“Learn to think with pain.”Footnote 1
Between November 1940 and April 1943, nearly four hundred thousand Jews were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto and systematically murdered. Among them was Rabbi Kalonymos Shapira (1889–1943), who had founded one of the largest Hasidic academies in Warsaw in 1923.Footnote 2 Before the war, he had also written extensively on the discipline of the emotions as a component of prophetic training and spiritual education. Overtaken by the genocide of Jews in Europe, however, Rabbi Shapira turned his attention in the Ghetto writings to consideration of the rupture that these events entailed and their implications for his pre-war cosmology. A reading attuned to anthropological concerns is called for because even excellent historical and theological accounts have typically failed to privilege the ritual and cosmological dimensions of Rabbi Shapira's concern, or their relationship to his pre-war writings on emotion and religious subjectivity.Footnote 3 Another way of saying this might be that “the problem of meaning” has distracted scholars from Rabbi Shapira's quest for ritual efficacy in a context of radical suffering and frequently unbearable pain.Footnote 4
This is at least partly because analytic concern with “meaning” in the study of religion still tends to privilege discursive coherence at the expense of sufferers' desperate concern with practical efficacy. Geertz exemplifies the trend when he asserts that the problem of suffering “from a religious point of view … is not how to avoid suffering … but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss … or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable,” which is really to say, “meaningful” and “symbolically coherent.”Footnote 5 This intervention is important, given our society's valorization of technical efficacy to the exclusion of much else. But by reducing the problem of suffering to a problem of meaning and interpretation, Geertz also inadvertently validates the subjectivism of post-Kantian apologists for religion such as Schleiermacher, who defend religion by circumscribing it to a realm of unassailable inner experience.Footnote 6 For Rabbi Shapira, the problems of meaning and of practical efficacy in suffering were never parted. They were linked by his overall concern with embodied subjectivity, and especially by the discipline of the emotions that he taught.
Scholars have been reluctant to confront the hard limits placed on meaning-making by radical suffering, which can be both world and consciousness destroying.Footnote 7 The destruction of European Jewry raises this concern in an especially urgent way, as Lawrence Langer has argued.Footnote 8 But whereas Langer depicts almost all accounts of meaning in Holocaust narratives as misguided or even bad-faith attempts to quiet the “alarmed vision” of radical demoralization, Rabbi Shapira's Ghetto writings exemplify a more complicated and provisional approach. As a communal and religious leader in the Warsaw Ghetto, he could permit himself neither the comfort of seamless “webs of significance” described by Geertz nor the severe self-consistency of their denial. Like the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, he grappled with the phenomenological implications of “useless suffering” that had lost its moral mooring, or “use,” because it could no longer be assimilated to any system of secular or religious theodicy.Footnote 9 His own response, however, was hermeneutic and literary rather than philosophic in nature. Through his sometimes startling interpretations of classic texts, he attempted to create a discursive space for the experience of uselessness, but also to frame that experience in terms of distinctive ritual and affective strategies that would allow his followers—and the cosmos itself—to resist collapse.
Prophecy and Neurasthenia: An Emotional Cosmology
In addition to a single slim volume of writings from the Warsaw Ghetto, Rabbi Shapira's extant works include a volume of pre-war homiletic and interpretive essays and a series of pedagogical tracts devoted to the spiritual development of students at various stages.Footnote 10 It is in these early works that his pre-war theory of the emotions finds its most systematic expression, based on a complex adaptation of mystical models, Hasidic innovations, and elements of cosmopolitan medicine. His preoccupation with nervous disorder as a paradigm for religious phenomena such as prophecy is especially noteworthy in this regard, because it sets him apart to some extent from earlier Hasidic writers. It is difficult to assess the Ghetto writings without reference to these pre-war reflections, because it is here that the ritual management of subjectivity and emotional experience that preoccupied Rabbi Shapira during the Holocaust years is first revealed as a pillar of his religious project.
The pedagogical tracts grew explicitly out of Rabbi Shapira's profound sense of crisis in Polish Jewish society between the wars. Like many of his colleagues, he was appalled and disheartened by the powerful tide of secularism that was evident among the young, and by the Jewish community's increasingly precarious political and economic situation.Footnote 11 Confronting this situation, he argued that an epochal change had taken place among European youth that rendered traditional, hierarchy-based educational strategies irrelevant:
Why, in previous generations, did any type of education at all seem to suffice? The vast majority of every teacher's students and every father's children became servants of God. This is no longer the case today.… The youth has arisen and considers itself mature before its time.… Our sages have already warned us about this from the beginning: “In the time of the heralding of the Messiah, arrogance will multiply.” … Sometimes [today] we are astounded to see literal children bearing such a spirit of independence and courage … [that they seem to] consider themselves to be grown men.Footnote 12
Rabbi Shapira perceived this trend to be irreversible, and although he could hardly describe it as other than arrogance [hutzpah], he also makes clear that it bears within itself a form of messianic potential, which is why he addresses the educational tracts directly to young people who are now called to take personal responsibility for their own spiritual and moral growth.Footnote 13 Like the educational reformer Janusz Korczak, who also spent his last years in the Warsaw Ghetto not far from Rabbi Shapira—and who went willingly to his death rather than abandon his young students—Rabbi Shapira argues that youths must now be treated as independent moral agents.Footnote 14
Arousal and management of the emotions were indispensable to this project. The only one of Rabbi Shapira's major manuscripts to see publication during his lifetime was Hovat ha-Talmidim (“The Obligation of Students”), which first appeared in 1932. Near the beginning of this work, he argues that only an emotional approach to Jewish education would stem the tide of disaffection evident among the young:
It is difficult for the youth of our generation, whose emotions [hitragshuyot] and passions [hitpa‘aluyot] have already been hardened and matured, to feel a sense of connection to [religious] principles through dry intellect alone.… We must pierce through to their soul, to arouse and inflame it, and to allow them to experience … the sweetness of even a slight illumination of the supernal light.Footnote 15
This was no mere rhetoric. The experience of “a slight illumination of the supernal light” had a definite cosmological referent for Rabbi Shapira, and implied the programmatic induction of young students into Hasidic mysticism. This was also an early statement of his preoccupation with emotional damping as a primary danger to social and religious continuity in the Jewish community. Students needed to be “aroused” and “inflamed,” according to Rabbi Shapira, and to have their imaginative capacities intensified, even though they previously would have been considered too young for such training.Footnote 16 His approach was in accord with widespread Hasidic ideals concerning the role of the emotions in religious life, but was later cast into sharp relief by Rabbi Shapira's increasing focus in his Ghetto writings on the dangers of hyper-emotionality and nervous collapse.
