the final stage of their journey to the promised
land (v. 1). Miriam dies and is buried there (v. 2). Immediately thereafter,
water runs out, causing the people to angrily confront their leaders, Moses
and Aaron (v. 3). It is worth noting that rabbinic tradition suggests that the
proximity of the water crisis with Miriam’s death indicates that her merit
prevented this crisis while she lived. In response to the people’s complaint,
God instructs Moses to take his special rod and speak to a certain rock,
which will bring forth water for the people (v. 8). Moses follows God’s
instructions, but instead of speaking to the rock, he strikes it with his
rod (v. 11). Water does flow abundantly, but Moses’s deviation from the
divine command is considered a sin, and Moses loses the opportunity to
lead the people into the promised land (v. 12).4
According to early rabbinic chronology, these events took place in
the final year of the forty-year wilderness trek following the exodus. As
216 Nehemia Polen

early as the biblical period, the prophet Micah proclaimed that God had
sent the Israelites three great leaders: Moses, Aaron, and Miriam (Mic
6:4). Building on this theme, a talmudic passage states that “three great
leaders arose for the Israelites: Moses, Aaron and Miriam; and three good
gifts were bestowed upon the people in their virtue: the well, the clouds
of glory, and the manna. The well was provided in the merit of Miriam,
the cloud in the merit of Aaron, and the manna in the merit of Moses.”5
This rabbinic reading highlights three miraculous phenomena that
provided the Israelites with their most basic needs during their forty-year
wilderness trek: the well, a constant source of water that miraculously
accompanied the people wherever they encamped; the divine cloud that
directed their travels and gave visible evidence of God’s presence; and the
“food from heaven,” or manna. The association of the cloud with Aaron
makes perfect sense, since Aaron presided over the tabernacle, where
the cloud was located (Exod 40:34–38; Lev 16:2; Num 10:11). Moses is
central to the manna narrative in Exod 16, and, as the one figure who
actually went all the way to the top of Sinai to be with God, it is natural
that he should be the one associated with the “food from heaven.” But
what about Miriam? What is her connection to the well in particular? It
is true that the juxtaposition of the water crisis and Miriam’s death (Num
20:2–3) suggests that as long as Miriam was alive, the well’s water was
provided in her merit.6 But, Shapira asks, what is the inner significance
of this juxtaposition? What was it about Miriam that made her the most
appropriate conduit for a miraculous water supply? He quickly adds that
he is not attempting to comprehend Miriam’s spiritual level, which is,
he says, entirely beyond our ability to assess. This is a hermeneutic of
ethical, epistemological, and spiritual humility, an acknowledgment of
incommensurate horizons. Rather, Shapira writes, his intention is to probe
what lesson we might derive from the linkage of Miriam and the well. As
he puts it, “What does this suggest to us [for our own spiritual lives]”?
His answer invokes another talmudic teaching about the three great
leaders of the wilderness period. Based on a literal reading of the phrase
al pi Adonai (Num 33:38; Deut 34:5), the deaths of Moses and Aaron are
said to have been brought about by “God’s mouth,” by a divine kiss. The
Talmud adds Miriam to this most rare group of individuals whose lives
came to an end in blissful mouth-to-mouth intimacy with their divine
creator.7 But, the Talmud asks, why does Scripture not say this explicitly?
The account of Miriam’s death does not mention the key phrase al pi
Adonai. The Talmud answers, as conveyed by Rashi, that it would not have
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 217

been respectful to portray God kissing a woman. Yet the Talmud does
not hesitate to fill in this key detail: Miriam did die, like her brothers, by
divine kiss, although Scripture was reticent to say so explicitly.
Shapira asks the obvious question: Since God does not have a body,
the “kiss” must be understood figuratively, so what is disrespectful about
saying that God kissed Miriam?8
Shapira’s response invokes a cornerstone of Hasidic theology: that
a life of religious aspiration and virtuous action is attributable to divine
grace. What impels some people and not others to strive for virtue and
holiness? Where does the yearning come from, if not from God?
Shapira suggests that this logic applies most directly to men, rather
than to women.
As he puts it:

When a woman becomes a tsaddeket [feminine form of tsad-

dik], studies Torah, and fulfills the commandments, that is her
own accomplishment, since she is not under any obligation to
do so; heaven has not really aroused her to do what she did.
Miriam did indeed die by a divine kiss. But Scripture
does not apply the key phrase al pi Adonai, “by God’s mouth,”
to Miriam, because her level of spiritual attainment was even
higher [than that of Moses and Aaron], since her achievements
were not attributable to divine elicitation but rather to her own
self-generated effort. She was not responding to the command
of “God’s mouth.” The source of her service was within her; it
flowed [internally] from her. That is why the well, the flowing
source of holy living water, appeared by virtue of her merit.

Here is the connection between the well and Miriam: The water that
miraculously accompanied the Israelites was a flowing artesian well, gush-
ing on its own, not needing to be primed or pumped. Similarly, Miriam’s
spirituality was self-generated. Drawing upon her own inner resources and
flowing from the depth of her being, it depended upon no other—not
even, as it were, the divine Other.
This exegesis is daring in the context of traditional Jewish thought,
which typically sees heteronomous submission to a divine command as
superior to autonomous, voluntary performance of a good deed. In the
classic formulation of the Talmud, “One who is commanded and fulfils the
command is greater than one who fulfils it without being commanded.”
218 Nehemia Polen

Indeed, a major determinant of women’s lesser standing in certain areas

of Jewish law is their status as persons “not commanded.” Shapira actu-
ally uses the talmudic language here: einah metsuvah ve-osah (one who
acts without being commanded), but instead of a barrier to full religious
standing, he turns it into an asset.

Section Two: Eternity Realized through Children

The sermon’s next section raises the question of why Moses hit the rock
in an effort to supply water even though God had commanded him to
speak to it. This question is an old crux that has been discussed over
several centuries, but Shapira’s concern here is not so much to add yet
another layer to a vast body of scriptural interpretation as it is to explore
the question from the perspective of be-remez la-avodah (textual hints for
sacred service). Much like the hermeneutic modesty we saw above with
regard to comprehending the distinction granted to Miriam, the rabbi
reminds us that we cannot comprehend the inner life of Moses, which
is utterly beyond our own religious horizons. Rather, we are looking for
useful guidance in our own lives. The assumption is that if the Torah
tells us the story of what appears to be a sin on Moses’s part, there must
be some lesson for readers throughout the ages and especially for the
rabbi’s own time and place (Warsaw Ghetto, June 1942); there must be
an accessible hint for sacred service.
Shapira begins the development of this section by introducing a
Zohar teaching that blessing a person’s children is equivalent to blessing
that person him- or herself.9 This in turn launches an exploration of why
humans identify so strongly with the fate of their children. Drawing on
traditional sources, he asserts that before Adam’s sin, humans would have
lived forever, but now the survival of the individual is only through his or
her descendants. The urge to live and survive is primal, at the constitutive
core of what it means to be human, and in the post-Edenic world, that
urge is only realizable through the ongoing survival of one’s children and
subsequent generations. This is a reflection of being “children of God”
(Deut 14:1); as God’s children, we have a tacit intuition of eternity that can
only be realized by having children and seeing them survive and flourish.
The intensity of one’s identification with one’s children therefore emerges
from a deep sense of our divine nature. We are bearers of eternity and
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 219

feel impelled to realize and instantiate that capacity. Sin makes us mortal,
but our godly nature is still intact, reflected in the urge to have children.

Section Three: Time and Individuation

The homily has thus far been grounded in issues suggested by biblical
narratives and themes: Miriam’s death and water, Eden and sin, mortality
and survival, children and eternity. This next section turns to more overtly
mystical ideas, introducing the principle of generativity (holadot) as the
core of the kabbalistic process of creation. The sefirot—the ten manifes-
tations of the unnamed infinite—are conceived here as dynamic foci of
incessant propagation. Popular introductions to the Kabbalah typically
display the sefirot as circular foci arrayed in stable triadic groups. This can
be misleading, since it suggests that the sefirot are static characterizations
of divinity with fixed positions. It is better to think of them as dynamic
constellations interacting with and shaping each other in an ever-fluid
cosmic divine dance. The sefirot reveal the Absolute turning toward Being
in a great chain, and this concatenation is ever-unfolding in relational
exchange, an inter-sefirotic cascade that is supple, vital, endlessly fertile.
As Shapira puts it, “[T]he main activity of the [parallel, superimposed]
worlds [described in Lurianic Kabbalah] and the sefirot is generativity
and incessant novelty.”10
Next, Shapira cites a famous comment by the medieval commenta-
tor Rashi on Gen 1:1: “Initially, God intended to create the world to be
governed under the rule of strict justice (middat ha-din), but God realized
that the world could not thus endure and therefore gave precedence to
divine mercy and affiliated it with divine justice (middat ha-rahamim).”
This dictum is conventionally understood to mean that God had origi-
nally wanted the world (and in particular, humanity) to be governed by
a strict principle of reward and punishment. Sins would trigger swift and
inescapable retribution. But God saw that the world could not survive
under such a regime, and God tempered din with rahamim (mercy). Din
is justice, judgment, and rigor. When carefully measured and titrated, it is
important for the smooth running of the world; it is the basis of all legal
systems and standards of assessment. When it is allowed to swell exces-
sively, however, it may morph into undue severity and even malevolence.
As Gershom Scholem pointed out, one kabbalistic explanation for evil is
220 Nehemia Polen

that it represents the “hypertrophy of din.”11 Rahamim is the principle of

compassion that sweetens din, keeping the principle of rigor in check and
saving it from its own temptation to immoderation.
In a creative rereading of this dictum, Shapira frames the terms rather
differently. Instead of opposing dispensations held in balance, polar modes
of adjudicating the world pulling in contrary directions that must temper
each other, they become two possibilities of the temporal unfolding of
being. As we saw in the previous section, God is revealed in generativity.
But the principle of din is now understood to mean continual creation.
Here, Shapira invites us to imagine a counter-world, a kabbalistic thought
experiment. In this world, everything is in ceaseless, constant flux. There
is no permanence, for absolutely everything is subject to continual and
immediate change. Every state of being instantaneously collapses into
another state. A close analogy to what Shapira has in mind is the world of
quantum mechanics, where many elementary particles are fundamentally
unstable, decaying into other particles that in turn may be annihilated,
only detectable by the traces they leave in a cloud chamber. These reso-
nances come into being—if “being” is the right term—for an instant and
immediately change to some other state or resonance. They are virtual
particles whose fate is to vanish in a flash into another particle or particles.
This is the way Shapira wants us to imagine a world governed solely by
middat ha-din: it would be a web of ceaseless flux and impermanence.
As he puts it, “Divine self-disclosure is through acts of creation:
continual creation in an ongoing, endlessly cascading sequence.” But cre-
ation is one thing, and endurance is another. Human existence requires a
measure of duration. Durative time is necessary for a unique personality
to develop, for acts of agency, for the ability to innovate and the freedom
to make mistakes; in a word: for individuation.
A world governed by pure din could not endure in any meaningful
human sense. It would have no permanence, no possibility of stability
consistent with identity formation. In such a world, human beings would
not be possible, for to be human means to have the opportunity to develop
a personality that is fluid yet ripens toward a coherent sense of self. There-
fore, God combined the principle of din with middat ha-rahamim, the
principle of compassion. This principle is now understood as the durative
temporality to develop, to grow, to err, to recover, to pick up where one
has left off and carry forward. Rahamim slows the pace of change just
enough so that human personality, with all its imperfections, false starts,
stumbles, and linked recoveries, has room to grow and be nurtured. To
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 221

be human requires a delicate balance of permanence and change. In a

world of pure middat ha-din, all existents would be no more than vectors
of generativity, ceaselessly collapsing into other states or resonances in
an endless sequence. Middat ha-rahamim allows for growth out of the
ground of imperfection, a modified stability that affords an ample yet
limited lifespan. The yearning for permanent survival, for the image of
God embedded in humans, is still evident, expressed in the urge to have
children. In the parlance of classic rabbinic theology, to be human is to
have behirah, freedom of choice, including freedom to sin. This entails
that each individual life will come to closure, yet human beings still leave
tracks pointing to eternity, through their progeny.
And “progeny” here does not only mean one’s biological children.
Shapira adduces the talmudic teaching that “when a person teaches Torah
to someone else’s child, Scripture accounts it as if they had given birth to
that child.” He explains that teaching Torah “is like inter-sefirotic generation:
to teach someone Torah is to cultivate and reveal their inner luminosity
and holiness.” Having a hand in the spiritual growth of another person,
especially a child, is as significant as giving birth to biological progeny—in
a kabbalistic sense, perhaps even more significant.

Section Four: Schoolchildren as the Face of the Shekhinah

The fourth section of the sermon continues the theme of teaching Torah,
now evoking the motif that “schoolchildren are the face of the Shekhinah.”
Teaching—the elicitation of new insight and realization in another per-
son, especially a young person—is the very essence of what it means to
create; it is a this-worldly parallel to inter-sefirotic generativity. Nothing
partakes of divinity more than assisting in the moral, intellectual, and
spiritual formation of another person, especially a young person whose
physical and spiritual growth are unfolding in tandem. Schoolchildren, in
their openness, energetic vitality, and eagerness to learn, are the embodied
personification of divinity’s cutting edge. In the faces of children, one can
discern the leading surface of godly generativity. Furthermore, as noted
above, one’s progeny are emissaries to the future, voyagers of the self
sent ahead in time to stake out a claim that gestures to eternity. A tragic
consequence of the sacredness and vulnerability of children is that they
are often the first targets of attack by malevolent actors who wish to harm
not just Jews but God’s very self. Furthermore, to murder children (as R.
222 Nehemia Polen

Shapira had now witnessed in the Ghetto) is to reach into the afterlife
(the “Garden of Eden,” in his words, where individual souls retain their
identities and enjoy beatific awareness) and harm their departed parents,
since the prospects of the dead for survival in the earthly plane are bound
up with the fate of their descendants. To murder the children of those
already slain is thus to slay the dead a second time. The rabbi writes,
“Even now [June 1942], to our great distress, we see that, beyond all the
astonishingly sadistic, murderous actions directed against us, the house
of Israel, the sadism and murderous actions directed against little boys
and girls exceeds everything. Woe! What has befallen us?!”

Section Five: The Omnipresence of God, the Preciousness

of Individuals, the Suffering of Children

Section five is by far the longest of all the sections (for specifics, see
footnote).12 It exceeds the other sections not just in lines of text but also
in its wide range of mood and register. R. Shapira writes:

Every Israelite person13 believes that “there is none else beside

him” (Deut 4:35). Our mystical literature interprets this verse
to mean not only that there is no other deity beside him but
that there is no existence at all in the universe other than him;
the entire universe and all that is within it is the luminous aura
of divinity. For that reason, nothing in the world should be
taken as an isolated entity, an existent unto itself, but rather as
God’s aura. So it is with progeny, Israelite children: one must
not take them to be an isolated class. One should not think
of them as “our children” [in a proprietary sense]. Rather,
think of children as living exemplars of the cosmic processes
of creation and innovation. Children reveal divinity in this
world. They also represent Israel’s linkage to eternity. So it is
with Torah study: the Torah that we learn with little children,
or collegial Torah study with friends, or moments when we
give ethical instruction and spiritual direction. One should
not think of these activities as isolated endeavors [set apart
from a broader, more expansive horizon of meaning]. Rather,
they are supernal processes, enactments of divine revelation.
They are manifestations of cosmic renewal and generativity.
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 223

Think this way: at first your interlocutor was not a scholar of

Torah, not a person of cultivated ethical sensibility, and now
[in part as a result of your instruction], he has been given new
life, transformed into a Torah scholar, an exemplar of moral
stature and noble disposition. To cite the talmudic dictum
again, teaching someone else is like giving birth to that person.
Indeed, all acts of regeneration and creation are revelations of
divinity, since there is nothing other than God, no other entity
in existence. It follows that everything an Israelite person does
and says is really, in their heart of hearts, directed to God. The
person’s soul knows that there is nothing other than God, that
everything is divinity; the soul is already directing all action
and speech toward God. But human corporeality hides this,
just as it hides the soul’s holiness and yearning for God. It only
appears to the person that he is engaged in activities and saying
words relevant to physical needs, [while in actuality these are
mundane projections of higher-order spiritual aspirations]. And
when we ask another Israelite for a favor, the soul knows that
only God can grant the favor, and the human to whom we are
making the request is just God’s messenger. [On the conscious
level,] we may think that we’re asking a specific person for
the favor, but our soul within is beseeching God, who has
the power to grant all things, who as compassionate parent
will have compassion and deliver us. When we hear victims
crying in agony, ratevet, ratevet [Help! Help!], we must know
that this is their soul’s cry—indeed, the cry of us all to God
the compassionate parent, rateve, rateve, while there is still a
spark of life within us. It is indeed astonishing that the world
still stands after so many such cries. . . . Innocent children,
pure angels, are being killed and slaughtered just because they
are Israelites. . . . They fill the entire space of the cosmos with
their cries—and yet the world does not revert to primordial
liquidity. It remains standing, as if God were unmoved, heaven
forfend! . . . It is incomprehensible [why the cries do not burst
through all barriers, reach God’s ears, and provoke immediate
intervention to save them]. Surely, we are not alone in our
prayers. Surely our ancestors—our patriarchs and matriarchs,
all the male and female prophets [nevi’im u-nevi’ot], all the
saintly men and women [tsaddikim ve-tsadkaniyot] are not
224 Nehemia Polen

resting, not silent in the face of our distress. Surely, they are
raising an uproar, shaking up the Edenic afterworld and all the
heavenly chambers with the magnitude of our calamity. Surely,
they are not taking comfort in the complacent suggestion that
“in any event the people of Israel will survive.” [This is entirely
inadequate, since] one must suspend the sanctity of Sabbath
in order to save even one Israelite in danger. Tsaddikim in
this world prayed not only for the community but for each
individual Israelite person. Surely now [in the afterworld] they
are raising a furor on behalf of each Israelite.

This section begins with a reference to the classic Hasidic teaching of

acosmism, the doctrine that denies ultimate reality to the cosmos. Perhaps
the most famous and forceful articulation of this teaching is that of Rabbi
Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, in his Gate of
Unity and Faith. He writes,

If the eye was permitted to see and perceive the living force and
the spiritual essence of each created being, bestowed upon it
from the source of God’s mouth and the breath of His mouth,
the physicality of the created being and its materiality and
reality would not appear at all to our eyes. For its existence
is really negated in relation to the living force and spirituality
that is within it. . . . Accordingly “there is nothing else beside
Him,” in truth.14

Yet Shapira immediately reframes this classic Hasidic doctrine in a man-

ner that encourages the development of an individual spiritual self (see
Maayan, this volume), countering the temptation to understand the dic-
tum that “there is nothing other than God” as a negation of the world,
or at least a negation of the value of particulars. If everything is God, as
early Hasidic sources emphasize, then one may be prone to see all exis-
tence as homogeneous and undifferentiated, without meaningful texture
and granularity. In particular, erasure of difference might seem to leave
little room for the flourishing of individual human beings. So, consistent
with the rest of his corpus and indeed with his entire life’s work, Shapira
endeavors to show how the omnipresence of God can foster awareness of
the uniqueness and inestimable significance of individuals (see Seeman,
this volume). The mysticism here is not one of negation of the world
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 225

and absorption into the Absolute but of the centrality and sacredness of
unique individuals, especially children. It follows that there is momentous
significance to participating in the creation of other persons, whether by
biological generativity (procreation) or in the formation of mind and spirit
by teaching Torah. Divinity is everywhere, but the traces of the divine are
to be found in the nodal points where one human being interacts with
another in positive ways, fostering the development of the divine face that
is the living, growing human being.
Section five also contains a passage of extreme emotion, an intense
and unsuppressed cry of pain, no doubt provoked by an atrocity he
had witnessed, still raw in his mind. “When we hear victims crying in
agony, ratevet, ratevet [Help! Help!] we must know that this is their soul’s
cry—indeed the cry of us all to God, the compassionate parent, ratevet,
rateve, while there is still a spark of life within us.” This kind of outburst
is quite unusual for the rabbi, who generally keeps his emotions in check
and writes with a sobriety and judicious balance that is quite astonishing
given the circumstances.15 Yet here he allows his agony to burst forth onto
the page. Evidently, children under fearful torture were crying desperately
for help,16 with parents and onlookers unable to save them. Perhaps even
more troubling, it seemed that God himself was indifferent to those cries,
cries that should have shaken the world to its foundations. Eschewing the
lame consolation that while individuals may die, the Jewish people as a
whole will survive, he conjures a vivid image of departed saints mounting
a loud protest in the afterworld, demanding divine intervention.

Section Six: Miriam as Model for Bold Religious Initiative;

Moses as Model of Leadership through Imperfection

The last section of the sermon for parashat hukkat 1942 recaps the main
themes of the homily and returns to the framing questions posed in sec-
tion one: What is the relationship between Miriam’s death and the lack of
water in the desert? How is it possible to understand the “sin” of Moses
in this context? Articulating and distilling the core message, it lifts up
the individual strands and weaves them into a thickly textured tapestry,
providing a powerful thematic resolution.

In conclusion: There is nothing other than God. Everything is

divinity’s aura. All modalities of generativity and ­origination—
226 Nehemia Polen

including the act of teaching another person—are not isolated

activities but revelatory moments of divine illumination. Even
our freely chosen good deeds are ultimately attributable to
God—since there is nothing other, no other than God. [But
if so, what room is there for human initiative?] What is left
for the person to do? We can ask that God inspire us with
the desire to choose the good, with awareness of what “good”
is. . . . [There is a virtuous circle here. Understanding what
holiness is, its value and transformative power, leads to deeper
and more intense desire to approach God.] A yearning per-
son will work to prepare himself, to make himself worthy to
receive holy light, supernal desire, and awareness. Returning
now to Miriam: She was the leader whose good deeds were
self-generated, not a response to prior divine command. This
indicates that the spiritual elevation she achieved, the com-
manding heights of her virtue, were the result of an abundance
of intense yearning that came from within her. So as long as
Miriam was alive, she was able to transmit her mode of service
to the rest of Israel, sparking them to feel yearning for God
and enabling them to be worthy of receiving the supernal
lights channeled by Moses. But when she passed away, their
yearning dissipated, and they were no longer able to receive
Moses’s supernal light. Moses needed to find a way to restore
their internal yearning, to rouse them and elevate them, but
in a manner that would be appropriate for them, not for him.
How to do this? He was compelled to meet them at their
level by doing something that would be considered a sin for
him, a sin related to theirs. The people bickered about water,
and Moses—in bringing forth water—disobeyed an aspect of
God’s command, hitting the rock rather than speaking to it.
He inclined himself to the people’s level by contravening the
precise terms of God’s command, generating the need for his
own repentance. By placing himself in the role of sinner, he
was able to bond with the people. If you are attempting to lift
up others in need, you must share their predicament. Moses
yearned to return to a fully right relationship with God, and
that yearning was transmitted to the people. Thus, Moses found
a way to substitute for Miriam’s self-generated yearning. He
did indeed lift up the people and effected the return of the
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 227

overflowing wellspring. And along with the return of the water,

there came a rush of spiritual bounty and great deliverance.

Summary and Discussion

We now survey this derashah as a whole, reviewing the individual sections,

tracing common threads, and discerning unifying themes.
Section one launches with a midrash-inflected reading of Num 20:1–3,
deployed to assert the unique significance of women’s spirituality. Such an
emphasis is unusual even today in the tradition-bound society of Hasi-
dism and was still more so in Shapira’s day.17 Miriam serves as a biblical
exemplar for autonomous spiritual yearning, establishing a domain that in
some measure avoids the ineluctable attribution of virtue to God. Miriam’s
spirituality is self-generated, drawing upon her own inner resources. In
this approach, men’s religious practice is always commanded by God and
therefore not truly innovative. The religious acts of men are always in
response to a prior heavenly call and therefore can never be considered
the result of their own initiative. Women, however, are not obligated to
fulfill temporally linked commandments, so when they take the initiative
to do so, they achieve autonomous, self-generated stature.
Section two also focuses on biblical texts read through a rabbinic
lens, beginning with Num 20:11, in which Moses strikes the rock to bring
forth water for his people. For reasons that only become clear much later
in the homily, the rabbi then moves to the topic of parents and children,
beginning with Gen 48:15, Jacob’s blessing to Joseph, which turns out to
be Jacob’s blessing to Joseph’s children. Then the focus turns to death and
the limits on the human lifespan, understood as a consequence of the sin
in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:19). Conversely, Deut 14:1 suggests that
as “children of God,” we have an impulse for permanence, a yearning for
eternity expressed in the desire for progeny. Shapira’s reading of these
sources is supported by contemporary scholars who note that the biblical
cultural milieu “understands the self in familial, transgenerational terms”
and that in the biblical period death did not have the finality that it has
in our own culture, “with a more individualistic, atomistic understanding
of the self.”18
Section three moves on to a kabbalistic development of the themes
of limited lifespan and survival through children. Divine compassion
(rahamim) enables individuals to survive and develop into robust yet
228 Nehemia Polen

fragile personalities. In a bold interpretive move, the rabbi frames the

old Talmudic-midrashic phrase middat ha-rahamim as describing the
moderation of a primal rate of change, a disposition that allows for the
emergence of human personhood, flawed and shadowed by death yet
buoyed by constant opportunity for improvement and self-correction
and impelled by an internal divine spark to seek eternity through prog-
eny. The rabbi’s thinking here may be helpfully illuminated by the words
of a recent expositor of Bible and Kabbalah who does not mention the
work of Shapira but whose writing is very congenial to it. I refer to the
late Charles Mopsik, who, in an important article called “The Body of
Engenderment,” writes:

A single notion qualifies cosmogonic becoming and human

genealogy: in both cases the text employs the term toledot,
which can be translated as either “engenderments,” “begettings”
or “generation.” . . . The process of creation and the process
of procreation, though different, are designated by the same
vocable, which implies that the concept of human generation
and filiation is rightfully inscribed within the divine creative
movement, that procreation merely continues cosmogenesis,
that it is a later stage of cosmogenesis.19 . . . By reproducing,
religious man imitates the divine work of the original organiza-
tion of the cosmos and his procreative act is perhaps considered
as the ritual reenactment of cosmogony.20

Section four amplifies these themes further, focusing on schoolchil-

dren, exemplars of growth on the cusp of bodily, emotional, intellectual,
and spiritual development. The “face of the Shekhinah” is a human being
in dynamic process, the leading edge of emergent personhood. To assist
in the healthy growth of such a being is akin to participating in sefirotic
propagation. Teaching Torah is truly a divine activity.
Section five begins with the classic Hasidic formulation of acosmism,
but the point is not the dissolution of the self or the negation of one’s
being. Personality is not transcended but developed and refined, without
ego-attachment or self-absorption. In a very powerful passage within this
section, Shapira reminds his readers that parents should not view their
children in a proprietary manner. Parents ought not be thinking of “our
children,” as he puts it. Similarly, teachers cannot claim ownership—
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 229

intellectual or otherwise—of their disciples. The relationship is recast as

a metaphysical one: the parent or the teacher is participating in a divine
process of birthing new personality, of character formation. This surely
has the result of setting one’s children and students free to find their own
path, but in this context, it functions as sober and painful pastoral advice
to soften the blow of death. Losing a child—as Shapira did—is the worst
fate a parent could imagine, yet the rabbi is reminding himself and others
that children never belong to parents as possessions. They are not property
or assets to be grasped, held onto, or, God forbid, lost to death but are
the face of divinity that one has been privileged to engender and mentor.
Hasidic acosmism is marshaled in the service of individuation, dialogical
relationship, and some measure of pastoral easing of pain.
The sixth and final section draws together all the themes of the
sermon. Since “everything is an aura of divinity,” the real religious ques-
tion is: What room is there for personhood, for freedom of choice, for
the action of the individual in a world where all is divine? The response
returns us to Miriam and her wellspring and later to Moses hitting the
rock. Miriam is the model of self-generated yearning, and Moses is the
exemplar of the near-perfect leader adopting the burden of imperfection
in order to identify with his flawed people to channel yearning, clearing
space for return and growth. Moses’s “sin” was a replacement for the loss
of Miriam’s self-generated religious initiative, her wellspring of yearning.
The personalities of Miriam and Moses shine precisely at the moment
they display autonomy and initiative, when they seemingly defy the mys-
tical narrative of “all-is-God.” While the formula ein od milvado (there is
nothing other than God) is evoked, the formula is deployed differently
from the way it was typically understood in early Hasidism. Rather than
the dissolution of particulars into the monistic One, it conveys the emer-
gence and embodiment of particulars from the One, especially in human
individuation and development. All-embracing divinity does not absorb
everything back into itself so much as it propagates by transmission from
node to node in an ever-expanding relational lattice that we call birthing,
teaching, and mentoring. To quote Mopsik again:

By mating and procreating man furthers the theophanic

lineage—each new generation is thus a stage . . . of the
manifestation of God in time. God does not fulfill [God’s]
being in one individual at one unique moment. In order to
230 Nehemia Polen

move toward [God’s] fulfillment, in order to be personified

[God] must pass into time’s texture woven by the threads of
engenderment.21

Coda: Miriam Shows the Way of Leadership to Moses

We now see the six sections—the biblical interpretations, the kabbalistic

expositions, the cries of pain and protest, the theology of personalism, the
references to his own situation—coalescing. Because the human condition
is biologically and temporally bounded, the importance of what we leave
for others is heightened. We savor the sanctity of the particular the more
we grasp the pervading immanence of the absolute. The mystic maxim of
acosmism, “There is nothing other than divinity,” points to the irreducible
granularity of existence and to the sacredness of human life, with its shout
of joys and, tragically, its desperate calls for help. Divinity emergent in
the world is embedded in an ever-propagating distributed network, and
divinity’s leading edge—the face of the Shekhinah—is the face of the child:
vulnerable, open, vitally keen to grow and learn.
The focus on Miriam and women’s spiritual autonomy, the motiva-
tion for Moses’s puzzling disobedience in striking the rock, the framing
of human existence on the cusp of persistence versus perishability, and
the fragile holiness of children: these are all ways of reserving a space for
human initiative, enabling agency and creative movement, unencumbered
by the overwhelming weight of omnipresent divinity, despite this being the
undisputed cornerstone of Hasidic theology, including R. Shapira’s own.
We might also suggest that by focusing on Miriam and Moses, the rabbi
is alluding to his own situation, bereft of his own wife, Miriam, grieving
the death of his son, and fearful for the fate of his daughter, struggling
to lead his flock with some measure of hope and comfort, perhaps “hit-
ting the rock”—imploring God with uncharacteristically sharp cries of
pain and protest—seeing everything through the eyes of a chastened yet
deeper faith.22
What the rabbi offers us here is not so much a philosophical or
theological system but rather a devotional stance. It will be recalled that
he emphasizes again and again that his goal is not some graspable ultimate
Truth (which, he avers, remains unreachable) but rather remez le-inyan
avodah—pointers, hints for sacred service and devotional practice. He is
offering a way to think about the human condition, about birth, growth,
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 231

death, and the way one person may beneficently influence another by
inspiration, mentoring, and teaching.
The horrors of the moment are not divorced from this perspective.
They are gazed at directly from within it. That gaze does not diminish
their pain, does not make them more palatable or understandable. But it
does give the believer a language to give meaningful voice to that pain,
to protest, to remain present and engaged, to retain hope, to participate
in the pain of others, including the pain of God.
I hope to have demonstrated the benefit of seeing a derashah as a
whole rather than as merely a resource for mining, piecemeal. This sermon
is cohesive in all its parts and its meaning emerges most powerfully when
we keep all the parts in our awareness simultaneously (see also Wiskind,
this volume). This approach highlights the importance of Daniel Reiser’s
edition, which provides unprecedented access to the original work, its layers,
unfolding, and structure. In addition, I hope to have indicated the great
importance of this particular teaching, parashat hukkat 5702. Rather than
attempting to offer an explanation for what was transpiring, the sermon
shuttles between theological polarities, each of which is inadequate in
isolation: immanence and transcendence; autonomy and heteronomy; the
infinite preciousness and holiness of humans, especially children, versus the
reality of horrific attacks aimed specifically at the most vulnerable. Only
by shuttling between opposites, only by traversing the places in between,
could Shapira authentically respond to both the extremity of the evil on
the one hand and the windows of blessed possibility that he still perceived
on the other. Not a position paper, not a theodicy (compare Magid and
Seeman, this volume), it may well be the single most profound Hasidic
teaching delivered and written at the very precipice of destruction.
This is quite an agenda for any single discourse. Coming shortly
before the so-called Great Deportation—the nearly total annihilation
of the Warsaw Ghetto and the brutal removal of its inhabitants to their
destruction—I see it as a self-aware reflection on Shapira’s own role and the
legacy he wished to leave, a kind of spiritual will for posterity. The biblical
exegesis, kabbalistic and Hasidic motifs, and descriptions of heartrending
contemporary events are all aspects of a coherent composition, traversing
the widest emotional and theological range imaginable. Together, they
stand as a testament to a truly great spirit, who described himself in early
1943, just as he was consigning his manuscript to the hidden Ringelblum
archive, as “one who is broken and crushed from my sorrows and the
sorrows of Israel, sorrows as profound as the Great Deep and reaching
232 Nehemia Polen

as high as the highest heaven; one who waits for God’s salvation, which
comes in the blink of an eye.”

Notes
1. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in Hebrew],
ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017), 1:224–32;
2:232–39.
2. I am drawing upon my observations in Holy Fire: The Teachings of
Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason
Aronson, 1994), 33–34.
3. Ibid., 146.
4. I am simplifying a very large body of interpretive opinions on how to
understand the nature of Moses’s misstep, but for our purposes it is sufficient to
mention the view of Rashi that forms the basis of Shapira’s exposition.
5. B. Ta’anit 9a, in the name of R. Yose b. Yehudah.
6. Rashi, based on b. Ta’anit 9a.
7. B. Mo’ed Katan 28a.
8. Maimonides draws upon the notion of death by divine kiss in his
Guide of the Perplexed (3.51). For him, it exemplifies “spiritual death in rapture,”
as discussed by Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God: Spiritual and Mystical Death
in Judaism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), esp. 24–27. For Mai-
monides, the kiss signifies union with the divine intellect. But this interpretation
does not address why the Torah did not tell us directly that Miriam as well as
her brothers died by the divine kiss. This is particularly enigmatic in light of
the common assertion that the Hebrew God is really above gender. As Peter Eli
Gordon observes, “There is something quite odd in Maimonides’ reluctance to
speak of God’s kissing Miriam.” See Peter Eli Gordon, “The Erotics of Negative
Theology: Maimonides on Apprehension,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 2 (1995): 1–38.
This comment is on 34n71.
9. Zohar 1:211b.
10. Reiser, volume I: 301.
11. See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York:
Schocken, 1995), 405n108 and 411n54.
12. Shapira’s writing spans ninety-two manuscript lines (see volume two).
Reiser carefully preserves the rabbi’s original line arrangement, it being understood
that in many cases—especially when the original manuscript line is augmented
by a marginal amplification—it was necessary to transcribe a single original line
onto two or three printed lines, indicated by a hanging indent. The typographical
convention of hanging indent signals that, allowing for the page layout constraints
 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children 233

of the printed book, we are tracking a single line of the original manuscript,
together with any associated marginal notes.
Assigning numbers to each line of the derashah, the first section runs from
line one through line eleven, for a total of eleven lines. The second section goes
from line twelve through line twenty-three, for twelve lines. The third section
covers lines twenty-four through forty-one, eighteen lines. The fourth section
spans lines forty-two to fifty-three, for twelve lines. The fifth section spans lines
fifty-four through eighty-one, for twenty-eight lines. The sixth and final section
runs from line eighty-two through ninety-two, eleven lines. In tabular format:

Section one—11 lines

Section two—12 lines
Section three—18 lines
Section four—12 lines
Section five—28 lines
Section six—11 lines

13. Translation note: When referring to members of his community, the

rabbi generally uses “person of Israel” or “Israelite” rather than the more famil-
iar “Jewish person” or “Jew.” This is clearly a deliberate choice, and my English
rendition tracks these terms.
14. Translation by Mark Verman, from his essay “Panentheism and Acosmism
in the Kabbalah,” Studia Mystica 10, no. 2 (1987): 24–37 (with minor modifications).
15. For discussion of this feature of the text, see Don Seeman, “Ritual Effi-
cacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard
Theological Review 101 (2008): 465–505.
16. According to Adolf Berman, “The Fate of the Children in the Warsaw
Ghetto,” in The Catastrophe of European Jewry: Antecedents-History-Reflections,
ed. Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976),
400–421, the first Aktion aimed against children took place on July 22, 1942.
This teaching was delivered on June 27; evidently, brutal outrages took place
before the Aktion began in earnest. Berman writes that “the children sensed
the danger threatening them and resisted the police, struggled with them, and
tried to escape. The streets echoed with the heart-rending screams and crying
of children” (ibid., 421).
17. We might add here that the association of Miriam with water is already
noticeable in earlier biblical narratives that are not explicitly mentioned but hover
in the background, such as Exod 2:4–10 and 15:20–21.
18. These formulations are drawn from Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Lev-
enson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God
of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 107.
234 Nehemia Polen

19. Charles Mopsik, “The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the
Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah,” in Fragments for a History of the Human
Body, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Nadaff and Nadia Tazi (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989), 1:51.
20. Ibid., 53.
21. Ibid., 61.
22. The self-referential aspect is underscored when we note that his wife’s
name was Miriam (Rahel Hayyah Miriam) and that she died on Shabbat parashat
hukkat, 10 Tammuz 5697 (1937). This teaching is in part a eulogy for his wife and
a reflection on the rabbi’s own situation, bereft of his life partner but still charged
with leading his community in an unprecedented crisis. It also bears remembering
that the passages on losing children were directly and painfully relevant for Shapira,
whose beloved son Elimelekh Ben-Zion was severely wounded during the initial
bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and who died days later after agonizing
attempts to save his life. His daughter Rekhell Yehudis was still alive at this time,
but she was deported a few months later, before the burial of the manuscript.
 10

Raging against Reason

Overcoming Sekhel in R. Shapira’s Thought

James A. Diamond

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe, spent his last years
theologizing, sermonizing, and writing in the Warsaw Ghetto. Like
Franz Rosenzweig before him, who wrote much of the Star of Redemp-
tion, his philosophical magnum opus, under the extreme conditions of
a war-ravaged landscape during World War I, R. Shapira produced his
own theologically tormented masterpiece within an environment designed
for the sole purpose of generating suffering—a death space. This chapter
addresses Shapira’s paradoxical adaptation of Maimonidean rationalism
in service of his own mystical-Hasidic attempt to overcome rationalism
in the context of extreme suffering.
My aim here is to further advance an argument that I have pre-
sented elsewhere: that the full force of R. Shapira’s exegetical strategy
can be appreciated only in light of the long history of engagement with
Maimonidean thought from the Middle Ages to the modern period.1 I
will also elaborate on how this striking transformation of a bedrock of
Maimonides’s Aristotelian epistemology into a Hasidic mystical theology
of suffering serves as the logical culmination of R. Shapira’s own prewar
engagement with Maimonides. This revamped theology was made necessary
by heightened fear and awareness of the “rage” (za’am) that R. Shapira
understood as the defining characteristic of the escalating devastation

235
236 James A. Diamond

unfolding around him from the beginning of the war until his death in
1943. Thus, it is crucial to probe what R. Shapira meant by the term za’am,
which he used in the title of his Holocaust-era sermons.

