Hasidism, Suffering, and Renewal

Description

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889–1943) was a remarkable Hasidic mystic, leader, and educator. He confronted the secularization and dislocation of Polish Jews after World War I, the failure of the traditional educational system, and the devastation of the Holocaust, in which he lost all his close family and eventually his own life. Thanks to a new critical edition of his Warsaw Ghetto sermons, scholars have begun to reassess the relationship between Shapira's literary and educational attainments, his prewar mysticism, and his Holocaust experience, and to reexamine the question of faith—or its collapse—in the Warsaw Ghetto. This interdisciplinary volume, the first such work devoted to a twentieth-century Hasidic leader, integrates social and intellectual history along with theological, literary, and anthropological analyses of Shapira's legacy. It raises theoretical and methodological questions related to the study of Jewish thought and mysticism, but also contributes to contemporary conversations about topics such as spiritual renewal and radical religious experience, the literature of suffering, and perhaps most pressingly, the question of faith and meaning—or their rupture—in the wake of genocide.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Hasidism and Renewal

1. The Place of Piety: Piaseczno in the Landscape of Polish Hasidism
Marcin Wodziński

2. The Rebbe of Piaseczno: Between Two Trends in Hasidism
Moshe Idel

3. The Devotional Talmud: Study as a Sacred Quest
Ariel Evan Mayse

4. Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw: A Comparative Study of Goals, Structures, and Methods
Zvi Leshem

5. Self-Creation through Texts: Kalonymus Kalman Shapira's Incarnational Theology
David Maayan

6. Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity: Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira's Derekh ha-Melekh
Ora Wiskind

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

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

9. Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children: Human Individuation at the Cusp of Persistence and Perishability
Nehemia Polen

10. Raging against Reason: Overcoming Sekhel in R. Shapira's Thought
James A. Diamond

11. At the Edge of Explanation: Rethinking "Afflictions of Love" in Sermons from the Years of Rage
Erin Leib Smokler

12. "Living with the Times": Historical Context in the Wartime Writings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira
Henry Abramson

13. Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh
Shaul Magid

14. Pain and Words: On Suffering, Hasidic Modernism, and the Phenomenological Turn
Don Seeman

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• History of religions
• Judaism
• The Holocaust

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438484020
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
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 children And for all the children whose childhood was taken from them
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Hasidism and Renewal
1 The Place of Piety: Piaseczno in the Landscape of Polish Hasidism
Marcin Wodziński
2 The Rebbe of Piaseczno: Between Two Trends in Hasidism
Moshe Idel
3 The Devotional Talmud: Study as a Sacred Quest
Ariel Evan Mayse
4 Mystical Fraternities: Jerusalem, Tiberius, and Warsaw: A Comparative Study of Goals, Structures, and Methods
Zvi Leshem
5 Self-Creation through Texts: Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s Incarnational Theology
David Maayan
6 Hasidism in Dialogue with Modernity: Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira’s Derekh ha-Melekh
Ora Wiskind
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
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
9 Miriam, Moses, and the Divinity of Children: Human Individuation at the Cusp of Persistence and Perishability
Nehemia Polen
10 Raging against Reason: Overcoming Sekhel in R. Shapira’s Thought
James A. Diamond
11 At the Edge of Explanation: Rethinking “Afflictions of Love” in Sermons from the Years of Rage
Erin Leib Smokler
12 “Living with the Times”: Historical Context in the Wartime Writings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira
Henry Abramson
13 Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in Esh Kodesh
Shaul Magid
14 Pain and Words: On Suffering, Hasidic Modernism, and the Phenomenological Turn
Don Seeman
Contributors
Index
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 Piaseczno’s Holocaust-Era Sermons: A Review of Daniel Reiser’s Critical Edition ,” 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).
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. 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 Kippur 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 , originally published under the title Esh kodesh (translated as Sacred Fire ) by Piaseczner Hasidim who survived the war. 6 The sermons were all composed 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, republished, 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 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 incommensurability 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 Hasidism 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 litera