Agitations of the Soul
One of the reasons that increased affect was so important to Hasidic writers in general, and to Rabbi Shapira in particular, was that emotions were conceived as intermediate points in a scheme of divine emanation (hishtalshelut) that linked abstract thought to coarse matter. He probably would have approved the anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo's suggestion that scholars treat emotion as “embodied thought in which I am personally involved,” but he would also have attached an important cosmological proviso.Footnote 17 For Hasidism, the “embodiment of thought” in human emotion participates in a cascade of divine vitality (often described as “light” or “abundance”) into the mundane, phenomenal world. Vitality is “drawn down” through a series of increasingly narrow “vessels,” each of which is identified with a different faculty of human thought, emotion, or action. Emotional experience is thus conceived as a kind of divine substance, sacred at its core despite the appearance of pollution sometimes occasioned by its bodily context—“like clear water,” Rabbi Shapira writes, “in a filthy glass.”Footnote 18 The content of emotional life is crucial to both mystical reflection and ritual practice because through attentiveness to emotional life and its source, human beings can attain privileged access to their own hidden continuity with divine subjectivity.
Many of these teachings are inherited from older schools of Jewish mysticism, but the Hasidic revolution that began in the eighteenth century elevated anthropopathic correspondence to new importance. The founders of Hasidism enacted a shift in focus away from theosophical speculation on the dynamic process of divine emanation toward what Scholem called a “mystical psychology” focused on the dynamic structure of human experience.Footnote 19 Anthropopathic correspondence between human emotional life and aspects of unfolding divinity meant that adepts could learn to seek understanding of one through reflection upon the other. “With every one of the endless stages of the theosophical world corresponding to a given state of the soul,” Scholem famously remarks, “Kabbalism becomes an instrument of psychological analysis and self knowledge … the precision of which is not infrequently rather astounding.”Footnote 20 In Rabbi Shapira's words, the founders of Hasidism revealed “the correspondence between the various levels of the soul as it emanates from the lofty divine realm down into the body, and the stages of contraction represented by the various worlds,” and he frequently avers that his own willingness to engage in mystical speculation is limited to that which can be revealed through the intimacy of human experience.Footnote 21
An important but often underestimated corollary of this approach is that the shifting contours of human experience also gain a purchase on cosmic reality through practices like ritual weeping, whereby adepts—both Hasidic and non-Hasidic—sought to shift the divine visage toward compassion.Footnote 22 Ritual aspects of mourning and celebration as well as the performance of mundane acts such as eating or walking with proper intentionality—not to mention the performance of the commandments—were all infused with theurgic and magical potential, especially where the Hasidic tzaddiq or master was concerned. The tzaddiq became a virtual axis mundi whose efficacious practice helped to direct the flow of vitality and blessing through all the regions of creation for both mundane and cosmic subsistence, and it is difficult to conceive of Hasidism without the dynamic charismatic influence of this institution.Footnote 23 Rabbi Shapira was heir to several different dynasties of Hasidic leaders and often portrays himself as an expositor of the Hasidic tradition as a whole rather than any particular school.Footnote 24 In a fascinating pre-war discussion, he argues for a kind of pluralism among different Jewish mystical schools, noting that the cosmological structure portrayed by each is dependant upon the unique personality structure of a different great master. The term partzufim, he notes, refers both to the endless variability of human faces and to the differing articulations of the divine anthropos in Jewish mysticism.Footnote 25 Rabbi Shapira's own cosmology falls squarely within the mainstream of Polish Hasidic thought, but also betrays a strong conceptual influence from the Habad school.Footnote 26
A few primary terms dominate Rabbi Shapira's discussion of the emotions in Hasidic education. Hitragshut implies agitation or excitement and a degree of sensitivity to external stimuli. A whole section of his second volume on spiritual education, which is entitled “How to Become an Emotional Person ('ish mitragesh),” includes exercises designed to intentionalize and amplify the emotions that occur in daily life. “You will laugh and cry together,” he promises his students at an early stage of their training, and he encourages them to let no emotion dissipate without first deploying it in their quest for spiritual development.Footnote 27 A moment of sadness over some trivial event should be seized and transformed into sadness over the exile of God and the Jewish people; a moment of mundane loneliness should be turned towards God in prayer. By its nature, hitragshut allows for mixed motives and ambivalence, which is not at all the case with hitlahavut or “burning enthusiasm,” a term that is frequently invoked in Hasidic literature to connote a state of single-mindedness in which “you cannot restrain or hold yourself back, since all of you is inflamed and your whole self, the flames of your soul, are alight with God's fire.”Footnote 28 If hitragshut applies to the emotions at almost any stage of training, hitlahavut is nearly always used to connote the attainment of higher devotional intensity through prayer.