Setting the Stage for Dealing with Za’am

Daniel Reiser’s new edition of R. Shapira’s collection wisely preserves his

original title, “Sermons from the Years of Rage,” rather than the more
commonly known “Holy Fire” (Esh kodesh), chosen by the Piaseczner
Hasidim who edited the original edition.2 While their choice of a title
containing an allusion to R. Shapira’s own name as well as to the martyrs
(kedoshim) who went up in flames was well intentioned, it undermines the
author’s original design and risks essentializing his work. The Hebrew term
za’am, which Shapira chose to describe the period in which he delivered
his sermons, will be shown to be central to his conception of the events
befalling his community and to the context of the spiritual response he
mounts to this challenge. We should therefore follow his lead and choose
terms with great care.
In a sermon from July 1940, Shapira cites a talmudic source describ-
ing an infinitesimal moment (rega) that occurs daily, when God is said
to be gripped by “rage” (za’am) toward his people. Balaam, the Israelites’
biblical nemesis, is described as having a unique talent for pinpoint-
ing and exploiting these moments to release a force of divine rage and
annihilation upon Israel. The Talmud then extols God’s beneficence for
never having succumbed to this za’am, for had he done so, “there would
have been not a single remnant in Israel.” The prooftext for this divine
suppression of za’am is Balaam’s assertion of the futility of any initiative
that runs counter to divine will: How can I rage against whom the Lord
has not raged? (Num 23:8).3 Though R. Shapira expresses the conviction
that Israel will withstand its suffering and ultimately prevail over its ene-
mies, there is nevertheless a revealing “instant” in this sermon at which
he contemplates the possibility of total national obliteration. In horror,
he imagines that “should the suffering last any longer, heaven forbid (has
ve-shalom), it will consist of an assault on the ‘essential dimension of Israel’
that affords it everlastingness.”4
It is inconceivable that a man as intimately absorbed in the language
of his tradition as R. Shapira would have chosen the term rage (za’am)
arbitrarily. His choice of a title for his book as he prepared to consign
 Raging against Reason 237

it for burial with the rest of the Ringelblum archives in 1943 must have
resonated with that 1940 sermon and with other uses of the term za’am
that were familiar to him from biblical and rabbinic literature.5 The term
appears in his Ghetto sermons as well as in some of the prewar sermons
that he continued to edit throughout the Ghetto period.6
Another rabbinic source that R. Shapira would certainly have known
identifies “wisdom,” hokhmah, as an instrument of protection against the
rage (za’am) posed by a powerful human king.7 I would suggest that R.
Shapira’s portrayal of the situation in the Warsaw Ghetto is in conversation
with this text, since the Jews were exposed to chaotic, destructive forces of
za’am against which “wisdom” in its colloquial sense had lost any of the
potency it may once have held. This is where Shapira enlists Maimonides
in a surprising reversal of this rabbinic source, whereby za’am becomes,
as it were, the positive catalyst for overcoming reason, here portrayed as
an obstacle to spiritual salvation. This claim requires some unpacking.
Many passages in the Ghetto sermons (see Polen, Magid, Leib Smok-
ler, this volume) reveal the depths of deprivation with which inhabitants
of the Ghetto were confronted. R. Shapira’s own experience of suffering
defied all reason, historical, political, or theological. So it is ironic that he
resorts to Maimonides, the most celebrated exponent of Jewish rationalism,
to find a way to persist in that realm beyond reason. Maimonides, who
not only holds reason supreme in his philosophical works but grounds
his entire code of Jewish law in “knowing” (da’at), is the last thinker one
would imagine being able to offer theological solace when reason was no
longer equipped to respond to the madness that engulfed R. Shapira and
his community.8 I believe that this counterintuitive reliance on Maimonides
is best understood as an expression of a longstanding endeavor by Jewish
thinkers of many kinds to hold onto Maimonides at any cost.9 Medieval
rationalists, including Maimonides, responded to the problem of evil by
negating its positive reality, which they attributed solely to the “privation
of good.” Faced with the experience of “radical” evil in the Warsaw Ghetto,
however, Shapira creatively and desperately invokes Maimonides himself
in an effort to overcome the inadequacy of that position. The view that
evil is merely the absence of good and therefore not attributable to any
positive act of a Creator God stands impotent in the face of the palpable
suffering in the Ghetto and the soon-to-be-discovered horror of a mil-
lion children systematically gassed and burned.10 Zoharic and Lurianic
Kabbalah had already opted for a view of evil as a substantive force in
the world even to the point of locating its source in the Godhead itself.11
238 James A. Diamond

If the philosophical dismissal of evil as an illusion fell short in the Mid-

dle Ages, it was certainly untenable in the context of the horrors of the
Shoah. As Gershom Scholem wrote, “It is cold comfort to those who are
genuinely plagued by fear and sorrow to be told that their troubles are
but the workings of their own imagination.”12
To gain a sense of how theologically destitute R. Shapira was ren-
dered by a few years of life in the Ghetto, it is important to consider a
note of retraction that he famously appended, at the end of 1942, to a
sermon he had delivered earlier during Hanukkah of December 1941.
In that original sermon, Shapira decried those who believed that Ghetto
suffering outstripped other examples of suffering throughout Jewish his-
tory, rendering them superfluous. At the time, R. Shapira had urged his
readers to remain steadfast in the knowledge that their own plight was
no different, intrinsically, from those their ancestors had survived since
ancient times. As Magid (this volume) describes at length, however, by
late 1942, R. Shapira had changed his mind. In a remarkable gesture of
intellectual and theological courage, he appended a note to his earlier
sermon admitting that events had proven him wrong. In this note, he
frankly admits that as far as “the monstrous torments, the terrible and
freakish deaths which the malevolent murderers invented against us, the
House of Israel, from that point on [the middle of 1942]—according to
my knowledge of rabbinic literature and Jewish history in general, there
has never been anything like them”13 (emphasis added).
In Shapira’s thought, then, the Holocaust confronts us with a histor-
ical novum, a manifestation of evil so heinously novel as to constitute a
“rupture” that literally shatters the causal historical continuum.14 Shapira’s
careful articulation of the Shoah’s uniqueness measures it against both
history and what he would have considered the very essence of Jewish
thought: rabbinic literature. The historical precedents he refers to—the
destruction of the temple and Betar—are constituents of a kind of Heils-
geschichte, in which they signify far more than mere past events. They are
rabbinically constructed as the quintessential Jewish tragedies, to which the
classical rabbis responded legally and theologically in order to maintain
and perpetuate their faith. These events thus form living theological, as
well as historical, archetypes to which all Jews are meant to turn in times
of pain and distress for their own spiritual sustenance. Yet by the end of
1942, this was no longer adequate.15 Thus, the Hasidic rebbe, whose life
and thought are filtered through the lens of the vast midrashic corpus of
his rabbinic predecessors, remains completely vulnerable to the theolog-
ical challenges of the radical evil of his own day. The momentous nature
 Raging against Reason 239

of this shift can be seen when his sermons from the “years of rage” are
compared with his earlier sermons.
Like Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed, Shapira contem-
plates readers of different kinds engaging with his work. However, while
Maimonides crafted his writing to accommodate wide disparities in the
intellectual capacity of his readers, Shapira directs himself to two ontolog-
ically distinct audiences. Along what we might call the horizontal plane,
his work is addressed to his own disintegrating community, offering hope,
consolation, and motivation to persevere in the face of its increasingly
diminishing prospects for survival. The relationship between Shapira and
his Hasidim already points to a path beyond reason, moored as it is in an
I-Thou encounter, “impossible to attain,” as he writes elsewhere, “by things
related to the intellect.”16 On the vertical plane, meanwhile, these writings
assume a metaphysical tenor analogous to supplicatory or petitionary
prayer (see Seeman, this volume). In that sense, they are also desperate
appeals to rouse a seemingly oblivious God to live up to both his specific
biblical characterization as a guardian of Israel and his universal role as
Creator and architect of historical events.
Persecution, deprivation, and suffering were entrenched conditions
of eastern European Jewry long before the advent of World War II. R.
Shapira’s Ghetto sermons were written in the same Hasidic tradition that
motivated earlier Hasidic masters such as Dov Baer of Mezritsh, one of
the pioneers of the Hasidic movement (see Idel, this volume). In the
preface to his own classic work, Dov Baer testified that the force driving
him to set pen to paper was “to inform the entire nation of God that
our God has not abandoned us even during this bitter exile, sustained in
this impure land, and that he has sent us great and insightful tsaddikim
to sustain us.”17 Likewise, R. Shapira’s sermons were not simply abstruse
rabbinic homilies or detached ruminations on the meaning of suffering.
Though the sermons were evoked by a life lived in painful extremis, Sha-
pira never lost sight of the relationships that had always consumed him
both with God and with his community. We can track the suffering in
the Ghetto and its rapid deterioration historically to an exact time and
place.18 However, in a sense, suffering was also an opportunity for R.
Shapira, since it is precisely suffering that jolts the righteous person, or
the Hasidic master, to become conscious of his calling, for “God desires
the prayers of the righteous.”19
A 1929 sermon preserved in Derekh ha-melekh (see Wiskind, this
volume) indicates the urgency and intensity this role must have assumed
for Shapira later in the Ghetto. The sermon posits that God desires prayer
240 James A. Diamond

and that suffering naturally evokes prayer from the righteous sufferer. The
supplicant acknowledges the divine need for prayer, and since suffering
evokes his prayer, the experience of suffering can also be conceived as
being for God’s benefit. R. Shapira then characterizes his suffering as a
form of self-sacrifice for God’s sake: “If I am fulfilling your will with this,
and if I suffer for you because you desire my prayer, then I endure it all
because of you.” God responds with an empathic consolation, a quid pro
quo of mutually advantageous suffering: “You suffer for me, and I will
suffer for you.”20 Every sermon in the Ghetto can be appreciated within
this paradigm of reciprocal suffering between R. Shapira and God. Like
prayer, R. Shapira’s sermons address God from the depths of unbearable
agony. Each one, then, is in a sense a sufferer’s prayer to God. The ser-
mons are reenactments of the tortured relationship of reciprocal suffering
between God and man intended to elicit a divine response that might
alleviate that very suffering.

A Hasidic Rebbe Reads Maimonides

R. Shapira’s process of engaging and reinventing Maimonides did not begin

during his captivity in the Warsaw Ghetto. At this point, I mention just
one of those prewar Maimonidean encounters, which lays the theological
groundwork for R. Shapira’s later adaptation of Maimonides in his Ghetto
sermons. I choose this example because it strikes at the very heart of the
Maimonidean project, which locates the core of Jewish life and practice in
the mind rather than the deed. In this passage, Shapira essentially reinvents
one of Maimonides’s thirteen principles of faith as filtered through the
popular Ani ma’amin version, an anonymously authored Hebrew adapta-
tion that has become a standard part of Jewish daily prayer books since
the middle of the sixteenth century.21 The third of these principles posits
God’s incorporeality, asserting that “God is not a body, and that nothing
material can attach to him, and that he is free of any form.” In a classic
midrashic mold, Shapira re-parses the principle to read “and the nothing,
it apprehends [God] in corporeal terms” (emphasis added). Rather than
exclude entirely any possibility of conceiving God anthropomorphically,
Shapira reads the principle as actually allowing for such popular con-
ceptions. He rereads it as a dispensation for an inferior “nothing” mode
of knowing God indulged in by those “who only apprehend corporeal
things and whose hearts and minds are filled with corporeal matters.”22
This kind of knowledge partially succeeds in approaching God because
 Raging against Reason 241

God undergoes a process of self-limitation (tsimtsum), which allows his

divinity to inhere in the material world, rendering it accessible through the
world.23 Thus, even the ignoramus can find his way toward God through
the medium of the lowest rungs of existence.
What is important for our purposes is that R. Shapira here reads
Maimonides against the grain of a philosophically abstruse conception
of a purely immaterial God. He thus turns the principle that privileges
abstraction, and theoretical reasoning as the only means of grasping that
abstraction, on its head. Arthur Hyman goes so far as to consider Mai-
monides’s third principle the only one that is wholly conceptual and asserts
that it therefore serves as grounding for several others. As he puts it, “Of
the five principles concerning God, that of Divine corporeality is the only
one which guarantees conceptual knowledge of Him for all. . . . Once God
is to be known as incorporeal, this knowledge can only be conceptual.”24
In R. Shapira’s hands (and in line with much Hasidic immanentism), Mai-
monides’s third principle demands precisely the opposite. It actually calls
for concretizing God in the material world and dismisses the notion that
philosophy and conceptualization are the exclusive means of apprehending
God (see Maayan, this volume).
This radical overhauling of an intellectualized principle of belief
chips away at Maimonides’s advocacy of reason as the exclusive route
toward God. In addition, by bridging what appears to be an unbridge-
able impasse between the corporeal world and an incorporeal Being that
shares nothing in common with that world, R. Shapira opens the door
to invoking Maimonides again when he is confronted with the theolog-
ical impasse posed by the inordinate suffering of the Warsaw Ghetto.
He essentially reconfigures Maimonides into a Hasidic pantheist.25 He
transforms Maimonides’s third principle, which is actually grounded in
the absolute separation between God and the world—“There is, in truth,
no relation in any respect between him and any of his creatures”—into
an actual bridge between the two.26 Shapira was not the first, as scholars
of medieval Jewish mysticism have noted, to convert Maimonides and
his philosophy into a “principal positive catalyzer of Jewish mysticism.”27

Maimonides in the Warsaw Ghetto

In a passage from the third and final annual cycle of sermons in the War-
saw Ghetto (culminating in the summer of 1942), R. Shapira attempts to
salvage some positive theological value from his pessimistic e­ xpectation
242 James A. Diamond

of the implosion of the world to its originating chaos. He does so by

returning to his rabbinic ideational homeland and his own prewar theol-
ogy, searching beyond reason for the true plane of convergence between
the human and the transcendent. We are now in a position to understand
how that desperate reach beyond reason crucially hinges on a particular
characteristic reading of Maimonides. The pertinent sermon was deliv-
ered on February 7, 1942 (parashat yitro), five months before the mass
deportations from the Ghetto to the death camps began.28 R. Shapira
seizes on a verse in which “knowledge” (da’at) is central as an opportune
starting point for his adaptation of Maimonides’s theory of knowledge.
God commands Moses to relate to the Israelites the importance and
sanctity of Sabbath observance: “Go and inform them, to know that I, the
Lord, have consecrated you” (Exod 31:13). R. Shapira then midrashically
rereads the verse, broadening this “knowledge” that Moses conveys into
an overarching principle underlying observance and piety. Maimonides’s
interpretation of “to know” in this verse is that Israel’s Sabbath observance
becomes an inspiring model of religious performance for members of
other religions: “in order that the religious communities should know.”29
However, R. Shapira elides this natural understanding of “to know”
as referring to informing others, opting instead for a mystical/Hasidic
understanding of the term as referring to knowledge of God’s knowledge.
God is now depicted as informing the people of Israel about the nature
of their self-knowledge when performing God’s commandments: “[T]hat
even the very knowledge by which one experiences that one is righteous
(hasid) is itself an integral part of divine knowledge (da’at elohim), and
through it, one knows.” In other words, the source of awareness of one’s
own piety is God’s knowledge of that piety. The question remains as to
how anyone can hope to enter the mind of God.
R. Shapira proceeds to anchor this interpretation in Maimonides’s
theory of the acquisition of knowledge by God and, in a somewhat analo-
gous way, by human beings: “It is well known, according to the Rambam
[Maimonides], cited by the mystics (mekubbalim), that God’s knowledge
is acquired by knowing himself, which we have discussed previously.
Consequently, God’s cognizance of one’s worship and righteousness is
also contained in the knowledge of himself. For a man’s worship and
righteousness belongs to God, since he grants him the will, the strength,
the intellect, and the emotions to worship. And when God grants a
part of his knowledge to the man and through it he knows of his own
worship, then he realizes that it is not his but that everything belongs to
 Raging against Reason 243

God.” R. Shapira bases his interpretation on kabbalistic conceptions of the

human being as a mirror of the divine anthropos.30 Shapira asserts that
the usual means of acquiring knowledge, by reason or experience, must
be surrendered, since they are actually obstacles to the ultimate truths of
divine knowledge. In support, he draws paradoxically on what has been
considered a supremely rationalist view, namely, Maimonides’s Aristotelian
conception of God as “thought thinking itself.”31 For divine knowledge to
enter and suffuse the world, he writes, human thought must abandon its
own sense of self-attainment. The self is a barrier to God’s knowledge, and
so, any claim to the acquisition of knowledge as one’s own rather than
God’s obstructs the identity between the human and the divine knowers.32
The result is Maimonides channeled through the kabbalistic tradition—as
R. Shapira puts it, “according to the Rambam [Maimonides], cited by the
mystics (mekubbalim).”
Once he grounds the authority for this theory of knowledge in
Maimonides, Shapira proceeds to the crux of his sermon and the positive
role suffering plays within it: “Now it is known that in Egypt,” he writes,
“knowledge [da’at] was in exile. . . . Worship consists of extricating knowl-
edge from exile. That is why it states, ‘And God knew’ (Exod 2:25). When
they left Egypt, it states that ‘I, the Lord, have consecrated you’ (31:13),
and when the messiah arrives, “the world will be filled with the knowledge
of God’ (Isa 11:9).” R. Shapira traces a historical trajectory along a plane
of divine knowledge that becomes increasingly reflected in the world
through the ongoing collapse of the barrier between human knowledge
and God’s knowledge. Ideal knowledge begins in an alienated state (exile)
and is progressively repatriated to its ultimate messianic return, when
all human beings will acknowledge that their knowledge is really God’s
knowledge. God’s “knowing” in Egypt is thus an interim stage between total
exile and the time of the messiah, when knowledge gone astray begins to
peek into the world because of suffering. God’s “knowing,” noted in Exod
2:25, evolves from a chain of sensory and mental awareness consisting of
hearing (God heard their mourning), remembering (God remembered his
covenant), feeling (their cry for help from bondage rose up to God—that is,
God was touched by an embodied form of Israel’s anguish), and seeing
(God looked upon the Israelites) (Exod 2:24–25). It was human suffering
experienced below that evoked all these divine sensations. Suffering pro-
pels human knowledge to merge incrementally with divine knowledge.
“All the sufferings then in Egypt and now, though they defy knowl-
edge, are in any event for this purpose—to crush and override human
244 James A. Diamond

cognition, with which man thinks he cognizes and on which he relies in

the sense of ‘increasing knowledge increases pain’ (Eccl 1:18)—to crush it
and override it so that the divine mind can reveal itself in each and every
individual internally and through the entire world.” R. Shapira reverses
the causal order of the common sense of Eccl 1:18 by considering the
second clause of the verse, “increasing pain,” as the catalyst for the first
clause, “increasing knowledge.” In other words, suffering precipitates
the acquisition of ideal knowledge through its crushing effects on the
human mind. In philosophical terms, suffering provokes an epistemo-
logical rupture, which vacates the human mind of its usual modes of
knowing, leading to a noetic paradigm shift in which they are replaced
by a divine episteme. The human intellect, and humanity’s confidence in
its own ability to make sense of the world, must be abandoned to gain
access to the divine mind. Only then can one make sense of what is an
insurmountably senseless world.
This notion of displacing the sekhel, or transcending it, to gain
true knowledge, or knowledge from a divine perspective, has deep roots
in Hasidic thinking. Like other Hasidic masters who preceded him, R.
Shapira is emblematic of how central Maimonides was to a movement
that largely eschewed rationalism as its path toward God and ultimate
metaphysical truth.33 One can trace the idea that suffering plays a positive
role in weakening the body and thereby strengthening the soul as far back
as the Middle Ages, to the Zohar, the canonical scripture of all subsequent
Jewish mysticism. God inflicts “sufferings of love” (see Leib Smokler, this
volume) when he “crushes the body to empower the soul; then the person
is drawn to him in love fittingly, the soul dominant, the body weakened.”34
Although Maimonides does consider there to be an inverse relationship
in strength between the body and the intellect, he rejects the notion of
sufferings of love out of hand as inconsistent with divine justice.35
It therefore is all the more ironic to see this idea surface in a Mai-
monidean guise in the nascent Hasidic movement of the eighteenth cen-
tury. R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812), one of Hasidism’s pioneers
and the founding father of the Chabad Hasidic dynasty, whose kabbalistic
theosophy exercised a seminal influence on R. Shapira, promotes a pan-
theistic Maimonidean incarnation of the very idea Maimonides rejects.36
Regardless of the extent to which a human being perfects the intellect,
Maimonides insists on a strict separation between God and the world,
and advances a theology that maintains an “unbridgeable chasm separat-
ing the divine essence and the human essence.”37 R. Schneur Zalman also
 Raging against Reason 245

repeatedly cites Maimonides’s Aristotelian-influenced identification of the

knower, knowing, and known as a kind of mystical axiom to which many
of the “sages of kabbalah admit.”38 The fact that God is one with what he
knows implies that he knows everything, because he knows himself. In
other words, according to R. Schneur Zalman there is nothing that exists
outside God. In short, Maimonides’s medieval rational epistemological
theory, which is borrowed from Aristotle, the founding father of the West-
ern rational philosophical tradition, forms the underpinning for Chabad’s
eighteenth-century kabbalistic acosmism. Maimonidean deism becomes a
support for the radically theistic view that all of reality is a facet of God.
Maimonides’s own formulation of divine knowledge, regarded in iso-
lation from his overall philosophical theology, lends itself to this mystical
appropriation, which absorbs all being into the divine Being. It appears
in both of his most seminal works: his legal halakhic code, the Mishneh
Torah, and his philosophical treatise, the Guide of the Perplexed.39 The
Mishneh Torah “codifies” the way God knows as follows: “All existences
external to the Creator, from the first form to the smallest insect there
could be in the heart of the earth, exist because of the power of his truth;
and because he knows his own being and perceives his greatness, glory, and
truth, he knows everything, and nothing is hidden from him” (emphasis
mine).40 After presenting an Aristotelian epistemological theory of the
unification of the knower with the knowing and the known (Greek nous,
noesis, noeton = Hebrew sekhel, maskil, muskal) that is constantly the state of
God’s knowledge, Maimonides then explicitly draws the logical conclusion
that “because he knows himself, he knows everything, because everything
is contingent on his being.”41 Similarly, the Guide endorses the unity of
cognition, where God “is the intellect, as well as the intellectually cog-
nizing subject and the intellectually cognized object,” which also identifies
anything known with the knower.42 Thus, though there are serious incon-
sistencies between the two works that have endlessly exercised scholars, on
this score, Maimonides’s jurisprudence and philosophy harmoniously and
radically intersect.43 Indeed, some contemporary scholars might view the
Hasidic version of Maimonides’s theory of divine knowledge as a logical
consequence of a Maimonidean “post-rational” philosophical mysticism.44
Even some who disagree conclude that Maimonides can in fact be read
as a “pantheist of sorts,” because “if, in cognition, subject and object are
identical, then mysticism follows when man knows God, or ultimate reality,
and pantheism of some sort follows when God apprehends the world. In
either case the opposition between subject and object collapses.”45
246 James A. Diamond

Although I cannot do justice to this discussion here, it is sufficient

for our purposes to note that other Hasidic readers before R. Shapira
underlined the potentially panentheistic consequence of this identity of
the knower with the known, which collapses all being into a divine one-
ness.46 For kabbalists, that unity is only manifest by way of the composite
emanation of the sefirot, whose unity with the divine essence is not, in the
words of R. Schneur Zalman, “within the bounds of human comprehen-
sion.” “It is an esoteric principle of faith,” he writes, “which “lies beyond
the intellect.”47 If this is a mode of intellection that surpasses the limits
of human comprehension, then perhaps the only way of entering that
mode is to abandon the normal modes of human reason. The pioneers
of Hasidic theology already postulated this idea of overcoming the self
(bittul), including one’s intellect, to achieve the true self, to an extreme
degree. One must undergo a “complete extinction of reflective conscious-
ness” as the necessary precondition for acquiring “a ‘new intellect,’ a form
of pure spiritual thought which is beyond time.”48
To understand the extent of this nonrational wisdom in R. Shapira’s
ambit, we need to go back nearly two decades, to a sermon he delivered
on the Jewish New Year of 1925, which also recalibrates Maimonides’s
Aristotelian epistemology in a kabbalistic register. Shapira draws on the
notion of a “concealed wisdom” (hokhmah stima’a) that exists on a plane far
beyond rational wisdom, an idea that traces its roots back to the Zohar.49
The wisdom inherent in the extant Torah as well as empirical reality are
merely pale reflections of this concealed wisdom, which “is the beginning
of the emanations when it is still without clothing.” It is located in the
unified “wisdom” (hokhmah) at the very highest level of the kabbalistically
constructed Godhead, consisting of various dimensions known as sefirot.
This “wisdom” undergoes a transformation from its pristine state in the
uppermost sefirotic triad of God’s being, whereby it becomes “clothed”
in the sefirah of “understanding” (binah)50 on the way to our world of
differentiation or fragmentation (pirud).51 The total unity contemplated by
Maimonides’s epistemological formulation of the unity of the knower, the
known, and the knowing is operative only in that realm. Once knowl-
edge is acquired in the lower world of fragmentation and the supernal
unified wisdom has been packaged, so to speak, to be comprehensible to
human minds, that packaging, or “clothing” (levush), separates the knower
from that which is known.52 In the realm of mundane wisdom, “there is
differentiation, the knower and that which is known [are distinct], the
knower apprehends the known, because wisdom (hokhmah) has already
 Raging against Reason 247

been clothed with a cover . . .” Shapira then continues to distinguish the

other wisdom, which inhabits a higher plane of existence. Since “concealed
wisdom” is not packaged, it does not inhere in the world of separation or
fragmentation but rather is absolutely unified. Thus, there is nothing to
separate the knower from that which is known. R. Shapira then asserts
that one realizes true apprehension “only by way of unification, that is,
apprehension takes place only in a unified form, by way of man who first
uncovers the concealed wisdom in it and then unites the two of them.”53
This bifurcation of an earthly wisdom and a supernal, concealed one
and its sharp swerve away from Maimonides’s own conception of “wis-
dom” are also essential to appreciating R. Shapira’s use of Maimonidean
epistemology in the Ghetto. Maimonides’s definition of the different senses
of the term hokhmah (wisdom) are all confined to its mundane usages
and are all within the scope of the human intellect’s range, or what R.
Shapira would consider an embodied wisdom that is “clothed.” In fact,
the highest form of wisdom for Maimonides is precisely that which is
independently acquired by rational demonstration.54 At the very core of R.
Shapira’s Maimonidean edifice is an irreconcilable difference that renders
his conclusion of overcoming reason in order to achieve true wisdom or
to somehow unite with the Godhead all the more startling.
It is precisely in the sharpness of this difference, particularly on the
nature of Torah wisdom, that Shapira’s theology can be best appreciated.
Both agree that Torah wisdom exists on two different planes and must be
acquired by two methods. Maimonides classifies wisdom learned from the
Bible and the ancient rabbis by way of transmission, or simply by accepting
what has been passed down from ancestors, as one distinct kind. The other
is wisdom by which “the rational matter we receive from the Law through
tradition is demonstrated.”55 For R. Shapira, the Torah that is received, the
Torah in its external form, is (drawing on a midrash) a “withered” form
of the supernal wisdom, the product of a process beginning in the upper
sefirot that progressively waters down that wisdom which transcends the
intellect for the sake of human comprehension.56
Indeed, R. Shapira cites this very midrash nearly two decades later
in the Ghetto as a preface to the passage engaging Maimonides that has
been the focus of my examination.57 That midrash presents the theology
that anchors that passage and establishes the principle that “investigation
by normal modes of reason ruins transcendence.”58 In order to acquire a
text’s concealed wisdom, one needs to pierce through the text to its supernal
underpinnings. Overcoming the text is accomplished by overcoming the
248 James A. Diamond

normal modes of thought and reason. This seemingly strange idea that
ideal understanding is only achieved by suppressing the commonly accepted
means of cognition emerges from a long-standing struggle with the role
reason plays in spiritual ascendance. Thus, R. Shapira turns Maimonides’s
distinction between Torah wisdom acquired by tradition and that acquired
by rational demonstration on its head. While Maimonides requires the
exertion of reasoned demonstration to mine the true concealed wisdom
of Torah, Shapira calls for reason’s surrender as the key to the Torah’s
true, supra-rational wisdom.

The Evil of Philosophical Wisdom

What is particularly noteworthy about this radical epistemology is the

historical context of suffering from which it emerged. During the first
year of his wartime sermons, R. Shapira’s sermon for Shabbat Zakhor,
when the evil committed by the biblical nation Amalek is traditionally
commemorated, features an exposition of how Amalek’s evil seeped into
the fabric of Israelite society. Rarely, if ever, does R. Shapira refer to the
Nazis or Germans by name, so it is reasonable to assume in this case that
Amalek stands in for the Nazis.59 As is his wont, R. Shapira applies some
exegetical ingenuity to biblical verse and rabbinic midrash, leading him
to the conclusion that the “external wisdom,” or science and philosophy,
by which Amalek gained world renown appealed to some Israelites and
served to dampen (literally, “cool down”) their faith in “Torah wisdom.”60
The same collection of sermons that reinvents Maimonides for a world
gone mad, with which reason cannot cope and regarding which it must
concede it cannot fathom, also renounces reason—which is, in Maimonides’s
view, the only characteristic that human beings share with God.61 For R.
Shapira, a reason-based faith is a watered-down faith, identified with the
nation considered by Jewish theology to be evil incarnate.
R. Shapira envisages the Germans as the intellectual successors to
the biblical nation of Amalek and to medieval Spain. The enemy of the
Jews in Shapira’s day was in fact the embodiment of the very summit of
Western culture and rationality. It was represented at its most rational
peak by the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, arguably one of the
greatest intellects of the twentieth century. In his prewar writing, R. Sha-
pira explicitly describes Germany as reaching the highest level of science
and rationalism while at the same time sinking to the abysmal depths
 Raging against Reason 249

of immorality, to the point of becoming “the very worst of the civilized

world.”62 But in his sermons during the war, he can no longer bring himself
to even utter the name of Germany, simply identifying it with Amalek.
R. Shapira clearly parts ways with Maimonides’s classification of “rational
virtues” as the “ultimate end” of “true human perfection” and of “moral
virtues” as merely preparatory to this end.63
Historically, according to R. Shapira, the very phenomenon of Jew-
ish attraction to philosophical wisdom accounts for the great catastrophe
of the Spanish expulsion in the fifteenth century. Morality grounded in
autonomous reason is fickle, since “those same sciences and rationales
that previously led autonomously to a beautiful ethics are now being
used to justify theft, robbery, and murder, and all the other disgusting
characteristics as good.”64 The only absolute ground of human behavior
that allows for no relativism is God’s word. Whereas rabbinic tradition
classified commandments as either mishpatim, rational commandments,
or hukkim, nonrational commandments, R. Shapira asserts that obedience
to all commandments must be motivated by submission to the divine
will rather than conformity to reason, for “all commandments are divine
hukkim, whether one understands them with one’s reason or not.”65
This position is consistent with R. Shapira’s prewar theology. In
one of his prewar sermons, Shapira asserts that “anyone who performs a
mitsvah solely because he understands it, that mitsvah remains incomplete,
since he fulfils the mitsvah only as a result of his intellect and his own
will but not because of the divine will.”66 For R. Shapira, rational under-
standing is only useful in providing the practical knowledge necessary for
the performance of a mitsvah. It is absolutely useless for discovering the
rationales for commandments, the ta’amei ha-mtisvot, a classic enterprise,
the chief exponent of which was Maimonides. He goes so far as to assert
that “even the mishpatim of the Torah, that is to say, something that
appears reasonable, are also hukkim. God wishes the commandment to
transcend intellect.”67 The “red heifer” (parah adumah), a classic rabbinic
example of a law that defies rational understanding, becomes emblematic
of the entire Torah.68
This notion also pervades a trilogy of works concerning R. Shapira’s
educational philosophy, typified by the following pedagogical advice to
young students who might be attracted to reason (sekhel) as the measure
of their approach to studying Torah. After distinguishing the sekhel of
Torah from all other natural forms of reason and stating that in relation to
Torah wisdom, all non-Torah wisdom simply pales as “useless n ­ othingness,”
250 James A. Diamond

Shapira insists on resorting to reason. Paradoxically, however, he instructs

his students to reason their way to the pointlessness of that very reason,
“so that also through your knowledge (da’at) you will comprehend that you
must negate your knowledge so that only simple faith (emunah peshutah)
will govern your entire being.”69

The Maimonidean Path to Emunah Peshutah

In a sermon delivered on Purim of 1925, R. Shapira engages Maimonides’s

assertion that God “cannot be apprehended in corporeal terms” to reinforce
the idea that the way to God is not through theoretical abstraction (see
Seeman, this volume) but through emunah peshutah, “simple faith.” For
R. Shapira, “remembering” the God who cannot be pictured because “he
cannot be apprehended by corporeal apprehensions” requires contemplation
that is so deep as to become integrated into one’s essence. Thus, in good
Maimonidean terms, faith cannot be accomplished through acceptance
of ancestral tradition or via obedience to commandments. Rather, it is
“necessary to realize the belief also independently through investigation
(hakirah) and reason (sekhel).”70 Maimonides also disqualifies mere belief
based on tradition, or mesorah, from being true knowledge. However, R.
Shapira understands autonomous reasoning as a preliminary stage only
on the way to achieving a bond between God and one’s soul (essence).
From that stage, one breaks away from the intellect to inculcate emunah
peshutah, which forges an existential intimacy with God to which reason
alone cannot aspire. As in his advice to young students urging them to
“know” that they must nullify “knowing,” he advocates the use of reason
to move beyond reason.71
R. Shapira further resorts to Maimonidean philosophy to posit
a decidedly anti-Maimonidean notion of a kind of merging with God
in which knowledge and memory of God is so ingrained as to become
etched in God’s very own memory. He draws on Maimonides’s theory
of attributes, which limits our knowledge of the Divine to attributes of
action, but adds the inference that “the force of the actor inheres in that
which is acted upon.”72 Thus, as humans are creations of God, and God
acts and affects human beings, God as actor inheres in human beings who
are acted upon. Thus, once divinity is integrated into the human being,
any human thinking about God becomes integral to God’s own thought,
further attracting divine knowledge of the one thinking of him. In R.
 Raging against Reason 251

Shapira’s hands, the theory of attributes of action, originally intended

to divert human knowing from God’s unknowable being toward what is
knowable in the world, reorients human thought back toward God and
ultimately toward assimilation into the divine mind.
This understanding of “simple faith” further elucidates Shapira’s
characterization of his time in the Ghetto as “years of rage (za’am).” In a
lengthy meditation on the virtues of contemplating one’s day of death, he
offers graphic descriptions of a terminally ill person caught in the throes
of intense pain. The pain becomes so unbearable that the person feels as
if his entire body were disintegrating, to the point of feeling swallowed
by the grave. At that point, the person realizes that “the instruments
of rage (za’am) have been sent from heaven to dismantle his body and
consume him, ending in the grave.”73 As the vitality of every limb drains
away, the “shekhinah stands over him,” presenting the opportunity to
“cleave to the divine presence.”74 This “rage” of imminent death may very
well approximate the rage of the Ghetto, where the only way to make
sense of the incomprehensible wasting of the body is to surrender to its
incomprehensibility. At that point, the intellect joins the body in an act
of self-negation that opens itself up to divine immanence.

Conclusion

Maimonides understands the divine unified mode of knowing, whose unity

is unlike that of any knowing with which human beings are familiar, as
being beyond the bounds of human comprehension.75 His excursus on
this epistemology in the Guide of the Perplexed clarifies the distinction
between human and divine cognition. When human beings exercise their
intellects, they effect a transition from potential knowledge to actualized
knowledge. It is only in the state of potentiality that knower, knowing, and
known are separate. However, when “the intellect is realized in actu, the
three notions become one.” When it comes to God, that state of unified
knowledge is constant and always actualized.76
In a sermon from the end of Yom Kippur of 1930, R. Shapira revisits
Maimonides’s epistemological union of the knower, the known, and the
knowing in a way that contributes significantly to our understanding of
his engagement with Ghetto life. In this sermon, he blurs the rigid dis-
tinction that Maimonides posits between the limits of the human intellect
and divine knowing. Grounding himself in Maimonides’s epistemology,
252 James A. Diamond

he concludes that “only when one enters the source of holiness, when
one ascends in thought beyond differentiation and sees the source of
knowledge in which God resides, does one see from the perspective of
this supernal seeing that everything is one.”77 Whereas Maimonides main-
tains a strict bifurcation between the human domain and the divine one,
Shapira, adopting Maimonides’s terminology, identifies divine knowing as
an achievable end of human efforts and as a key to entering the divine
realm, where all is one.
Within the setting of the Ghetto’s intolerable suffering, however, we
can now understand the horrifying “advantage” this theology provides in
making it possible to jolt God himself into a heightened consciousness.
The very last sermon calls on God not merely to know but to “see” the
suffering experienced in the Ghetto and includes a desperate final plea to
“open your eyes and see!”78 This suffering is so extreme as to eviscerate
the normal modes of intellect and allow human thought, along with its
torments, to ascend to the divine “source of knowledge.” If all is one on
that plane, once the human being elevates his tortured thought to that
point, God’s knowledge also transforms itself in the reverse direction, and
God can feel and “see” the human suffering below. Human knowledge,
which transcends intellect and unites with divine knowledge, causes God’s
perception to shift downward from an ideal realm where all is good back
to the world of differentiation where all is not good, where suffering is
experienced. Prior to the Ghetto, Maimonidean rationalism provided a
model for human beings to overcome reason and reach the heights of
divine existence. In the Ghetto, it became a model for God to overcome
his own ideal knowledge so that he could experience the depths of human
suffering.

Notes

1. James A. Diamond, “Maimonides and R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira:

Abandoning Reason in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Menachem Kellner and James A.
Diamond, Reinventing Maimonides in Contemporary Jewish Thought (London:
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019), 87–105. For a book-length treatment
of seminal Jewish thinkers reading and rereading Maimonides, see my Maimonides
and the Shaping the Jewish Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
2. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in Hebrew],
ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017).
 Raging against Reason 253

3. B. Berakhot 7a and b. Sanhedrin 105b, where that instant is said to be

the precise equivalent of 1/58,888 of an hour.
4. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat balak 5700 (1940), 1:145–46.
5. For the term’s use in the context of Balaam, see Num 23:7–8; See also,
for example, Ps 78:49; Nah 2:6; Isa 26:20, among others. For but one of the other
rabbinic sources, see b. Zevahim 41b.
6. See Reiser’s introduction to Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:50–53.
7. Y. Berakhot 7:2: Shimon ben Shetah addresses the king, who is angry
with him: “I heard that my master was angry at me and I wanted to fulfill this
verse: ‘Hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath (za’am) is past’ [Isa 26:20].
And it was said concerning me, ‘And the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom
preserves the life of him who has it’ [Ecc 7:12].”
8. The first sentence of the Mishneh torah (henceforth, MT) begins: “The
foundation of all foundations and the pillar of sciences is to know” (see MT,
Hilkhot yesodei ha-torah 1:1). Its final paragraph is the climax of his vision of
the messianic era, when “the entire world will be filled with the knowledge of
God” (MT, Hilkhot melakhim 12:5). Maimonides’s entire legal project, then, is
bracketed by knowledge. His philosophical project in the Guide of the Perplexed,
trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) (henceforth,
GP), is anchored in the human faculty that enables knowing: the image (tselem)
of God (GP 1:1).
9. On this phenomenon, see James A. Diamond, Maimonides and the
Shaping of the Jewish Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
10. GP 3:12. For a good exposition of Maimonides’s position on this issue,
see Oliver Leaman, Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), ch. 4.
11. See Gershom Scholem’s discussion in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
(New York: Schocken, 1995), 35–36; and Isaiah Tishby, The Doctrine of Evil in
Lurianic Kabbalah, trans. David Solomon (London: Kegan Paul Library of Jewish
Studies, 2008).
12. Scholem, Major Trends, 35. For a defense of the philosophical position
in the context of the Shoah, see Warren Zev Harvey’s lucid discussion in “Two
Jewish Approaches to Evil in History,” in Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological
Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman,
and Gershon Greenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 326–31.
13. Quoting from Nehemia Polen’s translation in his The Holy Fire: The
Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2004), 35. The original appears in Sermons from the Years of Rage,
hanukkah 5702 (1941), 1:242.
14. Emil Fackenheim famously advanced this philosophical conception of
the Holocaust. A succinct statement of Fackenheim’s novum in the history of evil
intended to challenge professional philosophers was made by Fackenheim at an
254 James A. Diamond

American Philosophical Association symposium in 1985. See his “The Holocaust

and Philosophy,” in The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 10 (1985): 505–14. In fact,
this retraction is precisely what Fackenheim zeroed in on. Shapira’s courageously
honest amendment is one of only two passages that Fackenheim cites in his
entire corpus.
15. For a comprehensive review of scholars grappling with the theological
adequacy of analogies between the ancient temple destruction and the Holocaust,
see Jonathan Klawans, “Josephus, the Rabbis, and Responses to Catastrophes
Ancient and Modern,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 2 (2010): 278–309.
16. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Mevo ha-she’arim (Jerusalem, 1962), 242.
17. See introduction to Maggid devarav le-Ya’akov, ed. Rivka Schatz-Uffen-
heimer (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990), 3.
18. The dates of each sermon are known, and the physical conditions Sha-
pira addressed can be correlated to other dated accounts, such Chaim Kaplan’s
diary, Megilat Yissurin—Yoman Getto Varsha [“Scroll of Agony—Warsaw Ghetto
Diary”], September 1, 1939–August 4, 1942 (Tel Aviv: 1966). However, as Daniel
Reiser astutely points out, a clear-cut historical progression in his thought is
complicated by Shapira’s continuous revisions to the sermons. See Sermons from
the Years of Rage, 1:70–72.
19. B. Yevamot 64a.
20. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh (Jerusalem: Feldheim,
2011), parashat vayyishlah 5690 (1929), 75.
21. See Marc Shapiro, “Ani Maamin,” Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Mac-
millan Reference USA, 2007), 165.
22. Derekh ha-melekh, vayyiggash 5689 (1928), 105.
23. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends, 260, considered this idea “one of
the most amazing and far-reaching conceptions ever put forward in the history
of kabbalism.” Tsimtsum’s implication of distancing of God from the world was
placed in tension with its Hasidic incarnations, which tended toward God’s
immanence in the world. On this, see Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to
God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1993), 79–91.
24. “Maimonides’s Thirteen Principles,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967),
119–44.
25. See James A. Diamond, Reinventing Maimonides, 92–93, where I discuss
this passage. Here, I reach a more radical conclusion regarding the extent of R.
Shapira’s pantheistic transformation of Maimonides’s ontology.
26. See GP 1:52. See also GP 1:56. For another example of a radical rereading
of MT, yesodei ha-torah, which configures Maimonides as a proponent of Chabad
acosmism, see Jacob Gotleib, Rationalism in Hasidic Attire: Habad’s Harmonistic
 Raging against Reason 255

Approach to Maimonides [in Hebrew] (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University

Press, 2009), 56–59.
27. See Moshe Idel, “Maimonides and Kabbalah,” in Studies in Maimon-
ides, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 67. See
also Elliot Wolfson, “Via Negativa in Maimonides and Its Impact on Thirteenth
Century Kabbalah,” Maimonidean Studies 5 (2008): 393–442, which argues for a
“genuine intellectual and spiritual kinship” between Maimonides and kabbalists.
28. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat yitro 5702 (1942), 1:267–68.
29. GP 3:24, 498. Prior to Maimonides, Rashi adopted this reading as well.
See my extensive treatment of the Sabbath’s role, where I conclude that Sabbath
in fact signifies God stepping back from the world and allowing nature to run its
course in James A. Diamond, Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the
Outsider (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 191–226.
30. See Gershom Scholem, “On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead,” in
On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York:
Schocken, 1991), 15–55.
31. For but one excellent treatment of Aristotle’s conception of how God
knows, see Thomas De Koninck, “Aristotle on God as Thought Thinking Itself,”
The Review of Metaphysics 47, no. 3 (1994): 471–515.
32. This is a corollary of the Hasidic theological principle bittul ha-yesh.
Chabad is a leading exponent of this. As Elliot Wolfson defines it, “to apprehend
reality one must strip it of its materiality, a reversal of the process of creation of
something from nothing.” Elliot Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism
and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009), 80.
33. See, for example, Rachel Elior’s “Faith that Transcends Intellect and
Contemplation,” in The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of
Habad Hasidism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 179–83.
34. Zohar 1:180b, and The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, trans. Daniel Matt
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3:93–94.
35. See GP 3:24. For talmudic notions of “sufferings of love,” see, for example,
b. Berakhot 5a; b. Kiddushin 40b.
36. Daniel Reiser pointed out to me that whenever R. Shapira cites another
rabbi or rebbe, he always does so by name, with the exception of R. Schneur
Zalman, whom he refers to as ha-rav, “the rabbi.” This is further evidence of the
importance of Schneur Zalman’s influence on Shapira’s thought.
37. See Howard Kreisel, “Imitatio Dei in Maimonides’s Guide of the Per-
plexed,” AJS Review 19, no. 2 (1994): 169–211, at 191.
38. Likkutei amarim—Tanya (Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 2000),
ch. 2. For the near-obsessive focus of Chabad Hasidism on Maimonides and its
transformation of him into an exponent of its brand of mysticism, see Naftali
256 James A. Diamond

Lowenthal, “The Image of Maimonides in Habad Hasidism,” in Traditions of

Maimonideanism, ed. Carlos Fraenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 277–312.
39. See also Moses Maimonides’s commentary on the Mishnah, Mishnah
im perush Rabenu Moshe ben Maimon, trans. Joseph David Kafih (Jerusalem:
Mossad HaRav Kook, 1965), 2:285, m. Avot 3:20; m. Sanhedrin, introduction to
ch. 10, 138. Although there are statements in this work that indicate the capacity
of the human mind to abstract God’s form, which seem to assume the logic of
the identity of the knower and the known, this would directly contradict other
statements that deny the human intellect’s ability to know God’s essence. On
this issue, see Herbert Davidson, Maimonides the Rationalist (Portland, OR: The
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011), 64–69; 201–206.
40. MT, hilkhot yesodei ha-torah 2:9.
41. Ibid., 2:10, which concludes that God knows creation by knowing himself.
42. GP 1:68, 163.
43. For just one good example of a study on the differences between Mai-
monides qua philosopher and Maimonides qua halakhist, see Yaakov Levinger,
Maimonides as Philosopher and Codifier [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik,
1990).
44. See, for example, David Blumenthal, “Maimonides’ Philosophical Mys-
ticism,” in Maimonides and Mysticism, ed. A. Elqayam and D. Schwartz, Daat
64–66 (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2009) v–xxv, and the comprehensive
bibliography compiled at xxii–xxv.
45. See Gad Freudenthal, “The Philosophical Mysticism of Maimonides
and Maimon,” in Maimonides and His Heritage, ed. Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Lenn
Goodman, and James Grady (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009),
113–52, at 122.
46. It is important to note that this mystified version of a Maimonidean
epistemological formulation also finds its way into the non-Hasidic rabbinic world
of the twentieth century in the figure of Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, who joins the
Hasidic enterprise of adapting the Maimonidean epistemological unity between the
knowing, knower, and known in quasi-mystical terms, resulting in intellectualist
mysticism. See Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, On Repentance: From the Discourses of
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Pinchas Peli (Jerusalem: World Zionist Federation,
1974), 196–97, and Dov Schwartz, “R. Soloveitchik as a Maimonidean: The Unity
of Cognization” [in Hebrew], in Maimonides and Mysticism: Presented to Moshe
Hallamish on the Occasion of his Retirement, ed. A. Elqayam, D. Schwartz, Daat
64–66 (2009) 301–21, at 321.
47. Likkutei amarim—Tanya, sha’ar ha-yihud ve-ha-emunah, ch. 9.
48. See Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Ele-
ments in Eighteenth-Century Hasidic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 176.
49. For early Hasidic formulations of this trans-intellectual intellect in Dov
Ber of Mezeritsch and his disciple R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi, see Gershom
 Raging against Reason 257

