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  • The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe:Diverting God's Gaze from a Utopian End to an Anguished Now
  • James A. Diamond (bio)

Introduction

In a sustained act of supreme resistance the hasidic master, Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (1889–1943), the Piaseczner Rebbe, or more popularly known as the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe, vigorously maintained his role as Rebbe to his followers even in the face of unimaginable pain and loss. His collection of sermons, The Holy Fire (Esh Kodesh), delivered in the Warsaw ghetto between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1942, transcribed, buried, and then fortuitously retrieved after World War II,1 is a rare and vital testament to efforts in consoling followers and wresting spiritual meaning out of evil of such magnitude as to defy all theological reason.2 What I wish to explore here is that a number of R. Shapira's midrashic confrontations with inordinate physical suffering interspersed throughout the Esh Kodesh reflect not only challenges that undermine traditional notions of divine governance, but are also designed to affect a change in that governance. In particular, my focus will be on a strategy which diverts the divine mind from its own inner directed perspective to a human one. That can be achieved by displacing God's ideal metaphysical construct of history where all time collapses into a totality of divine beneficence for a lived human experience and memory of historical events. Although not without precedent in hasidic thought,3 R. Shapira advances it in novel and radical directions culminating with what we shall explore as the key role played by Moses' authorial license in the composition of the final edition of the Torah. R. Shapira feels compelled to develop this strategy in response to what I believe Eliezer Schweid, in his penetrating study of R. Shapira's thought, has correctly identified as the central theological quandaries dealt with by the Esh Kodesh—"How is it possible to withstand [a test of faith] when the suffering is so intense as to destroy the sole means capable of reenforcing [End Page 299] faith in God and the Torah in the present age? Secondly, what is the meaning of suffering decreed on a nation that is not equipped to tolerate it? Is divine providence not operating against its very own goals?"4

Theological protest in response to these questions is a dimension of the dialectical faith Nehemiah Polen has already discerned in his pioneering study of the Esh Kodesh that, in existential response to the mind-numbing barbarism of the ghetto, fluctuates between "polar opposites of radical acceptance and vehement protest."5 In particular it is an impassioned repudiation of another self-expressed resignation, also noted by Polen and others, to a "world beyond judgment, beyond evaluation, beyond criticism or the need for explanation."6 On the contrary, that protest both renounces the very basis for that resignation, a faith in a redemptive future, and is crafted to impel God to surrender His plans of a just eternity in favor of urgent relief in a concrete historical present. The empirical evidence presented by ghetto life slowly eroded R. Shapira's confidence in a time worn theodicy that assumes the divine ends justifies its means and so Schweid also concludes "the dichotomy experienced between historical reality and what a believer like him could comprehend regarding the divine will 'in relation to Himself' overcame his recognition that the divine will is absolutely good."7

In what follows I abide by Polen's and Schweid's leads and further probe a dimension of the sermons deserving of extended treatment—R. Shapira's exegetical reevaluations of traditionally held notions of divine providence. Biblical exegesis is the primary medium of both protest and petitionary persuasion which demands of God conduct that is consonant with His very own Torah as midrashically determined by its saintly hasidic exegete, in this particular case R. Shapira. When engaged in this theological mode R. Shapira follows a well-documented Jewish tradition of challenging God beginning with the Hebrew Bible, through the classical rabbinic sources and culminating pronouncedly with the Hasidic movement in which he was firmly anchored.8 Since, R. Shapira's responses are, as has most recently been characterized, "hermeneutic...

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