Another analytically significant term is hitpa‘alut, which is “the quality of being acted upon” or moved by an external force, much like the English term “affect,” and like “affect,” it can also be qualified by specific emotive terms such as “sadness” or “joy.” Hitpa‘alut ha-ka‘as is therefore the affect or passion of anger, which can denote an ecstasy of anger in some contexts.Footnote 29 But while Hasidic texts frequently invoke hitpa‘alut to describe mystical states of various kinds, its first and primary meaning refers simply to the experience of emotion or passion in the Aristotelian sense of “something that is done to the thing of which it is predicated.”Footnote 30 This is the sense in which the word was first coined in the thirteenth century by Samuel Ibn Tibbon for his Hebrew rendition of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, where it stood for the Arabic term infi‘al. According to Maimonides, emotion was a property of changing, corporeal bodies that could not logically be predicated of the Unmoved Mover. Biblical language that seems to attribute affect of one kind or another to God is therefore always strictly metaphorical, and the ideal of imitatio Dei that Maimonides propounds entails a path of rational balance and resistance to agitation.Footnote 31 One acts as if angry when necessary, according to Maimonides, but strives to remain always untouched by anger.Footnote 32
This ethos of restraint and equanimity is of course opposed in many ways to the emotional cosmology advocated by Rabbi Shapira and other Hasidic writers, but some important leaders, like Rabbi Dov Baer of Lubavitch (1773–1827), sought to reconcile the two by arguing that Maimonides' rejection of divine hitpa‘alut must refer to the transcendent Infinite or 'Ein Sof that precedes emanation but not to the immanent and emotion-laden divinity that fills the Jewish mystical universe.Footnote 33 In 1831, Dov Baer's “Tract on Ecstasy” or Kuntres ha-Hitpa‘alut criticized Hasidim who sought ecstasy as an end in itself because their ultimate focus would remain the experiencing self rather than God.Footnote 34 An early stage of authentic hitpa‘alut, on the other hand, is what Dov Baer calls the “goodly thought,” referring to the attentiveness and attachment that one develops for an object of contemplation, “like a person who has received good news about a business project in which he is personally concerned [so that] the whole power of his mind becomes engaged in an ecstasy [hitpa‘alut] … known as ‘attachment of thought.’ ”Footnote 35 Attentiveness to “goodly thought” may develop into emotional longing at a later stage, before it finally gives way to selfless awareness of the divine presence. Rabbi Shapira's short work on contemplative practices, entitled “Disciples of the Goodly Thought,” was clearly influenced by this formulation, although he emphasized the educational rather than theoretical implications of hitpa‘alut and the rudimentary stages of practice appropriate to non-adepts or adepts-in-training.Footnote 36
Like the members of the Habad school whom he cites in this context, Rabbi Shapira preferred even negative forms of hitpa‘alut such as anger and impatience (a “boiling disposition”) over cold rationalism, because he believed that anger could be sublimated through training into spiritual longing and compassion, while cold affect signified that the soul was still deeply submerged or “hidden” by gross physicality.Footnote 37 By arousing the emotions and training them to be subjects of intentional control and reflection, the soul itself might gradually be made transparent to human experience as a primary conduit for divine influx and self-knowledge. While the naïve subject imagines that the body experiences stimuli (hitpa‘alut ha-hushim) and feels emotion (hitpa‘alut ha-regesh) in a direct and unmediated way, the adept comes to understand that hitpa‘alut always connotes action upon the experiencing soul, which is sheathed within and enlivens the body, but which must be understood as an extension of divine vitality.Footnote 38 Understanding this in an experiential and not merely theoretical way is central to the theme of attainable prophecy that runs like a scarlet thread through all of Rabbi Shapira's pre-war and Ghetto writings.
Nervous Bodies, Prophetic Bodies
Prophecy was by no means an unusual subject for East European Jewish thinkers. In 1899, a young Hebrew writer named Mordecai Feierberg published a short, semi-autobiographical novel describing the turmoil of a young man named Nahman who struggled to prepare himself for prophecy through rigorous religious discipline.Footnote 39 As the story unfolds, Nahman's failure leads him to disillusionment and then despair at the continuing exile and persecution of the Jewish people. He becomes an advocate of Enlightenment accommodation with Western civilization and ultimately—when even that hope has collapsed under the pressure of anti-Semitic rejection—a mad prophet of Zionist rebirth among the “peoples of the East.” The novel's title, Whither? captures some of the despair experienced by this generation of Eastern European Jewish writers, who had broken with traditional life-ways but found no secure home in the outside world.Footnote 40 In many ways, Feierberg's protagonist represents the impetus—as well as the risk—behind Rabbi Shapira's educational project.