Scholem, “The Unconscious and the Concept of the Primordial Intellect in

Hasidic Literature,” in Explications and Implications: Writings on Jewish Heritage
and Renaissance [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975), 351–60.
50. The sefirot are the staple of kabbalistic literature in all their various man-
ifestations and are essentially ten emanations that bridge an abstract unknowable
God with the world. For a good introduction, see Arthur Green, A Guide to the
Zohar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
51. Derekh ha-melekh, rosh ha-shanah 5686 (1925), 305. The origins of
this term can be traced back to the Zohar. For the purposes of this analysis, it
connotes the emergence out of absolute divine unity at the very highest level of
the supernal Godhead into a divine manifestation of more variegated dimensions
(the sefirot) and thus a transition from the “world of unity” (yihuda) to the “world
of separation” (peruda).
52. This is the kabbalistic parallel to Maimonides’s far more pragmatic
reason for the present form of the Torah, which employs anthropomorphic
language regarding God because it is geared to the average human mind, which
finds philosophical abstraction too difficult. It “speaks in the language of men”
(dibberah torah bilshon benei adam). See GP 1:26, pp. 56–57.
53. GP 1:26, 306. Although there are some subtle differences, Moses Cordo-
vero already restricts the Maimonidean notion of the unity of knower, knowing,
and known to the upper sefirotic triad in his Pardes rimmonim, 8:13.
54. See GP 3:54, 635, where the highest human perfection is acquiring
“wisdom” in the sense of “rational virtues.”
55. GP 3:54, 633.
56. Derekh ha-melekh, rosh ha-shanah 5686 (1925), 305, based on Bereshit
Rabbah 17:5, which uses the term novel, a term borrowed from the natural world
normally related to shriveled or withered fruit or leaves on a vine (e.g., Isa 34:4).
This idea can be traced back to the Zohar. See, for example, Zohar 3:152a, when
the Torah “came down into the world, the world could not have tolerated it if it
had not clothed itself in the garments of this world.” See also Gershom Scholem,
“The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” Diogenes (1956) 4(14): 36–47.
57. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat yitro 5702 (1942), 1:265.
58. Ibid., 1:266.
59. According to Alana Vincent, R. Shapira’s sermon on Amalek both
enabled his followers “to interpret their experiences within the narrative frame-
work provided by the cultural memory transmitted through the regular recital
of scripture” and “buttressed the viability of the Amalek narrative as a cultural
memory, a part of their own living (and lived) experience.” Alana Vincent, Making
Memory: Jewish and Christian Explorations in Monument, Narrative, and Liturgy
(Cambridge: James Clarke, 2014), 30.
60. This distinction between Torah wisdom and “external” wisdom traces
its roots all the way back to classical rabbinic literature. For a good overview of
one extensive engagement with the notion of some wisdom among gentiles in
258 James A. Diamond

the Hasidic/Lurianic tradition, see Yaakov Elman, “The History of Gentile Wis-
dom According to R. Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin,” Journal of Jewish Thought and
Philosophy 3 (1993): 153–87.
61. GP 1:1.
62. Derekh ha-melekh, shabbat teshuvah 2 (1937), 604. In that same prewar
sermon, R. Shapira also laments the crisis that the Jews were experiencing in
Germany a few years after Hitler’s rise to power, which had rapidly deteriorated
in the previous “five years,” before which German Jews enjoyed freedom and suc-
cess and “nearly all the great intellectuals, the professors who glorified Germany’s
reputation throughout the world, the majority were Jews.”
63. See GP 3:54.
64. Sermons from the Years of Rage, shabbat zakhor 1940, 1:114–15. See also
Derekh ha-melekh, shabbat parah 5696 (1938), 170, where he similarly laments
the fact that “some nations have deteriorated to such an extent . . . that the more
evil something is, the more admirable it is, and they pride themselves with every
perversion.”
65. Sermons from the Years of Rage, shabbat zakhor 1940, 1:115.
66. See Derekh ha-melekh, shabbat teshuvah, 11.
67. Ibid., shabbat parah 1930, 169.
68. Ibid., shabbat parah 1925, 175.
69. Shapira, Mevo ha-she’arim (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2000), 197. For another
theological response to the Holocaust also grounded in emunah peshutah that
involves an annulment of the ego, see Gershon Greenberg, “Areleh Roth’s ‘Pristine
Faith,’ ” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14, no. 1 (2015): 77, which cites Roth
saying that “Israel’s sole means of endurance through and means of responding
to the eruption of Amalek’s tumah was emunah peshutah.”
70. Derekh ha-melekh, purim 5685 (1925), 477.
71. The phrase emunah peshutah is often used in contrast to faith that is
grounded in reasoned research and investigation in Hasidic and kabbalistic lit-
erature. For but two examples, see R. Abraham Isaac Kook, Shemonah kevatsim
(Jerusalem, 2004), 3:333, and R. Nahman of Bratslav, Likkutei moharan (New
York: 1976), 2:5.
72. Derekh ha-melekh, purim 5685 (1925), 478.
73. Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim, 92.
74. Ibid., 98.
75. MT, yesodei ha-torah, 2:10–12.
76. GP 1:68.
77. Derekh ha-melekh, motsa’ei yom ha-kippurim 5691 (1930), 395–96.
78. Sermons from the Years of Rage, shabbat hazon 5702 (1942), 1:314.
 11

At the Edge of Explanation

Rethinking “Afflictions of Love”
in Sermons from the Years of Rage

Erin Leib Smokler

Introduction

R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira’s Sermons from the Years of Rage (more

popularly known as Esh kodesh or Holy Fire) draws on ancient tropes
of the Jewish canon in its efforts to reckon with the suffering of its era.
R. Shapira deployed, interpreted, and reinterpreted inherited models of
theodicy throughout his work, tweaking his understanding and shifting
his exegetical-existential vision over time. Examples of such biblical and
rabbinic explanatory paradigms include, but are not limited to, the trope
of sin and punishment, the binding of Isaac, the hiding of God’s face, and
the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Each of these offered Shapira
a lens through which to view the increasingly dire circumstances that he
and his community faced in Warsaw from September 1939 to July 1942.
I wish to argue that Esh kodesh is in many respects an exercise in the
elasticity of paradigmatic thinking (see Idel, this volume), an example of
how a supple theologian may stretch and reinterpret earlier models of
suffering in order to provide a framework for contemporary suffering.
But Shapira’s sermons also explore the limits of such thinking, as the

259
260 Erin Leib Smokler

ever-increasing intensity of life—and death—in the Warsaw Ghetto forced

him to confront the very limit of theological explanation.
One particularly poignant model of theodicy taken up by Shapira—
and one that exemplifies this elasticity—is that of yissurim shel ahavah,
“afflictions of love.” In the earlier biblical rendering of this notion, God’s
parent-like commitment to God’s people generates singular expectations
of them.1 God loves the children of Israel so profoundly that God offers
them more than other nations and also demands more of them. The
byproduct of this unique divine concern is a heightened level of human
accountability and thus a greater susceptibility to chastisement. In the
words of David Kraemer, “That God cares to punish through afflictions
is a sign of God’s love. If God did not care, God would not punish; thus
[those] who are punished must be, by that very evidence, God’s select
nation.”2 This theodicy overlaps with that of sin and punishment, but it
accents the divine affection that undergirds suffering in place of more
punitive motivations.
An extensive talmudic treatment of the matter in b. Berakhot,
however, steers the paradigm in a different direction, casting divine love
as that which helps to free or refine human beings through their pain.3
This talmudic source suggests that “afflictions of love” are loving insofar
as they promote these desirable ends even in the absence of punishment
for sin. Suffering yields freedom or purification, and so afflictions ought
to be treated as divine gifts, bestowing goods in this world and also,
potentially, in the world to come.4 The classical discussion of yissurim
shel ahavah portrays them as wounding pains that are in truth an offering
of a loving God, for they can bring benefits just over the horizon of the
current experience.
Yet if afflictions of love constitute a kind of alternate theodicy to
the one of sin and punishment, the talmudic discussion itself demon-
strates that the rabbis who used this term were actually struggling with
the limits of explanation. Indeed, yissurim shel ahavah are proposed in
response to failed attempts at justification through appeal to sin; they are
said to be applied only with the loving consent (kiblam me-ahavah) of
those who receive them and within certain parameters (i.e., they cannot
be too extreme). Such suffering, furthermore, promotes ends that might be
considered desirable but which also come at a very high price—one that
some of the talmudic rabbis in question would prefer not to pay. In the
course of the extended talmudic discussion in b. Berakhot 5a-b, several
rabbis who participated in the theoretical discussion of the meaning of
suffering fall ill. When each of them is asked by his colleagues whether
 At the Edge of Explanation 261

his afflictions are beloved to him (as afflictions of love ought to be), they
exclaim in turn, “Neither they nor their rewards!”5 Yissurim shel ahavah
is thus a paradigm that seems to fall apart as it confronts the irreducible
quality of individuals’ real pain. The very rabbis who espouse it buckle
under its weight. Rather than a theory of suffering, then, this rabbinic
construct seems to serve as a placeholder for the terrifying awareness that
one has actually run out of theories. It is in this sense an anti-theodicy,
a theodic model that reckons with the potential breakdown of theodicy
as a religious project.6
It is this complicated view that Shapira contends with most explicitly.
My aim in this chapter is to trace Shapira’s use of yissurim shel ahavah
in his wartime sermons, interrogating his sustained development of this
liminal category. I will argue that without explicitly saying so, without
conceding the end of explanation, he made use of this theodic paradigm
in Esh kodesh to acknowledge those moments that seemed to be beyond
explanation. In the face of swelling suffering, yissurim shel ahavah offered
him a language with which to wrestle publicly with pain that flouted
language altogether.

October 5, 1940: Forcing God’s Hand

The theme of yissurim shel ahavah is first referenced in the Ghetto

sermons on October 5, 1940, on the occasion of Shabbat Teshuvah, the
“Sabbath of Repentance” between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The
sermon opens, however, with a highly condensed reference to a different
talmudic tale from b. Shabbat 89a.The full story follows, with Shapira’s
small selection italicized.

R. Joshua b. Levi also said: When Moses ascended on high,

he found the Holy One, blessed be He, tying crowns on the
letters [of the Torah]. Said God to him, “Moses, is there no
[greeting of] peace in your town?” “Shall a servant extend [a
greeting of] peace to his master?!” replied Moses. “Yet you
should have assisted Me,” said God. Immediately Moses cried
out to Him (Numbers 14:17), “And now, I pray, let the power
of the Lord be great, just as You have said.”7

In this rather surprising episode, Moses encounters God on high and

is chastised for not offering a greeting. Explaining that he thought it
262 Erin Leib Smokler

­ nbecoming of a lowly slave like himself to address God directly, God

u
dismisses this silencing humility and asserts that Moses ought to help
him with his words. Moses does so through praise: “Let the power of
the Lord be great.” Human language somehow aids God, empowering
the divine, though it is unclear whether this assistance pertains to the
specific task mentioned (writing a Torah) or to God’s broader engage-
ment in the world.
Shapira introduces this story as a way of grounding and explaining
a similar verse found in the Torah portion of the week: “When I proclaim
God’s name, give greatness to the name of God.”8 The interpretation of this
verse attributed to the classical commentator Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitzhaki) is
that when a person pronounces God’s name, then God is rendered great.
God relies on human speech to establish and reify divine power in the
world. Shapira makes this claim very briefly and without argument, so
one must pause to take note of its subversive quality, which cuts against
the plain meaning of the verses he cites. Both Deut 32:3 and Num 14:17
(cited in the Talmud) explicitly extol the greatness of God’s name and the
power of the Lord, respectively. They highlight God’s wondrous strength,
presumably over and above that of human strength. It is therefore note-
worthy that these very verses become the basis of a teaching about God’s
reliance on humanity, such that God’s power actually depends on human
willingness to proclaim it.
Shapira’s selective quotation of the talmudic story—omitting its
location (on high) and God’s first exchange with Moses—elevates human
agency over divine power. It also strips the story of a context that points
toward another famous talmudic tale, one with very different implications:
“When Moses ascended on high, he found the Holy One, blessed be he,
tying crowns on the letters [of the Torah],” says R. Joshua b. Levi in b.
Shabbat 89a, the story referenced by Shapira. A parallel text from b. Men-
ahot 29b—in a story cited by Shapira several times in Esh kodesh9—opens
with the exact same image: “R. Judah said in the name of Rav: When
Moses ascended on high, he found the Holy One, blessed be he, tying
crowns on the letters [of the Torah] . . .” This tale then continues with a
harrowing dialogue between God and Moses, centered on the fate of R.
Akiva, the martyred rabbi of the Mishnah:

Said Moses, “Lord of the Universe, Who stays Thy hand?” He

answered, “There will arise a man, at the end of many gener-
ations, Akiva b. Joseph by name, who will expound upon each
 At the Edge of Explanation 263

tittle heaps and heaps of laws.” “Lord of the Universe,” said

Moses, “permit me to see him.” He replied, “Turn thee round.”
Moses went and sat down behind eight rows [and listened to
the discourses upon the law]. . . . Then said Moses, “Lord of the
Universe, Thou hast shown me his Torah, show me his reward.”
“Turn thee round,” said He; and Moses turned round and saw
them weighing out his [R. Akiva’s] flesh at the market-stalls.
“Lord of the Universe,” cried Moses, “such Torah, and such a
reward?!” He replied, “Be silent, for such is My decree.”

Shapira has much to say about this passage elsewhere, but I have cited
it here—where he elides it—to demonstrate the associations that Shapira
avoids by not quoting the full context of b. Shabbat 89a. The tale of b.
Menahot 29b highlights human impotency—R. Akiva’s powerlessness in
the face of an enemy that sought his flesh and Moses’s powerlessness in
his inability to make sense of divine justice. God offers no explanation to
Moses, merely declaring by fiat, “Be silent, for such is My decree.” Human
beings certainly do not enable or augment God’s power here. They are
victims of it. This is not the message that Shapira wishes to invoke in
October 1940. His selective hermeneutic reflects his emphasis on human
power, language, and agency at this early point in his Ghetto writing.
Having just placed human speech at the center of a theology of
human-God partnership, Shapira turns to another human activity that
similarly bolsters God: sacrifice. He writes:

It is only through a person’s worship in this world—when he

gives all his strength and soul in his worship of God, in his
study of Torah, and in his prayers to God—that he sacrifices
part of his soul to Him, blessed be He. . . . Nowadays, when
there are no animal sacrifices, the study of Torah, prayer, and
intense worship has become the essential sacrifice, determined
by the extent of the soul invested in them.
This is what our teacher Moses meant when he said, “Give
greatness to the name of God.” Help God, as it were, through
blessing His name, and by offering up your soul in your blessing
as a sacrifice to God. These sacrifices then become “the bread of
God” (cf. Leviticus 21–22). (Sacrifices are referred to as “bread
of God” because just as bread gives a person strength, so our
sacrifices give, as it were, strength to God.)10
264 Erin Leib Smokler

In line with earlier rabbinic thinking that sought to internalize sacrifice,

Shapira transforms the notion from a physical act to an act of language.11
Though he nods approvingly toward the days of animal sacrifice of the
past, he privileges sacrificing one’s soul, something that entails devotional
acts, study, and prayer. Words—chanted words, analyzed words, spoken
words—are the primary conduit for connecting to God.12
The effect of this transference is dramatic. Shapira not only transforms
a bodily act performed on another (an animal) into an internal one but
significantly redirects the very purpose of sacrifice. A sacrifice is not a gift
that a human being might give to God in recognition of God’s power and
in deference to it, as it is frequently construed to be. It is, rather, what
establishes and enables God’s power.13 The human being is the driver of
the process, not a meek participant in it. One has the unique capacity to
“feed” God on high through an offering of utterances, unleashing God’s
strength using “the gifts of [one’s] mouth” alone.14
With this empowering message regarding the human voice, some
implicit questions arise for Shapira: Do all vocalizations function as
nourishment for God? How much specificity and how much intention are
needed to spur God to powerful action? What is needed for sacrifice to
take place? To these he responds: “When a Jew shouts out to God from
pain, even though it is only pain and not his desire to worship God that
causes him to shout, nevertheless, since suffering washes away sins and
he is crying out to God, this is also counted as a sacrifice.”15
Despite the insinuations of the grounding verse of this essay—“When
I proclaim God’s name, give greatness to the name of God”16—that one
must use specific words (God’s name) or praising language to elicit God’s
power, Shapira argues otherwise. Cries of agony, inarticulate though they
may be, can function in the same way. By virtue of the fact that the suf-
fering Jew directs his cries to God, he names God as the one powerful
enough to respond to his pain. And in so doing, he reifies that power. He
crowns God as king, so to speak, when he identifies God as the proper
address for his woeful screams.17 Thus, the Jew in pain who himself feels
so very impotent in the face of his oppressor is hereby recast by Shapira
as an agent of immense potency, capable of unleashing divine force.
There is one more aspect of suffering that renders it spiritually effica-
cious. “Suffering washes away sins,” Shapira claims. It is in this context that
the text of yissurim shel ahavah is introduced: “The Talmud (b. Berakhot
5a) explains the verse (Ps 94:12) ‘Happy is the man whom You, O Lord,
 At the Edge of Explanation 265

chasten, teaching him [telamdeno] out of Your law’: Teach us this from Your
Law a fortiori from [the laws of] the tooth and the eye.”18 The remainder
of the talmudic passage—not included in the Hebrew original—elevates
suffering qua suffering into a redemptive force. It suggests that Jews ought
to welcome it, to enjoy it as an expression of their fortune, to revel in it
as a kind of liberation.
But that is not at all Shapira’s emphasis. In focusing exclusively on a
fortiori logic learned from the laws of slave damages (and leaving out all
framing references to the grandeur of pain), he points toward a different
message: that suffering can be empowering in its ability to force God’s
hand. Suffering renders one not a victim but a more commanding agent.
In the analogy cited, a master who harms his slave likely does so as a
reminder of his absolute power over him. But the result of the abuse is
that the slave actually wields greater power over the master. According to
biblical law, the slave sets himself free the moment that he announces his
master’s ill treatment. So too with human suffering vis-à-vis God, suggests
Shapira. It might look like Jews are being weakened on account of their
abuse (by Nazis or by a punitive or abandoning God), but actually, their
abuse foments their burgeoning strength. Through their voices alone, they
will force God’s hand. Through their cries, which are a kind of sacrifice,
God’s redemptive power will have to be unleashed. Like Moses in b. Shab-
bat 89a, they will assist God in writing the next chapter of Jewish history.
Shapira concludes this section by restating the verse from Psalms
referenced in b. Berakhot 5a: “Happy is the man whom You, O Lord,
chasten, teaching him out of Your Law.”19 He adds, “This we learn from
the Law: that pain cleanses and atones for sins.”20 By now it should be
clear that Shapira is not suggesting that pain itself exonerates one from sin
or automatically purifies one’s soul. Rather, torment generates wrenching
cries, and it is those voices, those vocal sacrifices, that in turn stir God
to forgiving, redemptive action. Thus, the grounding text of the notion of
yissurim shel ahavah here gets stripped down and reinterpreted entirely.
Rather than justifying unjustified pain as an expression of God’s potent
love for humanity, Shapira has repurposed b. Berakhot 5a as an expression
of humanity’s power over God, or, at the very least, necessary partnership
with God.
Lest one think that Shapira presents too rosy a picture of suffering’s
potential here, he ends this essay with a subtle note of protest against a
God who asks for this kind of assistance.
266 Erin Leib Smokler

In the prophetic reading (Haftorah) for this week (Hosea 14) we

say, “Return, Israel, to God your Lord for you are ensnared in
your iniquity. Take with you words and return to God, saying
to Him, ‘Forgive all our sins and take the good, we will pay
You oxen with our lips.’ ”21 . . . Why must we bring sacrifices
of pain and suffering, God forbid, offering “oxen with our
lips” by crying in pain? God might rather “take the good,”
and then the offerings we make—“the oxen we pay with our
lips”—would come from the good, and salvation from our
singing and praising of God.22

In other words, the elevation of tears to the height of sacrifice comes

at a grave price, for this form of human empowerment demands a tre-
mendous amount of pain. Shapira is using the concept of yissurim shel
ahavah, here reifying language as a mode of empowerment and seeming
to reinforce the vision of mutuality, devotion, and sacrifice he found in
the talmudic materials. But Shapira, quietly echoing the outrage of Moses
in b. Menahot 29b, poignantly asks: Could the God who invites human
partnership not find that assistance through human joy as opposed to
human suffering? Must the “gifts of one’s mouth” always be cries? Shapira
fares no better than Moses did in the face of Rabbi Akiva’s martyrdom:
God replied simply, “Be silent.” For Shapira in October of 1940, these
questions ominously dangle in silence.

January 31, 1942: On Suffering, Song, and Silence

The paradigm of yissurim shel ahavah and its attendant themes does not
resurface again in the wartime sermons until January 31, 1942. The primary
question that animates this essay for the Torah portion of Beshalah (Exod
13:17–17:16) is: Can one sing in the midst of suffering?23 Homiletically,
this question arises out of the central episode of the Torah portion, the
exuberant singing of the Israelites upon witnessing the miracle of the
splitting of the Red Sea.24 Conceptually, Shapira reckons here with the
despair that seems to have overtaken his community. How might anyone
find a way toward song or toward hope during dark times?
Introducing the song at the Red Sea, Exod 15:1 states: “Then Moses
and the children of Israel sang this song to the Lord, and they spoke,
saying, I will sing to the Lord, for very exalted is He; a horse and its
 At the Edge of Explanation 267

rider He cast into the sea.” The unusual use of the future tense in the
words “I will sing” captured the attention of many biblical commentators
throughout the ages, and they similarly interest Rabbi Shapira. He cites
two related explanations at the start of his essay. First, Rashi states that
at the moment of the splitting of the sea, the Israelites felt moved to sing.
Shapira then refers to Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev (1740–1809), who
suggests a different timeline. According to R. Levi Yitzhak, the Israelites
had to envision singing before they actually sang, and the two acts were
rather far apart. On this reading, the “Song of the Red Sea” was in fact
composed while the Israelites were still enslaved in Egypt. In the midst
of their oppression, they were able to imagine a time of liberation, and
so they sang in the future tense, projecting themselves into a reality that
would come but had not yet arrived. The Song of the Red Sea was thus a
rendition of a song written long ago when dreaming of a possibility that
was now coming to pass. “I will sing” were the words of a slave, certain
that one day she would indeed sing again. Though deeply mired in the
pain of servitude, a better future was imagined. But how reasonable is it to
demand this kind of future-oriented consciousness from suffering people?
Shapira recognizes the uniqueness of the ancient Israelite who could
sing in the midst of her suffering, just as he identifies the peculiarity of
King David, who composed a song describing the rebellion against him
of his own son Absalom.25 He writes:

It is possible to accept suffering and endure it with love [yekholin

lekabel yissurim b’ahavah], and to have faith that everything is
from God, but to actually sing while enduring it is difficult.
In order for a person to sing, his essential self—his soul and
his heart—must burst into song. One of the conditions of
prophecy was the necessity for the prophet to be in a state
of simcha—blissful joy—at all times, even while in pain, as
we learn in the book Sha’ar Ha-Kedusha, by R. Hayyim Vital,
of blessed memory. . . . [W]hen a level of simcha has been
reached, [then] a person can sing to God even about pain.26

Shapira here invokes the theme of yissurim shel ahavah not as an explana-
tion for suffering but as a framework for reckoning with it. Using language
lifted directly from b. Berakhot 5a, the notion of “accepting [pain] with
love” is cited as a reasonable expectation. One can conceivably choose
to interpret one’s lot as an expression of God’s loving involvement in
268 Erin Leib Smokler

one’s life. As the Talmud states, one can endure suffering “with consent,”
appropriating it as part of one’s spiritual identity and tying it to a divine
origin so that it is constitutive of a larger divine aim. But this interpretive
process has limits, Shapira insists. “To actually sing while enduring [pain]
is difficult.” Acceptance is one thing; celebration is another. Or, rendered
differently, we might say that cognitive assimilation of suffering into
one’s self-understanding might be possible and even praiseworthy, while
affective, enthusiastic celebration of such suffering seems inhumane and
beyond reasonable expectation.
The Talmud, cited by Shapira, addresses this issue regarding King
David. How could he have sung in celebration of his son’s uprising against
him? Instead of “A song of David,” the Psalm regarding Absalom should
have read “a lamentation of David,” it argues.27 The Talmud resolves:

When the Holy Blessed One said to David (2 Sam 12:11),

“Behold I will raise up evil against you out of your own
house,” David began to worry. He thought, “It may be a slave
or bastard who will have no pity on me.” When he saw that
it was Absalom, his son, he said, “Any normal son has a care
for his father,” and so he rejoiced. Hence, “A song of David.”28

Shapira interprets this passage thus: “How was David able to sing? The
Talmud answers that in suffering, he saw a miracle from heaven, because
things could have been so much worse, God forbid. King David rejoiced
over this miracle until he could sing about his pain.”29 David’s song was
not one of unadulterated, exuberant joy. It was a humble acknowledgment
that, deeply injured though he was, he had not been afflicted with the
worst of all possible wounds.30 He could imagine a fate more damning
than the treachery of his own son, and for this modest reprieve, he was
grateful. He trusted that his son would show a modicum of mercy. From
this place of relief, he found the strength to sing.
In a move uncharacteristic of Hasidic homilies—but not entirely
uncommon in Sermons from the Years of Rage—Shapira extrapolates from
the biblical character’s experience to the experience of his own community:
“This is an important rule for us,” he writes. “In all suffering, when there is
nothing with which to encourage ourselves, we must strengthen ourselves
and rejoice in the reflection that it could have been, God forbid, so much
worse.”31 Five months before the mass deportations from the Warsaw
Ghetto to Treblinka would begin, Shapira pauses to note with gratitude
 At the Edge of Explanation 269

that the dire circumstances of the moment are still not the worst of all
possible worlds. Concentration camps had already been established and
mass deportations had already begun elsewhere (from Lodz, for example)
at the end of January 1942. But for Warsaw’s Jews, the worst was indeed
yet to come: between July 22 and September 12, 1942, 265,000 Jews would
be deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka.32
Though perhaps buoyed temporarily by this perspective, Shapira
has no illusions about the long-term effectiveness of this coping strategy.
He writes:

But when, God forbid, the suffering is so great that one is

completely crushed and the mind has crumbled, when there
is insufficient personality left intact for it to be able to be
strengthened, then it is difficult to rejoice in reflections like
those of David. This is the reason why the Israelites [in Exod
6:9] “did not listen to Moses” [in Egypt].33

Though the Israelites in Egypt began, in this homily, as exemplars of hope

in the midst of despair, Shapira returns to them here to speak of their
encounter with numbing despondency. Exodus reports that when Moses
first introduced himself as a redeemer to the enslaved population, “they
did not listen to Moses because of their shortness of breath and the hard
work.”34 There were no songs sung, no dreams of the future confirmed.
On the contrary, the people were so mired in their years of crushing
oppression, so stuck in their self-understanding as trapped victims, that
they could not hear Moses’s promise of freedom. The possibility of an
alternate reality was simply incomprehensible to them, and so they rejected
the bearer of that unimaginable message.
There are two stages of despair, suggests Shapira, and two concom-
itant pathways for tempering it. The first is exemplified by King David
and by the earlier generations of enslaved Jews in Egypt (as interpreted
by Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev). This is a despair that can still see beyond
itself, either toward a better future or in comparison with what could
have been worse. This form of despair can still sing about its suffering.
It can vocalize its pain. It can imagine the possibility of release from
pain and find a way to move toward it over time. The second stage of
despair, however, is silent, hollowed out, without energy or perspective.
It paralyzes and renders mute. It darkens worlds and robs people of the
ability to even contemplate a way out. This was the horrific condition of
270 Erin Leib Smokler

the Jews in Egypt in advanced stages of their oppression, and he strongly

implies that it threatens to overtake the Jews of his own time as well.35
The classification of different forms of silence recurs several times
in the Ghetto sermons (see Seeman, this volume). The 1940 sermon we
have been discussing echoes an earlier treatment of “muteness” (ilmut) in
the sermon of December 2, 1939. After accounting for a kind of “silence”
born of suppressed speech (harishah), he describes the following condition:

When a Jew is, God forbid, crushed and broken to the point
where he has nothing to speak, he doesn’t comprehend or feel,
he even has no mind or heart left with which to comprehend
or emote, at which point it is no longer harishah but ilmut,
like a mute that has no ability to speak.36

As pain increases, the depth of one’s silence grows even more severe,
resulting in what James A. Diamond calls “total communicatory paralysis.”37
Drawing upon André Neher, Diamond describes this bleak condition: “A
more appropriate term for this kind of silence . . . is André Neher’s noc-
turnal metasilence or ‘nonsilence’ (lo dumiyah) of Psalms 22:3, which he
defines as ‘more silent than silence. It is the fall of silence into a deeper
stratum of nothingness; it is a shaft hollowed out beneath silence, which
leads to its most vertiginous depths.’ ”38 This is the painful, paralyzing silence
that Shapira refers to in this January 1942 sermon as “more silent than
silence” while his community hovers on the edge of its final catastrophe.
To address this kind of debilitating despair, self-generated and
future-oriented hope are unavailable. When Moses expresses frustration
to God about his contemporaries’ inability to hear his message, the Bible
recounts: “God spoke to Moses and Aaron and commanded them con-
cerning the Israelites and concerning Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, to let
the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt.”39 The content of the com-
mandment to Moses and Aaron regarding the Israelite people is ambiguous
here. Just what were they told to do? Shapira cites Rashi’s explanation:
“God commanded them to lead the Jewish people with gentleness and to
have patience with them.”40
God’s strategy to enable people who have been deafened by the
enormity of their own suffering to begin to hear once more is to treat
them with extraordinary compassion. Perhaps over time, through the
experience of being heard, they might learn to hear again, to trust in the
voice of one who promises a future beyond pain. Yet Shapira interprets
this gloss by Rashi in an entirely unexpected way:
 At the Edge of Explanation 271

The meaning of this is that it was the duty of the shepherds of

the Jewish people to bring about a change in Heaven’s policy
regarding the Jews, forcing it to administer the world with
gentleness and patience, instead of inflicting pain, God forbid.
This would allow the people to sing and to listen.41

Moses and Aaron were not commanded to turn to the people with gen-
tleness and patience. They were commanded by God to turn to God to
demand gentleness and patience on their behalf. They were to demand
of heaven—to force God—to change the fate of the Jewish people.42 The
way out of numbing suffering was not to comfort the sufferers but to
undo their suffering by confronting the one responsible. Shapira takes
great interpretive license here. First, nowhere does Rashi or the biblical
text itself indicate that the object of the biblical dictate is God. The chain
of command is entirely straightforward and thoroughly hierarchical: God
tells Moses and Aaron to communicate something to the people. Second,
Shapira has redirected the content of the command to God, calling for a
change in heavenly direction. The theology that undergirds this reimagined
command is ultimately anthropocentric. As in b. Shabbat 89a, previously
invoked by Shapira, God here demands that Moses assist him in chang-
ing the fate of the Jewish people. God once again needs human beings,
specifically leaders or “shepherds,” to help God be a better God.43
The partnership envisioned dramatically augments the power of
human leaders (and we can reasonably assume that Shapira understood
himself to be one such leader). In so doing, it also undermines God’s
omnipotence, which is otherwise assumed by the biblical text. Israel’s
suffering cannot be lifted until the right person makes the right kind of
demand of God. Shapira quotes the Talmud to support this claim: “The
tsaddik, the pious person, decrees, and the Holy Blessed One fulfills.”44 It
seems that God on high does not, or cannot, dispense kindness without
prompting from below. According to Shapira, God commands that he be
moved to mercy by people so that he might act toward them with com-
passion. This leaves human beings with power over God.
But, again, not just any human being. Behind the veil of the exodus
story, Shapira implies that only a tsaddik—perhaps one like himself—can
bring hopeful song back into the lives of his followers now. As he says
regarding Moses:

[God] commanded that, by decree, a change must be wrought

in the Divine administration of the world, decreeing that the
272 Erin Leib Smokler

Jewish people be led mercifully. This would bring an end to

their slavery, and enable them, even while they were still in
Egypt, to sing and praise God and to prepare themselves for
the singing and praising they would do upon redemption.45

Moses succeeded in doing this. By storming the heavens, so to speak,

he enabled his people to cultivate receptivity to redemption even before
redemption came. Shapira clearly hopes that he can do the same. He too
implicitly demands “that a change . . . be wrought in the Divine admin-
istration of the world” to bolster the spirits of his people, to open them
to the possibility of future song, even as they remain stuck in the mire
of Nazi oppression. Perhaps they could, after all, with his help “accept
suffering and endure it with love,” yekholin le-kabbel yissurim be-ahavah.46
This is consistent with his earlier depictions of love’s affliction, though by
1942 he apparently came to emphasize the prayers of the tsaddikim over
the songs of the Jewish masses. Shapira implicitly puts himself forward as
one who might prevail on God to “let [his] people go.”47 But note that he
quietly modifies his redemptive aspiration, now no longer foregrounding
a miraculous redemption so much as the mere ability to imagine the
possibility of life beyond affliction.

July 11, 1942: At the Edge of Explanation

The last time that Shapira mentions yissurim shel ahavah is on July 11,
1942, in the penultimate sermon of his wartime collection. It is here, I
believe, that Shapira finally concedes the inadequacy of this trope as an
explanatory frame for the experiences of the Jews of his time. This sermon
on the Torah portion of mattot continues the theme of joy as a necessary
prerequisite for the perception of God and concomitant hope in the world.
Tying his claims to a variety of classical biblical, talmudic, and mystical
traditions,48 Shapira declares not only that prophecy is unattainable in a
state of despondency and sadness but also that such a condition precludes
even lower-level spiritual engagement.

[Sadness] also affects one’s ability to take some homiletic teach-

ing from the painful experience, for even this is impossible
when a person is grief-stricken and spirit-crushed. There are
even times when it is impossible for a person to force himself
 At the Edge of Explanation 273

to say anything or to interpret events at all because of the

immensity of the breakdown and decline, may the Merciful
One protect us.49

Having guided his students thus far, offering them sermons that reflect
the crushing experience of the Warsaw Ghetto, Shapira is clearly entering
here into a paradigm of absolute crisis. He never fully leaves behind his
veil of impersonality as an author, but it does grow thin over time. The
mass deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka would soon begin (on July
22, 1942), but the Ghetto had already seen its share of misery, and Sha-
pira’s tone indicates that he is shaken. Just a few months before, he had
put himself forward as a leader and pleader before God on behalf of his
diminished and weakened community. Now, he too lacks the strength, and
certainly the joy, to storm the heavens and force God’s hand. And so he
asks: “With what can [a crushed soul] strengthen itself, at least a little,
so long as salvation has not appeared? And with what can the spirit be
elevated, even the tiniest bit, while crushed and broken like this?”50 Note
that the questions here are personal and anthropocentric. He does not ask
how to bring about salvation from on high as he did before but rather
how to cope with the now evident failure of such deliverance to arrive.
To this challenge, he offers several preliminary answers. First,
holding onto slipping hope, he suggests prayer and faith that God will
not entirely abandon his children to annihilation. He encourages trust in
the mercy of God and in the idea of redemption itself, even as it tarries.
Though Shapira will never explicitly give up on the possibility of divine
intervention, his focus here shifts subtly. This response, cloaked in theo-
logical language, seems less an assertion of God’s salvific power and more
a claim about the salubrious effects of belief in that power. “With what
can [one] strengthen [one]self?” he asks. “With prayer and with faith,” he
answers.51 These religious tools are spiritually strengthening, whether or
not they engender physical rescue. The belief in ultimate endurance—of
one’s people, if not of oneself—itself elevates the spirit, he suggests, even
if it will not save the body. This is a strategy for psychic survival.
Yet Shapira painfully acknowledges that as the numbers of the dead
increase, this belief becomes less plausible and thus less effective. He asks:

With what shall we gather strength over those, the holy ones,
who have already, God protect us, been murdered, relatives and
loved ones, and other unrelated Jews, many of whom touch us
274 Erin Leib Smokler

like our very own souls? And how will we encourage ourselves,
at least somewhat, in face of the terrifying reports, old and new,
that we hear, shattering our bones and dissolving our hearts?52

To this, he offers another approach. When trust in communal endurance

fails, when it looks like God just might allow for the end of the Jewish
people, trust in shared misery should prevail. Jews ought to take comfort
in knowing that they do not suffer alone, but rather that God suffers
alongside them. Ps 91:15 states, “I am with him in distress,” and this,
for Shapira, grounds a doctrine of solidarity. He again foregoes a strong
affirmation of divine salvation in favor of a soft declaration of divine
consolation. God will not necessarily save all of his people from pain, but
out of his particular love for them, he will join them in their pain. God
bears the burdens thrust upon his people together with them, dispersing
and thereby lightening their heavy load.
This theme of divine solidarity is one that he returns to often
throughout Sermons from the Years of Rage.53 What distinguishes this
particular reference—his last—is the way in which it is set so clearly in
contrast to divine deliverance. It is invoked precisely to account for the
growing awareness of God’s noninterference. Solidarity is offered as spir-
itual compensation for the lack of physical salvation.
Yet even the notion of divine solidarity cannot satisfy those with
“shatter[ed] . . . bones and dissolve[ed] . . . hearts.” The suffering has
grown intolerable, and a God who merely joins in it but does not remove
it fails to offer the solace that is much needed. So Shapira adds a third
approach:

There is suffering we endure individually for our sins, or pangs

of love [yissurim shel ahavah] that soften [or polish] and purify
us. In all of this, God merely suffers with us. But then there is
suffering in which we merely suffer with Him, so to speak—
suffering for the sanctification of God’s name. . . . The chief
suffering is really for God’s sake, and because of Him we are
ennobled and exalted by this sort of pain. With this, we may
encourage ourselves, at least a little.54

In this final stage of his Ghetto sermons, Shapira explicitly abandons the
notion of yissurim shel ahavah and reiterates the inapplicability of divine
retribution for Israel’s sin or iniquity. The conceptual tool of “afflictions
 At the Edge of Explanation 275

of love,” which itself struggles with the end of explanation, must be dis-
missed as insufficiently explanatory on account of the growing sense of
desperation. Instead, a new category is introduced: yissurim shel kiddush
Hashem, sufferings for the sanctification of God’s name.55
In the Talmud, kiddush Hashem refers to martyrdom, to Jews giving
their lives to God as a symbol of devotion.56 Yet Shapira uses it now to
describe dying on behalf of God or as God’s proxy. In a direct reversal
of his earlier doctrine of divine solidarity with humanity, Shapira here
advances the doctrine of human solidarity with God. The Jewish people, as
representatives of God in the world, suffer with God, on account of God,
and on behalf of God. Sometimes God is the real target of anti-Jewish
action and Jews the byproducts of that assault. They bear God’s burdens.57
They are with him in his pain. Shapira writes:

The liturgy [for the holiday of Sukkot] reads: “Hosanna, save

those who learn Your fear, Hosanna. Hosanna, save those who
are slapped upon the cheek, Hosanna. Hosanna, save those
who are given to beatings, Hosanna. Hosanna, save those who
bear Your burden, Hosanna.” By “those who learn Your fear,”
we mean those who learn the whole of Torah. . . . How is it
possible to learn when we are being “slapped upon the face”
and “given over to beatings?” Because Israel knows that she
“bears Your burden,” and from this she is able to take some
little encouragement.58

It is rare for Shapira to ground an argument in Jewish liturgy rather than

biblical or talmudic texts, but here he must be more innovative than
usual if he is to construct a new paradigm of theodicy. The holiday of
Sukkot is still a few months away for him, yet the refrain of “Hosanna”
in one of its central prayers—an elision of the Hebrew words for “save
us please”—is timely. In simply referencing this repetitive prayer, Shapira
subtly gives voice to the desperation of his people, who are in search of
a savior, while simultaneously offering justification for the failure of the
savior to come. God, as it were, is under attack by the Nazis (though
Nazis are never explicitly named), and the Jews, slapped and beaten, are
bearing his burden together with him. Not quite as empowered as they
were in previous essays, God’s children are hurting terribly along with
God, but this time they cannot assist him. They can only share in his
pain and presence.
276 Erin Leib Smokler

Awareness of this phenomenon ought to bring a modicum of relief.

The mirroring of God’s fate is a privilege, according to these late sermons,
a reflection of deep intimacy, connection, and inextricable identification.
Jews become God’s image in the world, echoing below the reality on high.
Suffering is a mere manifestation of this singular human-God relationship,
and thus, the Jews “are ennobled and exalted by this sort of pain.”59
Still, Shapira is not naive enough to believe that this recontextual-
ization can fully relieve Israel of its sorrows. His language is consistently
modest. At best, he writes, “we may encourage ourselves, at least a little”
or “from this [Israel] is able to take some little encouragement.”60 As a
third attempt to identify a strategy to maintain psychic cohesion in the
face of near-breakdown, this attempt falls short, even for Shapira himself.
Indeed, he caps his investigation into this matter with a plea that is a
protest: “ ‘Return O God, until when?’ (Ps 90:13). Jews are giving their
lives for the sanctification of God’s name. ‘Please, O God!’ He will have
mercy on His people and on His children who are killed and tortured
for His blessed sake.”61 Sufferings for the sanctification of God’s name,
exalted as they may be in theory, hurt as much physically, and almost as
much spiritually, as any suffering, and so Shapira begs God to release his
beloved people from this unbearable burden.

Concluding Remarks

The concept of yissurim shel ahavah is explicitly and finally relinquished

in the sermon of July 11, 1942. It is inadequate to the task of finding
a frame in which to process Jewish suffering. And yet, in replacing it
with a parallel concept, Shapira may be said to retain the structure of
the paradigm that he rejects. Yissurim shel kiddush Hashem is patterned
linguistically, as well as conceptually, on yissurim shel ahavah. Both are
essentially rooted in love. Both make Jewish suffering the outgrowth of
the unique relationship between God and Israel. Both make the claim
that pain recontextualized is pain diminished. Both place the psalmist’s
declaration “I am with him in his distress” at the core of their message.62
The difference between them lies in the direction of empathy. Yissurim
shel ahavah bear witness to divine love for human beings. Yissurim shel
kiddush Hashem bear witness to human love for and presence with God.
And so, as this penultimate sermon ends, afflictions of love are decid-
edly renounced, but their imprint continues to reverberate in Shapira’s new,
 At the Edge of Explanation 277

if unsatisfying, model: afflictions of sanctification. What is gained in this

process of substitution is subtle. In shifting the onus of suffering entirely
onto God, Shapira effectively removes any and all vestiges of blame from
the Jews. Not only are they not culpable for their own suffering, they are
not even its true subjects. Implicated though they are by God’s travails,
those travails are fundamentally not their own—either as sinners, or as
martyrs, or as purified lovers.
On the cusp of his final sermon, on the verge of the Great Deporta-
tion, Shapira stands at the edge of his own capacity for explanation. The
theory of yissurim shel ahavah has failed to justify suffering and has failed
to console the remnants of a community undone by pain. Though it began
as a model of human empowerment in October 1940 and reverberated
through sermons as late as January 1942, the paradigm could not ulti-
mately be sustained in the face of relentless devastation. It did, however,
offer a rich framework within which to grapple with the potential loss of
redemptive frameworks altogether. Like the ailing rabbis of b. Berakhot 5b,
who, faced with their own illnesses, came to reject their abstract notions
about beloved suffering, Shapira ultimately, if implicitly, declares in July
1942, Lo hem ve-lo sekharam,63 “We do not welcome our sufferings, nor
do we welcome their reward.”

Notes

1. See, for example, Deut 8:5; Prov 3:12; 13:24; Ps 94:12.

2. David Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 23.
3. The rabbinic understanding of the relationship between love and suf-
fering centers on one rather lengthy discussion, in b. Berakhot 5a-b, the longest
treatment of suffering in all of classical rabbinic literature.
4. See Rashi on b. Berakhot 5a, s.v. “afflictions of love.”
5. B. Berakhot 5b.
6. For a review of Jewish anti-theodicy, see Zachary Braiterman, (God)
After Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
7. Translation from Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sacred Fire: Torah from
the Years of Fury 1939–1942, trans. J. Hershy Worch (New York: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2002), 165. Also see Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the
Years of Rage [in Hebrew], ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic
College, 2017), 1:158–59. Unless otherwise noted, translations in this chapter
are from Worch, with additional citation from Reiser’s Hebrew edition. Please
278 Erin Leib Smokler

note that in this case, only the Hebrew original cites the condensed version of
the talmudic story. Worch added in the surrounding context—a move that I will
argue undermines Shapira’s intent.
8. Deut 32:3.
9. See Sacred Fire, 248, 252, 263; Sermons from the Years of Rage, rosh
ha-shanah 5702 (1941), 1:218; ibid., parashat vayyishlah 5702 (1941), 1:239; ibid.,
hanukkah 5702 (1941), 1:243; and ibid., parashat va’era 5702 (1942), 1:250–51.
10. Sacred Fire, 136; Sermons from the Years of Rage, shabbat shuvah 5701
(1940), 1:159. See note 11 for a discussion of the controversial status of the
parentheses.
11. For rabbinic precedents, see, for example, b. Menahot 110a and b.
Ta’anit 2a.
12. See Ariel Evan Mayse, Speaking Infinites: God and Language in the
Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2020).
13. See Jonathan Garb, Manifestations of Power in Jewish Mysticism (Jeru-
salem: Magnes, 2005); and Hartley Lachter, Kabbalistic Revolution: Reimagining
Judaism in Medieval Spain (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014).
14. Ps 94:12.
15. On laughter, song, and tears as a mode of overcoming tragedy and
absurdity, see also Ariel Evan Mayse, “Stories Untold: Theology, Language and
the Hasidic Spirit in Elie Wiesel’s The Gates of the Forest,” in The Struggle for
Understanding: Elie Wiesel’s Literary Works, ed. Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 137–67.
16. Deut 32:3.
17. See also Arthur Green, Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mys-
ticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
18. Sacred Fire, 118; Sermons from the Years of Rage, shabbat shuvah 5701
(1940), 1:159.
19. Ps 94:12.
20. Sacred Fire,137; Sermons from the Years of Rage, shabbat shuvah 5701
(1940), 1:160.
21. Hos 14:2–3.
22. Sacred Fire, 137; Sermons from the Years of Rage, shabbat shuvah 5701
(1940), 1:160.
23. See Nehemia Polen, “Niggun as Spiritual Practice, with Special Focus on
the Writings of Rabbi Kalonymus Shapiro, the Rebbe of Piaseczna” (forthcoming).
24. See Exod 15:1–21.
25. Psalm 3 begins: “A song of David, when he fled from Absalom his
son . . .” See also 2 Sam 15–18.
26. Sacred Fire, 276; Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat be-shalah
5702 (1942), 1:261.
 At the Edge of Explanation 279

27. b. Berakhot 7b.

28. Ibid.
29. Sacred Fire, 276; Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat be-shalah
5702 (1942), 1:261.
30. Betrayal by one’s own flesh and blood surely could be seen by some as
the most painful affront possible. Yet the Talmud imagines David to find comfort
in this instead, hopeful that his son will show him mercies that others would not.
In light of the activities of the Judenrat (Jewish councils directed by the Nazis)
already active in the Warsaw Ghetto at this time, Shapira’s use of this image gains
poignancy. Perhaps he too thought that the fate of the Jews would be less severe
if their persecution was mediated through fellow Jews.
31. Sacred Fire, 276–77; Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat be-shalah
5702 (1942), 1:261.
32. See Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1989), 197.
33. Sacred Fire, 277; Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat be-shalah
5702 (1942), 1:261.
34. Exod 6:9.
35. According to Exod 12:40, the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt for 430
years. Shapira proposes that there were two phases of oppression during this time.
During the first, the Israelites, though persecuted, were still able to accomplish
their work and, thus, their spirits remained intact. During the second, conditions
worsened as Pharaoh denied them the materials needed to execute their work
orders (see Exod 5:7). This added oppression to oppression and sent the Israelites
into deep despair.
36. Sacred Fire, 22; Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat vayyeshev
5700 (1939), 1:97.
37. James A. Diamond, “The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe: Diverting God’s Gaze
from a Utopian End to an Anguished Now,” Modern Judaism 30, no. 3 (2010):
299–331, at 302.
38. Ibid.
39. Exod 6:13.
40. Rashi on Exod 6:13.
41. Sacred Fire, 277; Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat be-shalah
5702 (1942), 1:262.
42. See Dov Weiss, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
43. See Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suf-
fering’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological Review 101, no. 3–4 (2008):
465–505.
44. B. Sotah 12a. This text, and the parallel in b. Mo’ed Katan 16b, are
frequently cited in Hasidic sources extolling the power of the tsaddik. See Arthur
280 Erin Leib Smokler

Green, “Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq,” Jewish Spirituality II:
From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York:
Continuum, 1987), 127–56; Green, “The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 3 (1977): 327–47.
45. Sacred Fire, 278; Sermons from the Years of Rage, be-shalah 5702 (1942),
1:262.
46. B. Berakhot 5a, cited in Sacred Fire, 276; Sermons from the Years of
Rage, be-shalah 5702 (1942), 1:261.
47. Exod 9:1.
48. See 2 Kgs 3:15; b. Shabbat 30b; and Hayyim Vital, Sha’arei ha-kedushah,
17–22.
49. Sacred Fire, 333; Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat mattot 5702
(1942), 1:310.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 334; Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:310.
53. See, for example, Sacred Fire, 54, 154, 158, 211, 315; Sermons from the
Years of Rage, parashat vayyikra 5700 (1940), 1:113; ibid., parashat toledot 5701
(1940), 1:171; ibid., parashat vayyishlah 5701 (1940), 1:173; ibid., parashat re’eh
5701 (1941), 1:213; ibid., parashat mishpatim-shekalim 5702 (1942), 1:272; and
ibid., parashat ha-hodesh 5702 (1942), 1:292.
54. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat ha-hodesh 5702 (1942),
1:287–294; Sermons from the Years of Rage, mattot 5702 (1942), 1:311.
55. See the classic study of Shimon Huberband, Kiddush Hashem: Jewish
Religious and Cultural Life in Poland During the Holocaust, trans. David E. Fish-
man (Hoboken: Ktav, 1987).
56. See, for example, b. Bava Kama 113a and b. Sanhedrin 74a.
57. For a discussion of yissurim shel kiddush Hashem, see Nehemia Polen,
The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of
the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1994), 120–21.
58. Sacred Fire, 334; Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat mattot 5702
(1942), 1:311.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ps 91:15.
63. B. Berakhot 5b.
 12

“Living with the Times”

Historical Context in the Wartime Writings
of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira

Henry Abramson

Rabbi Shapira’s wartime sermons seem completely disconnected from

the quotidian reality of the Ghetto, citing and explaining sources from
the Jewish literary tradition as if the world were not collapsing around
both its author and his immediate audience. The mood of the sermons
is dark—Shapira’s writings constitute perhaps the most sustained theo-
logical meditation on theodicy and human suffering since Nahmanides,
or perhaps even the biblical book of Job—but the almost total lack of
explicit historical references in this work is striking. If we understand
history solely in terms of Leopold von Ranke’s nineteenth-century defini-
tion, wie es eigentlich gewesen war (what actually happened), then Rabbi
Shapira’s works represent a distinct challenge, because he seems to have
been virtually impervious to the temptation to make explicit reference to
any political or social occurrence in his Shabbat sermons. He preferred
to situate his weekly message in the ahistorical world that simultaneously
included biblical Egypt, talmudic commentators from Babylon, medieval
exegetes from pre-expulsion Spain, and Hasidic masters from eastern
Europe (see Wodziński, Wiskind, this volume). Given this literary-reli-
gious style, how can anyone glean actual historical data from Sermons
from the Years of Rage?

281
282 Henry Abramson

It is true that the written record of R. Shapira’s handwritten manu-

script preserved in the Ringelblum archives contains only a distillation of
the actual discourses he taught. Common Hasidic practice suggests that
he delivered his messages in Yiddish rather than Rabbinic Hebrew and
probably spoke at much greater length than the brief entries, recorded
from memory on Saturday nights, suggest.1 Perhaps he prefaced his oral
remarks with explicit discussion of the historical moment; we simply
don’t know. The written record, however, preserves what can be nothing
but a conscious attempt to avoid, with only a few exceptions, almost any
reference to historical context.2
There are multiple reasons why explicit references to contemporary
historical events might be ignored in a rabbinic sermon, as Marc Saperstein
has amply demonstrated. “Addressed to a familiar audience at a specific
moment,” he writes, “the sermon is by its nature an allusive genre. The
preacher can refer to ‘the dramatic events of the past few days,’ to an
incident that had become the topic of widespread discussion . . . confident
that the listeners would follow.”3 Moreover, converting that oral presen-
tation to a written document might lead the author to eliminate details
that would cause the material to seem (literally) dated.4 Nevertheless, the
almost complete absence of historical references, especially during the
terrifying years of the Holocaust, calls for better explanation.

Reading History in Sermons from the Years of Rage

Judith Thidor-Baumel proposed as early as 1980 that a careful compari-

son of R. Shapira’s dated sermons with what is known of the day-to-day
microhistory of the Ghetto might shed light on the internal life of the
Hasidic community and how it came to understand the unfolding events
of the Holocaust.5 The challenge to the historian, she argued, would be to
read these Sabbath sermons as commentaries on history as much as they
were commentaries on Torah. On a fundamental level, I am arguing that
this is precisely what Shapira was hoping to achieve with his sermons.
Confronted with confused, bewildered, and beleaguered Hasidim who
sought comfort and consolation, the rebbe would mine his extensive
knowledge of the Jewish literary tradition to place the horrendous events
of the Ghetto into the metahistorical context of Torah. The explicit words
of the sermon might be describing the tribulations of the Jews in Egypt,
on this reading, but the crucial subterranean meaning would directly
 “Living with the Times” 283

address the suffering of the Jews in contemporary Warsaw and later in

the Warsaw Ghetto.
The artistry of R. Shapira’s approach is remarkable. The under-
lying meaning—literally the “subtext”—remains opaque to unprepared
twenty-first-century readers, but it would have been transparent to his
audience. Through allusive language and references to biblical models,
his style would ipso facto reinforce the notion that the contemporary
suffering of Jews under German occupation was part of the larger pattern
of Jewish history, a traditional concept encapsulated in the phrase ma’aseh
avot siman le-vanim, “the experiences of the ancestors are a sign for their
descendants.”6 This literary device also served to reinforce the promise
of ultimate redemption: just as the ancestors were ultimately saved from
the Egyptian crucible, so too would their descendants emerge from the
Nazi inferno.
The data to be gleaned from reading the wartime sermons in this
way is unlikely to yield much that is new in the way of modernist histo-
riographic data. We are not about to learn many new details about how
the Judenrat operated, or about the structure and function of the Jewish
resistance, or even about the size and complexion of the Hasidic commu-
nity. Rather, I would argue that the historical data we may derive from
R. Shapira’s wartime writings are more postmodern in nature, to adapt a
distinction articulated by Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (Rav Shagar).
Sermons from the Years of Rage can help us appreciate the specific truths
of Warsaw Jewry, even though they remain largely silent on the general
truths frequently sought by historians.7
Consider the following exception, which may help to prove the
rule. In one of his early Ghetto sermons, R. Shapira comments briefly (in
just five Hebrew words!) on a contemporary trial faced by pious Jews in
Warsaw: the forced and public shaving of their beards (see Seeman, this
volume). Rabbi Shimon Huberband, a relative and member of Shapira’s
yeshiva in Warsaw, provides personal testimony to this widespread practice
in the initial weeks of the German occupation beginning in October, 1939:

Two other Jews were seized along with us; one with a black
beard, the other with a long yellowish beard. A moment later,
they grabbed an elegantly dressed young lady and forced her
to shear off my beard and Shtayer’s. The girl wept as she cut
our hair, for the honor of the Jewish people which was being
disgraced in public by the evil ones . . .
284 Henry Abramson

These barbarities were done not only to grown men but

also to children with earlocks. In Praga, a group of German
officers chanced upon the ten-year-old Avrom Igelnik, at the
gate of 32 Brukowa Street. They took him away to their head-
quarters, where they set fire to his earlocks. The young boy
was lucky to have been left alive.8

R. Shapira makes mention of this cruelty in his sermon for parashat tole-
dot, November 11, 1939, through reflection on a verse in Isaiah (27:13):

And then they will come, those who are lost in the land of
Assyria, and those who are dispersed in the land of Egypt.
There are two distinct categories: the lost and the dispersed. The
dispersed refers to one who is displaced to a distant locale yet
remains distinct and recognizable. This is in contradistinction
to the lost—this person is lost and is neither distinct nor recog-
nizable. For when the hardships are presently so compounded
that they even cut off the beards of Jews, which makes them
outwardly unrecognizable—and due to unimaginable persecu-
tion and unbearable afflictions, they are no longer recognizable
internally—such a person loses himself, he ceases to recognize
himself. How did he feel a year ago, on the Sabbath, or on a
weekday prior to prayers, or during prayers, etc.? Now he is
trampled and crushed, such that he no longer senses if he is
a Jew or not, or a human being or not, or an animal that has
no capacity to feel. This is the nature of one who is lost, yet
they will come, those who are lost.9

One may imagine the impact of these words on his audience, which
likely included individuals whose beards and earlocks had already been
shorn by the Nazis. Marshaling his keen psychological insight, Shapira
empathizes with the victims and affirms the deep connection between the
external markers of identity and a person’s internal state: “he ceases to
recognize himself.” Shapira concludes with a message of encouragement
to his listeners and readers:

The Talmud states that the one who lost something seeks after
his lost object.10 When he lost it, it was no longer percepti-
ble nor recognizable, and thus the owner seeks to find it, to
 “Living with the Times” 285

pick it up and bring it home. And is it not God who is the

master of we who are lost? Are we not the lost possessions of
God? . . . May the Owner of the lost return to find us . . . 11

The element of historical context, that is, the clear reference to the shearing
of the beards of Orthodox Jewish men, is the slight deviation from the
pattern established for the vast majority of the entries in Sermons from
the Years of Rage. Shapira’s goal throughout was to provide consolation
and guidance to his audience, and to accomplish this pastoral objective,
he adopted the following basic pattern:

1. Locate the sermon within the context of the Jewish calendar,

typically with a reference to the text of the week’s Torah
reading or a practice in a proximate holiday.
2. Refer in an allusive, oblique manner to experiences of
contemporary Warsaw Jews. Demonstrate his awareness
of their suffering and validate it.
3. Return to the scriptural reference and conclude with a
message of consolation and hope for both physical and
spiritual redemption (see Maayan, this volume).

Viewed in this light, Sermons from the Years of Rage represents a sustained,
heroic effort by R. Shapira to provide spiritual leadership to his follow-
ers in extremis for the duration of the war. He clearly refused to see his
wartime sermons simply as intellectual discourses on esoteric subjects: he
was invested in the suffering of his community and took on the awesome,
exhausting mantle of responsibility to care for their spiritual and mental
well-being under incomprehensible circumstances.
Detailed reading of the wartime sermons will yield a small number
of references that have value in terms of historical context, but they tend
to be of very local, specific importance, revealing more about the personal
well-being of the author and the conditions under which he spoke and
wrote than what Warsaw Jews endured as a whole. We learn, for example,
that he went into hiding when the Nazis were arresting Jewish commu-
nal leaders in retaliation for the assassination of a soldier by the Jewish
resistance, and that he survived a bout of typhus.12 We also see explicit
references to historical events such as yortsayts, or death-anniversaries:
two for his son Bentsion Elimelekh, killed in the initial Luftwaffe bombing
286 Henry Abramson

of Warsaw in October 1939, and once for R. Shapira’s father.13 From a

historical point of view, these derashot (sermons) do not add much to our
knowledge of the condition of the Warsaw Jewish community.
More common in R. Shapira’s wartime writing are allusive references,
often quite central to the sermon in question, that directly address the
concerns of the community. Consider, for example, his remarks on parashat
metsora 5700 (April 13, 1940). Earlier that month, Warsaw Jews were
distressed to witness the initial construction of walls in several parts of
the city. Up until the building of these walls, the concentration of Jews in
certain parts of Warsaw had been effected only by administrative decree,
with few permanent structures demarcating the boundaries of the ghetto.
R. Shapira’s sermon begins with a citation from the medieval com-
mentator Rashi regarding the treatment of a house that had been placed
under quarantine after it showed signs of the plague known in Scripture as
tsara’at (Lev 14). Biblical law mandates that such a home be quarantined
as impure for seven days and then examined to see whether the plague
remains before destroying it. Rashi cites an ancient midrash according to
which the owners of a particular home began to dismantle their home
as the law requires, only to find a treasure hidden within the walls by
previous inhabitants, long ago:

Let us understand: if such is the case, why is one required to

seal the house for seven days at the outset and only afterward
remove the stones [i.e., dismantle the structure]? Once the
plague is visible, one knows that treasures are to be found
there! This is especially true according to the understanding of
Nahmanides, cited in the works of my holy father, that plagues
on houses and clothing are supernatural occurrences and are
only for the benefit of the Jewish people in order to reveal the
hidden treasures.14 Why, then, does the Torah command us
to render the house impure at the onset of the seven days?15

To restate Shapira’s question: If the tsara’at is to be understood as a super-

natural signal to the Jews that there are treasures hidden within their walls,
then what is the point of the quarantine? Shouldn’t the Jews simply destroy
the walls immediately once the first indications of tsara’at are evident?
One can only imagine how his question must have electrified his Hasidim,
who were seeking guidance on the meaning of the walls being constructed
around them in Warsaw. Shapira’s reference to long-lost treasure may have
 “Living with the Times” 287

alluded to a hidden benefit in the walls, but did these words also contain
a hint of rebellion or advocacy of sabotage? He continues:

In truth, the intent of the Torah and its commandments is

beyond our grasp. We can, however, perceive allusions, for
we know and believe that all that God does for us—even,
Heaven forbid, when God strikes us—is all for our benefit. At
the present time we see, however, we are not solely smitten
with physical afflictions but also, Heaven forbid, with those
[afflictions] that distance us from the Blessed One. There is
neither primary Torah school nor a yeshiva; neither study
hall in which to pray as a congregation nor mikveh, and so
on. Consequently, a glimmer of doubt, Heaven forbid, arises
within us: is it possible that even now God’s intent is for our
benefit? If it is for our benefit, God should have chastised us
with those things which would have drawn us closer, not with
the cessation of Torah study and prayer or, Heaven forbid, the
fulfillment of the entire Torah!16

Before answering his own question, Shapira probes even further by specifi-
cally referring to the present condition of Warsaw Jewry. The punishments
of the spring of 1940 seemed to serve only to distance Jews from their
spiritual occupation, he avers. How could the new Ghetto walls possibly
hold good tidings for the suffering Jews of Warsaw? What did they mean,
and how should Hasidim relate to their construction? Shapira returns to this
question by digging deeper into the talmudic teaching that only a member
of the priestly caste (kohanim) has the authority to place a home under
quarantine. A non-priest, even an expert, may only render an opinion:

A person must only say it resembles a plague to me,17 and even

a Torah scholar who knows that it is in fact a plague must
nonetheless say “it resembles a plague,” because a person is
incapable of saying if it is in truth a plague or affliction. It is
a matter of perception, such that one must say, “it resembles
a plague,” whereas in truth it is an act of benevolence for the
Jewish people by means of which God does good for us.18

Shapira’s concluding words contained several distinct messages. First, he

validates the suffering of the Jews and its deleterious impact on their
288 Henry Abramson

s­ piritual growth. Second, he remains steadfast in his faith that developments

in the Ghetto were somehow beneficial in the larger plan of the Almighty.
Finally, like the expert who is not a member of the priestly caste, he can
only state that “it resembles a plague”: he cannot definitively pronounce
that it is in fact a plague, thereby initiating the quarantine and subsequent
discovery of the treasure. By analogy, he can only speculate on the meaning
of the Ghetto walls—“it resembles a plague”—yet he believes with per-
fect faith that there is an ultimate divine purpose that will ultimately be
revealed as a valuable treasure. His response to his Hasidim, troubled by
the meaning of the walls, validates their fears but urges them to strengthen
their faith in divine providence. Viewed without the historical context of
the microhistory of the Ghetto (the initial construction of the Ghetto
walls in early April 1940), the sermon remains intelligible, but it loses its
original, and primary, purpose. The sermon becomes more pointed still
when we realize that Ghetto walls were first proposed by German public
health officials to protect occupying forces from contagion by infectious
disease that ran rampant among the malnourished population.19
Another relatively accessible example of Shapira’s style may be seen
in his comments on parashat shelah, delivered shortly after the news of
the fall of Paris in June 1940. The Nazi victory ruined the immediate
post-Shavuot atmosphere by casting an additional layer of gloom over the
city. Shimon Huberband records an example of the black humor typical
of the Ghetto circulating at that time:

Jews are now very pious. They observe all the ritual laws: they
are stabbed and punched with holes like matsot, and have as
much bread as on Passover; they are beaten like hoshanot, rat-
tled like Haman; they are green as etrogim and thin as lulavim;
they fast as if it were Yom Kippur; they are burnt as if it were
Hanukah, and their moods are as if it were the Ninth of Av.20

With the fall of France, the Third Reich neared its high-water mark,
stretching from the English Channel to the Soviet Union, and the
rumor-ridden Ghetto population sank even more deeply into despair.
R. Shapira responded with a remarkably powerful, undiluted message
of courage. The starting point is, as usual, a biblical text. After the spies
return from the land of Canaan with a baleful report of the impossibility
of the Israelite cause (Num 13), Caleb rejects their pessimism with a call
to action. Rabbi Shapira writes:
 “Living with the Times” 289

Let us go up and take it over, for we certainly can.21 Let us

understand: the spies certainly spoke meaningfully and rea-
sonably [when they said], but the nation is powerful . . . and
the cities are fortified.22 Why did Caleb not argue with them to
rebut their rationale and their arguments? Instead, he simply
said, let us ascend.
Such must be the faith of the Jew. Not only when he sees
an opening and path to his salvation, which is to say that he
reasonably believes, according to the course of natural events,
that God will save him, and thereby he is strengthened; but also
at the time when he does not see, heaven forbid, any reasonable
opening through the course of natural events for his salvation,
he must still believe that God will save him, and he is thereby
strengthened in his faith and trust. On the contrary, at such a
time it is better that he not engage in intellectual convolutions
to find some rationale and opening through natural means,
since it is clear that he will not find one—consequently it is
possible that his faith will be diminished. This diminution in
his faith and trust in God might serve to prevent his salvation,
heaven forbid. Rather, he must declare that it is all true, that
the nation that lives there [in the land] is in fact powerful,
that its cities are really fortified. Nonetheless, I proclaim my
faith in God, that God is beyond limitation and nature, and
that God will save us. Let us go up and take it over, beyond
reason and beyond logic. Such faith and trust in God draws
our salvation closer.23

Shapira’s message here is clear: despite the terrible news from the western
front, Jews were not to give credence to the doomsayers. Like Caleb’s
report to Moses on the enemy forces in Canaan, the Jews need not focus
on the power of the German army. They need only proclaim, Let us go
up and take it over, for we certainly can. The Third Reich, no matter how
powerful, is no match for the Almighty.24

Annotations as Historical Markers in R. Shapira’s Oeuvre

Given his general preference for only indirect reference to contemporary

events unfolding around him, it is characteristic and worth nothing that
290 Henry Abramson

R. Shapira sometimes historicizes an otherwise apparently ahistorical

sermon or teaching through the striking use of brief annotations or
apparently incidental mention of historical contexts. This begins in his
prewar writings and continues into Sermons from the Years of Rage. There
is a powerful example of this in the only one of R. Shapira’s works that
was published and widely circulated before the war, Hovot ha-talmidim
(The Obligation of Students), the 1932 classic that catapulted him to fame
as a master educator.
Like his wartime sermons, Hovot ha-talmidim mostly eschews
explicit historical references. Though he situates his book historically in
an introduction written “to parents and educators,” the body of the text is
composed as timeless spiritual advice for young people who wish to take
responsibility for their own religious development. In a chapter dedicated
to discouraging laziness, Shapira describes the complicated parable of a
pious but impoverished shoemaker who falls on hard times. Weak with
starvation and unable to face the hunger of his wife and children, this
shoemaker goes off into the fields to pour out his heart in prayer, and
collapses from sheer exhaustion. Later, he is revived by the scent of an
unusual flower, which he resolves to bring home for his family to enjoy.
On his way home, however, he is approached by a nobleman who offers
him a large sum for the special flower; blinded by hunger and poverty,
the shoemaker sells it for a paltry two loaves of bread to feed his family.
That night, his father comes to him in a dream and castigates him for
selling the miraculous flower so cheaply. His prayers had so moved the
heavens, his father told him, that Satan the deceiver was sent to trick him
into giving up his precious gift for a single meal:

My son, you have harmed not only yourself but all of Israel
and even the Holy One of Israel. It was all in your hands: the
forefathers, prophets, tsaddikim, even the messiah—and you
lost it all for a loaf of bread.25

The surface meaning of the parable is clear: that a student must resist
the temptation to give up the disciplines of prayer and study for merely
material gain. It is framed as a ma’aseh, a story that once happened in
an imaginary setting. “There once was a poor shoemaker in the land of
Israel, who lived near a crossroads.”26 Just two paragraphs later, however,
Shapira inserts a jarring note of historical context (emphasis added): “At
 “Living with the Times” 291

the beginning of the Great War, all traveling in that area ceased, and what
little sustenance the shoemaker had earned was reduced to nothing.”
Why did R. Shapira feel it necessary to place his otherwise timeless
parable so precisely in relation to the recent outbreak of the Great War
in 1914? I believe he used this technique specifically because the story
of the shoemaker is otherwise so timeless that it risks being treated as
merely a story. The sudden mention of the Great War, which many of his
readers would have known about in a very personal way (see Wodziński,
this volume), shocks the reader’s system and forces the audience to under-
stand the relevance of the parable to their own life and circumstances.
This technique of inserting an element of historical context is deliberate,
and in fact, we see Shapira utilizing it on a number of occasions in his
wartime writings as well, most notably in his address on parashat zakhor
5702 (February 28, 1942), when the first Great War was again specifically
mentioned.
More significant for our purposes here are the several annotations
that Shapira appended to his sermons toward the end of Sermons from
the Years of Rage. As Daniel Reiser has amply demonstrated in his critical
two-volume edition of wartime sermons, Shapira engaged in heavy editing
of each address—even a casual glance at the facsimile of the manuscript
(reproduced as the second volume of Reiser’s critical edition) reveals
hundreds of strikeouts, emendations, and additions to the text. The vast
majority of these changes are literary or religious in nature, illustrating
R. Shapira’s attempt to find the most effective phrase to express a theo-
logical concept, and might more be more valuable as such to scholars in
other disciplines than to historians. Three of these additions, however,
are dated—uncharacteristically for Shapira—lending support to the idea
that their historical setting was important to him.27 Let us examine each
of these in turn.

Annotation to Ekev 5701 (August/September 1942)

In early 1942, a young Jewish man escaped from Chelmno, one of the
notorious Nazi death camps, and made his way to Warsaw, where he con-
nected with the Warsaw Jewish underground.28 His chilling description of
how the Germans had deported the Jews of his village to a remote loca-
tion and murdered them with gas was one of the first indications of the
292 Henry Abramson

so-called “Final Solution” in practice. The refugee only survived immediate

destruction because he had been selected as one of the Sonderkommando,
prisoners given the awful duty of transporting the bodies of the dead for
mass burial, and was able to somehow slip away from his captors. The
Jewish resistance transcribed his testimony and smuggled it out to the
West, but even before the Grojanowski report was released, its contents
were broadly known to the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto.29
R. Shapira’s sermons from this period, beginning with parashat
mishpatim 5702 (February 14, 1942), are markedly different in tone and
intensity from earlier sermons. This intensity continues until parashat
hazon (July 18, 1942), when the great deportations of Warsaw Jews to
Treblinka began. R. Shapira was not sent to the death camp but was
rather selected to serve in Schultz’s “shop,” one of the various industries
that the Nazis maintained with slave labor after the depopulation of the
majority of Jews had been accomplished. Between July 1942 and January
1943, Shapira reviewed his writings with a view to eventual publication.
A note reproduced in the 2007 printing of Esh kodesh records Shapira’s
wishes that the manuscript version of one of his books include his recent
updates.30 The date on the note, August 3, 1942, suggests that Shapira
diverted his attention to the review of his manuscripts after the depor-
tations. The annotations to the sermons were likely written after August
1942 but no later than January 1943, when Shapira handed them to Oneg
Shabbat. The milk container that held his work, along with many other
documents written by the clandestine group of Ghetto scholars, was bur-
ied at 68 Nowolipkie Street in February and would remain there until its
accidental discovery in December 1950.31
It is impossible to determine with certainty when each of the
hundreds of textual emendations was noted on the original manuscript,
but most are very brief in nature, two or three words at most. The three
dated annotations, by contrast, are much longer and speak directly to the
reader. They were composed with the explicit intent that future editors not
integrate them into the message itself. Rather, their distinctive voice was
to be preserved separately, as a note printed below the sermon. In other
words, the sermons read, almost without exception, like transcripts of oral
addresses, which is basically what they are. The dated annotations, on the
other hand, read as if Shapira were speaking directly to a single reader.
The original sermon for parashat ekev 5701 (August 16, 1941)
included the following passage:
 “Living with the Times” 293

Certainly, it is true that at a time when every mind is depressed

and every heart is ill, it is difficult to study and pray as one
ought. There are some people, however, who become overly
preoccupied with their suffering and idly waste their time
speaking of foolish matters all day. Even if it is impossible
for such a person to study in depth in these times, let him at
least recite Psalms.32

R. Shapira’s comment represents a fairly conventional exhortation intended

to encourage Jews to engage in religious activity. Recognizing the huge
psychic burden carried by the suffering Jews of Warsaw, Shapira urged
them not to succumb to despair but rather to assuage their woes with
more productive use of their depleted spiritual energies, either through
study of Torah or, failing that more intellectually demanding task, at least
the pious recital of Psalms. A year later, and with a view to posterity, he
felt the need to qualify his words.

I said and recorded these words in 5701. At that time, even

though there was much bitter suffering, some of which is appar-
ent in my words, nonetheless, at this time it was still possible
to lament them and relate a small portion of them in words,
to experience anguish over the survivors, to cry regarding the
future—how will the schools and yeshivot be built once again
and so on, even to strengthen the survivors and encourage
them to study and fulfill Torah. This is no longer the case at
the end of 5702, because the holy communities have all but
been irrevocably destroyed. Even the few who survive are
overcome with this Egyptian servitude, crushed and living in
mortal fear. They no longer have the ability to express lament
over their troubles, and there is no one left to encourage, no
heart to awaken to divine service and Torah study. Prayers are
only recited under difficult conditions, and the observance of
the Sabbath, even for those who truly wish to observe it, is
exceptionally onerous, and how much more so is it difficult to
cry regarding the future, and regarding the establishments that
have been devastated, at a time when (may God have mercy
and save us) no spirit or heart remains. It is up to God alone
to have compassion and save us in the blink of an eye and
294 Henry Abramson

reestablish the devastated. Only with the final redemption and

the resurrection of the dead will the Blessed One be able to
rebuild and heal. I beseech you, God, have mercy and do not
delay our salvation.33

This comment is rich in significance. The continuity of his message,

encouraging Jews to remain steadfast in their faith despite persecution,
was broken by the severity of suffering after the great deportation. Theo-
logically, the implications are dramatic: “No spirit or heart remains. It is
up to God alone to have compassion and save us.” The Jews can no longer
contribute to their own redemption, as they did in Egypt by at least crying
out for salvation. This “arousal from below” (hit’aruta de-letata), to use
Hasidic terminology, provoked God to respond with overwhelming “signs
and wonders” (i.e., “arousal from above”), leading the Jews to freedom.
This pattern was simply no longer relevant after the great deportation.
Suffering had so depleted the spiritual reserves of Warsaw’s Jews that
they simply could not summon the energy to pray for redemption. Thus,
Shapira argued, “it is up to God alone.”34

Annotation to Hanukkah 5702 (November 27, 1942)

Evidence that Shapira viewed the great deportation as a major rift in the
cosmos, altering the millennia-long relationship between the Jews and
their God, is also present in his annotation on his sermon for Hanukkah
5702. The eight-day holiday was celebrated between the fourteenth and
the twenty-first of December 1941. He spoke then about the need to place
the current suffering in historical perspective.

And in truth, what place is there for our questions, heaven

forbid, and supplications, even though it is true that trials such
as we are enduring now come only once every few centuries?
But in any case, how can they help us understand these acts
of God? And they can damage, heaven forbid, if we do not
understand them. If we do not even understand a single blade
of grass made by God, how much more will we not understand
a soul, and how much more an angel, and how much more the
mind of the Blessed One? And how can this help our minds to
understand that which the Blessed and Exalted One knows and
 “Living with the Times” 295

understands and why a person like this is hurt with these trials
nowadays, more than the trials the Jews have ever endured?
Why, when one learns a verse, Talmud, or midrash, and hears
of the suffering of Jews from then until now, is his faith not
damaged? But now it is damaged? For those people who say
that trials such as these never existed in Jewish history are in
error. What of the destruction of the temple, Betar, and so on?
May God have mercy and say “enough” to our suffering and
redeem us immediately and forthwith, from now and forever.35

Once again, Shapira’s original message was fairly conventional in nature.

He sought to provide some comfort to his congregation by moderating
their suffering, fitting their contemporary experience within a larger phi-
losophy of history. The model of cyclical, periodic persecution is a well-
known feature of Jewish culture: “In every generation,” reads the text of
the Passover liturgy, “someone rises up to destroy us, but the Holy One
who is Blessed rescues us from their hands.” Prior generations witnessed
horrible persecution, and it would be overly optimistic to argue that Jews
need no longer fear persecution in the future. Shapira’s thought, resonant
with references to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the fall
of Betar, essentially asks, “Why should our generation be any different?”
(For more on this passage, see Diamond, Magid, this volume.)
As in the previous cases, R. Shapira answers his own question with
a dramatic annotation to this sermon:

Note: Only the suffering up to the end of 5702 had previously

existed. The unusual suffering, the evil and grotesque murders
that the wicked, twisted murderers innovated for us, the House
of Israel, from the end of 5702, in my opinion, from the words
of the sages of blessed memory and the chronicles of the Jewish
people in general, there never was anything like them, and God
should have mercy upon us and rescue us from their hands
in the blink of an eye. The eve of the holy Sabbath, 18 Kislev
5703. The author.

The eighteenth of Kislev 5703, to which this annotation is dated, was

Friday, November 27, 1942.36 Taken together with his previous note on
parashat ekev 5701, it is clear that Shapira now believed that a funda-
mental change had occurred in the universe. The events later known by
296 Henry Abramson

the name Holocaust represented an occurrence sui generis, a degree of

persecution so awful that the term inhuman cannot capture its cruelty.
Not only was the quality of the Holocaust a complete novum in world
history (Diamond, this volume, also invokes this term) but its impact
was such that it affected the very nature of the relationship between the
Jews and their God. On Hanukkah 1941, Shapira had argued that though
the Nazi persecution was bitter, it was in the final analysis comparable to
previous historical episodes. By November 1942, he regretted these words:
The Holocaust, he now suggested, could not be compared to any prior
tribulation the Jews had ever endured in their long history.
One can only imagine the traumatic impact this recognition had on
R. Shapira’s internal spiritual outlook. His entire raison d’être, expressed
in so many ways throughout the corpus of his literary oeuvre, had been
to inspire Jewish youth to engage and develop their spiritual capacities
and prophetic selves.37 What must he have thought of himself as a rebbe
and teacher, now that his Hasidim were destroyed in the gas chambers of
Treblinka? Dr. Daniel Reiser, while examining R. Shapira’s original man-
uscripts in Warsaw, was arrested by the way in which Shapira recorded
his name on the cover page of the prewar pedagogic manuscript entitled
Mevo ha-she’arim.38 As was customary, he typically wrote his full Hebrew
name on title pages: “Kalonymus Kalmish, son of the holy rabbi, my
teacher, Elimelekh of Grodzisk.” Underneath his signature are two words,
struck out with violent, heavy strokes. Reiser was barely able to decipher
the underlying script, which read “Head of the Jewish Court (av beit din),
Piaseczno.” Reiser suggests that this unusually aggressive obliteration of R.
Shapira’s prewar title took place after the great deportations, an expression
of utter anguish over the destruction of his prior home in the village of
Piaseczno (on the significance of this town, see Wodziński’s chapter in
this volume). Recall that at this moment in the autumn of 1942, Shapira
was among the few remaining survivors of the entire Jewish community of
Piaseczno. The erasure of his own title, which mirrored the utter destruc-
tion of his Hasidic court, seems to point to a more profound erasure of
identity: How could he continue to be a Rebbe without his Hasidim?
A similar phenomenon may be evident in the title page to the
wartime sermons themselves.39 It is apparent that paper was not easily
acquired in the Ghetto, because the title page was clearly adapted from an
earlier use. A small strikeout appears at the very top: the Hebrew letters
forming the year 5700. This title page was likely the original, dating from
 “Living with the Times” 297

the beginning of the war. It is written in Shapira’s own hand, not that of
the scribe who recorded the earliest sermons, so it was probably created
some time after the spring of 1940, a reflection of Shapira’s decision to
publish these sermons in a special collection after the war’s conclusion.
The page carries a simple working title: “Words of Torah that I spoke on
the Sabbath and Holidays of the years 5700, 5701, and 5702.” Below this
title is a mysterious paper patch, glued to the cover page, replacing an
original text. Underneath it, Shapira simply and humbly signs his name,
“Kalonymus.”
What was originally written below the patch? In personal corre-
spondence, Reiser has said that it is impossible to determine what this
text may have contained. It is possible that the original document bore
the author’s name and title, his lineage, and perhaps a few honorifics like
“author of Hovat ha-talmidim,” as is common in Hasidic works. Perhaps
R. Shapira sought to obliterate all of these secondary markers of identity,
in a manner comparable to his dramatic strikeout on the title page of his
Mevo ha-she’arim manuscript. After the great deportation, perhaps he no
longer wished to be reminded of his murdered Hasidim and remained
simply “Kalonymus.”
Did the Holocaust cause R. Shapira to lose his faith, as some scholars
(see Magid, this volume) claim? Even a cursory reading of his wartime
writings demonstrates the absurdity of the question. At no point does R.
Shapira ever despair of God’s existence and omnipotence, even up to his
final will and testament, bequeathing his manuscripts to his brother in
Israel. He maintains an active, passionate relationship with God through-
out his wartime sermons, sometimes raising his voice in anguish and
fear but always confident in God’s ability to save the Jewish people “in
the blink of an eye.” Why, then, did God not intervene to save the Jews
of Europe? This tortured question is implicitly or explicitly present in
every sermon Shapira delivered since the outbreak of the war. I do not
believe he presumed to provide a definitive, absolute answer: even Moses’s
request to “know God’s ways” was denied. Shapira nevertheless responded
to his congregation’s need for an answer by providing several approaches
to the question, some of them conventional, some highly innovative.
Three interrelated lines of argument have been identified by theologians
researching Shapira’s thought. Early in the war, he portrayed suffering
as retribution for Jewish abandonment of religious values and practices,
confident that a mass return to tradition would right the b ­ alance and
298 Henry Abramson

end their t­ ribulations. By the summer of 1941, this position had not been
fundamentally altered, but Shapira had come to place greater emphasis
on the sympathetic suffering of God with his people. Then, with Jacob
Grojanowski’s escape from Chelmno and report on the conduct of the
“final solution” in January 1942, something shifted once again, and he
turned in his final sermons to contemplating God’s own unfathomable
suffering. God withdraws, as it were, to a hidden chamber, there to weep
terrible, calamitous tears.40
Yet I think it is important to emphasize that Shapira’s faith in God
was unshaken—what broke was his faith in history. Jacob Grojanowski’s
report from Chelmno put the lie to misplaced hopes: the Nazis fully
intended to murder every last Jew in Europe and seemed well on their
way to succeeding through their terrible bureaucratic apparatus of death.
Shapira could no longer fit the suffering of Warsaw Jewry into any pre-
vious paradigm of history, least of all suffering as a redemptive response
to sin, bringing with it the hope of repentance. His post-deportation note
on parashat ekev 5701 laments that the persecution has gone too far: the
Jews simply have no energy left with which to repent.
For Shapira, the world had changed beyond recognition. The
Holocaust was a seam in time—what lay beyond the abyss was a novum
in the history of the cosmos, altering the theological laws of gravity
forever. Shapira did not theorize abstractly what this new reality meant
for the Jews, other than to throw himself and the entire Jewish people
on the unmitigated mercy of God, beyond reason (see Diamond, this
volume). His apprehension of suffering had breached all limits, yet he
would not relinquish his firm grip on faith in his Creator. Like the
biblical Job, Shapira came to personify the verse “though God may slay
me, yet I will trust in God” (13:15). Unlike Job, however, he would not
uphold the latter, more rebellious second half of the verse: “but I will
maintain mine own ways before him.” He could not comprehend, even
theoretically, what possible purpose the Holocaust might have in the
divine plan, yet he retained, perhaps even fortified, his unshakeable
faith in the Almighty.

Last Will and Testament, January 3, 194341

Like many contributors to Emmanuel Ringelblum’s secret Oneg Shab-

bat archival project, Shapira penned his last will and testament before
 “Living with the Times” 299

submitting his precious manuscripts to the society for burial. He wrote

a cover letter in Yiddish, well known to all students of Piaseczno Hasi-
dism, headed by a single, dramatically underlined word followed by three
exclamation points:

ATTENTION!!!