Like Rabbi Shapira's ideal student, Nahman attempts to attain prophetic insight through ascetic disciplines that include the self-conscious development of his imaginative and emotional faculties. In one of the novel's central passages, Feierberg describes Nahman's decision to seek prophecy after he experiences an ecstatic but wrenching vision (Alan Mintz calls it a “rêverie”) of Jerusalem in ruins, and decides to intercede with God on his people's behalf.Footnote 41 These visions are close to the imaginative exercises that Rabbi Shapira would later prescribe for new initiates.Footnote 42 Unlike Nahman or the novelist, however, Rabbi Shapira continued to believe in the redemptive power of prophecy and its emotional prerequisites even after the speedy redemption for which he had hoped had been denied. Feierberg's novel is just one more piece of evidence in support of Eliezer Schweid's contention that prophecy was a key metaphor in Jewish religious and political thought during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.Footnote 43 For mystics like Rabbi Shapira, prophecy was part of an integrated religious worldview replete with ritual and hermeneutic strategies for the confrontation with a difficult and increasingly dangerous modernity.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, like Rabbi Shapira, was the scion of an important Hasidic family in Poland between the wars who devoted himself to this topic. Born in Warsaw in 1907, Heschel left Poland just a few months before Hitler's invasion, arriving in the United States in 1940. He eventually became a leading figure at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where his evocative writings on the phenomenology of religious experience arguably won him more admirers than disciples.Footnote 44 The 1962 English adaptation of his pre-war German doctoral dissertation, The Prophets, bears close comparison with Rabbi Shapira's corpus, because in it he links the idea of biblical prophecy to the study and discipline of the emotions and to divine anthropopathism. “The characteristic of the prophets,” Heschel writes, “is not foreknowledge of the future, but insight into the present pathos of God.”Footnote 45 The prophet is “homo sympathetikos,” [sic] existing in a state in which “man is open to the presence and emotion of the transcendent Subject. He carries within himself the awareness of what is happening to God.”Footnote 46 This is virtually the same “mystical psychology” identified by Scholem and others with the Hasidic revolution in Jewish mysticism, and it is entirely in keeping with Rabbi Shapira's outlook. Although ostensibly teaching the history of biblical religion, Heschel's Prophets must also be understood as an extension or restatement of the Hasidic emphasis on prophecy as a continuous core of Jewish religious experience.Footnote 47
Rabbi Shapira treats prophecy in his pre-war writings as an ideal telos of Jewish spiritual practice as well as a pragmatic educational goal related to the Hasidic resistance against secularism. “We don't wish to turn you into a prophet,” he tells his young readers in 1932, “or even into a master of the Holy Spirit—at least not all at once. But a prince who has been thrown into a disgusting dungeon must have become very corrupt indeed if he is not at least anxious over his fate and does not yearn for his previous condition.”Footnote 48 This theme grows increasingly explicit (and indeed urgent) in subsequent chapters. At one point, Rabbi Shapira argues that Hasidic enthusiasm and biblical prophecy lie on a single continuum of attempts to leverage hitpa‘alut ecstasy into a revelation of the divine vitality at the heart of all things. In an appended essay for older students he writes, “An Israelite who purifies his body” through Hasidic discipline “cannot help but be aroused to higher thoughts and more exalted yearnings, to peer beyond his body's mask.”Footnote 49
The “body” to which these texts refer is a standard kabbalistic adaptation of the “unified hierarchical scheme” that Greco-Islamic medicine bequeathed to medieval Judaism.Footnote 50 It joined physiology to cosmology through a set of distinctive and perduring metaphors including that of differentiated “vessels” that channel vitality to the different organs of the human body:
The narrow end of a funnel enters the glass with its wide part (which actually contains most of the liquid) remaining above. Just so, [divine] light and holiness … descend from the highest of worlds, and are contracted … in accord with what the body, depending on its degree of purification, has the capacity to receive. … [This “light”] becomes clothed [i.e., takes form] as neshamah [vitality enabling thought] in the brain; as ruah [vitality enabling speech and emotion] in the heart; and as nefesh [vitality enabling animation] in the liver [i.e., blood]. Each vessel [organ] receives only the level of holiness that it is capable of receiving.Footnote 51
The heart is thus a bodily seat of passions (ruah) that are themselves “drawn down from on high,” making the body's condition crucial for the attainment of prophetic sympathy. Heschel likewise notes that the term ruah (literally “wind” or “breath”) denotes emotion in biblical texts, and that the prophet Hosea is described as 'ish ha-ruah, or “man filled with divine pathos” for just this reason.Footnote 52 Rabbi Shapira's innovation was to tie this emotional cosmology to a contemporary theory of nerves and nervousness that had not yet been invoked by his predecessors.
Prophecy, for Rabbi Shapira, is dependant on both contingent and essential factors. While he considered discipline and training to be crucial, he also thought that Jews were inherently more susceptible to prophetic agitation, and he was the first to ground this distinction in a twentieth-century medical idiom of nervousness. He portrayed the nerves, ‘atzabim in Hebrew (occasionally simply transliterating “nerves” into Hebrew characters), as the most ethereal of all corporeal organs and therefore the best suited to mediate body and spirit through an emotional medium. He was by all accounts well acquainted with contemporary medicine, which portrayed the nervous system as a fragile receptive network susceptible to impression (and potential overload) by external trauma.Footnote 53 Indeed, Nehemia Polen recounts that Rabbi Shapira's friend Dr. Aaron Solowiejczyk, who was head of surgery at Warsaw's Jewish hospital, saw to it that the rabbi's prescriptions (based on autodidactic medical knowledge) were honored at local pharmacies—even though Hasidim sometimes preferred to keep his signature for its talismanic power rather than having their prescriptions filled. Rabbi Shapira was aware that some observers would cynically attribute his healing efficacy to the “power of suggestion” but remarked that he preferred the Hasidic idiom of “simple faith.”Footnote 54 In addition to sensory stimuli, he argued that human nerves were receptive to the diffuse presence of divinity or 'elohut that radiates through all things, vibrating with an emotional vitality that allows homo sympathetikos to emerge. Yet this framework, in which authoritative religious and medical discourses coalesce, also allowed nervous disorder to emerge for the first time as a properly religious dilemma requiring explanation.