Blessed is God. I have the honor of requesting the esteemed

individual or institution that finds my enclosed writings
Hakhsharat ha-avreichim, Mevo ha-she’arim (from Hovat
ha-avreikhim), Tsav ve-zeruz, and Torah Insights on the Weekly
Readings for the Years 5700, 5701 and 5702, to please exert
themselves to send them to the Land of Israel to the following
address: Rabbi Yeshaya Shapira, Tel Aviv, Palestine. Please also
send the enclosed letter. When the Blessed One shows mercy
and I and the remaining Jews survive the war, please return
all materials to me or to the Warsaw rabbinate for Kalonymus,
and may God have mercy upon us, the remnant of Israel in
every place, and rescue us, and sustain us, and save us in the
blink of an eye.
With deep, heartfelt gratitude, Kalonymus42

Switching to eloquent Rabbinic Hebrew, Rabbi Shapira then pens a message

to his brother Yeshaya Shapira (the so-called Pioneer Rebbe, living on an
agricultural settlement in Mandatory Palestine), describing the nature of
the manuscripts and asking that they be prepared for publication. This
letter, Rabbi Shapira’s final will and testament, also contains an exhortation
to future readers of his work. “Please also print in every work,” he wrote,
“that I urge every single Jew to study my books, and that the merit of
my holy ancestors will stand by every student and his family, now and
forever.” This letter is dated 27 Tevet 5703 (January 3, 1943) and concludes
with the words “May God have mercy upon us.”
In this note—certainly his most direct and perhaps his most per-
sonal—R. Shapira expresses the precise state of his belief in the face of
imminent destruction. On the surface, for public consumption, he projected
confidence within a sacred humility: the Jews required divine mercy, but
he expected that he, or at least the Warsaw rabbinate, would survive the
war. In his private note to his brother, however, he left instructions for
posthumous publication of his writings.
300 Henry Abramson

Conclusion: “Living with the Times”

Tradition claims that Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the eighteenth-cen-

tury founder of Chabad Hasidim, who is frequently quoted in Shapira’s
work, once said that “Hasidim must live with the times.” Lest one think
that this statement referred to a modernizing impulse, requiring Hasidim
to somehow adapt their thought and practice to contemporary mores,
the author of the Tanya continues, “meaning, one must live with the
weekly parashah (Torah portion).”43 Time is not defined by the calendar
for Hasidim. It is contextualized and made comprehensible by the weekly
cycle of Torah readings.
This is precisely the literary-theological method by which Shapira
fulfilled his sacred leadership task. By firmly, and exclusively, planting
the locus of historical context in the sacred text rather than quotidian
events, he reaffirmed this message week after week, utterly devoting
himself to strengthening the resolve of his Hasidim. Making explicit
reference to historical context would only have served to cheapen his
message, surrendering the centrality of the Torah to the daily profanity of
the Warsaw Ghetto and ultimately the Nazis themselves. The Torah, not
the German oppressors, would dictate his message. With the exception
of a few passages, R. Shapira placed his writings within a larger, timeless
context, guaranteeing their relevance for as long as Jews followed the
weekly cycle of Torah readings. The few exceptions discussed here only
serve to clarify this pattern.
I opened this chapter with the proposition that in addition to their
primary religious significance, Shapira’s writings also held value for his-
torical research. Determining this value requires a profound realignment
of focus. If we were to restrict our understanding of history to von Ran-
ke’s wie es eigentlich gewesen war (what actually happened), we would be
limited to noting certain biographical details mentioned in the text: that
R. Shapira survived a bout of typhus, that he went into hiding, and so on.
This is more biographical than historical. I believe we need to shift our
focus from understanding external events to understanding the internal
life of Warsaw Jewry, including the hundreds of thousands who were
murdered with no record of their inner lives. What can we know about
these silent, martyred Jews?
The hallmark of postmodernism (whether of the “hard” or “soft”
variety) is the fundamental inaccessibility of what we once called “objec-
tive truth”: we come to understand the importance of vantage point and
 “Living with the Times” 301

perception (of the participant as well as the historian) to any account

of the past or its meaning. By first immersing ourselves in the detailed
history of the Ghetto and then reading corresponding entries from Ser-
mons from the Years of Rage, it is my hope that we may be able—from
a great distance and with the inevitable distortion of our comfortable
postwar conditions—to enter R. Shapira’s beit midrash, to hear his Torah
for ourselves, and to replicate, on at least some level, the experience of
his Hasidim. Is this history? It is the most important kind.

Notes

1. See Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in
Hebrew], ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017),
1:66n5. See also Ariel Evan Mayse and Daniel Reiser, “Territories and Textures: The
Hasidic Sermon as the Crossroads of Language and Culture,” Jewish Social Studies
24, no. 1 (2018): 127–60. Internal literary evidence indicates that the derashot
were recorded after they were delivered, including the entry of January 3, 1940,
which includes Shapira’s concluding comment, “more than this I cannot recall.”
2. This point is made effectively in Ariel Evan Mayse’s review article “Words
of Flames and Madness,” Studies in Judaism, Humanities and the Social Sciences
3, no. 1 (2019): 124–30.
3. Marc Saperstein, ed., Jewish Preaching in Times of War 1800–2001
(Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), xvi.
4. I am grateful to Dean Stanley Boylan for this observation.
5. Ester Yehudit Thidor-Baumel, “ ‘Esh kodesh,’ sifro shel ha-admo”r
mi-Piaseczno, u-mekomo be-havanat ha-hayyim ha-dati’im be-gito Varshah,” Yalkut
Moreshet 29 (1980): 173–87.
6. The literary roots of this notion extend to the midrash Bereshit Rabbah,
and it finds its clearest expression in the thirteenth-century commentary of Nah-
manides (for example, on Gen 12:6: “everything that happened to the ancestors
is a sign for their descendants”).
7. See Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Faith Shattered and Restored:
Judaism in the Postmodern Age (New York: Maggid Books, 2017), especially the
chapters entitled “My Faith: Faith in a Postmodern World” and “Justice and Ethics
in a Postmodern World.”
8. Shimon Huberband, Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural
Life during the Holocaust (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1987), 190–91.
9. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat toledot 5700 [1939], 1:92–93.
See also Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’
in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological Review 101 (2008): 481.
302 Henry Abramson

10. See b. Kiddushin 2b, which is in turn an allusion to Adam seeking

Eve, his “lost” rib.
11. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat toledot 5700, 1:93.
12. See Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat yitro 5700 (1940), 1:103–5;
and ibid., parashat toledot 5702 (1941), 1:233–36.
13. See Sermons from the Years of Rage, sukkot 2 5701 (1940), 1:160–63;
ibid., sukkot 5702, 1:226–30; and ibid., rosh hodesh nisan 5702, 1:295–98.
14. Nahmanides on Leviticus 13:47, cited in Imrei Elimelekh, 111b–112a
and Divrei Elimelekh, 138b.
15. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat metsora 5700 (1940), 1:128–29.
It is worth mentioning that for reasons that are unclear, this entry appears out
of sequence in R. Shapira’s original handwritten manuscript (see Sermons from
the Years of Rage, 2:88–91).
16. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat emor 5700, 1:129.
17. Lev 14:35.
18. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat emor 5700, 1:129.
19. See Christopher Browning, “Genocide and Public Health: German Doc-
tors and Polish Jews 1939–1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3 (1988): 21–36;
Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’ ”: 481.
20. Huberband, Kiddush Hashem, 113.
21. Num 13:30.
22. See Zohar 3:193a.
23. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat shelah 5700, 1:144–45.
24. This is in contradistinction to the explicit reference to contemporary
events in writings by some other rabbinic writers during the same period. See,
for example, Gershon Greenberg, “The Suffering of the Righteous according to
Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer of Bratislava, 1939–1944,” in Remembering for the
Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, ed. John K. Roth et al. (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 422–38; Gershon Greenberg and Asaf Yedidya, eds.,
Mishpateha tehom rabah: Tagovot hegotiyot ortodiksiyot la-sho’ah (Jerusalem: Mosad
Ha-Rav Kook, 2016); and Saperstein, Jewish Preaching in Times of War.
25. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, A Student’s Obligation: Advice
from Shapira of the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Micah Odenheimer (New York: Jason
Aronson, 1991), 44.
26. Ibid., 42.
27. The weekly parashah, of course, generates an equivalent calendar date
as well. The point here is that by explicitly indicating the calendar date in these
annotations, Shapira clearly wished to convey his desire that these references be
understood as later additions. This is also evident from the style guide he left for
future editors, discussed in Sermons from the Years of Rage, 2:9–14.
28. I have discussed this period in greater depth in the fourth chapter of
Torah from the Years of Wrath, 1939–1943: The Historical Context of the Aish
Kodesh (New York: Sam Sapozhnik, 2017).
 “Living with the Times” 303

29. See Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum,
the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press), 285–95.
30. Aish Kodesh, unpaginated section prior to sermons that begin at Sermons
from the Years of Rage, 1:7.
31. At present, a detailed study of annotations to Shapira’s other works bur-
ied in the Oneg Shabbat archive remains unwritten. Reading the printed versions
of the three works in question (Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim, Mevo ha-she’arim, and
Tsav ve-zeruz), it seems unlikely that the manuscripts contain any annotations of
historical value for the war years themselves, with the exception of some passages
in Tsav ve-zeruz surrounding the death of his son in 1939.
32. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat re’eh 5701, 1:212.
33. Ibid.
34. On this theme, see Isaac Hershkowitz, “Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Sha-
pira, the Piaseczner Rebbe His Holocaust and Pre-Holocaust Thought, Continuity
or Discontinuity?” [in Hebrew] (master’s thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 2005), 17–18.
35. Sermons from the Years of Rage, hanukkah 5702, 1:242.
36. Hanukkah was to be commemorated the following week, reinforcing
the possibility that Shapira was reviewing the sermons roughly according to their
chronological dating at least up to January 1942–43.
37. See Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy.”
38. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:52.
39. Ibid., 2:16–17.
40. See the works of Polen and Seeman on this subject.
41. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:328.
42. Shapira’s cover letter is reproduced in Sermons from the Years of Rage,
1:328.
43. Cited in Hayom yom for 1 Heshvan.
 13

Covenantal Rupture and

Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh

Shaul Magid

“Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is

he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both willing
and able? Whence then is evil?”
—Epicurus cited by Lucretius, De Rerum natura

Introduction

Commenting on the verse in Gen 7:23 “And he remained Noah,” the Hasidic
master R. Ya’akov Yitzhak Horowitz, known the Seer of Lublin (1745–1814),
adapting the standard reading of the verse “And Noah remained,” asked,
“ ‘And he remained Noah?’ After Noah witnessed the destruction of the
world, can it be he remained as he was?” In a similar vein, Elie Wiesel
was alleged to have said, “I understand people who lived through the
Shoah who didn’t believe in God before the Shoah and believed in God
afterward. And I understand people who did believe in God before the
Shoah and didn’t believe in God afterward. What I don’t understand is
someone whose belief was not altered by living through the Shoah. How
can it have remained the same?”1 Both of these comments gesture to the
relationship between belief (or nonbelief) and experience, more pointedly

305
306 Shaul Magid

between belief (or nonbelief) and an experience that renders that belief (or
nonbelief) untenable. Events certainly stretch, test, and challenge beliefs
about the world, in some cases causing us to revise our beliefs, in some
cases to defend then, and in some cases events simply justify what we
already believe. For many Jews, the Holocaust was an event that betrayed
any attempt at justification according to common traditional belief in
divine providence. One way to articulate this view would be to say that
believing God was present in the Holocaust is blasphemy, yet to believe
God was absent is heresy.2
There was, of course, much more reflection on these matters after the
final bodies were laid to rest, after survivors began to rebuild their lives,
after the fear of extinction proved false but near annihilation proved true.
There were some cases of individuals, scholars, rabbis, and laypeople, who
did write about the implications of the events as they were happening.
One case of note was the Hasidic rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of
Piaseczno (1889–1943), whose Holocaust testimony in the form of sermons
from the Warsaw Ghetto were collected and hidden before the destruction
of the Ghetto. They were subsequently found after the war and published
in 1960.3 The oddity of these sermons as a testimony of the Holocaust, as
opposed to, say, the work of Primo Levi and many others, is that Shapira
never mentions the Nazis, almost never mentions current events, never
even overtly mentions the deaths of his family.4 The sermons are therefore
somewhat of a unique testimony of the Holocaust purely through the lens
of Torah from the years 1939–1942, embedded in sermons preached in
Shapira’s synagogue in the Ghetto.5 Noteworthy is that the sermons were
dated and thus ostensibly enable us to read them in light of the events
that unfolded as they were being written and delivered. I say “ostensibly”
because the very recent work by Daniel Reiser, a two-volume reworking
of the texts of these sermons from manuscript with an important intro-
duction, show us that what we thought was a linear progression in these
sermons is a far more complex exercise of editorial review and revision,
what he calls a “layered approach,” which undermines the linearity of the
material. What Reiser proves through a close examination of the manu-
script written in Shapira’s own hand is that he continually returned to his
work, adding, deleting, and including marginalia, errata, and notes until
he gave over his materials to the Oyneg Shabbos archives in the winter of
1943. Some of these markings prove significant in regard to viewing the
dates the sermons were initially written as definitive of Shapira’s reaction
to any particular event.6
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 307

Below I explore the question asked by both the Seer of Lublin and
Elie Wiesel: whether and how a believer can sustain their previous belief
in light of a world-historical disaster. Or, asked in a somewhat different
vein by Israeli scholar Eliezer Schweid, “How is it possible to withstand
[a test of faith] when the suffering is so intense as to destroy the sole
means capable of reinforcing faith in God and the Torah in the present
age?”7 Schweid argues with others who have written on these sermons
that Shapira, given the caveat of his theological protest and the erosion of
the congruity of his belief, expresses in these sermons a sustained belief
in God and covenant to the very end. Schweid writes that the goal “of
all the sermons was to find ways in which the faithful could maintain
their faith.”8 In general, this is correct. However, I will argue that there is
a distinction between Shapira’s public persona as it comes through in his
sermons and his own struggles with faith after the Great Deportation in
late summer 1942 expressed in the last words we have from his pen, and
the future audience he was writing for in these final entries.9
Shapira’s career as a Hasidic master was, for better or worse, over-
shadowed by the survival and publication of these wartime sermons. He
called his collection of Ghetto sermons simply Hiddushei Torah auf sedros,
Torah Novella from the Weekly Parsha, or Derashot Mi-Shenot Ha-Za’am
(Sermons from the Years of Rage). They were later published under the
title Esh kodesh (Holy Fire). Before the war, Shapira was widely known
as an innovative Hasidic rebbe. During that time, he wrote a trilogy on
Jewish education, including educating young men for prophecy, only one
volume of which was published in his lifetime.10 Two of those volumes, A
Student’s Obligation: Advice from the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Hovot
ha-talmidim) for young children, and very recently, Jewish-Spiritual Growth:
A Step-by-Step Guide by a Hasidic Master (Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim) for
adolescents, have appeared in English. Another slim volume on building
community, Benei mahshavah tovah (Conscious Community), appeared in
translation in 1996 and has become popular in Jewish Renewal circles.11
A collection of earlier sermons called Derkeh ha-melekh (The Way of the
King) is widely viewed as a Hasidic classic of the period.12 But it is his
Warsaw Ghetto sermons, published as Esh kodesh (appearing in English
in 2000 as Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939–1942) that has
become the most popular.
The fact that these heart-wrenching sermons were dated to the years
of the Ghetto gives us a startling view into one man’s struggle with faith,
as the world—and, ultimately, I will argue, his faith—collapsed around, and
308 Shaul Magid

within, him. Nechemia Polen, in his The Holy Fire (1999), calls this book
“a testament of fidelity to Torah and tradition, in the face of the enemy’s
efforts to destroy both.”13 Polen, whose work initiates English-language
scholarship on Shapira, adeptly traces the trajectory of his struggle with
the incongruence between tradition and destruction as life in the Ghetto
became unbearable and, ultimately, unlivable. Following him, James Dia-
mond views the sermons through a dialectical lens, showing the ways
Shapira reaches the precipice of hopelessness, and faithlessness, only to
retreat back into faith, only to approach the precipice once again.14 While
each scholar who has written on Shapira has offered novel contributions to
this emotionally charged tribute to the struggle of one man against human
evil and a God whose behavior appears increasingly incomprehensible, all
maintain that Shapira died in the embrace of a belief he never abandoned.
For example, while he acknowledges that Shapira’s last sermons in the
spring and summer of 1942 indicate a shift in his theological orientation,
Polen claims that to the end Shapira remained committed to faith in a
God that could not, or would not, save him. Henry Abrahamson does so
as well, when he writes, “Did the Rebbe lose his faith in the Holocaust?
Even a cursory reading of his wartime writings demonstrates the absurdity
of that question. At no point does he ever despair of God’s existence and
omnipotence, even up to his final will and testament.”15 Daniel Reiser
makes a similar but by no means identical observation.

Now, as his sermons are about to end, and as “the woes con-
tinue,” he tells his public that he no longer has the ability to
strengthen and comfort either himself or others. Furthermore,
the Rebbe admits that his exhortations no longer affect him,
and he is aware that they do not have any effect on his listeners
either. Lest this be misunderstood, what we observe here is not
a loss of faith—the continuation of this sermon [referring to a
sermon delivered on Shabbat Zakhor, February 28, 1942] and
the ensuing sermons rule that possibility out—but extraordi-
nary candor and a sharing of his profound agony and personal
vacillations with the reader.16

Below I suggest that Abramson’s description of what loss of faith might

mean—“despair of God’s existence and omnipotence”—does not negate
what I call Shapira’s broken faith that resulted from Shapira’s realization
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 309

that God will not save the Jews from the fires of Nazi evil and that
nothing the Jews might have done deserved that fate. And while Reiser’s
“loss of faith” is never quite explained—i.e., what was the faith that was
not lost?—I want to suggest that indeed there was a loss of faith but not
its total erasure, especially in the transition between the final sermon in
the summer of 1942 and the addendum added in November of that year.
It is worth pointing out that Shapira does end that infamous note with
a classical liturgical flourish: “May God have mercy upon us, and save
us from their hands, in the blink of an eye (ke-heref ayin).” Is that not
a prayer? Perhaps. But I would suggest we see it otherwise for the very
fact that it undermines the note that precedes it. Rather, I see this as a
classic kind of liturgical conclusion (hatimah), a formulaic finale to one
who has, in effect, stopped praying, or at least stopped believing in the
efficacy of his prayer, because he knows those prayers will not be answered,
not unlike the fictitious Yosl Rackover (see my discussion of him below),
who continues to pray to God despite his acknowledging that God has
abandoned him. We cannot know why Shapira decided to end this very
radical note, really his final comment to us, with such a formulaic liturgical
conclusion. But I certainly do not think we can conclude from this that
the note that precedes it does not undermine the very covenantal frame
in which such liturgical formulas are operative.
My assessment of what Shapira comes to in the end respectfully
moves in another direction from Polen, Abramson, Reiser, Schweid, and
others.17 My reasoning is that these scholars never quite define what they
mean by faith (faith in what?) and thus the claim that faith remained is
not adequate. Most of those mentioned above do acknowledge that some-
thing changed, but what it was is not clear. Abrahamson suggests what
was lost was not faith in God but “faith in history.” “The Rebbe could
no longer fit the suffering of Warsaw Jewry into his paradigm of history,
which operated with the notion that persecution promoted repentance,
which brought about redemption.”18 Here, I side with Jacob Neusner, Yosef
Yerushalmi, and Amos Funkenstein (discussed below) that in a covenantal
model, there cannot be a loss of faith in history without also a loss of
faith in God. The disunion between history and God in a covenantal
and providential model is, to my mind, not tenable.19 From a classical
Jewish standpoint, to distinguish between God and history, which is what
Abrahamson suggests, it to leave the orbit of covenantal theology. This
notion is shared by many others as well. For example, biblical h ­ istorian
310 Shaul Magid

Ernst Wright writes, “Biblical history is the confessional recital of the

redemptive acts of God in a particular history, because history is the chief
medium of revelation” [italics added].20
I would like to revisit these sermons in order to suggest that something
seismic indeed shifts in Shapira’s belief, in the very possibility of belief, as it
may have existed before, even as late as 1942. I am specifically interested
in his final sermon in the summer of 1942 and a brief addendum he
added in November 1942 to a previous sermon, which to my mind breaks
through something Shapira never quite acknowledged before: that what
he and his community are experiencing, what the Jews are experiencing,
has never been experienced before. This admission, apparently a final edit
to his writings after he had put his pen to rest, likely a rereading of an
earlier sermon after the Great Deportation, is more than a mere depressing
flourish, although certainly that too; I think it breaks faith in a covenantal
God and sets the stage for what would become post-Holocaust theology a
few decades later. The observation that Shapira’s Ghetto sermons set the
stage for post-Holocaust theology is not new; it was already made by Erin
Leib in her 2014 dissertation “God in the Years of Fury.”21
Leib frames Shapira’s sermons around the question of theodicy and
anti-theodicy in Zachary Braiterman’s study of post-Holocaust theology
(God) After Auschwitz.22 Braiterman claims that the engine that generates
post-Holocaust theology in thinkers such as Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer
Berkovits, Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, and others largely rests on the notion
of anti-theodicy, that the question of evil can no longer be an integral
part of God and God’s relationship to the Jewish people or the world.
Braiterman defines anti-theodicy this way: “By anti-theodicy we mean
any religious response to the problem of evil whose proponents refuse to
justify, explain, accept as something meaningful the relationship between
God and suffering.”23 For post-Holocaust theologians, the Holocaust made
classical theodicy impossible. Belief in God can continue to exist, but it
can no longer be wed to the problem of evil. If it is believing at all, it is
believing “otherwise.” Amos Funkenstein puts it this way. “Jewish theo-
logians . . . such as Emil Fackenheim or E. Berkovits admit that they see
no rationale to the Holocaust. The Holocaust is incomprehensible, they
say, and defies all theodicies. . . . Even these diluted versions of theodicy
are offensive” [italics added].24 On Braiterman’s reading, post-Holocaust
theologians from the more traditional Berkovits to the more progressive
Rubenstein all work along the anti-theodic spectrum founded on the
notion that the Holocaust was unprecedented and, as such, drove a stake
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 311

into classic notions of covenantal belief. Braiterman contends that this

notion “gains a larger currency in specifically religious circles only after
the Holocaust.”25 Leib suggests that “Esh Kodesh demonstrates that, in fact,
the 20th century turn toward anti-theodicy actually began during the war
itself.”26 She notes, “In this final sermon, we find a turn toward anti-theo-
dicy, a quiet but final abandonment of the project of theodicy altogether.
Either God will soon respond to Jewish suffering with salvation or he
will not, but either way, the attempt to rationalize, reframe, or justify it is
over.”27 I agree with her view here and would like to move the discussion
from the metaphysical or even theological frame of theodicy to the realm
of faith—what kind of God can one believe in when theodicy ceases to
function? And can we label such belief as identical, or even categorically
similar to, a theodic one?
The consequences of anti-theodicy are varied. As Braiterman notes,
“Although it borders on blasphemy, anti-theodicy does not constitute athe-
ism; it might even express love that human persons have for God.”28 In
the final section of this essay I will explore this insight through a reading
of Zvi Kolitz’s Yosl Rakover Speaks to God and Shlomo Carlebach’s story
of the “Holy Hunchback” about a student of Shapira Carlebach allegedly
met in Tel Aviv.29 For now, the border where blasphemy can coexist with
love for God is where I would like to place Shapira’s broken faith. As
opposed to Abrahamson, this is not a loss of faith in history; it is a loss
of faith of God in history.30 The God that remains, the God that can be
believed in, or loved, after theodicy, after history is de-theologized, is
not the same God as before theodicy crumbled with the Ghetto walls or
the Great Deportation. Before getting there, however, some preliminary
remarks are in order.

Holocaust Theology and Post-Holocaust Theology

Few traditionalists wrote about the Holocaust in any systematic way. And
those who did record reflections of the war raging around them, did not
tend to view it as an event that shattered the covenantal foundation upon
which Judaism is constructed. The traditional, and ultra-traditional, mind-
set, it has been argued, lives in what Jacob Neusner called “paradigmatic
thinking”—a belief that all events correspond to a predetermined notion of
covenant, even if that correspondence, or God’s providence, may be veiled
from view, for example, in a state of hester panim or deus obsconditus.
312 Shaul Magid

Neusner believed that “paradigmatic thinking,” and thus the traditional

model of the covenant, became impossible with the introduction of histor-
icism.31 His view of “paradigmatic thinking” is that history conforms to a
special model of theological cause and effect, even if not always evident,
that cannot bear the weight of a historicist critique. That is, for Neusner,
once history becomes the lens through which Judaism or the covenant is
viewed, classical theodicy can only function as a historically contingent
phenomenon and no longer an operative theological principle. Barbara
Krawcowicz put it nicely when she wrote, “[For Neusner] it is the paradigm
that defines and shapes reality and not the other way round. Paradigmatic
thinking identifies, ‘a happening not by its consequence . . . but by its
conformity to the appropriate paradigm.’ ”32 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
sums up “paradigmatic thinking” quite nicely in his seminal book Zak-
hor: “What has occurred now is similar to the persecutions of old, and
all that happened to the forefathers has happened to their descendants.
Upon the former already the earlier generations composed selihot and
narrated the events. It is all one.”33 Paradigmatic thinking offers a cyclical
view of history determined by a promise made that lies beyond historical
contingency. This is, of course, a play on a popular rabbinic dictum, “the
acts of the fathers are signs for their children.”34 We live in a world of
reward and punishment not totally of our own making but not arbitrary
either. “It is all one.”
For post-Holocaust theologians, the Holocaust could not fit into
this paradigm. More strongly, the belief that it could, for some, might
itself be blasphemous (for an anti-theodician theodicy is heresy). Jewish
historian Amos Funkenstein notes in his essay about the Holocaust, “To
the most courageous among recent theologians, the very meaninglessness
of the Holocaust is itself, they say, a matter of faith, a positive religious
act.”35 Believing in a covenantal God after the Holocaust was, for many,
an act of “bad faith.” Braiterman puts it this way: “With Auschwitz in
mind, many contemporary readers are repelled by theodicies found in
traditional Jewish sources.”36 Acknowledging this rupture was not solely
the product of Richard Rubenstein’s groundbreaking After Auschwitz.
Rubenstein’s teacher Mordecai Kaplan, who really never wrote directly
about the Holocaust, wrote obliquely in his 1970 book The Religion of
Ethical Nationhood, “[The Holocaust] rendered the traditional idea of
God untenable.”37
All post-Holocaust theologians were deeply influenced by modernity,
even though some, such as Berkovits and Greenberg, were Orthodox.
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 313

Shapira, as the proto-post-Holocaust theologian, one who understood the

depth of the covenantal rupture and its implications as it was happening,
is in one way an exception and in another a sign that the impossibility of
faith after such a rupture is not dependent on modernity per se but can
be gleaned through a stark and honest confrontation with the limitations
of tradition. Braiterman notes that classical Jewish texts do indeed contain
anti-theodic elements even as they are mostly overwhelmed by a theodicy
response. Modernity may be a tool that makes post-Holocaust theology
permissible but it is not a theological novum as much as turning up the
volume of a whisper that, in my view, already appears in the tension
between Shapira’s final sermon in the summer of 1942 and his addendum
in November 1942.
If Shapira is an exception, what of most other ultra-Orthodox Jews?
Some, such as rabbis Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar (saved from almost cer-
tain death in Bergen-Belsen by the Katzner transports),38 Yosef Yizhak of
Lubavitch, and Elhanan Wasserman (who was murdered by Lithuanian
collaborators of the Nazis in the summer of 1941 after he returned to
Europe from America to be with his students), maintained a belief in the
traditional covenant and viewed the Holocaust as punishment for Jewish
secularism, including Zionism.39 Others, such as rabbis Zvi Yehudah Kook
and Yaakov Moshe Charlap, viewed the Holocaust as a punishment for
not leaving Europe after the Balfour Declaration. That is, for rejecting
Zionism.40 Zvi Yehuda even called the Holocaust an act of “divine surgery.”
Each case, however different, is an exercise in “paradigmatic thinking,” and
as different as these views are from one another, they actually share more
with each other than they do with any post-Holocaust theologian or, I
would argue, with Shapira. Shapira might have agreed with these views in
one form or another at the outset of the war, but by the summer of 1942
and certainly after the Great Deportation, I hope to show that he did not.
If the frame of anti-theodicy requires rupture of theodicy, on what
foundations does classical theodicy rest? Here I am indebted to my grad-
uate student Barbara Krawcowicz, whose 2013 dissertation, “Covenantal
Theodicy among Haredi and Modern Jewish Thinkers During and After
the Holocaust,” deftly explores ultra-Orthodox responses to the Holocaust
during the war.41 Krawcowicz is the first to deploy Neusner’s notion of
“paradigmatic thinking” in reference to the Holocaust by treating some of
the major ultra-Orthodox rabbis who reflected on the events during and
immediately after the war. Krawcowicz argued that many of these figures
who wrote about the Holocaust during the war, such as Rabbis Shlomo
314 Shaul Magid

Zalman Ehrenreich (1862–1944), Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer (1888–1944),

and Yissakhar Teichthal (1885–1945), all of whom perished, while they
did not conclude, as did many post-Holocaust theologians did afterward,
that the covenant was irreparably broken, nevertheless also did not offer
reasons for the Holocaust that fit neatly into the paradigmatic thinking
that, as Hayyim Yerushalmi stated, “It is all one.” For them, the Holocaust
posed a theological dilemma but not a theological crisis. Teichthal is an
interesting case here because the Holocaust did evoke in him a radical shift
from being a staunch anti-Zionist to one who believed that establishment
of a Jewish homeland in Erets Yisrael was indeed a priority.42
Krawcowicz chose not to include Shapira in her dissertation, but here
I would suggest that Shapira stands somewhere between her ultra-Ortho-
dox subjects and the modern post-Holocaust theologians. More strongly,
I think Shapira presages post-Holocaust theology from the very depths
of its destructive fire. He chose a path none of the others dared to tread.
Shapira, of course, never lived to further articulate some of his more
radical notions articulated in his final sermons. At the end of the Ghetto
revolt in May 1943, Shapira, with many other Jews who remained in the
Ghetto, was deported to the Trawniki labor camp. Although we do not
know for certain, it is thought that he was murdered November 3 in what
was known as “the Harvest Festival” (Aktion Erntefest) in response to
violent uprisings in other camps.43
Considering their historical import, it is surprising that the collection
of Shapira’s sermons in the Ghetto was not published until 1960. Even
after its publication, Esh kodesh remained very much within Hasidic circles
until Shlomo Carlebach and a few others discovered the work and began
conveying its teachings in non-Hasidic communities. Carlebach captured
this work in his story “The Holy Hunchback,” the story of a broken, elderly
street cleaner Carlebach encountered in Tel Aviv who, as a child, was one
of Shapira’s students in his yeshiva in Warsaw.

Esh Kodesh as Holocaust Testimony

Daniel Reiser’s two-volume work Sermons from the Years of Rage is more
than another significant contribution to the study of R. Kalonymus Kal-
man Shapira. It is a piece of scholarship that potentially changes how
the wartime sermons are studied and understood, in part because Reiser
shows mistakes, errors, and misreadings in some of the transcriptions that
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 315

became the 1960 printing of Esh kodesh. As I mentioned above, one of the
distinctive characteristics of Sermons from the Years of Rage is that we know
when each sermon was delivered and thus can link that week with events
in the Ghetto, suggesting the ways in which the unfolding horror of the
Ghetto, including the travails of Shapira’s own family, may be embedded
in the sermon. Given that Shapira does not mention events in the ser-
mons themselves, the dating is the primary way for us to view this work
as a Holocaust testimony, that is, to view it as an account of the tragedy
of the Warsaw Ghetto. Reiser’s reexamination of the original manuscript
using new technology to make it more easily discernible enabled him to
make many corrections in the only printed edition until now (1960) and
produce a corrected text that includes many significant changes. More
relevant to our purposes, Reiser reproduces the manuscript, which exhibits
detailed editing, deletions, redistribution of paragraphs, and addenda in
the margins of many of the sermons. Analyzing the different markings, he
concludes that Shapira seemed to continue to rework and edit the sermons
throughout his time in the Ghetto.44 Thus, he concludes, “It seems to me
that, although different phases in the Rebbe’s theology of suffering are
discernible and have been clearly distinguished, this differentiation is not
clear cut and each phrase does not constitute a paradigm in itself. One
may detect, for example, a ‘late’ concept of suffering in the Rebbe’s early
sermons and an ‘early’ one in later sermons. Nevertheless, this does not
refute the thesis that his theory was of an evolutionary nature; it merely
refines it.”45 Toward the end of his English essay on Esh kodesh, largely a
translation from a section of his Hebrew introduction to Sermons from
the Years of Rage, Reiser makes a slightly more definitive claim: “Given
the layered nature of the entire manuscript, it is virtually impossible to
attempt to date each and every sermon. . . . Accordingly, I prefer to avoid
any discourse about ‘meaning’ and to propose a different research approach.
Instead of seeking development and meaning this views Esh Kodesh as
a work that re-expresses the question of suffering in phenomenological
terms and takes its readers on a jarring spiritual journey.”46
In the next section, I look at two texts from Esh kodesh: first, Sha-
pira’s final sermon delivered on the Shabbat before Tisha be-Av (Shabbat
Hazon) 1942 and second, a well-known addendum to an earlier sermon
delivered on Hanukkah 1941 that serves as the last written testimony we
have from his hand.47 This addendum was written in November 1942. I
want to offer a “phenomenological” reading of the space between the Shab-
bat Hazon sermon and the later addendum, paying attention to how the
316 Shaul Magid

addendum appeared in the manuscript, and offer a reading that suggests

how the subtle shift from the Shabbat Hazon sermon to the addendum
marks a break in Shapira’s faith as he reconciled the impending doom
that was about to unfold. This gestures back to Schweid’s question that I
noted at the outset: “How is it possible to withstand [a test of faith] when
the suffering is so intense as to destroy the sole means capable of rein-
forcing faith in God and the Torah in the present age?” Unlike Schweid,
I suggested that it wasn’t.

The Final Sermon: Marginalia, Addendum, and Revision

Shapira’s final sermon focused on the first verse of the haftarah, Isa 1:1, “A
vision, shown to Isaiah son of Amoz.” This first chapter in Isaiah is one
of the darkest in the prophets, as it describes the destruction of Israel in
vivid and horrific terms. The final verse of the chapter, “The mighty will
become tinder and his work a spark, both will burn together and no one
to quench the fire,” could not but catch the attention of Shapira living
in circumstances surrounded by fire and the righteous being relegated
to hapless victims of the power of evil. The sermon revolves around the
distinction between “seeing,” “hearing,” and “knowing.” His midrashic text
is from Song of Songs Rabba 3:2, “There are ten expressions of proph-
ecy, but which one is the most difficult? R. Eliezer said, ‘A vision is the
hardest,’ as it says, A cruel vision was told to me (Isa 21:1).” Asking about
the seeming incongruity between “seeing” and “knowing” in the verse
“I have truly seen the suffering of my people . . . for I know their pain”
(Exod 3:7), Shapira likens this to a father who knows the necessity of a
son’s operation yet cannot bear to watch it because seeing it makes him
unable to truly know that the operation is for the son’s own good. That
is, the experience of the pain of a loved one makes knowledge of its ben-
efits impossible. So therefore, God says, “Now go, I am sending you to
Pharaoh, take My people out of Egypt,” (Exod 3:10) as if to say, “I cannot
watch, just go . . .” The “vision” is the hardest level of prophecy because
it disables any recognition of a future; it is stuck in the present moment
of seeing. This is one example where Diamond’s dialectical approach is
operative. Shapira comes to the precipice; the pain of seeing the fire of the
Ghetto, the degradation of the righteous, the vision that makes “knowing”
impossible, makes a future impossible, makes the covenant impossible.
And at that very moment Shapira digs back into Torah to grasp onto
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 317

Dan 9:18, “Open your eyes and see.” This is part of Daniel’s prayer for
Israel. Verses 18 and 19 read, “O my God, incline Your ear and hear;
open Your eyes and see our desolations, and the city which is called by
Your name; for we do not present our supplications before You because
of our righteous deeds, but because of Your great mercies. O Lord, hear!
O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and act! Do not delay for Your own sake,
my God, for Your city and Your people are called by Your name.” Even in
the moment where vision blinds knowledge of the good end, perhaps the
belief in any good end, there is Daniel, who beseeches God for salvation.
And so, Daniel’s call here is answered by the final verse in the haftarah
(the sages knew better, I think, to end here and not read to the end of
the chapter), “Zion will be redeemed with justice, and her captives with
charity” (Is 1:27). With that, Shapira put down his pen. Almost. As Reiser
shows, while he did not write any more sermons, he apparently continued
to revise the ones already written.
In a sermon delivered on Hanukkah, December 1941, Shapira
reflected on the liturgical insert for Hanukkah known as al ha-nissim, one
of the earliest extant liturgies in the Jewish tradition. In general, though,
the sermon is about faith (emunah), one of the more sustained sermons
about faith in Esh kodesh. Shapira comments that Israel’s faith and Abra-
ham’s faith are categorically different because Abraham’s faith “was an act
of righteousness” (since he was not reared in faith), while Israel’s faith
is intrinsic to who Israel is, as an inheritor of Abrahamic faith (“faith is
the light and holiness of God inside the Jew”). Following this he turns
to his present situation. “To our chagrin, we see that even among those
who have faith, there are now certain individuals whose faith has been
damaged [nifgamah ha-emunah etslam]. They question God, saying, ‘Why
have you forsaken us? . . . Why is the Torah and everything sacred being
destroyed?’ ” Responding to this sentiment, while not denying its emotional
impact, he launches into what can be viewed as a classical theodic claim
preached from a moment of high anxiety and utter turmoil.

Faith must be with one’s whole being (bi-mesirat nefesh,

“self-sacrifice”) because all mesirat nefesh comes from faith.
If faith is not exercised with mesirat nefesh, how can mesirat
nefesh exist at all! The notion of mesirat nefesh in faith must
be operative, and even when God is concealed (ha-hester),
one must believe that everything is from God and is for the
good and the just and all suffering is filled with God’s love for
318 Shaul Magid

Israel. . . . In truth, there is no room for questioning [heaven

forbid]. Truthfully, the sufferings we are experiencing are like
those we’ve suffered every few hundred years. . . . What excuse
does one have to question God and have his faith damaged
by this suffering more than the Jews who suffered in the past?
Why should one’s faith be damaged now when it wasn’t when
he reads descriptions of Jewish suffering from the past? Why
is it that when one reads a line from the Talmud or Midrash
and hears of past sufferings in Israel his faith is not damaged
but now [confronting the experience on the Ghetto] it is? Those
who say that the suffering now has never happened before to
Israel are mistaken. The destruction of the temple and the
massacre at Betar were like what we are suffering now. May
God have mercy and call an end to our suffering; may God
save us now, immediately, and forever.48

This is an impassioned and quintessential expression of classical Jewish

theodicy, almost angry, quite atypical of Shapira’s wartime sermons. So
many of Shapira’s sermons stress suffering and express empathy and
understanding, and yet here he turns into a fire and brimstone orator
chiding his listeners, warning them not to be deluded that they are living
in some unprecedented reality. While we do not know for sure, it appears
that this change in attitude may have been instigated by “those who say
that the suffering now has never happened before.” To whom this refers
we do not know. In any case, I think Shapira deeply understood the
theological implications of such an assertion, likely more than his listen-
ers, and perhaps that is why he was pushing back so hard against it. The
very foundations of faith that he speaks about in the beginning of the
passage, the faith driven by mesirat nefesh, the faith in God’s saving power,
is dependent on the covenantal principle of “paradigmatic thinking,” that
what we are experiencing not is not a novum, that providence remains in
operation, that salvation is still possible. That nothing here is new, that
this is our covenant, that this is the test we must pass (“every few hundred
years”) to maintain our place in God’s love is what underlies the passion
of these comments.49 As Neusner puts it, “A paradigm predetermines and
selects happenings in accord with a pattern possessed of its own logic and
meaning, unresponsive to the illogic of happenings, whether chaotic or
orderly, from the human perspective. . . . Paradigms admit to time—the
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 319

spell that intervenes between this and that, the this and the that beyond
defined within the paradigm” (italics added).50
As Reiser has shown us, Shapira continually revisited and revised
these sermons throughout his time in the Ghetto. He writes, “The Rebbe’s
renunciation of certain perceptions that he had presented and his decision
to delete them are crucial for our understanding of his thinking vacilla-
tions, and change of heart during the Holocaust years.”51 Sometimes he
crossed out a word leaving the word legible, sometimes he drew a line
through an entire section of a sermon, sometimes he blackened a word
beyond recognition and replaced it with another; in many cases he added
marginalia, clarifying a point. In some cases, the meaning of the original
comment is altered, sometimes it is nuanced, but rarely is it rejected
entirely.52 In one case, in the sermon he delivered on Hanukkah 1941, he
did something quite unusual: he added an addendum (in Hebrew, haga’ah)
on the bottom of the page (not in the margins). The addendum relates
back to the passage quoted regarding faith.

It is only the suffering (tsarot) that were experienced until the

middle of 1942 that were precedented (hayu kevar). But the
bizarre suffering (tsarot meshunot) and the evil bizarre deaths
(u-mitot ra’ot u-meshunot) that were invented by these evil
bizarre murderers on Israel in the middle of 1942, according
my opinion and the teachings of the sages of the chronicles of
the Jewish people more generally, there were none like these
before. And God should have mercy on us and save us from
their hands in the blink of an eye. Erev Shabbat Kodesh, 18
Kislev 1943. The author.53

The suggestion that the tragedy unfolding was both unprecedented and
unparalleled (“there were none like these before”) may seem ordinary, even
obvious, to many contemporary readers. However, much of the thinking
about the Holocaust, both by scholars and laypeople, and much of the
way the Holocaust has been ceremonialized (e.g., establishing a national
Holocaust Memorial Day), is founded on this very principle. Much of
the haredi protest against Holocaust Memorial Day is precisely that the
Holocaust is not unprecedented and should thus be folded into Tisha
b’Av.54 Zvi Yehuda Kook included his reflections on the Holocaust as an
extension of his sermons of the tenth of Tevet, a fast day commemorating
320 Shaul Magid

the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem.55 But for a Hasidic Jew in 1942
or 1943 who lived deep within the orbit of the covenantal theology and
“paradigmatic thinking” of Judaism, such a comment, even if thought,
was almost never stated outright; it gestured to what would become a few
decades later a radical reassessment of the Holocaust as a full-blown theo-
logical crisis and a serious challenge to the Jewish tradition. A full-blown
theological crisis, in this case, emerges only when two conditions are met
simultaneously: first, the belief that the Holocaust was an unprecedented
event in Jewish history; and second, that this unprecedented event must
irrevocably rupture the covenantal framework established in the Hebrew
Bible. Shapira’s comment certainly adopts the first condition and, I would
argue, also gestures toward the second.
The way this addendum appears in the original manuscript, thanks
to Resier’s publication of it, I think strengthens my point. Shapira could
have simply crossed out the theodicy paragraph in the original Hanukkah
sermon. We see in the manuscript that he often does that. Or he could
have softened its harshness with marginalia, which he does quite often as
well. He did neither. He left this statement of covenantal theology intact
and, in a note (haga’ah) on the bottom of the page, he qualified it out of
existence. The foundational notion of exercising faith through self-sacrifice
(mesirat nefesh) by arguing that faith serves as the bedrock of all acts of
mesirat nefesh, the belief in God’s salvific promise and potential, in his
mind did not survive the Great Deportation that occurred between July
and September 1942. The Shabbat Hazon sermon delivered on July 18,
1942 was a final testament to an entire theological structure that would
collapse for Shapira in the coming months. As that was his last sermon
that has survived, almost nothing remains extant from him after July
1942 aside from this addendum, which he added in November of that
year.
One can only shudder to imagine Shapira sitting in his home during
those dark months, hungry and weak, reading through these sermons one
more time only to come across his Hanukkah sermon of 1941, read his
exhortation about faith and the fact that “this (suffering) happens every
few hundred years” and how dare we think otherwise, and then pick up
his pen, one more time, to add a few final sentences. I assume he wanted
his reader to know that something changed between the autumn of 1941
and November 1942. He did not blot out his call to faith. Rather, he
contextualized it by saying that it was no longer relevant. His comment
in the Hanukkah sermon, that “those who say that the suffering now
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 321

has never happened before to Israel are mistaken,” is undermined. His

comment that “there are now certain individuals whose faith has been
damaged” is justified. And now he counts himself among them. This is
an example of a courageous admission of error in the time of crisis; and
he apparently wanted his reader to know he was mistaken as he left his
words from Hanukkah 1941 and November 1942 to posterity. That mis-
take, I suggest, was not simply an empirical admission of miscalculation
but a deep theological rupture, as I read the claim of the Holocaust as
an “unprecedented” event that makes “paradigmatic thinking” impossi-
ble, as Rubenstein and other post-Holocaust theologians argue as well. If
we return once more to Diamond’s dialectical hypothesis, I would argue
that there is no stepping back from that final note in November 1942; in
other words, the dialectic is broken. This is a step off the cliff of theodicy
into the abyss of anti-theodicy and, more relevant to my concerns here,
a move from theodic faith to broken faith. To reiterate, I am not saying
that Shapira lost faith in God entirely; I think he did not. But the faith
he had after November 1942, based on the only words we have, is not
the faith he had previously. It structurally cannot be for the simple reason
that he removed the very theological, and theodic, structure that made
that faith possible.
What is noticeably different in Shapira’s Hanukkah addendum is
that his unprecedented claim does not come from historicism or secu-
larism, or even from theology, but from a deep existential realization of
the utter inability of the tradition, which was for him until those months
of darkness ironclad and indestructible, to withstand this level of radical
evil. He brings no anti-theodic text, in fact no text at all, just an empirical
observation with what seemed to him an obvious conclusion. Theodicy
collapses and nothing exists to take its place. Disbelief was untenable. But
belief as previously defined was no longer possible. God remained, but
the covenant, at least as it existed previously, did not.
Taking Reiser’s “layered approach” into account, I suggest that Esh
kodesh can be divided into three distinct but overlapping parts, not linearly
defined, that loosely correspond to the period when he began his sermons
in the Ghetto in September 1939 until the final recorded sermon on the
Shabbat before Tisha B’Av in the summer of 1942. These three periods
can be marked by three aspects of his vocation: In the first phase, Shapira
functioned largely as a pastor, offering his community words of strength
in times of peril. Here, he thought very much within the paradigmatic
model that what Jews are facing is not categorically different from previous
322 Shaul Magid

times of Jewish suffering. Perhaps the sermon on Hanukkah 1941 is the

quintessence of that.
In the second phase, Shapira had the ominous job of teaching his
people how to die. This is illustrated in his many sermons about martyr-
dom and suffering that were deftly discussed by Polen, Schweid, Diamond,
Seeman, Hershkovitz, Abrahamson, and Leib, among others. These sermons
about martyrdom are nothing less than learning how to die with dignity;
how to understand that, although beyond comprehension, they are part
of some divine drama and serve as its cadre of heroes. One gets a sense
in these sermons that Shapira knew he was speaking to individuals who
would likely not be alive the following year. To read these sermons with
that in mind is heartbreaking. In the final period, ending abruptly in July
1942, with the crucial addendum in November 1942, Shapira emerges as
a radical theologian, implicitly rejecting, or certainly contesting, some
of his earlier sermons by suggesting that this moment does not fit into
any paradigm, that what he and his constituents were experiencing was
“unprecedented and unparalleled.” These two words separate Shapira from
his ultra-Orthodox colleagues and, as Leib notes, plant the seeds of what
would become post-Holocaust theology a few decades later. Paradigmatic
thinking cannot absorb a true novum.
The paradigm that enabled Jews to withstand disbelief throughout
Jewish history simply would no longer carry the burden of this historical
moment even as it was not historicism that broke the back of “paradigmatic
thinking” but rather witnessing the pure and bizarre evil that erased a
covenantal God. By this time, more than the previous two, one gets the
sense that Shapira is preaching largely to himself or, perhaps with that final
note, writing for posterity, to those who might read these sermons if any
Jews survived at all. Shapira seems left alone to process the brokenness
of his inner world as the world around him collapsed.
As to the theological, or historical, question “Is the Holocaust a
novum?” I think that question was utterly irrelevant for Shapira because
that question is an act of historical, or historicist, explanation one way
or the other. It is significant that Shapira is not advocating silence in the
moment where the paradigm, and faith, reaches its limit, where God
seems to absent Godself from history such as we see in other ultra-Ortho-
dox thinkers writing during the war, examined in Barbara Krawcowicz’s
work.56 Shapira realizes that he will die with a God who has abandoned
his people, a faith shattered, a belief in a God who is broken, a God
who cannot save or will not save. To believe in God becomes as absurd
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 323

and as blasphemous as not to believe in God. Braiterman uses the term

“anti-theodicy” to describe post-Holocaust theology as that which refuses
to view catastrophe as instrumental in the divine covenant. Sharpira was
not anti-theodic in that sense; and here I disagree slightly with Leib and
suggest that Shapira’s view might more accurately be described as a “bro-
ken theodicy.” His final flourish, “God have mercy on us and save us like
the blink of an eye,” was not only rhetorical. Yet it was no longer coming
from the faith that had existed before. Perhaps that breach, between pure
rhetoric and uttering something that he no longer believed but also could
not put to rest, opened the door for the anti-theodicy that was to come
a few decades later.
In the final section I want to explore a little more deeply what may
have been the nature of Shapira’s “broken faith.” I do so by comparing my
reading of Shapira with two fictitious careers from the Warsaw Ghetto:
those of Yosl Rakover, the creation of Zvi Kolitz, and the Holy Hunchback,
the creation of Shlomo Carlebach.

Rabbi Shipira, Yosl Rakover, and the Holy Hunchback

When the story “Yosl Rakover Speaks to God” first appeared in a Yiddish
newspaper in Buenos Aires in 1946, it was thought to be an authentic
document of one of the last Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943
discovered in the rubble of the Ghetto. It was then edited by the great
poet Abraham Sutzkver for the Yiddish press in Israel and appeared in
French in 1955. It soon came to be known that it was a fictitious story
written by Zvi Kolitz, a Jew from Lithuania living in Israel who was visiting
Argentina on an assignment for the Zionist Revisonist Movement. The
fictitious nature of the story did not diminish its power, or its influence,
and this story quickly became iconic and inspired commentaries by the
likes of Emmanuel Levinas, among others.57
Briefly, the story is about a Jew, a Hasid from the Hasidic court of
Ger, trapped in a building as the Ghetto collapses, preparing for one last
assault on the Germans below (he has a few jerry cans of gasoline he
will use to drop on the Nazis and gleefully watch them burn) before he
succumbs to inevitable death.58 The story is often cited as one Jew’s defiant
belief in God, even despite God. “You may torture me to death—I will
always believe in You. I will love you always and forever—even despite
You” (italics added). He remains a “believer but not a supplicant, a lover of
324 Shaul Magid

God but not His blind Amen-sayer.”59 He says that “I cannot say after all
I lived through, that my relation to God is unchanged. But with absolute
certainly I can say that my faith in Him has not altered a hair’s-breath.”60
This takes us back to Wiesel’s comment at the outset: Can it really be that
someone experiences what Yosl experienced and his faith has not changed
one bit? That is precisely what Wiesel fails to comprehend. And yet this
appears to be what Yosl is saying. I think not.
In his short rendering of the French version of the essay published
in the Zionist Parisian paper La terre retrouvee, Emmanuel Levinas offers
an indirect response to Wiesel’s question. Levinas writes, “On the road
that leads to the one and only God, there must be a way station without
God. True monotheism must frame answers to the legitimate demands of
atheism. An adult’s God reveals Himself precisely in the emptiness of the
child’s heaven.”61 For Levinas, the lynchpin in Kolitz’s essay is the rabbinic
citation, “I love God, but I love God’s Torah even more . . . and even if I
have been deceived by Him and, as it were, disenchanted, I would none-
theless observe the precepts of God’s Torah.” This was one of Levinas’s
early essays on Judaism, and Tamra Wright argues that the idea that for
Judaism love of Torah precedes love of God, certainly of a God who reveals
Godself to humans, becomes a fundamental principle for Levinas’s later
work.62 For Levinas, teaching, as opposed to experience, becomes the very
contribution Judaism has to answer the legitimate question of the atheist.
For our purposes, Levinas suggests that Yosl frames his final “belief ” on
a protest that becomes the transition from the “emptiness of the child’s
heaven” to the one who stands ready to die, not necessarily for God, but
for Torah. And so Levinas ends his brief commentary, “To love the Torah
more than God—this means precisely to find a personal God against
whom it is possible to revolt, that is to say, one for whom one can die.”
Levinas does not mention that Yosl was a Hasid, but perhaps it is
relevant to his rendering. The God Yosl believes in at the end, at least
according to Levinas, is no longer the Hasidic God. It is not a God with
whom one can experience devekut. It is a God who has abandoned Israel
but left the Torah behind. “The emptiness of the child’s heaven” is the
great and legitimate question of the atheist, especially after the Holocaust,
a question Levinas claims monotheism must answer. For the believer with-
out Torah, Levinas implies, citing Simone Weil, there is no real answer
to atheism, surely not after the Holocaust, which is why Levinas says to
Weil, “you do not understand anything about the Torah!”63 What does
Yosl love? An absent God? An “empty heaven”? No, Yosl loves a God who
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 325

gave Torah because that is the only thing from God that remains, even
though, or precisely that, God may not.64
As not to be misunderstood, I do not think there is an exact sym-
metry between Yosl and Shapira. But there is a resemblance worth noting.
Shapira’s final note to us, one he never shared with his congregants, stated
the following: “The God of the covenant, the God who saves, the God
to whom prayer is efficacious, that God is no longer. That God cannot
survive the death of theodicy, the ‘unparalleled and unprecedented.’ But
there is still the God who created the world, even as that very God is
now destroying it.” And Shapira can still believe in and love that God.
But in relation to what existed before, that faith is not whole; that faith is
broken.65 Yosl professes love for God, but in that rabbinic quote there is
a protest. “I love you despite the fact that you have abandoned me. Why?
Because you left us Torah. That’s all. It’s not what I had hoped, but I guess
it will have to be enough.” Levinas calls it “mature” faith. I call it broken
faith, a faith without theodicy, in some way, a faith without covenant.
Whether Levinas would agree with that formulation, we will never know.
The difference between theodic faith and anti- or post-theodic faith is that
anti- or post-theodic faith can never claim superiority over nonfaith. It
can never fully answer the atheist because it is faith in a God who is not
there. It is faith in a God who has torn the covenant.
“The greatest thing in the world,” said the Holy Hunchback, quoting
his rebbe, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno, to Shlomo Carlebach
on the Yarkon in Tel Aviv, “is to do someone else a favor.” In the story
of the Holy Hunchback, Shlomo meets an elderly Jew, a street cleaner in
Tel Aviv who reveals himself as one of Shapira’s students in his yeshiva
for children. The story served as one of the ways Shapira’s work Esh
kodesh became popular among non-Hasidic Jews worldwide. When asked
to repeat any Torah he learned from Shapira, the Holy Hunchback can
only remember what the rebbe used to repeat at the Shabbat table. “My
children, listen, the greatest thing in the world is to do someone else a
favor.” It is with these words, and with the story of the Holy Hunchback,
that Shapira became known to the non-Hasidic world.
Here, the Holy Hunchback enters through the portal of Shlomo
Carlebach. “Can you tell me please,” asks Carlebach, “tell me something
you learned from him [Shapira]?” The Holy Hunchback puts down his
broom. He washes his hands, puts on his jacket and hat, straightens his
tie. “From my years in Auschwitz, I have long forgotten his Torah,” he
says in a heavy Polish Yiddish, “but I remember that during the Friday
326 Shaul Magid

night Shabbos meal, between every course, between the soup and the
fish and the fish and the chicken, he used to say to us, ‘Children, take
heed, the greatest thing in the world is to do someone else a favor.’ ” And
then Carlebach added, “Do you know how many favors you can do in
Auschwitz?”
The Holy Hunchback’s recollection—if it happened at all—hap-
pened before the Ghetto, when Shapira had a yeshiva, Da’at Moshe, for
children in Warsaw. But perhaps there is some foresight here as to what
would happen some years later, a response to Shapira’s own realization
that the covenant is fractured beyond repair, that we are left to take care
of ourselves. In that world where God will not save, where history will
not conform to the confines of tradition, where we are left alone in the
thralls of radical evil; in that place of utter despair, “unprecedented and
unparalleled,” there is nothing better than doing someone else a favor.
That becomes the covenant. Perhaps Shapira’s message is that after the
Holocaust, the only thing left is the ethical. And a new Torah, if it will
be constructed at all, will be constructed on that foundation. And any
new Torah without that foundation is not worth having. What is a belief
in God without a covenant? Doing someone else a favor.
Some months later, Carlebach returned to the Yarkon in Tel Aviv to
find the Holy Hunchback. He looked everywhere, to no avail. He asked
a passerby, “Have you seen the Holy Hunchback?” only to realize that he
had left the world. But he had passed on his torah of broken faith.
Tragically, Shapira did not live long enough to offer any resolution
to what I take to be his crisis of faith. He never had the opportunity to
explain to us what he meant in that last addendum from November 1942.
But in any case, he also did not fool those who would read his words after
the war into believing that the covenant could carry the burden or could
survive what transpired in the summer of 1942. It could not. The pastoral
vocation in the first period of his work had become, for him, obsolete.
He taught his congregation how to die; many of them had already died.
And now he was left to his own devices, quite different and yet also oddly
similar to Yosl Rakover. It is better to die facing the truth of the moment,
even if it tears the fabric of tradition, than to defend a paradigm that has
already become obsolete. Shapira famously said in numerous places in Esh
kodesh, “Since God does this, that is the way it is supposed to be.” But
from the perspective of paradigmatic thinking, or covenantal theology,
if something is unparalleled, that is precisely not the way it is supposed
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 327

to be. Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer and Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich could

respond to the Holocaust only with silence. But Shapira was not silent. He
added that note in November 1942 to say something to his future reader.
In my view, that note was not written by a man of faith; it was written
by a man of broken faith. Faith may have remained, but it was not like
before. It could not be. And so what we are left with is a Hasidic master
who was not able to finish his theological work, a Hasidic master who in
the privacy of his dilapidated home, in the months before he too would
succumb to the Nazi evil, wrote the ostensibly blasphemous final words
that this catastrophe was not like all the others. That it was unprecedented.
It was a tear in, or rupture of, the covenant. All (of Jewish history) is not
one. With that stroke of his pen, post-Holocaust theology truly begins.

Notes
I would like to offer my thanks to James A. Diamond, David Maayan, Daniel Reiser,
and Don Seeman for their invaluable comments and suggestions. ‫חברותא או מיתותא‬.
1. I heard this orally from someone who heard it from Wiesel, but I have
not found a source for this.
2. Of course, there are post-Holocaust theologies such as Eliezer Berkovits’s
Faith after the Holocaust that present theories of hester panim, or God concealing
God’s face, as a traditional theological posture that could explain God and also
justify God’s inactivity in the Holocaust. For more examples, see David Wolpe,
“Hester Panim in Modern Jewish Thought,” Modern Judaism 17, no. 1 (1997):
25–56. I would suggest that for many Jews, rabbis, theologians, and laypeople
alike, such a rabbinic category does not adequately explain the Holocaust. In
some way, post-Holocaust theology exists between the poles of Berkovits’s hester
paim theory and Richard Rubenstein’s covenantal rupture theory.
3. I will not rehearse the many stories about the how these sermons were
concealed and how they were found. This has been expertly done by Daniel Reiser
in his “Esh Kodesh: A New Evaluation in Light of a Philological Examination of
the Manuscript,” Yad Vashem Studies 44 (2016): 66–69.
4. See Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in
Hebrew], ed. Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017),
1:55.
5. We don’t actually know whether the written sermons, even in manuscript
form, were exactly those that were preached. Shapira could have easily excised
things he felt were redundant or added things he thought about later. Thanks to
David Maayan for this insight.
328 Shaul Magid

6. Reiser, ed., Sermons from the Years of Rage.

7. Eliezer Schweid, “The Bush Is Aflame—But the Bush Is not Consumed,”
in From Ruin to Salvation [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1994), 105 and James A. Dia-
mond, “The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe: Diverting God’s Gaze from a Utopian End
to an Anguished Now,” Modern Judaism 30, no. 1 (2010): 299. Shapira was not
the only one who lived through the Holocaust who seriously confronted the
question of faith in light of it. Aside from the many works of Wiesel, it is worth
mentioning David Halinvi’s The Book and the Sword (New York: Farrar, Strauss,
and Giroux, 1996). More recently see Yishai Mevorach, Theology of Absence: On
Faith after Chaos [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Reisling, 2016). Mevorach, a student
of Rav Shagar, works through the writings of Rav Shapira and also discusses
Shapira, Nahman of Bratslav, and others on the question of faith and absence in
the contemporary religious life.
8. Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation, 138.
9. This is not exactly true. We do have a note that he wrote on January 3,
1943 (17 Tevet), that offers instructions to the one who finds his writings to mail
them to his brother Isaiah in Tel Aviv. In it, he writes about his other works as
well and, like the final note in November 1942, he ends with a liturgical flourish,
using the same locution that “God should save us in the blink of an eye (ke-heref
ayin).” See below where I offer a reading of this end to his note in November 1942.
I suggest the same would apply here. While this note certainly postdates his final
insertion in Esh kodesh, it does not relate to the events and their significance but
rather is more practical. Thus, I claimed above that the final note in November
1942 is really the last significant thing we have from him. I want to thank Daniel
Reiser for pointing out this final note from January 1943.
10. This is discussed at length in Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic
Mysticism, and Useless Suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological
Review 101, no. 3–4 (2008): 465–505. Cf. Zvi Leshem, “Between Mysticism and
Prophecy: Hasidism According to the Piaseczner Rebbe” [in Hebrew] (PhD diss.,
Bar Ilan University, 2008); and David Maayan, “The Call of the Self: Devotional
Individuation in the Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno”
(master’s thesis, Hebrew College, 2017).
11. See Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, A Student’s Obligation: Advice from
the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Hovot Ha-Talmidim), trans. M. Odenheimer
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995); Shapira, Jewish Spiritual Growth: A Step-
by-Step Guide of a Hasidic Master, trans. Yaacov David Shulman (CreateSpace
Independent Publishing, 2016); and Shapira, Conscious Community, trans. Andrea
Cohen-Kiener (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997).
12. In 1917, Shapira moved from Piaseczno to Warsaw, where he founded
the yeshiva Da’at Moshe. In the ensuing years, he traveled back and forth from
Piaseczno to Warsaw, residing mainly in Warsaw. See Sermons from the Years of
Rage, 1:14.
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 329

13. Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman
Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994),
19. Others who have written about Esh kodesh include Mendel Piekarz in his
Polish Hasidism: Between the Wars (1978); Pesach Schindler in Hasidic Responses
to the Holocaust in Light of Hasidic Thought (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1990); Henry
Abramson, Torah from the Years of Wrath 1939–1943: The Historical Context of
the Aish Kodesh (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017); Itzhak
Hershkowitz, “Rabbi Kalomymus Kalman Shapira, the Piasechner Rebbe: His
Holocaust and Pre-Holocaust Thought” [in Hebrew] (master’s thesis, Bar-Ilan
University, 2005); Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless
Suffering’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological Review 101, no. 3/4 (2008):
465–505; Diamond, “The Warsaw Rebbe,” 299–331; Ron Wacks, The Flame of
the Holy Fire [in Hebrew] (Alon Shevut: Tevunot, 2010); Erin Leib, “God in the
Years of Fury: Theodicy and Anti-Theodicy in the Holocaust Writings of Rabbi
Kalonymous Kalman Shapira” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014); and most
recently Daniel Reiser’s new two-volume Hebrew work on the manuscript edition
of Sermons from the Years of Rage (2017).
14. See Diamond, “The Warsaw Rebbe,” 299–331.
15. Abramson, Torah from the Years of Wrath, 249.
16. Reiser, “Esh kodesh: A New Evaluation,” 70. A more apologetic read-
ing by Esther Farber in Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halacha, and
Leadership during the Holocaust, 2 vols. (New York: Feldheim, 2007), 579–612
pushes back even harder against any notion that Shapira’s faith diminished at all.
17. In his essay “Ritual Efficacy,” Don Seeman does indeed address the
notion of broken faith in the final sermons of Shapira. Like few others—James
A. Diamond would be another example—Seeman entertains the real possibility
that by 1942 Shapira loses something he had before, although he does not go as
far as I do in suggesting that for Shapira faith in the covenant itself collapses.
See Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 503–504. On Seeman’s reading of the final added
footnote, see ibid., 494. Seeman does not read into that note as much as I do,
though he does recognize its significance.
18. Abramson, Torah from the Years of Wrath, 251.
19. See, for example, in Jacob Neusner’s The Idea of History in Rabbinical
Literature (London: Brill, 2004); and Neusner, “Paradigmatic Versus Historical Think-
ing: The Case of Rabbinic Judaism,” History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1977): 353–77.
20. Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology and Recital (London: LSCM,
1954), 13 and Barbara Krawcowicz, “Covenantal Theodicy among Haredi and
Modern Jewish Thinkers During and After the Holocaust” (PhD diss., Indiana
University, 2013), 19 (in typescript).
21. Leib, “God in the Years of Fury.”
22. Theodicy is a term coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in 1709. See
his Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin
330 Shaul Magid

of Evil (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996). It was a term that was criticized often
by people from Voltaire to William James.
23. Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in
Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 31.
24. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1993), 310, 311.
25. Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 14.
26. Leib, “Theodicy and Anti-Theodicy,” 12.
27. Ibid., 178.
28. Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 4.
29. Zvi Kolitz, Yossel Rackover Speaks to God (New Jersey: Ktav, 1995).
30. For a theological reflection of God in relation to history on the question
of the Holocaust, see Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1972), who rarely mentions the Sermons from the Years of
Rage. He does discuss this work in What Is Judaism: An Interpretation for the
Present Age (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999) 290ff., where he thanks
Nehemia Polen for introducing him to Shapira. It remains somewhat curious that
the Sermons were printed in 1960 as Esh kodesh, yet Fackenheim did not know
of Shapira’s work until the 1980s when he read about him in Polen.
31. See Jacob Neusner, “Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking.”
32. Barbara Krawcowicz, “Covenantal Theodicy among Haredi and Modern
Jewish Thinkers During and After the Holocaust” (PhD diss., Indiana University,
2013), 24 (in typescript). I want to thank Barbara Krawcowicz for sharing the
revisions of her dissertation.
33. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 50.
34. Midrash Tanhuma 9.
35. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 329.
36. Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 30.
37. Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood: Judaism Con-
tribution to World Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 202.
38. See Teitelbaum, Vayoel Moshe (Jerusalem, 1961), 7–9. See also Menachem
Keren-Krantz, “R. Joel Teitelbaum: A Biography” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University,
2013). He stated this in other places in very explicit terms. See, for example, in
the journal Ha-Me’or, Tammuz 1958, 3–9, cited in Keren-Krantz, 291, where he
adds a political reason for Zionism’s culpability. “Today it is known that Zionism
caused the death of six million Jews. This is not only because they positioned the
hearts of many in Israel with their heresy . . . for it is known that heresy is the
cause of evil, but their very political behavior and irresponsibility was responsible
for the death of millions of Jews because they believed that the establishment of
a sovereign state can only come about with Jewish blood. In the Nazi tragedy
there were many opportunities to save thousands of Jews . . . we see now from
 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh 331

the Katzner trials that reveal only a small part of the Zionists’ culpability in
saving the lives of Jews.”
39. An indispensable collection of translated material from these and other
traditional thinkers on the Holocaust can be found in Gershon Greenberg and
Steven T. Katz, Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after
the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). In addition, see the
many essays written on a variety of ultra-Orthodox thinkers on the Holocaust
by Gershon Greenberg and Elizer Schweid, Wrestling until Daybreak: Searching
for Meaning in Thinking on the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1994).
40. See, for example, R. Zvi Yehuda Kook, “Ha-shoah,” in Sihot R. Zvi Yehuda
Kook: Moadim—Rosh ha-Shana-Purim, ed. Shlomo Aviner (Jerusalem: Hava, 2013),
264–86. For a more extensive rendering of Kookian views on the Holocaust, see
Shlomo Aviner, Me’orot me-ofel: Al ha-shoah (Jerusalem: Hava, 2010).
41. Barbara Krawcowicz, “Covenantal Theodicy.”
42. See in Teichtal’s Em habanim semeichah, now in English as Yissakhar
Shlomo Teichtal, Em Habanim Semeichah: Erez Yisrael, Redemption, and Unity
(Jerusalem: Urim, 2002).
43. See Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:24, where Reiser gives November
2 as the date of his death.
44. See ibid., 1:59, 60.
45. Ibid., 72.
46. Ibid., 97. Cf. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” esp. 488–93.
47. For the Hanukkah sermon, see Sermons from the Years of Rage, hanukkah
5702 (1942), 2:240. The addendum appears there as well.
48. Ibid., 2:173–75.
49. Diamond seems to recognize this change, even noting that after the
summer of 1942 the “traditional rationale for suffering as a necessary stage in the
unfolding of the divine plan [was] . . . no longer viable”—that is, after the Great
Deportation—but he does not extend this to its natural conclusion of the end of
theodicy for Shapira and its, to my mind, necessary and radical consequences.
See Diamond, “The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe,” 4; and Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy.” Cf.
idem, “Otherwise than Meaning: On the Generosity of Ritual,” Social Analysis 48,
no. 2 (Summer 2004), 62–67.
50. Jacob Neusner, “Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking: The Case of
Rabbinic Judaism,” History and Theory 36, no. 3 (1997): 359.
51. Reiser, “Esh kodesh,” 91.
52. This is all laid out in detail in Reiser’s introduction to the wartime
derashot. In English, see Reiser, “Esh kodesh,” 83–97. See especially 90–91. On
crossing out an entire sermon, see Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat
kedoshim 5700 (1940), 2:62–63. Reiser notes that this sermon was printed in the
1960 edition without any indication that it had been crossed out.
332 Shaul Magid

53. This translation comes from Reiser’s manuscript edition in Sermons from
the Years of Rage, 2:175. There are some differences between previous translations,
e.g., Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939–1942, trans. J. Hershy Worch
(New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 251. I tried to offer a more literal, if
also perhaps more clumsy, translation in order to render a reading as close as
possible to the original. For example, Worch uses the terms “unprecedented and
unparalleled” for “there were none like them before” (lo hayu ke-motam). I agree
with Worch’s reading, which in some sense makes my point even more strongly,
but I wanted to keep it as close to a literal rendering as possible.
54. See 2 Kgs 25:1–25.
55. See Zvi Yehuda Kook, Sihot Ha-Rav Zvi Yehuda: Festivals, 264–86.
56. Barbara Krawcowicz, “Covenantal Theodicy.”
57. See, for example, Franz Josef Van Beeck, Loving the Torah More than
God: Towards a Catholic Appreciation of Judaism (Chicago: Loyola, 1989). Cf.
Leon Wieseltier’s Introduction to Yosl Rakover Talks to God (New York: Vintage,
2000); and Marvin Fox, “Yossel Rakover,” in Yossel Rakover Speaks to God (New
Jersey: Ktav, 1995).
58. The only place where I have seen the Hasidic identity of Yosl playing
a central role in the story is in Marvin Fox’s “Holocaust Challenges to Religious
Faith: The Case of Yossele Rakover, Hersh Rasseyner, and Chaim Vilner,” in Zvi
Kolitz, Yossel Rakover Speaks to God: Holocaust Challenges to Religious Faith (New
Jersey: Ktav, 1995), 73–100.
59. All citations are from Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, trans. Carol
Brown Janeway (New York: Vintage, 2000), 9.
60. Ibid., 3.
61. Levinas, “To Love the Torah More than God,” reprinted in Zvi Kolitz,
Yossel Rakover Speaks to God: Holocaust Challenges to Religious Faith, 29.
62. See Tamra Wright, The Twilight of Jewish Philosophy: Levinas’ Ethical
Hermeneutics (London and New York: Routledge, 213), 99, 100.
63. Op. cit., 30.
64. In some way this can be seen as following the rabbinic teaching in
Pesikta de Rav Kahane 15:5, “R. Huna, R. Jeremiah said in the name of R. Hiyya
bar Abba, Me they have abandoned? (Jeremiah 16:11). Is it possible that they have
kept My Torah? Would that they would have abandoned me and kept My Torah!”
65. Here, Seeman seems to concur although he maintains that even the
covenant remains whereas I do not. See his “Ritual Efficacy.”
 14

Pain and Words

On Suffering, Hasidic Modernism,
and the Phenomenological Turn

Don Seeman

The decade and more that have passed since the publication of my essay
“Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’ in the Warsaw
Ghetto” have witnessed an explosion in published scholarship on the life
and work of R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira.1 In addition to the classic
studies on R. Shapira’s Holocaust-era writings by Mendel Piekarz, Nehemia
Polen, Eliezer Schweid, and others, we now have a variety of challenging
and important studies on his educational theories, his prophetic/contem-
plative teachings, and his exegetical practices, as well as Daniel Reiser’s
new critical edition of his Sermons from the Years of Rage. R. Shapira’s
popularity among the general public has also grown apace: he has been
invoked in debates over post-Holocaust theology (see Magid, Reiser, and
Abramson this volume) and emerged as a hero of Neo-Hasidism (Idel,
this volume). Yet despite this upwelling of truly admirable work of all
kinds, I confess to a continuing sense of unease with some of the ways
in which R. Shapira and his legacy have been represented. Sometimes,
the author of the Warsaw Ghetto sermons seems to serve as little more
than a place holder for contemporary writers’ commitment to their own
paradigmatic narratives of meaning in suffering and unbroken faith—or
of faith’s inevitable demise. This is less than R. Shapira deserves.

333
334 Don Seeman

In my previous work, I invoked the theme of ritual efficacy—the

“complex, differentially constructed, even contested” ways in which
ritual can be said to convey pragmatic effects such as healing, cosmic
renewal, or distinctive forms of moral experience—as an alternative to
the intellectualizing fascination with “Hasidic doctrine” and cultural
“meaning-making” in Jewish studies and Geertzian anthropology, respec-
tively.2 Focusing on the contingencies of ritual efficacy (particularly those
described or conveyed through Hasidic textual practice) has allowed me
to trace literary and thematic connections among a variety of different
dimensions of R. Shapira’s wartime and prewar writings. These include
his pursuit of prophetic subjectivity and his later desperate attempts to
avoid emotional collapse in the Warsaw Ghetto by bracketing the force
of that subjectivity, his desire to channel divine salvation to his people,
and the devastating moral cost he clearly associated with his own survival
in the face of so much suffering.3 None of these pressing and sometimes
paradoxical dilemmas map neatly onto the projects pursued by scholars
far removed from the events R. Shapira suffered.
The question that so vexed early scholars such as Piekarz and Polen,
who debated whether R. Shapira’s wartime writings followed any discernible
pattern of thematic development, looks quite different when viewed from
the perspective of ritual efficacy. The unfolding of the text, on my reading,
serves not just to convey a set of doctrines but also to convey vitality for
healing and defense of human subjectivity or to mediate intimacy with
unspeakable divine grief.4 I do not mean to suggest, with Pierkarz, that the
Holocaust-era sermons contain little more than “ideas and fragments of
ideas” or “paraphrases of Hasidic writers from the generation between the
wars” haphazardly set down in sermons lacking any underlying coherence.5
Rather, I mean to insist that we seek evidence of that coherence in R.
Shapira’s own terms, in what seems to be at stake for him in the writings
he shared, and in his own frequent acknowledgment that ritual and moral
failure were always real—and all-too-frequently realized—possibilities.6
I am glad that my previous work has helped to stimulate interest in
the undeniable relationship between R. Shapira’s Holocaust-era sermons
and his impressive prewar corpus of sermons and contemplative manuals.7
Indeed, the thematic connections between his early and later writings have
yet to be fully plumbed (see Diamond, Wiskind, this volume). Yet I also
have come to feel that my earlier emphasis on the sheer immediacy of
suffering depicted in these Holocaust-era sermons ought to be qualified
by greater attention to the self-conscious literary strategies that R. Shapira
 Pain and Words 335

employed in depicting the catastrophe he witnessed. We now know, thanks

to Daniel Reiser’s critical edition, that R. Shapira continually edited and
made stylistic changes to his wartime writings before finally consigning
them to the secret Ringelblum archives some time after the completion
of his final sermon of mid-July, 1942.8 His searing and unprecedented
evocation of suffering and moral injury in the Warsaw Ghetto was built
in part on literary strategies he developed long before the war in pursuit
of new imaginational techniques and prophetic revitalization.9 If what I
contend is true, then ritual efficacy and literary efficacy, activity in the
religo-moral and aesthetic spheres, respectively, were so intertwined in R.
Shapira’s phenomenology of suffering that they demand a fully integrated
sort of analysis.10 I will argue that his experimentation with new literary
and contemplative techniques, his phenomenological turn, and his interest
in reaching new audiences for Hasidism amount to a distinctive kind of
“Hasidic modernism” through which all of his efforts should be understood.
This is a project that must attend, among other things, to the emergent
and often ritually mediated relationship between words and bodies in
R. Shapira’s literary production: the capacity of bodies to both bear and
transcend discursive meaning; the capacity of words to both bear and be
broken by infinite longing and pain.

Hasidic Modernism and the Phenomenological Turn

R. Shapira focused more intensely and insistently than other Hasidic writers
on the description of everyday religious experience and the experience
of suffering. Moshe Idel (this volume) argues perceptively that although
R. Shapira had much closer genealogical connections to the so-called
“magical” school of early Polish Hasidism—a Hasidism focused heavily
on wonder-working and the power of the tsaddik—his own prewar teach-
ing seems far more attentive to the spiritual training and contemplative
discipline required of ordinary and aspiring Hasidim.11 For Idel, this puts
R. Shapira into the typologically “spiritual” school that he associates with
figures such as the Maggid of Mezritsh, R. Nachman of Bratslav, R. Schneur
Zalman of Liady, or even R. Menachem Mendl of Kotsk and R. Mordecai
Leiner of Izhbits.12 Even if Idel’s thesis warrants some qualification (the
tsaddik is not nearly as marginal to R. Shapira’s prewar sermons as Idel
implies), he is right that this feature of his writing contributes to R. Sha-
pira’s later popularity in Neo-Hasidic circles that emphasize spirituality
336 Don Seeman

and contemplative technique over the magical power of tsaddikim. Be that

as it may, my argument is that R. Shapira’s career exemplified a broader
“Hasidic modernism” that was socially, genealogically, and in some ways
ideologically continuous with the great prewar Hasidic communities of
eastern Europe.13
While scholarship has begun to explore the contours of Neo-Hasidism
among Jews influenced by figures like Zeitlin, Buber, and Heschel, who
either “rediscovered” or repackaged Hasidism for a Western audience, it
is important to remember that some forms of Hasidism were themselves
evolving toward new audiences and changing circumstances on their own
terms.14 My understanding of Hasidic modernism is derived in part from
parallels with studies of “Buddhist modernism,” which developed as Bud-
dhist traditions migrated from Asia to the West or confronted Western
scientific, religious, and colonial claims in Asia.15 Exploring new forms
of congruence between Hasidism and contemporary science or medicine
(especially professional psychology), experimenting with new literary and
educational techniques for a diverse audience, and emphasizing the validity
of individual subjectivity and contemplative technique while downplaying
“magic” are all elements of Hasidic modernism that have close parallels
in the Buddhist modernism context. Idel (this volume) notes provoca-
tively that the development of modern Neo-Hasidism might have been
influenced directly by modernizing forms of Buddhism and Hinduism to
which European Jews were exposed during the early twentieth century. We
should not, however, overlook the possibility of convergent adaptation to
similar modernizing conditions.16 The analytic frame of Hasidic modern-
ism is broad enough to encompass both Neo-Hasidism as Idel defines it
and other diverse, modernizing facets of traditional Hasidic communities.
Daniel Reiser, for example, has argued that R. Shapira was the
first Hasidic leader to develop extended, almost “cinematic” programs
for lengthy contemplative visualization—a suggestive development that
depended in part on psychological sensibilities informed by the rise of
hypnosis, mesmerism, and the widespread concept of “creative imagination”
as well as the growing popularity of cinematic entertainment.17 Though
clearly drawing, as Idel has shown, on medieval “ecstatic” kabbalah and
earlier Hasidic sources, R. Shapira also contributed to a broad interest
in the renewal of prophecy among twentieth-century Jews.18 All of his
prewar tracts are devoted to this “prophetic” project, which he identifies
with classical Hasidism but to which he attends with unprecedented detail,
pedagogic systematicity, and concern for literary accessibility.19 His shift
 Pain and Words 337

in emphasis from the mystical powers of the tsaddikim to the religious

experience of students and everyday Hasidim also resonates with Marcin
Wodziński’s suggestion (this volume) that R. Shapira catered specifically
to a new community of displaced, urbanized, and “à la carte Hasidim”
who did not offer their allegiance to any single rebbe in Poland between
the wars.20
Support for this view can be gleaned from R. Shapira’s famous
introduction to his prewar Hovat ha-talmidim (the only work published
during his lifetime), which was explicitly directed to a broad and, in many
cases, secularizing public.21 But there is also more direct evidence. After
encouraging students to undertake individualized spiritual training in one
prewar sermon, R. Shapira acknowledges that some students may find the
well-trodden paths of earlier generations easier to follow but denies that
they must pick any one tsaddik to emulate:

If it is difficult for you to make [spiritual] progress, then

follow the trail that has already been blazed. Take into your
thoughts the path of a particular tsaddik, such as R. Elimelekh
[of Lizhensk]. . . . Not just to have knowledge of this path
but to contemplate it. Even though I have no apprehension
of the tsaddik’s greatness and sanctity, nevertheless, what-
ever I have apprehended from his book or the stories I have
heard about him, I should visualize this path and sanctity in
my mind. . . . Nor should this necessarily be limited to just
one tsaddik! Rather, you might visualize, according to your
apprehension, this path of R. Elimelekh and that path of the
Maggid of Kozhnits, in order to see the whole chariot and
higher sanctity even in this world and to serve God with joy
and enthusiasm from what you have seen before you.22

This passage clearly envisions readers who would know the great Hasidic
masters primarily through their books and stories rather than presuming
any close attachment to a particular Hasidic court. I believe that this was
also the context in which R. Shapira worked to innovate new literary and
pedagogic styles that would appeal to this growing audience, provide them
with tools for spiritual self-edification, and establish his own distinctive
voice in the crowded field of Polish Hasidism.23
From his illustrious forbears, R. Shapira inherited a broadly panenthe-
istic tendency and an emphasis on avodah be-gashmiyut (divine service in
338 Don Seeman

and through corporeality). He was not the first Hasidic writer to describe
the “nerves” as bodily conduits of divine vitality (a similar formulation
is also found in the ma’amorim of R. Dov Ber Schneuri [1773–1827] of
Chabad).24 He does, however, seem to have been the first to articulate
a coherent theory of prophetic experience grounded in a contemporary
medical idiom of nervous disorder.25 Thus, the supposed susceptibility of
Jews to neurasthenic complaints, which was part of a familiar anti-Semitic
trope, becomes in R. Shapira’s hands a sign of special Jewish receptivity to
the prophetic impulse, which courses through Jewish religious experience
but can lead to nervous illness when it is not properly developed.26
This is not the place to review what I have described at length
elsewhere, but I recall it here in order to emphasize that this psycho-phys-
iological theory of prophecy encapsulates key elements of R. Shapira’s
phenomenological turn, as well as its embeddedness in concerns about
ritual and therapeutic efficacy. It locates both prophecy and the patholog-
ical failure of prophecy in a bodily network associated by the psychology
of his day with emotional, “nervous” experience and its potential for
excess, all described in a contemporary medical idiom.27 Although he
never returns explicitly to this nervous-energy theory in his Holocaust-era
sermons, it can be understood as a backdrop to themes of ritual efficacy,
emotional overload, and loss of the human that are central to those later
writings. I will return to this observation in the context of the debate
over R. Shapira’s disputed “crisis of faith” toward the end of his wartime
sermons (see Abramson and Magid, this volume), because it may suggest
an alternative to the intellectualist or theological reading that focuses on
problems of belief rather than more pragmatic concerns such as loss of
vitality and nervous collapse.
R. Shapira’s appeal to lived experience and embodied subjectivity is
thorough and unwavering (see Maayan, this volume) and even conditions
his account of Hasidic metaphysics. There is no valid academic or merely
cognitive knowledge of Kabbalah’s complex cosmologies, he writes, because
these cosmologies represent guides to the attainment of distinctive subjec-
tive states rather than esoteric knowledge to be mastered.28 “You believe,
and yet do not believe,” he writes to his close disciples, “that it will be
possible for you to ascend to a state in which you will see spirituality and
sanctity in the whole world; not just that you will understand this with
your intellect but that you will truly see sanctity, souls, and [divine] names.”
A person who studies Kabbalah with this goal in mind may well come
to know the conditions and permutations of the spiritual potencies that
 Pain and Words 339

underlie phenomenal reality, he adds, but this only applies to a kabbalist

who is also a Hasid. “A person who is not a Hasid, a dried up person who
comes to study Kabbalah with dried out senses [hushim], will perceive
nothing but confusion and contradictions within himself,” unable to escape
the false dualism of natural attitudes that perceive only physical sustenance
(rather than divine vitality) in a loaf of bread.29 Study of Hasidism and
Kabbalah implies a whole panoply of personal disciplines focused heavily
on the cultivation of new affective possibilities. Even studies of law and
Talmud, as Ariel Evan Mayse has effectively shown in this volume, are
pressed into the service of this revitalizing project.
R. Shapira sees himself as standing squarely within the Hasidic tra-
dition, even when he subtly expands upon it. “From my flesh, I will see
God” (mi-besari ehezeh eloha) is a standard motif of Hasidic sermons, often
conveying that the best way to conceive divinity is by analogy to embodied
human experience. Scholem observed that this analogizing goes both ways.
“With every one of the endless stages of the theosophical world correspond-
ing to a given state of the soul,” Scholem writes, “Kabbalism becomes an
instrument of psychological analysis and self-knowledge . . . the precision
of which is not infrequently rather astounding.”30 R. Shapira, too, insists
on “the correspondence between the various levels of the soul as it ema-
nates from the lofty divine realm down into the body and the stages of
contraction represented by the various worlds.”31 Yet rather than insisting
on a uniform cosmology that must choose between or harmonize the
different approaches of classical masters such as R. Cordovero, R. Luria,
or the Baal Shem Tov, R. Shapira nods to the historicizing sensibilities of
modern readers by frankly acknowledging the apparent incompatibility of
different teachings. He argues that each sage’s perception of the heavenly
order was conditioned by the distinctive structure of his own personal-
ity and is therefore independently valid as such. There is precedent for
interpretive pluralism in kabbalistic literature—R. Hayyim Vital is said to
have encouraged his students to develop different interpretations of his
work—but here it is surprisingly central and explicit even in teachings for
young children.32 The grounding of this pluralism in an explicit theory of
unique, individual subjectivity is also worthy of note.
Earlier in the same work, R. Shapira emphasizes to his young students
that their own apperception of the upper worlds of Kabbalah is limited
to “your own portion of these worlds and of your own nefesh, ruah,
neshamah, haya, and yehidah [attributes of the human soul].”33 There is a
sense in which a person can only know their own Torah, corresponding to
340 Don Seeman

their own distinctive psychospiritual attributes and to their current level

of self-understanding. On a more prosaic level, R. Shapira’s well-known
introduction to his prewar educational tract Hovat ha-talmidim empha-
sizes the desperate need of contemporary Jewish educators to perceive,
and tailor their educational efforts to, the unique needs and capacities of
each individual child.34
Young children who would once have happily followed in their
parents’ footsteps now see themselves prematurely as adults, he writes,
and need to be approached with this new individualism in mind. The
rhetorical effect is to justify his own educational innovations by calling
attention to the crisis of changing times (see Wodziński, this volume), but
it also constitutes an unusually self-conscious pedagogical bridge between
ancestral and modernizing forms of Hasidism. The cultivation of an indi-
vidual’s ramified subjective distinctiveness emerges as one of the central
emphases of ritual or devotional labor (avodah) in R. Shapira’s corpus.35
Everywhere, R. Shapira is energized by the need to spiritualize dis-
tinctively modern dilemmas of individual subjectivity. In one 1929 sermon,
he suggests that the experience of diffuse anxiety with no discernible
cause can be understood as a reminder that a person needs to reorient
their lives or return to God (teshuvah).36 The solution is characteristically
pietistic, but R. Shapira is well aware that there is no more distinctively
modern problem than the profusion of rootless and inexplicable anxiety
described in literature, philosophy, and medicine of the time.37
Perhaps even more telling is R. Shapira’s comment in his spiritual
handbook Tsav ve-zeruz that students who “groan to themselves, ‘Where is
my free will?’ ” ought to respond by developing their individual thoughts
and innovations (hiddushim) in Torah study.38 This is not just a response
to the student’s struggle with religious apathy and worldly desire, which
threaten to eclipse freedom, but is also an act of self-conscious resistance
to the deterministic theories of the age.39 He speaks of the need to “dis-
tinguish oneself [as an individual] from the rest of the [human] species”
and from “the laws and tendencies that encompass the species, without
individuality or [freely] choosing personalities.”40 In order to bear free
will, a person must first strengthen their subjective sense of uniqueness
to become a choosing subject.
This goes well beyond the traditional language of Torah study as
an antidote to illicit desire. Just as any alert reader can immediately
distinguish between the distinctive style and ethico-spiritual stance of a
text by Maimonides and one by Nahmanides, for example, so R. Shapira
 Pain and Words 341

insists that the antidote to the deterministic fallacy is to sharpen one’s

own sense of individuality and literary style. Each student is “called upon
to reveal their own distinctive spiritual form and image” through inno-
vative scholarship. “This is his [individual] path in Torah, and this is his
[individual] path in devotion.”41
This is a key passage for me because it shows how an ostensibly
scholarly/textual practice focused on intellectual or even literary/aesthetic
goals (the development of a distinctive literary voice and persona) may
be deployed to further the habitudes of moral subjectivity. R. Shapira
responds to the crisis in free will not by arguing for the reality of free will
on discursive intellectual grounds, but by encouraging the revitalization
of each student’s unique personality, so that the problem is itself raised
to an entirely different experiential register. Freedom is not an intellectual
but an existential concern, which can only be addressed by shifting the
existential ground on which the sufferer stands. The recommended way for
an aspiring scholar to accomplish this is through innovative scholarship
(hiddushim) and writing.