Like tuberculosis and other epoch-defining maladies, nervous overload carried ambivalent and sometimes contradictory meanings at the turn of the century. George Beard's 1881 treatise American Nervousness portrayed neurasthenia as a troublesome but necessary consequence of America's frantic industrial capitalism, a sign as well as a symptom of modernity's promise. In Europe as well as North America, nervous energy was often portrayed as a sign of feminine weakness that could also however be imbued with positive meaning as a mark of special moral and emotional sensitivity. It is not surprising that Jews were often portrayed as nervous and effeminate in the scientific and popular literature of the day.Footnote 55 “Nothing is more conspicuous among them [the Jews],” wrote Victorian essayist William Lecky, “than their unhealthy coloring, their frail, bent and feeble bodies. … Their nervous organization is extremely sensitive, and … they are very liable to insanity and to other nervous and brain disorders.”Footnote 56 For Lecky, nervousness was related to Jews' effeminate hatred of violence and “peculiar horror from blood.”Footnote 57 Yet Rabbi Shapira inverted this charge by arguing that while Jews were in fact prone to nervousness, this was a result of their special readiness for prophetic agitation, which could only be controlled and shaped through ritual discipline. It was religious training, rather than effeminacy, that made Jews less susceptible than Gentiles to bouts of nervous violence.Footnote 58
It was, in fact, only the absence of prophetic training that sometimes transformed Jewish nervousness for Rabbi Shapira into a pathological condition that required treatment. “We can at least say,” he writes, “that Israelites are by nature prone to nervousness … because they are the descendants of prophets.”
If they use this capacity for divine service, they can reach a very high level, and even attain the Holy Spirit [i.e., a weak form of prophecy]. If not, it is like the case of a person who is born with a powerful mind. When he does not use this intelligence, he risks madness. Thus it is that emotional excitement [hitragshut]—which is a preparation for exalted service through self-annihilation, ecstasy and the Holy Spirit—can also be transformed into mischief and nervous agitation.Footnote 59
The pre-war essays make only passing reference to psychologists (hakhmei ha-nefesh) and to physicians who attempt to “weaken [i.e., calm] the nerves” of those whose “thought has been damaged and impaired” through nervous exhaustion, but these references are crucial because they help to map the convergences in Rabbi Shapira's thought between medical and spiritual concerns focused on the emotional life.Footnote 60 Techniques designed to quiet the mind through physical exercise and avoidance of mental agitation were important elements of contemporary thinking about nervous disorder, as they had been of nineteenth-century “rest therapies” applied to disorders of the moral will.Footnote 61 Rabbi Shapira's innovation was to link these medical ideas with Hasidic ritual cosmology through meditative techniques designed to quiet and subdue the agitated mind into readiness for a prophetic influx.Footnote 62 A short essay written by one of his students in 1936 (“On Cultivating Inner Quiet”) describes his induction of select disciples into these methods, and attests to the urgency with which he viewed their propagation.Footnote 63
Rabbi Shapira's dialectical concern with the necessity and danger of emotional agitation was thus framed from the outset by a distinctive junction of Hasidic cosmology and cosmopolitan medicine grounded in ritual practice. Emotion was conceived neither as a purely inner experience nor as a component of discursive meaning and shared personal significance, but was above all an efficacious presence or vitality endowed with real power to enliven the world, to link the divine and human realms—or better, to reveal their deep intrinsic unity. “Just as all of the other activities of the soul are revealed to us through actions of the bodily organs,” writes Rabbi Shapira before the war, “so too it is with the emotions. It is the soul that is revealed by means of the body and its nerves.… ”Footnote 64 This being the case, it should come as little surprise that his later response to crisis in the Warsaw Ghetto would not be limited to what Geertz has called “the problem of suffering”—the quest to make suffering meaningful—but extended also to the problem of efficacy, the “originary cry for help” (Levinas 1988), which precedes articulate meaning and may persist even when language and meaning have apparently failed.Footnote 65
“Useless Suffering” in the Warsaw Ghetto