Bodies, Letters, and Texts

Text, experience, and divine vitality are clearly linked in R. Shapira’s

exposition of a classical Hasidic teaching attributed to the Baal Shem Tov,
which holds that all of creation is at every moment continuously enlivened
by the vitality (or “light”) contained within the letters of divine speech
that continuously bring them into being.42 “Man does not live by bread
alone but by all that goes forth from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut 8:3)
is explained to mean that corporeal bread can only sustain life because of
the divine vitality contained by the divine (Hebrew) letters through which
it is constituted.43 This isn’t yet about the lexical or literary meaning of
texts but about something far more atomistic and therefore boundless—
the sheer facticity of the letters (not yet words) of Torah that are read
or pronounced.
This is the theme of a powerful sermon from January 1930.44 R.
Shapira notes that the appellation Hasid applies to a person who conducts
himself lifnim mishurat ha-din (one who goes beyond the requirements
of Jewish law) not simply because he wants to be strict in his perfor-
mance of the commandments but because his inner life is connected to
the letters of the Torah he studies (see Wiskind, this volume). “For it is
342 Don Seeman

known from the Holy ARI that the letters are rooted in a very high place
that cannot be contracted to human intellect.”45 The letters are essentially
unbounded in a way that words and sentences—the units of semantic
meaning—cannot be, and this is the place beyond reason (or prior to
reason) where Hasidism locates the origin of subjectivity. It is significant
that R. Shapira’s version of this teaching focuses here on the consciousness
of the Hasid rather than that of the tsaddik. Characteristically, he also
uses this as an opportunity to discuss the pedagogic implications of this
idea. Perhaps, he suggests, the infinitude of the letters can help to explain
the fact that many traditional Jews “begin [in teaching their children to
read] with the study of letters rather than whole words as they now seek
to do in the ‘improved’ [i.e., more modern] schools.”46 Even the simplest
of traditional Jewish learning practices—here, the distinctive manner in
which children are taught to read by focusing on the sounds made by
one Hebrew letter and vowel combination at a time rather than jumping
to the larger semantic unit—serves to promote the distinctive intensity
of Hasidic devotion. The manner of learning how to read, the cultivated
awareness of divine infinitude, and the characteristically strict Hasidic
attitude toward Jewish ritual observance are all mutually constitutive and
interdependent facets of efficacious practice.
This is not limited to children. With characteristic attention to bodily
and perceptual experience, R. Shapira describes how the Hasid, funda-
mentally unbounded by the limited lexical meaning of the text, also “gazes
upon the world in an unbounded way . . . as the Baal Shem teaches that
‘when you gaze upon the world you gaze upon [God] and [God] gazes
back at you.’ ”47 When such a person comes to Torah, says R. Shapira, “he
[or she] is not satisfied with the simple contextual meaning [peshat] of the
Torah or of the Kabbalah but is forced to see in everything an unbounded
vision” accompanied by equally limitless longing for God. With due respect
to the importance of literary reading of Hasidic sermons, it is unclear to
me how any poetics grounded solely in the lexical meaning of texts and
committed to the ordinary, commonsense distinction between words and
things (or language and corporeality) might accommodate this teaching.
The Hasid whose mind and will are fixed on this lifnim mishurat
ha-din reality attains the power to exercise influence upon the social and
physical environment by serving as a channel for the vital infinitude of the
letters that breaks through language. While Hasidic literature sometimes
portrays the Hasid as the more or less passive recipient of the tsaddik’s
influence, here it is the attainment of the everyday Hasid that has power
to influence his or her own environment.48 The secondary revelation
 Pain and Words 343

accessible to people in the Hasid’s sphere of influence may not always rise
to the level of consciousness, but it can be perceived diffusely, “through-
out their body.”49 This is intriguing. One might speculate that there is a
kind of resonance for R. Shapira between the individual letter of Torah
and the individual body because of the way that bodies and letters each
stand apart in a kind of atomistic separateness from other people or
letters on a page. Indeed, he reminds us later in this sermon that Jewish
law mandates the calligraphic separation of every letter in a Torah scroll
and even mandates a border of empty parchment around the text as a
whole, because the light that fills the empty space transcends even what
the letters themselves can hope to convey.50 Like individual letters on a
page, the body is a repository of holiness transcending language.51 It is
only in the community of Hasidim, teachers and students together, that
the diffuse bodily knowledge of Torah can be made manifest. “Someone
who has a portion of that Hasid—which is to say that he became a Hasid
through him—he alone will be able to understand, while another person
who may be a greater scholar will think he is speaking of things that go
against reason or are simple [i.e., unsophisticated] things.”52 The force
of letters that transcend reason may not be conveyed linguistically, but
through sheer personal presence, where there is a relation of mentorship
or teaching between two fellow Hasidim.
Bodies and letters participate in one another’s phenomenological
horizon. Gazing upon the face of a tsaddik, R. Shapira writes in a 1925
sermon, conveys its own form of transrational blessing (segulah), “because
you are gazing now at his soul (nafsho) and the combinations of letters
of his soul that God made to be externally revealed.”53 That is why gazing
upon the face of the tsaddik constitutes a form of devotion. “They [the
letter combinations] pass over [through the act of gazing] to our soul
and work upon the letters of our soul to make a good combination or,
God forbid, the reverse.”54 “Eyes of flesh see only flesh,” R. Shapira writes,
“but the eyes are the path that God has made for the soul to perceive
the letter combinations of another person’s soul,” and this is a perceptual
skill that can be enhanced through training.55 The blessing conveyed by
the image of the tsaddik, at any rate, derives from the combinations of
letters through which the world and its contents have been created and
sustained. Thus, likewise, “it is forbidden [and deleterious] to gaze upon
the face of a wicked person.”56
I would like to suggest that R. Shapira never completely resolved
the tension between this sort of nonlexical, letter-based spirituality and
the signal importance he accorded to holistic literary composition as an
344 Don Seeman

expression of individual subjectivity. This is the recurring thread of an

extended 1929 sermon in which he emphasizes that “every desire of the
heart, understanding, and idea related to sanctity that enters the heart and
mind of an Israelite [not necessarily a tsaddik!] is a form of prophecy and
revelation from heaven” that must be developed in writing:

He must reveal his spiritual physiognomy [shi’ur komah] limb

by limb, one more idea related to sanctity, one more path in
divine service, one more word of Torah, one more [good]
intention. Each one of these becomes a limb, and from all of
them, his shi’ur komah is revealed . . . so that through him God
reveals his prophecy of holiness, which is above any physical
garment whatsoever. . . . Therefore, such a person must speak
and write at least a small portion of his ideas . . . 57

Just as a person has a complex physical body made up of parts that must
each be sanctified, so too do they have a spiritual body (shi’ur komah)
made up of the unique insight and spiritual perceptions they have attained.
Particularly in our fallen generation, R. Shapira writes, an author must work
to invest the text with his own soul (nishmato) by renewing or innovating
paths of divine service through written composition.58 It is the investment
of the text with the author’s vitality as much as the content that matters.
In this register of literary practice, readers too are encouraged to
think comprehensively. The student of an isolated text or sermon may
encounter the spiritual “limbs” of its author but is likely to be left with
doubt and misunderstanding. Contemplation of an entire book or corpus of
writings, by contrast, offers privileged access to their author’s shi’ur komah
(spiritual physiognomy), giving readers the ability to perceive “thoughts
and paths of understanding” that transcend any semantic content that the
texts themselves are able to convey:

It thus transpires that the revelation of prophecy (hitgalut

nevi’ut) is the reading of a book! The book reveals not just
atomistic elements [devarim bodedim] but also the essence
of the possessor of a [particular] shi’ur komah through
which the prophetic revelation occurs; not a revelation of
the future . . . but a revelation of guidance and intimacy and
sanctification as an Israelite.
 Pain and Words 345

Tellingly, R. Shapira eschews the more traditional word kri’ah, which

can also refer to chanting or reading aloud (an important focus of let-
ter mysticism) in favor of histaklut ba-sefer (looking at a book), which
seems to refer to the more modern practice of silent reading. This is not
a reference to a specialized visualization technique, in other words, but
a potential consequence of ordinary, attentive reading. “Everyone knows
and perceives,” he writes, “that sometimes when he reads a great deal, a
person will suddenly be moved by something and taken aback, and it will
burrow into his heart without rest for many years until it has the capacity
to transform him into another man and to sanctify him and raise him up.”
A person may have read many books on similar topics, yet somehow this
text, in which the author’s essence and individual personality (ishiyut) have
been revealed, moves him in a correspondingly distinct and individual
way.59 It is inconceivable that R. Shapira did not have the composition
and study of his own books and sermons in mind.60
This fits nicely with the central theme of all of R. Shapira’s prewar
educational tracts: that the purpose of Hasidic education is to “reveal the
soul” of the student by drawing it out from its corporeal sheath.61 I am
tempted to say that the infinite light of the letters must be channeled or
contracted through textual and pedagogic practice into the necessarily
more finite but also richer, more densely ramified, and personalistic world
of literature, innovation, and unique individual cognitive-emotional apper-
ception of Torah. In this intersubjective frame, the fundamental work of
self-revelation by the writer serves to evoke a student’s own distinctive
prophetic signature in a way that the undifferentiated infinitude of the
Hebrew letters alone could not. The tension between the expansiveness of
books and the atomism of individual letters expresses an even more fun-
damental tension in the phenomenology of tsimtsum (divine contraction)
that both engenders and transcends corporeal language.
A profound ethnographic study of ritual healing among Hasidim
in London published some years ago by Roland Littlewood and Simon
Dein showed how this interdependence of words, letters, and bodies
contributes to everyday forms of ritual efficacy and healing among some
contemporary Hasidim.62 Another way of saying this, which would be
perfectly compatible with R. Shapira’s teaching, is that the manipulation
and organizing powers of sacred language (for example, tsiruf ha-otiyot,
or letter recombination) can convey power and vitality directly into the
phenomenal world. My contribution here, however, is to emphasize both
346 Don Seeman

the importance of l­iterary development in its own right and the fact
that even these semantic, meaning-producing capacities of language are
implicated by R. Shapira in a very broad range of efficacies that include
(but also transcend) meaning making.63 Learning to write in a way that
would appeal to students and provoke their strong emotional and aesthetic
response was not just a utilitarian necessity for a writer seeking new
audiences; it was also part of the ritual-cum-mystical praxis of “revealing
souls” and imbuing them with an irreducible prophetic vitality.

Words Fail, Bodies Destroyed

Commenting on the Talmudic articulation of yissurim shel ahavah (afflic-

tions of love) in his Shabbat Teshuvah sermon for 5690 (1929), R. Shapira
cites a passage in which God is said to observe the commandments of
the Torah out of love for his people just as his people observe the com-
mandments out of their love for God (see Smokler, this volume). Such
reciprocity means that when a Jew sins or undergoes some other kind of
moral failure down below, it has the capacity to inflict pain, as it were,
upon God on high. A person must pray not just that their love of God
finds proper expression in word, deed, and thought but also that they
develop the sensitivity to personally identify with at least some spark of
the divine pain they may have caused. This feeling, or hargashah, can
lead them to a “fear of sin” rooted not in the terror of punishment but
in the desire to protect one’s beloved from affliction.64 The ability to feel
God’s pain cannot, however, be taken for granted. “When can an Israelite
perceive the supernal anguish? Only when his own mind and heart are
untroubled by bodily affliction, for otherwise he cannot know whether the
pain he feels is actually from his own affliction or from the pain on high.”65
Recognition that too much suffering (or the wrong kind of suffering)
can forestall prophetic experience or ruin religious subjectivity is thus
already well attested in R. Shapira’s prewar writings, though it takes on a far
more central and terrifying role in his later Ghetto sermons. In his prewar
educational tract Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim, he laments “the enemies who
make our lives exceedingly bitter from without” as well as “the coldness
toward Torah and divine service within.”66 In language presaging some of
his bleakest comments from the “years of rage,” he responds to a rash of
suicides brought on by economic collapse between 1926 and 1928, saying,
“Do not weep only for the one who kills himself, but weep also for the
 Pain and Words 347

walking dead, whose very self and essence have grown cold!”67 This is a
stark portrayal of suffering, but it is also a pathological counterimage of
the vivified prophetic self at the heart of R. Shapira’s literary-educational
program.
Consider the early wartime sermon from parashat toledot 5700 (1939),
in which R. Shapira describes the collapse of basic human subjectivity that
results from the torture and humiliation to which Jews in the Ghetto are
subject, including the brutal public shaving of men’s beards. It is worth
citing part of that sermon here at length:

It is possible . . . that the verse “those who are lost in the land
of Assyria and those who are cast off in the land Egypt shall
return” [Isa 27:13] means that there is a quality of being lost
and a quality of being cast off. “Cast off ” means just cast off
from one’s place to a distant locale, but [such a person] is still
visible and recognizable. Not so a “lost person,” who is miss-
ing, not seen or recognized. For when troubles multiply now
to such an extent that the beards of Jews are simply shaved
off, by means of which they become unrecognizable in their
exteriority, so too the increase in persecution and afflictions
is difficult to bear and impossible to estimate, so that their
interiority [also] becomes unrecognizable. He is lost to himself
[er farlirt zich] and does not recognize himself, how he used to
feel [margish] a year ago on the Sabbath or even on a weekday
before and during prayer and so forth. Now he is trampled
and smashed till he cannot perceive [margish] whether he is
an Israelite, whether he is a human being or an animal that
has no self to feel68—this is what it means to be lost, [as in]
“the lost shall return.”

While clearly specific to the context of German occupation, this depiction

invokes an imagery of inner emptiness—the walking death—that R. Shapira
had already developed during the interbellum financial crisis. Here, the
sermon continues with a desperate hope that the situation might be reversed
through divine salvation, since clearly the Jews cannot save themselves:

The Talmud [Kiddushin 2b] . . . says that the owner of a lost

object must search for it, claim it, and bring it back to himself.
The Holy One blessed be he is the owner of that which we
348 Don Seeman

have lost, and therefore, Isaac blessed Jacob our father [with
the words] “God will give you”:69 not just when the Israelite
is visible and recognized but also with respect to the “lost,” he
will “return and give again.” The owner of the lost object will
return to find us and to give us all goodness, to return us to
him and to redeem us in body and soul with great kindness
and good salvations.70

Persons who are lost to themselves cannot effectively perform divine service
until God, as it were, first performs the mitsvah of returning lost objects
(hashevat avedah) by returning them to some semblance of their former
selves. The observance of mitsvot by God in reciprocity with Israel, the
feared loss of human subjectivity, and the inability to engage in divine
service while suffering are central themes in this wartime sermon that were
already emphasized in teachings that R. Shapira wrote at least a decade
before. This sermon was not as heavily edited as some in Reiser’s critical
text, but marginal comments, word deletions, and later insertions for the
sake of clarity all betray R. Shapira’s sustained attention to the expressive
form of his sermons, which he explicitly intended for publication.
I am not retreating from my previous claim that passages like these
are remarkable for their unprecedentedly frank and honest depiction of
human collapse, possibly unrivaled in the phenomenology of faith and
despair.71 Nor am I denying, as I have written elsewhere, a degree of
rupture between his prewar and Holocaust-era thinking. I do, however,
want to emphasize that these later sermons cannot be treated merely as
unmediated reflections of wartime and Ghetto experience. To the contrary,
some of these sermons convey careful attention to chosen ritual, literary,
and theological tropes that R. Shapira had been long developing as well as
impressive thematic continuity with his prewar compositions on religious
subjectivity. They paradoxically portray an author of profound descriptive
power marshalling his own formidable talent to describe the collapse of
religious experience and human self-awareness in himself and other Ghetto
inhabitants. Though he tends to avoid the technical language associated
in his earlier writings with visualization or visionary experience, it may
not be too much to suggest that these extended meditations on suffering
and collapse were also meant to evoke and modulate more limited kinds
of prophetic agitation or reverie to master despair. Between debilitating
grief and utter loss of human feeling lay the text and the vulnerable skein
of intersubjective relations it sought to engender and preserve.
 Pain and Words 349

Toward a Post-Holocaust Theology?

We are now in a position to confront the “problem of faith” raised by

Abramson, Magid, and others in R. Shapira’s context. R. Shapira raises
this theme quite explicitly in a prewar sermon from 1936:

All Israel believe [ma’aminim] in the Holy One blessed be he,

and through their faith they draw down his holiness, may he be
blessed. It is known from sacred books [i.e., Hasidic literature]
that “faith” [emunah] signifies “drawing down” [hamshakhah].
[God] believes in the will and service and sanctity of Israel,
and since he believes in us, he draws us upward and joins us
to his holiness.72

What is clear even from this brief passage is that “faith” is not, in this
context, primarily a matter of accepting or “believing in” a set of propo-
sitional truths. This is not at all to say that R. Shapira would deny such
propositional truths if they were put to him but rather to insist that this
is not what he is trying to convey. He is concerned with hamshakhah,
which implies the drawing of one subject toward another, expressed either
as the drawing down of divine vitality or the drawing upward of human
subjectivity toward God. It is a dynamic better described in ritual-theurgic
than in conventional theological language.
As the sermon continues, R. Shapira focuses on how a person may
create the reciprocal conditions under which the vital flow of emunah may be
strengthened: “When we serve [God] actively and with great desire [teshukah],
then he believes in us, and his faith, may he be blessed, works to strengthen
our faith in him and the other way around.”73 It is therefore “impossible for
a person to achieve strong faith unless he actively performs his devotional
service [avodah] with strength and with longing.” Preparing for this influx
requires self-discipline to improve one’s character and a willingness to give
oneself wholly to the other. Success cannot be taken for granted. A person
may find themself inconstant in their devotion, or they may be unable to
shift attention consistently beyond their own temporal need and desire. R.
Shapira’s account of faithfulness, or emunah, is thus very like his account
of prophecy: the intersubjective space in which potentially infinite divine
vitality meets determinate forms of human practice and lived experience.
In one early wartime sermon whose theme was ostensibly the sin
of the biblical spies that Moses sent to reconnoiter the Promised Land,
350 Don Seeman

R. Shapira describes emunah in a more traditional vein of trust in divine

salvation, but even here, he deploys vitalistic rather than propositional
language. A person ought to believe that God will save them even when
there seems to be no rational way forward; indeed, to insist too strongly
on being able to perceive the path of God’s salvation may lead to a pegam
(blemish), which will block any salvation that might otherwise have
flowed.74 In a 1940 sermon, he observes that “every blemish in the faith,
God forbid, of some Israelites (as when Moses said, ‘They [the slaves in
Egypt] will not believe in me’) is because of the extremity of the affliction
that they are suffering from exile.”75 This does not contradict his later claim
that the very purpose of Israel’s exile in Egypt was to “arouse the longing
of Israel, for it is natural that when a person is in spiritual and physical
trouble it is easier to rouse their longing for God.”76 That is simply how it
is with vital flow—it requires modulation. Too much suffering can block
the channel through which faith flows reciprocally between God and
humans, just as surely as too “dry” an affect, bereft of longing, can cause
the well of faith to run dry. There is some evidence here for the “cove-
nantal theology” Shaul Magid (this volume) thinks R. Shapira eventually
abandoned as he was forced to witness the extermination of his people.
But to portray this as a fundamentally propositional matter—“faith in
the God of history”—strikes me as misconstruing the true nature of the
terrible crisis R. Shapira faced.
Indeed, as the Holocaust-era sermons progress, I agree with Magid
that faith becomes a more insistent and difficult theme. On Hanukkah
5702 (1941), R. Shapira writes that even though the Jewish people inherit
their faith (i.e., their channel of vital flow) from the patriarchs, it may
only be self-consciously activated through a willingness to act (as they
did) in self-sacrifice. “The matter of self-sacrifice in faith,” he writes, “is
that even at a time of [God’s] hiding, a person will trust in him that
everything from him is for the good and that all is justice and that all
of the afflictions are filled with God’s love for Israel.”77 He acknowledges
somewhat restrainedly that “to our distress, we see now, even among those
who were always completely faithful, some few individuals whose faith
has been injured and who ask, ‘Why have You abandoned us?’ ” What
is questioned is not God’s existence but his redemptive efficacy: “For if
it was in order to bring us closer to Torah and divine service that these
afflictions have come, then to the contrary, all Torah and sanctity have
been destroyed!”78 Hard questions are perfectly legitimate “when asked
in the language of prayer and supplication and pouring out one’s heart
 Pain and Words 351

before God” but become destructive when they harden into the merely
cognitive demand for answers.79
A few weeks later, in early 1942, R. Shapira insists once again that
faith (emunah) “is a spirit of sanctity [ruah kedushah] that is in a person
and allows him to trust [in God], above his level of understanding or his
intellect.”80 Yet faith can also be “weighed down” or compromised by an
excess of elemental “earth” in an individual’s constitution—a humoral the-
ory of emunah according to which it can be broken down or interrupted.
“Therefore, many afflictions, God forbid, that break a person and cause him
to fall can also injure his faith.”81 This is more than the English word belief,
with its strong cognitivist bias, can typically convey. R. Shapira’s emphasis
remains where it has always been, on the experience of the sufferer and the
ritual-devotional attitudes required for conditions of unimpeded flow. Thus,
my response to the debate between Shaul Magid and Henry Abramson
as to whether or not R. Shapira suffered a crisis in faith (and to a much
broader set of public contests over the disposition of R. Shapira’s legacy)
is that this question ought to be reframed (just like the question of free
will described above) in ritual and phenomenological terms.
Magid argues that by the time his Ghetto sermons were consigned
for burial, R. Shapira had already undergone a crisis that left his faith
“broken” and that positioned him as a kind of “radical theologian” who
might serve as a missing link with later post-Holocaust theologians. Magid
is a subtle reader of Hasidic texts, and there is no need for me to rehearse
his argument here except to say that it turns heavily on a single, late 1942
emendation to the Hanukkah sermon he had composed a year before.
That emendation, which may be the last surviving writing in R. Shapira’s
own hand, disputes his earlier claim that the Jews of the Ghetto should
view their suffering as being on a clear continuum with that of Jews in
previous generations. By the end of 1942, he writes, no comparison is
tenable. He does not, however, attempt to emend the rest of his sermon
in light of this recognition.
For Magid, R. Shapira’s change of heart about the commensurability
of suffering is sufficient to indicate a near-total break with any recognizable
form of traditional Jewish theodicy. Without adherence to the paradigm
of sin, punishment, suffering, and redemption, Magid argues, the whole
“Jewish God of history” becomes a sort of logical impossibility, which leads
inexorably toward the conclusions of radical post-Holocaust theologians
such as Richard Rubinstein or Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, who redefine the
very idea of a covenant with God in the wake of the Holocaust. Pointing
352 Don Seeman

to assertions of faith throughout the sermons, by contrast, Abramson

(this volume) insists simply that R. Shapira “remained steadfast in his
faith that the developments [of history] were somehow beneficial in the
larger plan of the almighty.” Outside the academy, such contestations are
often less polite. A writer for one popular Jewish magazine takes aim at
Magid’s “libelous claim” and accuses him of “besmirching” R. Shapira’s
“pristine legacy.”82 Magid, for his part, complains with some justice that
writers who defend R. Shapira’s “unsullied faith” rarely define just what
they think this term might imply. My own attempt to clarify R. Shapira’s
use of the term emunah in his prewar and Ghetto writings is intended
as a response to this challenge.
For clarity’s sake, let me be clear that I do not subscribe to the aca-
demic conceit that sometimes resists almost any attempt to appropriate
a text such as Sermons from the Years of Rage for the sake of a “useable
past” that can speak to contemporary concerns. Indeed, I think traditional
believers and radical post-Holocaust theologians might both find a great
deal in these texts to refine, sensitize, and challenge their respective posi-
tions. They have certainly edified and challenged my own spiritual and
intellectual adventure in ways I can scarcely fathom. Yet it seems to me
that contemporary readers ought to be clear-eyed about the differences
between the concerns and existential positions from which they approach
these texts and those that animated their author. In one of the last Ghetto
sermons from the spring of 1942, R. Shapira expounds upon the verse
“Israel saw [the miracles] and believed in God and in his servant Moses”
(Exod 14:31). He cites the Zohar, which asks why, if Israel already “saw”
the wonders, the biblical text emphasizes that they also “believed?” Isn’t
seeing better than merely believing? To this, R. Shapira replies: “The faith
in God of an Israelite is not just that he knows and believes but that he
knows and sees with his soul, that the soul of the Israelite sees a little bit
of the shining of his greatness and sanctity. . . . This is like the visions
of the prophets, except that for them, these visions were literally revealed
to their eyes, while for us it is an inner knowledge.”83 Here, in one of the
last surviving Ghetto sermons, R. Shapira returns to some of the central
themes of his whole previous career: the phenomenological turn, the fragile
contingency of religious subjectivity, and the reading of classical Jewish
terms such as faith in light of his vitalistic Hasidic cosmology. From my
point of view, both Magid and his critics are committing a categorical
error in reading these sermons as expressions of the question, “What
does R. Shapira believe?” rather than ritual and literary expressions of his
 Pain and Words 353

desperate ongoing attempt to resist a final collapse. This is by no means an

attempt to rob the sermons of their potential theological or philosophical
significance, though the register of ritual efficacy has hardly been touched
upon by either field.84
Consider the following passage from the sermon just cited, with an
eye toward ritual efficacy and religious subjectivity rather than doctrine:

Besides the need to prepare oneself through divine service to

increase love, fear, faith, and other forms of divine effluence,
one also requires strengthening and joy, so as to increase the
effluence. Therefore, in times of trouble, God forbid, they [love,
fear, faith, etc.] are weak and failing, but this is not, God for-
bid, because [Israelites] lack faith, heaven forfend. They are all
believers! Yet they cannot feel that faith or the certainty that
is revealed by it.

Is this an expression of “pristine faith” or of a significant and undeniable

crisis? Support could be found here for either reading, but neither accounts
for the dynamic ritual and existential context in which faith, love, and fear
of God each emerge as fragile expressions of divine influx that has been
blocked through suffering too terrible to bear. The felt reality to which
this sermon responds is absolutely one of crisis, justification before God
of those who have already fallen, and desperate strategies to persevere.
The final sermon to mention emunah is from June 1942, just three
sermons from the end of the collection. It is a long, meandering exposi-
tion that begins with the death of the biblical Miriam and makes a rare
explicit reference to the horror of the deportation of children that R.
Shapira had recently witnessed. I cannot do justice to the totality of that
sermon here (see Polen, this volume), but one section bears comment in
this context. “All Israel,” he writes, “believe that ‘there is none but him’
(Deut 4:35), which means not just that there is no other divinity but that
there is no reality other than [God] in the world at all and that the whole
world and its fullness are revelations of the light of divinity.”85 Therefore,
he continues, we must perceive everything in the world not as a thing
unto itself but as an expression of divine light:

Nor should the Jewish children be perceived [merely] as inde-

pendent beings, as “our children,” but as a new creation and
renewal and revelation of divinity, as well as the eternity of
354 Don Seeman

Israel. Neither should the Torah that we teach the little school
children, nor what anyone teaches his neighbor, nor any word
of ethical teaching or guidance that is spoken be treated as a
thing unto itself that we teach but rather as . . . a revelation of
divinity, since it constitutes renewal and generation. . . . Every
renewal or creation is a revelation of the divine, for there is
nothing other than [God], alone.86

Here, near the very end, I do not perceive R. Shapira as trying to teach
the Hasidic “doctrine of acosmism,” which he simply presupposes as a
backdrop for the work that must be done. The teaching itself is an act of
making divinity present, an attempt to keep the world precariously alive
for one more day even as he grieves its terrible, seemingly inevitable
collapse. How, he asks, does the world even persist, despite the cries of
the children calling from the transports, “Save us, save us!”? This is a
question to which he does not really offer an answer.
In exegetical terms, this sermon addresses one of the perennial ques-
tions of Jewish commentary: Why did Moses sin (Num 20) by striking the
rock rather than speaking to it when the people cried out for water—a
sin that the biblical text itself identifies with Moses’s lapse of faith: “for
you have not believed in me (Deut 1:32)”? R. Shapira’s provocative answer
is that the Israelites had been enduring a kind of drought since the time
of Miriam’s death—her presence and longing for God had served as a
conduit of divine vitality that dried up when she was gone. Ultimately,
he suggests, Moses acted like a Hasidic tsaddik: he had to descend to the
level of his people (and bring down the divine influx) by committing an
act that, while not technically a sin, would be accounted as one for a man
of his stature. He did this so that the longing and penitence he would
subsequently experience—it is the experience of teshuvah (penitence) that
counts—could prime the wellsprings of faith again for others. This is where
the classical doctrine of the tsaddik whose “descent” into the world brings
life and blessing to his followers meets R. Shapira’s phenomenological turn.87
The effluence that the tsaddik conveys is premised on blessing of a very
specific kind: the continued ability, despite overwhelming suffering, to feel.
I am in basic agreement with Ora Wiskind’s claim that we ought to
attend not just to the extremities of Holocaust suffering in the wartime
sermons but to the hermeneutic strategies their author deploys in defense of
more quotidian goals such as “dimensions of self-awareness, introspection,
the need for inner psychic unity, an urgency of communication, a search
 Pain and Words 355

for divine presence in everyday life.”88 These are complex tasks, to which
I would add the always uncertain efficacies of healing and vitality, the
attempt to perceive the divinity that pulses even through suffering, and the
literal attempt to sustain life against genocide. If Magid’s and Abramson’s
concern with the “belief content” of R. Shapira’s sermons places them on
one side of a broad methodological divide in approaching these texts,
then the attention that Wiskind and I give to the text as a field of fragile
strategic interventions in human subjectivity places us on the other. It is
probable that several of the other contributors to this volume can also be
located somewhere along this continuum. There is no need for uniformity,
and the Rebbe of Piaseczno would be the last to demand it. Words and
pain, religious teaching and the collapse of language, the text as a vehicle
of shared vitality and threatened loss of humanity, are the terrible knife’s
edge on which R. Shapira—for a time—stood.

Notes
This essay is dedicated in love and admiration to my son Noam, who is teaching
me how to be a father every day.
1. Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism, and ‘Useless Suffering’
in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Harvard Theological Review 101 (2008): 465–505. See also
Don Seeman, “Otherwise than Meaning: On the Generosity of Ritual,” Social
Analysis 48 (2004): 55–71. Although the current chapter stands alone, it can be
read most profitably in light of these earlier works.
2. Arthur Kleinman, Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropol-
ogy and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 10. See Moshe
Idel, “On the Theologization of Kabbalah in Modern Scholarship,” in Religious
Apologetics—Philosophical Argumentation, ed. Yossef Schwartz and Volkhard Krech
(Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 123–74.
3. This is a central theme of Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy.”
4. Ibid., 493–505.
5. Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut Polin bein shtei ha-milhamot (Jerusalem: Mossad
Bialik, 1990), 378. Perhaps the first to dispute this claim was Nehemia Polen, The
Holy Fire: The Teachings of R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (Northvale, NJ: Jason
Aronson, 1994), xviii.
6. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 504–505. The classic methodological work
that informs all my thinking in this area is Arthur Kleinman and Joan Klein-
man, “Suffering and Its Professional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of
Interpersonal Experience,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 15 (1991): 275–301.
7. Kleinman and Kleinman, 468–80.
356 Don Seeman

8. R. Kalonymus Shapira, Sermons from the Years of Rage [in Hebrew], ed.
Daniel Reiser, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, 2017).
9. Daniel Reiser, Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism, trans.
Eugene D. Matanky with Daniel Reiser (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).
10. See Don Seeman, “Apostasy, Grief, and Literary Practice in Chabad
Hasidism,” Prooftexts 29 (2009): 398–432; Don Seeman and Shaul Magid, “Mystical
Poetics: The Jewish Mystical Text as Literature,” Prooftexts 29 (2009): 317–23.
11. See Moshe Idel, Hasidism between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1995).
12. For my own exposition of R. Leiner’s quite different spiritual project and
an earlier version of my focus on ritual efficacy in Hasidism, see Don Seeman,
“Martyrdom, Emotion, and the Work of Ritual in R. Mordecai Joseph Leiner of
Izbica’s Mei Ha-Shiloah,” AJS Review (27): 253–80.
13. The term Hasidic modernism was coined by Don Seeman and Michael
Karlin, “Mindfulness and Hasidic Modernism: Towards a Contemplative Ethnogra-
phy,” Society and Religion: Advances in Research 10 (2019): 44–62. See also Michael
Karlin, To Create a Dwelling Place for God: Life Coaching and the Lubavitch-Chabad
Hasidic Movement in Contemporary America (PhD diss., Emory University, 2014);
Don Seeman, “On Mystical Sociology and Turning Judaism Outward,” in Jewish
Spirituality and Social Transformation: Hasidism and Society, ed. Philip Wexler
(New York: Herder and Herder, 2019), 17–36.
14. For a selection of essays on the theme of Neo-Hasidism, see Arthur
Green and Ariel Evan Mayse, eds., A New Hasidism: Roots (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society of America, 2019) and idem, A New Hasidism: Branches
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2019).
15. See especially D. L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); idem., “Modernity and the Early Dis-
course of Scientific Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72
(2004): 897–933; D. S. Lopez, Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Lawrence Kirmayer, “Mindfulness in
Cultural Context,” Transcultural Psychiatry 52 (2015): 447–69; Veronique Altglass,
From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
16. See Seeman and Karlin, “Mindfulness and Hasidic Modernism.”
17. Reiser, “Imagery Techniques,” v, 10, 110, 195, 406. For an ethnographic
consideration of the relationship between cinema and the religious imagination,
see Birgit Meyer, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Don Seeman, “Sensational Movies
and the Anthropology of Religion: Towards a Comparative Moral Imaginary,”
Religion (2016): 1096–1115.
18. Eliezer Schweid, “Prophetic Mysticism in Twentieth Century Jewish
Thought,” Modern Judaism 14 (1994): 173–94; Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 474–76.
 Pain and Words 357

19. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 468–80.

20. Marcin Wodziński coined the term “à la carte Hasidism” in his “War and
Religion: Or, How the First World War Changed Hasidism,” The Jewish Quarterly
Review 106, no. 3 (2016): 283–312.
21. Author’s introduction to R. Kalonymus Shapira, Hovat ha-talmidim
(Jerusalem: Oraysa Publications, 2000), 1–28.
22. Kalonymus Shapira, Derekh ha-melekh (Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei Piasec-
zno, 1991), shabbat teshuvah 5690 (1929), 231. R. Shapira made similar arguments
elsewhere. See Reiser, Imagery Techniques, 94n123.
23. A detailed comparison of R. Shapira’s literary endeavors with those of
his older contemporary R. Abraham Isaac Kook, who addressed secular Zionist
pioneers, is the subject of a future essay. On Kook’s literary trajectory, see Yehudah
Mirsky, Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook
1865–1904 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021).
24. The Hebrew atsabim and the transliterated word nerves both appear in
this context. See Don Seeman “Apostasy, Grief, and Literary Practice in Habad
Hasidism,” 410.
25. See Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 475–80; Benei mahshavah tovah, 14; Hovat
ha-talmidim, 170; Haksharat ha-avreikhim, 10b–11a.
26. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 475–80.
27. Ibid.
28. See, for example, R. Kalonymus Shapira, Benei mahshavah tovah (Jeru-
salem, 1989), 30–32; Hovat ha-talmidim, 171–72.
29. Benei mahshavah tovah, 31–32; emphasis added. See Steven Vaitkus,
“The ‘Naturality’ of Alfred Schutz’s Natural Attitude of the Life World,” in
Explorations of the Life-World: Continuing Dialogues with Alfred Schutz, ed.
Martin Endress, George Psathas, and Hisashi Nashu (The Netherlands: Springer,
2005), 97–122.
30. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Scho-
ken, 1995), 341; See Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 470.
31. Hovat ha-talmidim (“Torah, Prayer, and Singing to God”), 98–99, 171.
32. Ibid., 217–18. Elliot Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of
Reading,” in Suffering Religion, ed. Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (London:
Routledge, 2002).
33. Hovat ha-talmidim, 172.
34. Ibid., 7–28 (“A Conversation with Teachers and Parents”).
35. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Harper
and Row, 1962), 1:11; On Heschel’s phenomenology of religious experience, see
Edward K. Kaplan, “Abraham Joshua Heschel,” in Interpreters of Judaism in the
Late Twentieth Century, ed. Steven Katz (New York: B’nai B’rith, 1993), 131–50;
Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Idea of Revelation (Atlanta: Georgia
State University Press, 1989); Arthur Green, “Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting
358 Don Seeman

Hasidism for Moderns,” Modern Judaism (2009): 62–79. See also my more detailed
comparison of Heschel and Shapira in Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 475–77.
36. Derekh ha-melekh, shabbat teshuvah 5690 (1929), 229. See also Derekh
ha-melekh, parashat hayyei sarah 5690 (1929), 14.
37. See Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 478–79.
38. Tsav ve-zeruz, 9, par. 10.
39. R. Abraham Isaac Kook also prioritizes the importance of human
freedom in his early manuscript now published as Le-nevukhei ha-dor (Tel Aviv:
Yediot Aharanot, 2014), 27–29. See Don Seeman, “Evolutionary Ethics: The
Ta’amei Ha-Mitzvot of Rav Kook,” Hakira: Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and
Thought 26 (2019): 13–55. In a letter dated 15 Tammuz 2724 (1964), R. Yitzhak
Hutner argues that the fundamental problem of the current age is the denial of
free will. Yitzhak Hunter, Pahad Yitzhak: Iggerot u-ketavim (New York: Gur Aryeh
Institute, 1991), 70–71.
40. Tsav ve-zeruz, 9, par. 10.
41. Ibid.
42. See Moshe Idel, “Modes of Cleaving to the Letters in the Teaching of
Israel Baal Shem Tov: A Sample Analysis,” Jewish History 27 (2013): 299–317.
43. Benei mahshavah tovah, 31–32. See Moshe Idel, Vocal Rites and Broken
Theologies: Cleaving to Vocables in R. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov’s Mysticism (New York:
Herder and Herder, 2019).
44. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat vayyehi 5690 (1930), 71–75.
45. Ibid., 72.
46. Ibid., 74.
47. Ibid., 73.
48. This should be compared with certain emphases in contemporary Chabad
which are beyond the scope of this essay.
49. Derekh ha-melekh, 73.
50. For more on the history and implications of this idea, see Moshe Idel,
“White Letters: From R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev’s Views to Postmodern Herme-
neutics,” Modern Judaism 26 (2006): 162–92.
51. For some of the background to this theme in medieval Kabbalah, see
Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Body in the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment,”
Jewish Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 479–500.
52. Derekh ha-melekh, 73.
53. Derekh ha-melekh, motsa’ei yom ha-kippurim 5686 (1925), 242.
54. Ibid. This may shed some light on the ritual efficacy of practices whose
sociopolitical effects are well described by Maya Balakirsky Katz, The Visual Culture
of Chabad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
55. Ibid., 241.
56. Ibid., 242.
57. Derekh ha-melekh, parashat shemot 5689 (1929), 81.
 Pain and Words 359

58. Ibid., 83.

59. Ibid., 82.
60. Compare Don Seeman, “Publishing Godliness: The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s
Other Revolution,” Jewish Review of Books (July 16, 2014). https://jewishreviewof-
books.com/articles/1085/publishing-godliness-the-lubavitcher-rebbes-other-revolu-
tion/; accessed February 03, 2020.
61. This is, for example, a central theme in the first chapters of Hovat
ha-talmidim. See at length Daniel Reiser, “ ‘To Rend the Entire Veil’: Prophecy
in the Teachings of R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira of Piazecna and its Renewal
in the Twentieth Century,” Modern Judaism 34, no. 3 (2014): 334–52.
62. Roland Littlewood and Simon Dein, “The Effectiveness of Words: Reli-
gion and Healing among the Lubavitch of Stamford Hill,” Culture, Medicine and
Psychiatry 19 (1995): 339–83.
63. See Seeman, “Otherwise than Meaning.”
64. Derekh ha-melekh, shabbat teshuvah 5690 (1929), 229.
65. Ibid.
66. Hakhsharat ha-avreikhim, 62b; Seeman, Ritual Efficacy,” 489.
67. Tsav ve-zeruz, 16–17; see Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 489.
68. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:92. This is a good example of Reiser’s
contribution. The standard published edition of Esh kodesh (Jerusalem: Va’ad
Hasidei Piaseczno, 1960), on which I based a previous translation of this passage,
mistakenly transposed a single letter which changes the meaning of this sentence.
Compare Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy,” 481.
69. Gen 27:28. The reference is to the beginning of the sermon, not trans-
lated here, where R. Shapira cites the gloss of Rashi on this verse, to the effect
that God will give to his people and then return and give again.
70. Sermons from the Years of Rage, 1:92.
71. Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy.”
72. Derekh ha-melekh, shabbat hazon 5696 (1936), 159.
73. Ibid., 160.
74. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat shelah 5700 (1940), 145.
75. Ibid., parashat vayyeshev 5701 (1940), 175.
76. Ibid., shabbat haggadol 5701 (1941), 183.
77. Sermons from the Years of Rage, hanukkah 5702 (1941), 241.
78. Ibid., 241.
79. Ibid., 241.
80. Ibid., parashat va’era 5702 (1942), 252.
81. Ibid.
82. Elly Kleinman, “Critiquing a Critique,” Ami Magazine, April 26, 2017,
http://ellykleinman.com/critiquing-a-critic. See also Shaul Magid, “The Rebbe of
the Warsaw Ghetto,” Tablet, April 7, 2017, https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-
and-culture/228300/the-rebbe-of-the-warsaw-ghetto; Henry Abramson, “Hasidim
360 Don Seeman

and Academics Debate a Rebbe’s Faith (and on Facebook of all places),” The
Lehrhaus, March 4, 2019, https://www.thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/hasidim-and-
academics-debate-a-rebbes-faith-during-the-holocauston-facebook-of-all-places.
83. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat ha-hodesh 5702 (1942), 288.
84. See Don Seeman, “Divinity Inhabits the Social: Ethnography in a
Phenomenological Key,” in Theologically Engaged Anthropology, ed. Derrick
Lemons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 336–54; Seeman, “Otherwise
than Meaning.”
85. Sermons from the Years of Rage, parashat hukkat 5702 (1942), 303–304.
86. Ibid.
87. See, for example, Emmanuel Etkes, “From Esoteric Circle to Mass
Movement: The Emergence of Early Hasidism,” Polin 9–10 (1991): 78–79.
88. Ora Wiskind-Elper, “Hasidic Homiletics in Dialogue with Modernity,”
R. Kalonymos Shapira: New Directions in Scholarship. Conference Paper for the
GEOP Interdisciplinary Research Workshop that I was privileged to cohost with
Daniel Reiser at the Polin Museum in Warsaw, June 26–29, 2017. A slightly dif-
ferent formulation appears in Wiskind’s chapter for this volume.
 Contributors

Editors

Don Seeman is associate professor in the Department of Religion and

the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. He works at the
intersection of social theory, the anthropology of religious experience, and
Jewish thought. In 2017 he was co-convener of an international research
workshop on R. Kalonymos Shapira: New Directions in Scholarship at Polin:
Musuem of the History of Polish Jewry in Warsaw. Seeman is co-editor
of the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion series at Palgrave and
of a forthcoming co-edited volume on Existential Anthropology and the
Study of Religion. He is also the author of One People, One Blood: Ethi-
opian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (Rutgers 2009). The working
title of his current project is An Ethiopian Jew Goes to Uman: Existential
Anthropology of the Jews.