Rabbi Shapira's wartime essays, or derashot, were buried in the Ghetto before his murder and published several decades later by surviving Hasidim under the title 'Esh Kodesh (“Sacred Fire”). The first essay dates from the Jewish New Year of September 1939, shortly before the occupation of Warsaw, which was soon followed by a German order to segregate Jews into separate Ghettos, but over a year before nervous German public health officials ordered the Ghetto to be literally walled off against the outbreak of infectious disease that might compromise German troops.Footnote 66 Even though the war had only just begun when Rabbi Shapira began writing, it is well to remember that some of his most devastating personal losses would be suffered during this period. His daughter-in-law and his sister-in-law (the latter had been visiting from Palestine) were killed outright during the initial German shelling, but his only son Elimelekh was mortally wounded on Yom Kippur and then lingered for a week without medical care until the festival of Tabernacles, or Sukkot, when he finally expired. Upon his death, Rabbi Shapira is said to have led the holiday prayers with their usual exuberance, after admonishing the Hasidim that Jewish law permitted no public display of mourning during the festival. Already the dynamic of emotional control and its profound personal cost, which would characterize so many of his later Ghetto essays, was here in evidence. “This war has already defeated me,” he was heard to remark; “we can only pray to God that the community of Israel outlasts the war.”Footnote 67
Early Ghetto sermons focused insistently on the problem of suffering that exceeds all normal or meaningful bounds, suffering that resists the sense of being “borne” or “suffered” because it overwhelms the ramified subjectivity that a stance of bearing presumes. In early November, a biblical text from Isaiah provided Rabbi Shapira with a framework for reflection upon the distinction between sufferers who were merely “exiled” but could, with effort, sustain a coherent subjectivity, and those who were “lost” because their power of self-recognition had already been shattered by radical suffering beyond repair:
Even now, when troubles multiply to such an extent that the beards of Jews have simply been shaved off, leaving them unrecognizable on an external level, so too their interiority changes, leaving them unrecognizable from within. The person loses and cannot recognize himself (er farlirt zikh). He cannot feel the way he did a year ago on the Sabbath or on a weekday before the prayers, or during prayer itself. Now, he is trampled and crushed, until he cannot even feel whether he is a Jew or a human being, or whether he is an animal. He has no reality left to feel. He is lost.Footnote 68
The public humiliation of forced shaving points for Rabbi Shapira to a deeper and more terrible attack on the grounds of subjectivity and meaning-making that leaves the sufferer with “no reality left to feel.” The sermon may conclude with a promise of ultimate divine rescue (God too, must perform the mitzvah of returning “lost objects” to their owners), but this hardly justifies identifying the essay with a stance of Hasidic optimism or unwavering faith. What truly stands out in these Ghetto writings is their unprecedented depiction of psychic collapse and the desperate struggle by their author to overcome his gathering silence and despair.Footnote 69
Rabbi Shapira's depictions of collapse and near-collapse were unprecedented in the rabbinic literature of the time. What distinguishes the essays that comprise 'Esh Kodesh from most other essays by rabbinic authors that have been preserved was the extent to which their author was willing to engage the problem of meaninglessness and collapse as an irreducible core of Ghetto experience. Testimony collected by the Ghetto historian and diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum attests to the desperation with which many Jews in Warsaw turned to numerological speculation or to the search for hidden portents concealed within sacred texts and current events, but Rabbi Shapira scrupulously avoids these themes, just as he avoids the burgeoning messianism of Hasidic rabbis such as Joseph Isaac Schneersohn of Lubavitch, who had already escaped to New York, or Shlomo Teichtal, who wrote from pre-invasion Budapest.Footnote 70 Premature messianism, notes Rabbi Shapira with empathy in one of his pre-war essays, is like a man rushing passionately to get someplace, only to smash and wound his head on the doorpost.Footnote 71 In the Warsaw Ghetto, each false promise or unrequited hope brought Jews closer to an ultimate and unfathomable despair.Footnote 72
Scholars have debated whether Rabbi Shapira articulates a coherent ideological response to suffering in 'Esh Kodesh or merely a contingent and sometimes contradictory set of homiletic responses to his followers' immediate pastoral needs.Footnote 73 Yet important as this debate may be, it also obscures something significant about Rabbi Shapira's overall project, which also links the pre-war and Ghetto writings. While it may be possible to abstract Hasidic ideologies or doctrines from Hasidic texts, writers like Rabbi Shapira sought explicitly to train the subjectivity of their readers for divine service, which in Rabbi Shapira's idiom meant training them for prophecy. These concerns, which before the war focused on the “enflaming” and sanctification of emotion as divine vitality, necessarily shifted in the Ghetto context to a concern with the management and sometimes damping of emotion for the preservation of humanity and cosmos alike. The ritual and hermeneutic strategies portrayed in 'Esh Kodesh are keyed primarily to the problem of efficacy rather than meaning, and to the defense of embodied human subjectivity against collapse. Two of the most important of these strategies, whose related yet incommensurate demands haunt Rabbi Shapira until the closing pages of his wartime corpus, might be called “suffering for the other” and “weeping in secret places.”