Daniel Reiser is associate professor and chair of the Department of Jew-

ish Thought at Hertzog College in Jerusalem. He specializes in Kabbalah,
Hasidic philosophy, and theology in the Shoah. He produced a critical
edition of R. Shapira’s writings, Sermons from the Years of Rage (2017).
His latest books are Imagery Techniques in Modern Jewish Mysticism (2018)
and (with Ariel Evan Mayse) Language of Truth in the Mother Tongue: The
Yiddish Sermons of Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (2020).

Ariel Evan Mayse is assistant professor of religious studies at Stan-

ford University and Rabbi-in-Residence at Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute
(atiqmakers.org). He was previously the director of Jewish Studies and
visiting assistant professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew College

361
362 Contributors

in ­Newton, Massachusetts. Mayse holds a PhD in Jewish Studies from

Harvard University and rabbinic ordination from Beit Midrash Har’el in
Israel. He recently published Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the
Teachings of the Maggid of Mezritsh (University of Pennsylvania Press) and
co-edited (with Arthur Green) the two-volume A New Hasidism: Roots
and Branches (Jewish Publication Society, 2019).

Contributors

Zvi Leshem is Director of the Gershom Scholem Collection for Kabbalah

and Hasidism at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. He immigrated
to Israel from the United States in 1979. He holds rabbinic ordination
from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and a PhD in Jewish Philosophy from
Bar-Ilan University. His current areas of research include Hasidism, Jew-
ish education, Gershom Scholem and the thought of Rav Shagar. He has
directed the Gershom Scholem Collection since 2011.

David Maayan is a doctoral student in comparative theology at Boston

College. His doctorate focuses on Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s insis-
tence that the indispensable heart of Hasidic devotional life consists in the
lifelong cultivation of a uniquely articulated, deeply feeling, and centered
personhood. Shapira’s project is deeply rooted in techniques, images, and
teachings of early Hasidism and medieval Kabbalah, yet has nuances and
elements which are clearly of the twentieth century. The dissertation will
compare Shapira’s thought with modern Christian mystical theologies of
the transformation of the human person through the lens of divinization
and the development of the spiritual senses.

Ora Wiskind is professor and chair of the graduate program in Jewish

Studies at Michlalah College in Jerusalem. Her interests include Jewish
thought and literary studies, Hasidism, and the interface between scrip-
tural exegesis, culture, and religious experience. Her latest book, Hasidic
Commentary on the Torah (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization-Liver-
pool University Press, 2018), is a wide-ranging study comprehending two
hundred years of Hasidic teachings (1749–1943). It draws creatively on
modern thought, literary theory, and cultural history to demonstrate the
contribution of Hasidic thought to Jewish life and tradition. A National
Jewish Book Award finalist, it draws creatively on modern thought, literary
 Contributors 363

theory, and cultural history to demonstrate the contribution of Hasidic

thought to Jewish life and tradition.

Moria Herman is an independent investigator whose research focuses on

Hasidism, education, and Hasidism during the interwar period.

James A. Diamond is Joseph&Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the

University of Waterloo. He specializes in Jewish thought, philosophy, and
theology. His most recent books are Jewish Theology Unbound (Oxford
2018) and (with Menachem Kellner) Reinventing Maimonides in Contem-
porary Jewish Thought (Littman Library, 2019).

Henry Abramson serves as a dean of Touro College in Brooklyn, New

York. He is the author of numerous works, including Torah from the Years
of Wrath, 1939–1943: The Historical Context of the Aish Kodesh.

Shaul Magid is professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and

Kogod Senior Research Fellow at The Shalom Hartman Institute of North
America. He works on Kabbalah, Hasidism, and Modern Jewish thought
and culture. His last two books were Piety and Rebellion: Essay in Hasidism
and The Bible, The Talmud and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s
Commentary to the Gospel, both published in 2019.

Erin Leib Smokler is director of spiritual development and dean of students

at Yeshivat Maharat rabbinical school, where she teaches Hasidism and
Pastoral Theology. She is also a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman
Institute of North America, where she sits on the Theology Research
Team. She earned both her PhD and MA from the University of Chica-
go’s Committee on Social Thought, and her BA from Harvard University.
Dr. Leib Smokler is currently at work on two books, Torah of the Night:
Pastoral Insights from the Weekly Portion and Torah in the Time of Plague:
Literature, Law, Liturgy, and Legacy.

Nehemia Polen is professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew College. He is

the author of The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman
Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Jason Aronson Press, 1994), and
The Rebbe’s Daughter: Memoir of a Hasidic Chilhood (Jewish Publication
Society of America, 2002), which was a recipient of the National Jewish
Book Award.
364 Contributors

Moshe Idel is Emeritus Max Cooper Professor in Jewish Thought at the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, senior researcher at the Shalom Hartman
Institute, and Matanel Chair of Kabbalah at the Safed Academic College.
He holds a PhD in Kabbalah and has served as visiting professor and
researcher at many universities and institutions worldwide, including
Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities in the United States and École
des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His numerous publica-
tions include Kabbalah: New Perspectives and Messianic Mystics (both by
Yale University Press), and Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (SUNY
Press, Albany). In 1999, Prof. Idel received the prestigious Israel Prize for
excellent achievement in the field of Jewish Philosophy.

Marcin Wodziński is professor of Jewish history and literature at the

University of Wrocław in Poland, where he heads the Taube Department
of Jewish Studies. Wodziński previously worked as the chief historian for
the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Major publications
include the Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton University Press, 2018),
Hasidism, Key Questions (Oxford University Press, 2018) and he is a
co-author of Hasidism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2018).
 Index

Abraham. See biblical characters Avodah (worship), 5, 132, 218, 230,

Abramson, Henry, 14, 308–309, 349, 337–338, 340, 349
351–352, 355
Absolute, 219, 224–225, 230 Baal Shem Tov (Besht), 5–6, 54–55,
Abulafia, Abraham, 9, 56–60 81, 93, 96, 115, 132, 138, 158,
Aesthetic, 11, 335, 341, 346 160–162, 167, 339, 341–342
Affliction, 186–187, 260–261, 272, Beard, 206n4, 283–285, 347–348
274–277, 284, 287, 346–347, Becker, Ernest, 12, 198
350–351. See also suffering Being, 92, 97, 137–140, 145, 147,
Aggadah, 85–91, 98–99, 105n78, 204. 157–160, 200, 209n39, 217, 219–
See also halakhah, theology 220, 228–229, 241, 245–246, 251
Akiva, 112, 166, 266 Belief, 11, 15, 64–66, 241, 250,
Amalek. See biblical characters 273, 305–313, 317, 320–326, 338,
Anthropology, 13, 202–203, 334. See 351–355. See also faith
also ritual Benei mahshava tova, 2, 9, 19n3,
Anthropos, 243 40, 44, 57–59, 107–112, 115–124,
Aristotle/Aristotelian, 129n51, 245, 135–136, 153, 307
255n31 Berkovits, Eliezer, 310, 312, 327n2
Atheism, 145–146, 311, 324–325. See Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, 90
also belief Biblical figures: Aaron, 215–217,
Auschwitz. See concentration camps 270–271; Abraham, 317; Amalek,
Authenticity, 97, 156–158, 171n14, 248–249, 257n59, 258n69; Balaam,
200–201, 231 236–237, 253n5; David, 267–269,
Author, 137, 149n22, 156, 167–169, 279n30; Haman, 288; Isaac, 259,
195, 198, 236, 273, 282, 297, 348; Jacob, 131–135, 156–159,
344–345. See also reader 173n32, 227, 348; Joseph, 134–135,
Authority, 31–32, 34, 42, 45, 82, 287 227; Miriam, 7, 215–219, 225–227,
Autonomy, 32, 160, 217, 227, 229– 229–230, 353–354; Moses, 159,
231, 249–250 215–218, 225–230, 242, 261–266,

365
366 Index

Biblical figures (continued) Compassion, 133, 140–141, 152n65,

269–272, 297, 349–350, 352, 354; 219–220, 223–228, 270–271,
Noah, 305 293–294
Biblical prophets: Hosea, 266; Isaiah, Concentration camps: Auschwitz, 17,
284, 316; Jeremiah, 19, 332n64; 199, 312, 325–326; Chelmno, 14,
Micah, 216. See also Prophecy/ 291, 298; Treblinka, 8, 268–269,
Prophetic Renewal 273, 292, 296; Trawniki, 2, 123,
Binah. See sefirot 130n57, 314
Blessing, 55–56, 203–204, 218, 227, Contemplation: contemplative
263, 343, 354 practice, 4, 9, 16–17, 65, 80, 91–92,
Body/Embodiment, 10–11, 84, 90–93, 135–140, 161, 168, 250–251,
96, 109–110, 131–137, 141–143, 333–337; meditation, 17, 66, 83,
146–147, 149n26, 157, 164–168, 107, 112–113, 122; visualization
221, 228–229, 240, 244, 247, 251, techniques, 9, 57–60, 336, 337, 345,
338–339, 343–344, 358n51 348
Boethius, 199, 208n23 Consciousness: consciousness of
Bones, 165–167, 169, 274 the Hasid, 342; corporeality
Book, 167–169, 174n43, 210n61, 337, and, 151n47, 343; extinction of
344–345 reflective, 246; future-oriented,
Brill, Alan, 69n10, 164 167; heightened, 107, 109, 252;
Brown, Benjamin, 20n10, 169n4 historical, 153, 184; permeation of
Buber, Martin, 18, 21n15, 64, 164, one’s, 157, 161, 164, 173n25; self-
169n2, 174n33, 336. See also creation and, 138, 142–145. See also
Neo-Hasidism subjectivity
Buddhism, 17, 19, 60, 66, 73n59, Corporeality/Physicality, 10–11,
75n82, 150n36, 336 57, 83, 85, 91, 96, 111, 113, 118,
129n50, 132–136, 141, 146, 149n26,
Caleb, 288–289 151n47, 160–161, 166–168, 192,
Carlebach, Shlomo, 16–18, 64, 67, 198, 199, 221, 223–224, 240–241,
311, 314, 325–326 250, 264, 273, 274, 276, 285,
Charlap, Yaakov Moshe, 313 337–339, 341–345, 350
Children, 7, 83, 186–187, 213, 221– Cosmos, 65, 93, 97, 203–205,
228, 325–326, 339–342, 353–354 223–224, 228, 298
Christianity, 20n13, 31, 36, 67, 75n83, Cosmogony, 228
147n1 Cosmology, 203, 338–339, 352
Commandment (mitsvah), 60, 88–90, Covenant, 14–15, 115, 307, 309–314,
92–93, 103n37, 110, 133–134, 316–327, 350–351
147, 152n64, 157, 217, 227, 242, Creativity, 61, 63, 79, 80, 88, 89,
249–250, 341, 346 94–95, 103n33, 138–140, 152n64,
Communication, 4, 118, 154, 157– 154, 186, 198, 202, 205, 208v26,
158, 159 214, 228, 230, 336. See also exegesis
 Index 367

Crisis, 14, 18–19, 37, 41, 43–45, Drink, 5, 111, 125n13. See also
50n52, 87, 119–120, 164, 169n3, corporeality
203, 213, 215–216, 234n22, 258n62,
273, 314, 320–321, 326, 338, 340, Economy, 30, 35, 41, 43, 47n10, 55,
341, 347, 350, 351, 353 120–122, 129n50, 169n3, 346
Critical Edition, 3, 12, 53, 179–189, Ecstasy, 5, 9, 54–59, 66, 68n6, 87–88,
194–198, 213, 291, 333–335 122, 128n41, 336
Culture, 23n48, 31, 63, 83, 155–156, Education/Pedagogy: Hasidism and,
175n44, 198, 201, 208n26, 227, 248, 42, 44–45, 82, 89; Shapira’s tracts
295 on, 2, 9–10, 15, 44, 54, 112, 153,
201, 296, 307, 340, 345–346;
Da’at, 85, 140, 143–146, 157, 237, Shapira’s orientation towards, 7,
242–243, 250. See also sefirot 44, 82–83, 93, 109, 121, 154–155,
Death, 2, 7, 8, 9, 12, 45, 123, 137, 249–250, 333, 336–337, 340–345
138, 149n26, 155, 165–166, Egalitarianism, 46n1, 110, 113,
185–186, 191, 192, 196, 198–205, 116–118
209n39, 214, 215–216, 216, 219, Egypt, 114–115, 243, 267–272,
225, 227–231, 235, 238, 243, 251, 281–284, 293–294, 350
260, 285, 303n31, 306, 319, 323, Elimelekh of Grodzisk. See Shapira/
330n38, 347, 353, 354 Shapiro family
Deportations, 2, 8, 242, 268–269, Elimelekh of Lizensk, 6, 55, 166,
273, 353. See also Great Action/ 170n8, 171n12, 337
Deportation Elimelekh Shapira (nephew), 180. See
Derekh ha-melekh, 2, 91, 103n30, also Shapira/Shapiro family
104n53, 153–156, 188, 239 Emotion/Affect: vital flow and, 10, 15,
Despair, 14, 186, 200–201, 207n6, 346, 350; study and, 81–98, 339,
266, 269–270, 288, 293, 297, 308, 345; knowledge and, 157, 268, 205,
326, 348. See also belief, faith, 109, 158–165, 225, 231, 334, 338
suffering Engenderment, 171n15, 228–230
Devekut (attachment), 5, 81, 116–119, Epicurus, 305
131, 148n8, 170n10, 324 Epstein, Kalonymus, 55, 103n41, 108
Devotion, 5–6, 10, 17, 55, 79–83, 87, Esh Kodesh. See Sermons from the
89–98, 132–133, 140, 230, 264, 266, Years of Rage
275, 340–343, 349–351 Esoteric, 82, 84–85, 94, 163–164, 246,
Diamond, James A., 13, 308 338
Disease/Illness, 8, 277, 288, 338 Ethnographic/Ethnography, 17, 345,
Dislocation, 4, 7, 34–35, 41, 61, 355n6, 356n13, 360n84. See also
75n83, 155 anthropology
Doctrine, 11–13, 29, 188, 202, Evil, 117, 154, 219, 231, 236–238, 248,
210n49, 224, 274–275, 334, 258n64, 283, 285, 305, 308–310,
353–354 319, 321–322, 326, 327
368 Index

Exegesis, 79–80, 84, 87–91, 94–95, Flesh, 110, 139, 263, 339, 343. See
98–99, 103n33, 204, 214, 217, 231. also corporeality
See also creativity, study France, 288
Exile, 122, 161–163, 166, 239, 243, Frankl, Viktor, 199, 208n25
350 Fraternity (Mystical Fraternity), 2,
Existentialism, 3, 11, 89, 108, 145– 9–10, 40, 43–45, 107–124
146, 149n24, 160, 200–201, 250, Free Will, 109, 340–341, 351, 358n39
259, 321, 341, 352–353 Friendship (haverim), 113, 116–118
Experience: affect and, 15; embodied Funkenstein, Amos, 309–310, 312
and lived, 93, 131, 147, 151,
257n59, 268–273, 338–339, 346; of Garb, Jonathan, 68n5
faith and doubt, 200–203, 305–301, Gassing as murder, 237, 291, 296
316, 324, 335; Hasidism and, Geertz, Clifford, 203–204, 334
155–160; mystical or religious, 5, Gender, 12, 232n8. See also women
9, 57–59, 109, 122–124; prophetic, Genocide, 3, 8, 12, 14, 61, 302n19,
58–59, 122–124, 168, 338, 346; 355
self-creation and, 137; Shapira’s Gentiles/non-Jews, 48n28, 65–67, 121,
personal, 53, 155, 166, 185–188, 188, 257n60
237, 272–273, 283–285; study and, Germans, 8, 191–192, 248–249, 284,
80, 83–90, 98; suffering and, 240, 288–289, 291, 300, 323
243, 252, 295, 346, 348, 349, 351, Germany, 248–249, 258n62, 288–289
354 Ghetto: Lodz, 269; Warsaw, 8–11, 98,
Explanation: the absence of, 204, 231, 153, 180, 184, 203–204, 231, 237,
260–261, 263, 267, 275–277 241, 260, 268–269, 279n30, 292,
Expulsion, 35, 154, 249 300, 315, 323, 333–335; Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, 8
Face, 151n47, 161–162, 221, 225, Golem, 65, 149n24, 158–159, 171n15
228–230, 259, 327n2, 343 Great Action/Deportation, 204,
Facsimile, 181, 291 231, 277, 292–298, 307–313, 320,
Faith (emunah): acts of, 123; crisis 331n49. See also deportations
and loss of, 14–15, 19, 154–155, Greenberg, Yitz, 310, 312
164, 192, 297, 307–311, 316, 338, Green, Arthur, 64, 174n33, 257n50
351; defining, 11; faith beyond Grodzisk (Mazowiecki), 22n27. See
intellect, reason and, 168, 200–201, also Shapira/Shapiro family
246, 248–250, 289, 351; simple, Guide of the Perplexed, 232n8, 239,
250–251; strengthening of 267, 273, 245, 251, 253n8, 255n37
288–289, 294, 298, 333 Guilt, 198, 204
Feeling (hargashah), 10, 86–87, 96,
133, 141–145, 175n43, 204, 243, Halakhah, 8, 81–82, 85–90, 91–92, 99,
346, 348. See also Emotion/Affect 104n58, 105n78, 203, 206n2, 341,
Final Solution, 292, 298 343. See also commandment
 Index 369

Hakhsharat ha-avreihim, 2, 112, 181, Heresy, 186, 306, 312, 330n38

299, 303n31, 307, 346 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 4, 64,
Handwriting. See writing 69n6, 73n63, 164, 336, 357n35
Hannukah; 1941 sermon for, 317–319, Hinduism, 66–67, 336
350; annotation to 1941 sermon for, History: of ideas, 3; God of, 350–351;
238, 294–296, 315, 317–322, 351 Jewish, 238, 265, 283, 295, 320–322,
Hasid; definition, 160, 172n18, 341, 327; social, 3, 108
339; tsaddik and, 36, 39, 164, Holiness/Sanctity, 94–96, 109–110,
342–343; Yosl Rakover’s identity as, 120, 132–136, 146–147, 150n35,
323–324 157–168, 217, 221–230, 252,
Hasidic Modernism, 9, 19, 150n36, 343–349
335–336 Holocaust: as novum, 238, 253n14,
Hasidism: “à la carte” Hasidism, 4, 296, 298, 313, 318–322; theology
9, 36, 41–43, 337; Belz, 15, 62; and, 14, 310–314, 321–323, 327,
Bratslav, 7, 16, 55, 62, 117, 120, 333, 349–352
124n3, 172n18, 258n71, 328n7, 335; Holy Hunchback, 16–17, 311, 314,
Chabad/Lubavitch (or Habad), 9, 323, 325–326
11, 15–16, 62–63, 104n57, 141–142, Homily/Homiletics, 12–13, 88, 97–99,
173n26, 173n31, 174n39, 224, 153, 155, 175n44, 204, 213–214,
244–245, 254n26, 255n32, 255n38, 239, 268–269, 272–273
300, 313; Ger, 15, 33, 38–39, 42–44, Hope, 160, 186, 192, 200, 205, 207n6,
51n58, 61–63, 80, 82, 323; Golden 230–231, 239, 266–273, 285, 298,
age of, 7, 43; Izbits, 9, 16, 55, 308, 325, 347
124n3, 149n24, 335; Karlin-Stolin, Hovat ha-talmidim, 2, 79, 103n30,
108, 114–119; Komarno, 115, 120, 297, 337, 340, 359n61
150n30; Kotsk (Kock), 9, 38, 55, 79, Huberband, Shimon (Szymon), 184,
82, 103n37, 149n24, 335; magical 283, 288
and spiritual, 44, 54–56, 58–65, 67,
168, 335–336; Satmar, 15, 62–63, Idel, Moshe, 9, 13, 17, 168, 335–336
75n83, 313; Toledot Aharon, 63; Image, 161–164, 276
Vizhnits, 15, 62 Imagination, 36, 58, 108, 164, 238,
Healing/Medicine, 8, 14, 54, 179, 192, 335–336
294, 334, 336, 340, 345, 355 Imitatio Dei, 133, 255n37
Heaven/Heavens: emptiness of the Immanence, 5, 11, 93, 110, 131, 162,
child’s, 324; initiative from, 217, 230–231, 241, 251, 254n23
227; storming, 271–273; tsaddik Incarnation, 10–11, 110, 131, 134,
connecting earth and, 55, 167 136–137, 147n1
Hebrew, 53, 64, 113, 153, 191, 195, 245, Individuality/Individualism, 4, 10, 36,
265, 282, 296, 299, 341–342, 345 80, 108–109, 128n41, 131, 136–139,
Heidegger, Martin, 200, 208n27, 142, 145–146, 152n64, 157–160,
209n39, 248 200, 222–225, 227–230, 336–341
370 Index

Individuation, 142, 200, 219–221, 229 Language, 10, 13, 64, 82, 93, 158,
Influx, 57, 59–60, 349, 353–354 262, 263, 264, 266, 342–346,
Intention (kavvanah), 5, 109–110, 346–355
113, 117, 120–121, 132, 134–136, Laitman, Michael, 65
264, 344 Leadership: crisis and, 213, 285, 300;
Intellect: body and, 244, 251; integration models of hasidic, 6, 21n20, 34,
of emotion and, 86–92, 141; 39–45, 55–56, 63, 168; Shapira on,
transcendence of, 88, 239, 244, 246– 225–230
247, 249–250, 252, 338–342, 351 Leib-Smokler, Erin, 13, 19, 244, 346
Interpretation, 79–80, 88–89, 95–98, Leshem, Zvi, 9–10, 43, 135
135, 138–139, 143–145, 157, 218, Levi, Primo, 306
230, 242–243, 339–341. See also Levi Yitzhak of Barditshev, 144–145,
creativity; exegesis 267–269
Israel, land of, 1, 8, 15–16, 62, 85, 87, Levinas, Emmanuel, 203, 323–325
112, 120, 180, 181, 211n65, 290, Liebes, Yehuda, 112, 199
297, 299, 323 Light: divine vitality and, 341–345,
Israelite: Shapira’s use of term, 233n13 353–354; drawing down of, 59–60,
92, 167; receptivity to, 162, 226;
Jewish Historical Institute, 180 revelation of, 93, 132, 163–164;
Joy, 5, 111, 113, 141, 230, 266–268, texts and, 103n37, 167–168; tsaddik
272–273, 337, 353 and, 165–168
Judgment (din): 86, 98, 120, hasid Limbs, 84, 110, 167, 251, 344
and, 160–161, 341–342; attribute of, Literature: exegetical, 12; general,
219–221, 341–342 3, 119, 340, 345; Hasidic, 148n8,
258n71, 342, 349; kabbalistic,
Kabbalah: contemporary interest in, 83, 93, 112, 222, 258n71, 339;
65–67; Cordovero and, 54, 56–57; merkavah, 112; rabbinic, 81–82,
ecstatic, 9, 56–59, 336; Hasidism 85, 90, 93–97, 143, 194, 237–238,
and, 10, 54, 67, 76n86, 81, 96; 257n60, 277n3; Russian, 209n32
Lurianic, 5, 67, 97, 112, 219, 237; Lithuania, 16, 61, 80–81, 89–92, 313,
Shapira on, 82, 85–90, 91–97, 111, 323
135–136, 160, 338–342; Zeitlin and, Lodz, 83
119–121. See also Zohar Longing, 84, 96–98, 209n39, 335, 342,
Kavvanah. See intention 349–350, 354
Kedushat Levi. See Levi Yitzhak of Love: afflictions/chastenings of love,
Bardishev 13, 244, 260–261, 274–277, 346; for
Kleinman, Arthur and Joan, 355n2, others, 110–113, 117–118, 141–142,
355n6 171n11, 276–277; of and for
Kook, Abraham Isaac, 16–17, 60, 90, God, 311, 317–318, 323–325, 350;
127n33, 258n71, 357n23, 358n39 suffering and, 267–268, 272; “Three
Kook, Zvi Yehudah, 313, 319, 331n40 Loves” of the Besht, 129n50
 Index 371

Luria, Yitzhak and Lurianic Kabbalah, 135, 143–146, 159, 165, 180, 204,
5, 67, 81, 97, 108, 112–114, 117, 227–228, 238, 240–242, 247–248.
171n15, 174n39 See also Talmud; study
Luzzatto, Moshe Hayyim, 108, 112 Migration, 7, 155
Mindfulness, 11, 17, 150n36, 160
Maayan, David, 10–11, 170n10, Miracle, 44, 266–268, 352
175n45 Mishnah, 86–87, 99, 110. See also
Magid, Shaul, 14–15, 75n85, 349–355 Talmud; study
Maggid: of Mezritsh, 6, 9, 55, Mitsvah. See commandment
115–117, 149n24, 158, 163, 171n15, Modernization, 6, 19, 36, 73n64,
172n24, 335; of Kozhnits, 55, 82, 336–340
166, 174n36, 337; of Zlotshev, 81 Morality, 36, 85, 162, 249, 334–335,
Manuscripts: Shapira’s, 1–3, 153, 169, 341, 346
180–187, 193–202, 204–205, 213– Moria, Herman, 12
215, 232n12, 291–292, 296–299, Mourning, 153, 243
303n31, 306, 315–316; various, 57, Moses. See biblical characters
114 Murder, 1, 14, 33, 119, 123, 184, 187,
Ma’or va-shemesh, 103n41, 108, 53, 61, 207n4, 221–222, 238, 249,
174n36 273, 291, 295, 297–298, 319. See
Martyr/Martyrdom, 108, 119, also Final Solution, Genocide
123–124, 210n45, 236, 262–266, Music, 13, 36, 67, 112, 125n13
275–277, 300, 322 Mussar, 80, 119
Mayse, Ariel Evan, 10, 17, 20n11, 131, Mysticism, 20n10, 64–66, 112, 154,
204, 210n56, 339 203–204, 224–225, 241, 244–245,
Media/Mediation, 10–11, 23n48, 345
42, 44–45, 164, 171n15, 279n30,
334–335 Nahmanides, 136, 281, 286, 301n6,
Meaninglessness, 155, 186, 200–203, 302n14, 340
312 Nazi, 4, 14, 61, 191, 206n2, 207n4,
Meditation. See contemplation 208n27, 248, 265, 272, 275,
Mercy (rahamim), 1, 110, 118, 165, 283–285
179, 208n12, 219–221, 227–228, Negation, 201, 224, 228. See also self
268, 271, 273, 276, 293–294, 295, Neo-Hasidism, 3, 15–19, 45, 54,
298, 299, 309, 318, 319, 323 63–67, 154, 169n2, 333, 336. See
Messianism, 122, 129n54 also Buber, Martin; Zeitlin, Hillel
Metaphor, 158, 163 Nerves/Nervous Disorder, 4, 9, 338
Mevo he-she’arim, 2, 112, 175n45, 181, Neusner, Jacob, 309, 311–312,
296–297, 299, 303n31 318–319
Midrash, 19; Shapira on, 84–90, Newspaper, 23n41, 74n76, 122, 181,
98–99, 134–135, 204, 238–242, 295, 323
318; Shapira’s use of, 98–99, 134– Nietzsche, Friedrich, 201
372 Index

Oneg Shabbat archive, 175n47, 184, Psalms; interpretation of passages from,

292, 298, 303n31 265, 268, 270, 276; recitation of, 293
Psychology/Psychological; 9–11, 123,
Palestine. See Israel 153–154, 158, 185–186, 198–205,
Pain. See suffering 336–339
Pantheism, 5, 113, 241, 244–245 Purification/Purity, 99–100, 122, 260,
Paragraphing, 12, 214–215, 315 265, 274, 277
Parashiyot (Torah Portions): Ekev,
292, 295, 298; Hazon, 292; Hukkat, Rackover, Yosl, 309, 311, 323–325, 326
186, 214–231; Metsora, 286; Rage (za’am), 235–237, 251
Mishpatim, 188, 206n3, 292; Naso, Rashi, 19, 134, 139, 143–145, 166,
188; Shelah, 288; Shemot, 167; 216, 219, 262, 267, 270–271, 286
Toledot, 284, 347; Vayyeshev, 131; Reader, 87–89, 97, 137, 147, 167–169,
Yitro, 182–183, 242; Zakhor, 291 193–195. See also author
Pedagogy. See education Reason/Rationality; Hasidim and, 12,
Phenomenology, 3, 9, 12–15, 67, 80, 244; Shapira’s relation to, 147, 161,
119, 147, 153–154, 192, 202–205, 235–248, 249–253; faith beyond,
315, 335–346, 348, 351–354 289, 350; critique of Western, 200,
Philology, 67, 194–198 248–249
Philosophy/Philosophical, 12–13, 60, Reciprocity, 167, 240, 346–350
64, 119–123, 144–145, 186–188, Reformation/Counter-Reformation,
198–202, 237–258 19, 42–45, 51n56
Piasezcno (town), 2, 7, 30–34, 40, 45, Reiser, Daniel, 2–4, 12, 58, 170n9,
51n66, 115, 296 179–189, 214–215, 231, 291,
Piekarz, Mendel, 191, 333, 334 296–297, 306–332, 333–336, 348
Piety, 7, 82, 84, 89, 91, 242, 340 Responsa, 206n2
Poland, Interbellum, 1–4, 41–43, Revelation; divine, 84, 87, 92, 136;
80–82, 89, 119, 347–348 interdependence of divine and
Polen, Nehemia, 12–13, 17, 102n30, human, 136–139; Heschel on,
123–124, 308–309, 330n30 164, 357n34; ongoing, 164, 167,
Postmodernism, 16, 283, 300–301 222–223, 353–354; of the soul/self,
Prayer, 5, 9, 31, 36–41, 56–57, 61, 66, 111, 150n36, 157; through text, 93,
81, 94–95, 97, 109, 113, 117, 120– 344–345
121, 138, 155, 179, 223, 239–240, Ringelblum archives, 1, 231, 237, 282,
253–254, 272–273, 275, 284, 287, 298, 335. See also Oneg Shabbat
290, 293, 309, 317, 325, 347, 350 archive
Progeny. See children Ritual: ritual efficacy, 6, 11–15,
Proofing, 181, 184–185, 194–196, 203–204, 333–335, 338, 345, 353;
204–205 ritual in its own right, 203–205
Prophecy/Prophetic Renewal, 4–7, Rosenzweig, Franz, 12, 191, 200, 235
57–59, 68–76, 88–89, 107, 112, Rosh Hashanah (New Year), 31–32,
167–170, 296, 333–338, 344–352 97, 119, 140–146, 261
 Index 373

Rupture, 3, 11, 13–14, 19, 198, 238, Sermons from the Years of Rage (Esh
244, 312–313, 320–321, 327, 327n2, Kodesh): 8, 12–19, 153, 193–202,
348 236, 259, 268, 274, 281–291, 301,
Russia, 6, 41, 82, 114, 119 307, 330n30; critical edition of,
3–4, 12, 53, 180, 188–189, 194–198,
Sabbath, 36, 63, 66, 136, 153, 179, 213, 236, 291, 314–315, 331n52,
192, 206n3, 242, 255n29, 284 333, 359n68
Sabbateanism, 67 Schachter-Shalomi, Zalman, 16–17,
Sacrifice, 240, 263–266, 317, 320, 350 24n57, 64, 66, 75n82
Sadness, 98, 272–273 Shneur Zalman of Liady, 55, 92,
Safed, 56, 85, 108, 114–115, 124 104n57, 141–142, 173n25, 173n31,
Salvation: advocacy of irrational faith 244–246, 255n36, 256n49, 300, 335.
in, 237, 289, 316–317, 350; coping See also Tanya
with lack of apparent, 273–274, Shapira/Shapiro family: Elimelekh of
289, 293–294; divine initiative and, Grodzisk (father), 7, 22n28, 22n29,
294, 347–348; human activity and, 33, 56, 170n8, 174n36, 174n43,
83, 211n65, 266, 334; possible, 232, 286, 296; Elimelekh (son), 8, 230,
311, 318. See also belief, faith 234n22, 285, 303n31; Rahel Hayyah
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 145–146 Miriam (wife), 7–8, 22n30, 230,
Scholem, Gershom, 10, 15, 59, 234n22; Rekhell Yehudis (daughter),
102n19, 114, 219, 238, 254n23, 339 230, 234n22; Yeshaya (brother), 8,
Schweid, Eliezer, 307–309, 316, 322, 15, 297, 299, 328n9
333 Shekhinah, 113, 221, 228, 230, 251
Secret: Torah and, 85, 94, 111, Shestov, Lev, 200–201, 209n32,
fraternities, 44, 107, sharing of 209n37, 209n41
one’s, 111, 119 Shi’ur Komah, 167, 344
Secularization, 6, 32, 80, 89, 121 Shtibl/Shtiblekh, 9, 36–42, 66, 155
Seeman, Don, 9, 13, 15, 105n79, 139, Silence, 159, 263–266, 269–270, 322,
150n36, 202–204, 329n17 327
Seer of Lublin, 47n11, 55, 174n36, Sin, 113, 138, 162, 218–219, 221,
305, 307 225–229, 259–260, 265, 274, 298,
Sefirot, 171n15, 219–221, 228, 346, 351, 354
246–247 Slavery/Slave, 261–262, 265, 267, 269,
Self: self-creation, 138–139, 142–146; 272, 279n35, 292
self-knowledge, 140, 156–157, Socrates, 12, 198–199
242, 339; self-nullification (bittul), Sonderkommando, 292
10–11, 57, 131, 136, 149n24, 158, Song, 67, 111, 266–272, 278n15
170n10, 246; self-recognition, 95, Sorrow, 194, 196, 231, 238, 276. See
139–141, 145–146, 284, 347–348; also sadness, suffering
self-referential, 168, 230, 234n22; Soul: animal, 111; body and, 84, 131,
self-sacrifice (mesirat or mesirut 141–142, 146–147, 165, 192, 244,
nefesh), 240, 317–320, 350 339, 343, 348; God and, 223, 250,
374 Index

Soul (continued) Testimony, 14, 41, 54–55, 107, 113,

263–264; levels and states of, 155, 115, 123, 196, 202, 205, 205n1, 283,
339; perception and, 162, 223, 342, 292, 306, 314–315
352; revelation of, 94–97, 105n79, Textual practice and textuality, 11–14,
111, 139–140, 150n36, 173n27, 345; 203, 334, 341, 345
soul of tsaddik, 165–167; study Theodicy, 13, 231, 259–261, 275, 281,
and, 83, 85–100; writing and, 137, 310–313, 318–323, 325, 329n22,
208n19, 210n61, 344 331n49, 351. See also suffering
Soviet Union, 288 Theology: anthropocentric, 263, 271;
Speech; thought, deeds and, 91, consistency of Shapira’s theology,
109–110, silence and, 159; public, 247–249, 315; covenantal, 309,
129n53, 169n4; letters of divine, 320–326, 350; Hasidic, 83, 217,
341 230, 235, 246; incarnational,
Spies, 288–289, 349 10, 131; Jewish, 3; law and, 89;
Spirit, Holy, 86–88, 96 post-Holocaust, 14, 19, 310–314,
Spirituality, 61–67, 84, 90, 146, 155, 321–327, 349–352; rabbinic, 221;
168, 217, 224, 227, 335–338, 343 theology of Maimonides, 244–245;
Study. See Torah theology of personalism, 230; Torah
Subject: intersubjectivity, 345, and, 157
348–349; subjectivity, 3, 10–11, 14, Theurgy, 170n9, 208n12, 349
334, 336, 338–349, 352–355 Tiberius, 9–10, 108, 114–119, 124
Suffering: afflictions of love (yissurim Time, 13, 99, 204, 220, 227, 230, 349
shel ahavah), 13, 260–268, 272–277; Torah: Study of, 79–106, 110–122;
pain and, 121–122, 141, 192, Letters of, 132, 134–136; self-
198, 204, 225, 229–231, 238, 244, revelation and, 136–139, 157; scroll,
251, 260–261, 264–271, 274–277, 137
316, 335, 346, 355; for the Other, Tradition: alienation from, 89; aura
203–205 of, 34, 36; belief and, 250; challenge
Suicide, 17, 154, 169n3 to, 308, 313, 320–321, 326; fidelity
Sukkot, 8, 275 to, 308; hasidic, 164, 239, 339;
hasidic tradition and renewal,
Talmud (Gemara): cited by Shapira, 164, 175n46; Jewish literary, 13,
166, 216–218, 236, 264–265, 268, 281–282; kabbalistic, 243; language
271, 284; devotion and, 79–98; of, 13, 80, 236; philosophical, 245;
Gemara of Tannaim and Amoraim, rabbinic, 215, 249; return to, 297;
86–87; in curriculum, 16, 82–83, tradition of mystical fraternities,
110, 339, 347; transformative study 112, 115, 119, 121; wisdom and,
and, 99–100; Zohar and, 88 247–248
Tanya, 92, 120, 173n25, 300. See also Transcendence, 134–135, 163, 231,
Shneur Zalman of Liady 242, 247
Temporal or temporality. See time Trauma, 154, 296. See also suffering
 Index 375

Truth, 11, 15, 200, 230, 243–245, 283, Wolfson, Eliot R., 23n46, 72n49,
287, 300–301, 326, 349–350 147n1, 173n31, 209n32, 210n56,
Tsimtsum, 160, 241, 254n23, 345 255n27, 255n32, 357n32, 358n51
Tsaddik, 6, 9–10, 33–45, 54–56, 64, Women, 7, 62, 170n5, 217–218,
66, 116–118, 151n40, 155, 164–168, 223–230
217, 223–224, 271–272, 335–337, Writing: self and, 137–139, 158;
342–344, 354 Shapira’s reflections on, 167–168,
Tsav ve-zeruz, 2, 105n67, 137, 154, 185; death and, 192, 196, 198–199,
210n61, 299, 303n31, 340 203–205; writing as mystical ritual,
211n65; handwriting, 1–3, 180–181,
Ukraine, 5, 62 188–189, 194, 197, 282
Ultra-Orthodoxy, 2, 16, 313–314, 322
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayyim, 309, 312,
Veil, 162, 271–273, 311 314
Vessels, 87, 135, 158, 162 Yeshiva: Bet El, 107, 112–115,
Visualization. See contemplation 117–119, 124; Da’at Moshe, 7, 42,
Vital, Hayyim, 56–60, 81, 113–114, 44–45, 50n50, 82–83, 102n25, 326;
267, 339 Shapira’s teachings in the Zionist
Vitality/Vital Flow, 5–6, 10–11, 15, yeshiva, 16–17
60, 91, 105n79, 133, 168, 196, 203, Yiddish, 2, 16, 53, 64, 103n30, 153,
219, 334, 338–339, 341, 344–346, 171n15, 191, 282, 299, 323, 325
349–352, 354–355 Yom Kippur, 2, 160–163, 251, 288

War: devastation and, 30, 154, 192; Zeitlin, Hillel, 60, 64, 74n76, 104n57,
World War I, 4, 7, 33–37, 41–43, 108, 119–123, 169n2, 201, 336. See
154, 200, 235, 290–291; World War also Neo-Hasidism
II, 15, 120, 239 Zionism, 7, 16, 313, 330n38
Weber, Max, 10, 65, 202 Zohar: cited by Shapira, 218, 352;
Weeping/Tears, 5, 154, 179, 185, 196, ideas rooted in, 244, 246, 257n51;
266, 278n15, 298, 346. See also mystical fraternities and, 108–109,
suffering 112, 115, 117; revelation and,
Weil, Simone, 324 167; Shapira’s commentary on,
Wiesel, Elie, 64, 305, 307, 324 85, 210n47; Shapira on exegesis
Wiskind, Ora, 10–11, 13, 17, 44, 139, in, 88–89; study of, 88–89, 97,
354–355 117, 119–121; view of evil in, 237;
Wodziński, Marcin, 4, 9, 17, 155, 337 Tikkunei Zohar, 161–163