Suffering for the Other
The Jewish liturgical calendar for the Sabbath of November 4, 1939 called for the public reading of the Torah portion that begins with Genesis 23, describing the death and burial of the matriarch Sarah in the city of Hebron. The biblical narrative offers no explanation for Sarah's death or for its juxtaposition with the “Binding of Isaac” in Genesis 22. Some ancient exegetes argued that Sarah's death follows upon Isaac's binding in order to teach that Sarah died from grief or shock when she learned that her husband had tried to slaughter their only son upon God's altar, and it is this midrash, rather than the biblical text itself, to which Rabbi Shapira turns after a brief prologue on the nature of suffering:
The word “brit” [covenant] is juxtaposed in the Bible with both salt and with suffering.Footnote 74 … Just as salt in proper measure preserves the meat, but in excess makes it impossible to enjoy, so suffering should come in proper measure, so that a person has the capacity to receive it. Suffering should be blended with mercy.Footnote 75
This teaching, which Rabbi Shapira attributes to his grandfather, R. Kalonymos Epstein of Krakow, implies that suffering itself can be described as a form of divine vitality that need not be viewed as inimical to human welfare so long as it is “blended” with mercy (rahamim) and experienced in “proper measure.”Footnote 76 But having established a traditional Hasidic framework for thinking about suffering, Rabbi Shapira then veers into uncharted territory by arguing that Moses himself organized the biblical narrative to juxtapose Sarah's death with Isaac's “Binding” (‘aqedah) precisely in order to call attention to the fact that Sarah had not been called upon by God to suffer “in proper measure,” but far in excess of that limit:
[That is why] Moses, our faithful shepherd, juxtaposed Sarah's death in the Torah with the Binding of Isaac. It was in order to exonerate us; to show what can happen, God forbid, when a person is made to suffer beyond measure. It was through excessive suffering that Sarah's soul expired. And if this was true for Sarah, that great saint, who for all that was unable to withstand her harsh affliction, how much more so for us!Footnote 77
Relaying the tale of Sarah's death through “too much suffering” is the Torah's strategy for exonerating future generations who would also one day face trials too terrible to withstand. This is a humane reading, which sides with human frailty in the face of divine power, and implicates Moses himself in teaching God a lesson, as it were, about human limitations.Footnote 78
“Excess suffering” cannot be blamed on the sufferer, according to Rabbi Shapira, but God can be called to account for imposing it. Rabbi Shapira goes still further, insisting (with no obvious exegetical need) that Sarah exercised a paradoxical agency in her own demise, allowing herself to perish from grief so that her death would call attention to the erasure of agency on the part of those who would later be overwhelmed by suffering and grief:
It is also possible to suggest that Sarah herself, in taking Isaac's binding so much to heart that her soul expired, did so for the good of Israel. In order to show God that an Israelite cannot be made to suffer beyond measure. And that even a person who remains alive after his affliction, through God's mercy, must still lose portions of his vitality, his mind and spirit. What difference does it make to me if I suffer a full or a partial death?Footnote 79
Sarah is thus complicit in her own death because “she took the Binding of Isaac so much to heart” when she might instead have distanced herself from grief over her son for the sake of continued well-being. Rabbi Shapira portrays her as the mirror image of his own pre-war focus on the dangers of emotional quietude, since her destruction comes from a self-willed superabundance of empathy and emotional agitation. By allowing pain to defeat her rather than bracketing emotion, Sarah models a kind of agency whose strength is in vulnerability, in the practical knowledge of human fragility, and in recognizing the limits of meaning in suffering. This is an especially powerful example of “suffering for the other,” because the matriarch in this reading allows shattering pain to defeat her as a lesson to God for the sake of other humans.
Sarah's death must nevertheless be contrasted with the traditional Hasidic valorization of martyrdom accompanied by proper intention (kavvanah) and heroic resolve. The traditional martyr is defeated only in body but not in spirit, imparting strength of conviction to others. In his pre-war writings, Rabbi Shapira himself encourages students to undertake a contemplative technique popularized by his famous ancestor R. Elimelekh of Lyzhansk, an early Hasidic leader who promoted the visualization of martyrdom described by earlier Jewish mystics as an adjunct to prayer.Footnote 80 In passages from the pre-war writings, students are taught to visualize themselves carrying the wood, leaping onto the pyre and so-forth, for the sake of God's unity and oneness.Footnote 81 Yet with only a few exceptions, this theme is minimized in the wartime essays.Footnote 82 In October of 1940, Rabbi Shapira goes so far as to argue that contemporary Jews are being murdered completely outside the traditional martyrdom paradigm because they lack any redemptive “intent” of their own. This might seem to rob their deaths of religious significance, except that Rabbi Shapira finds even here a hint of sacrificial efficacy. It may be true, he writes, that the biblical patriarch Abraham's intention to sacrifice his only son to God was frustrated by divine intervention, but contemporary Jews complete the circle by giving their lives without any volition whatsoever—perfect ma‘aseh (action) to consummate Abraham's perfect kavannah (intent).Footnote 83 To the extent that there is religious agency here, it is measured by the span of generations rather than individual lives, and in pure passivity.
Sarah is available to Rabbi Shapira as an icon for Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto precisely because her death is not portrayed as a traditional martyr's death, with all of the implications of spiritual grandeur and powerful agency such a death would imply. Like many deaths that Rabbi Shapira must have witnessed in Warsaw, Sarah's death was unheroic and religiously unremarkable. She perished when suffering overwhelmed her defenses, yet she also allowed meaninglessness to engulf her for the sake of others who would one day fail to withstand their own challenges of radical suffering. This does not mean that images of traditional martyrdom are absent from 'Esh Kodesh, as earlier studies have noted. But writers attuned primarily to the continuities between Rabbi Shapira's œuvre and those of other traditionalist writers tend to overlook his subtle and sometimes radical innovations, including the frequency with which he points toward configurations of human experience that lack the signs of religious authentication or “meaningfulness” that other rabbinic authors of the period almost always seem to impose.Footnote 84 Schweid has argued convincingly that Rabbi Shapira's phenomenological realism was an attempt to identify with his Hasidim in their difficulties, and perhaps also a strategy to stave off despair by objectifying his own pain.Footnote 85 Yet I would add that there is also another, more organic basis to Rabbi Shapira's realism with regard to suffering, which is his longstanding concern for the depiction and training of affective states through which divine vitality flows.Footnote 86
It cannot be insignificant that Rabbi Shapira's own mother Hannah Berakhah also died during the early days of the German occupation in October 1939, allegedly “of a broken heart” or “heart attack.”Footnote 87 Polen's citation of a Yiddish article published in the New York Forward in 1940 helps to emphasize the implicit contrast between the portrayal of Hannah Berakhah's death and that of Rabbi Shapira's own apparent fortitude and self-control during this period:
So the Piaseczner Rebbe lost, in the period of a few days, his only son, his mother, his daughter-in-law, and his sister-in-law. As there was no one else to say Kaddish for those who had died, the Rebbe is now reciting Kaddish for all of them.… The stricken Rebbe, however, is not broken in morale or spirit. He has remained in Warsaw, conducts tish [the ritual sharing of food] with his hasidim, learns Torah throughout the day, and is currently writing a book ['Esh Kodesh?]. The Piaseczner hasidim marvel at the remarkable self control of their Rebbe.Footnote 88
It is difficult to know what sources this account may have drawn upon, yet the parallel between the news report and themes raised in 'Esh Kodesh itself is remarkable. While the Forward praises Rabbi Shapira's heroic fortitude and productivity as a communal leader, there is good evidence from the wartime essays that Rabbi Shapira himself remained painfully torn between the model of suffering presented by Sarah and his own celebrated steadfastness, which required a certain emotional deadening toward his own suffering and that of others.
In the essay on Sarah's death, for example, Rabbi Shapira obliquely raises but then quietly rejects the possibility that Sarah should be viewed as a kind of suicide because she “sinned against the remaining years of life allotted her” by failing to enact the psychic distancing that would have allowed her to survive. She did what she did for the sake of others, he writes, so she cannot be held blameworthy.Footnote 89 In his final essay for the Jewish liturgical year that ended in late September 1941, by contrast, he describes the psychic deadening and collapse of self that paradoxically allowed sufferers like him to continue to function in the Warsaw Ghetto:
We can now see that we do not feel [margishim Footnote 90] the pain of each affliction that comes upon us with the same intensity that we used to feel even minor troubles. Moreover, we know that if we were to feel today the full pain of each affliction that comes upon us with the same bitterness and emotion [hargashah] that once we felt, it would be impossible, God forbid, to continue to exist for even one day. The simple reason for this is that, as our sages have taught, “The dead flesh of a living person does not feel the scalpel.” All that we feel is a crushing sensation throughout our bones; the world is turned dark for us, neither day nor night, just disorientation and confusion, as if the whole world were pressing down upon us and crushing and compressing us, God forbid, until we burst. But we do not feel each individual torment.Footnote 91
This is one of several essays in which Rabbi Shapira's measured hermeneutic gives way to a tone of desperate personal exclamation. Although he continues to believe in and to preach the inevitability of ultimate redemption, he acknowledges darkly that there are some for whom the salvation will certainly come too late, not because they have already been killed but because tragedy has ensured that “no person [i.e., experiencing subject] even remains to rejoice or to have his faith strengthened.”Footnote 92
On November 22, 1941, after his recovery from what might have been typhoid, Rabbi Shapira grows even more explicit about the terrifying moral cost associated with his own survival:
Even the person that God saves and revives from his troubles or heals from his illness lacks the heart to rejoice in his salvation. For although he is a Jew—and should he not rejoice that a Jew has been saved from death?—Still, he dares not be glad. In his heart, he thinks, “If I rejoice in the fact that I have been revived, am I not in the category [of one who says] “I am, and there is none but me?”Footnote 93 As if I did not take to heart the whole catastrophe of Israel, and the masses of men, women and children who still had many years of life ahead but now fill graves of earth, as though they had descended alive to the abyss?”Footnote 94
“There are times,” Rabbi Shapira writes in one of his last Ghetto essays, in March of 1942, “when [a person] beats his heart, wondering, ‘Is it other than the hardness of my heart within me that allows me to strengthen myself and to continue [sacred] study in the midst of my afflictions and the many afflictions of Israel?’ ”Footnote 95 Polen glosses this painful question “survivor guilt,” but there are also cosmological and ritual referents that lend this fear a poignancy that transcends the diagnostic paradigm.Footnote 96
Radical suffering can be experienced as an “excess” that overwhelms subjectivity and shatters the subject as it did in Sarah's case, making apt Rabbi Shapira's occasional invocation of the Lurianic metaphor of “shattered” cosmic vessels, overwhelmed by an influx of divine light.Footnote 97 But suffering can also be experienced as a crushing weight that presses subjectivity into retreat, a literal absence of vital flow that preserves the body alive only as a kind of empty vessel, devoid of “all that really matters.”Footnote 98 These two models appear side by side in a brief pre-war note that Rabbi Shapira composed in response to a wave of suicides that he attributed to the economic collapse of the Jewish community in Poland between 1926 and 1928. “Do not weep only for the one who kills himself,” he wrote at the time, “but weep also for the walking dead” whose “very self and essence have grown cold.”Footnote 99 The fear of what one anthropologist calls the “loss of the human” takes many forms in Rabbi Shapira's œuvre, from shattering overflow to deadening loss of all empathy for oneself and others, rendering death—even by suicide—far from the most terrifying eventuality.Footnote 100
Despite these persistent indications of wrenching ambivalence, Rabbi Shapira struggled throughout the Ghetto years to preserve a degree of pathos and empathy commensurate with prophetic experience. In his sermon for 21 September 1940, he invokes the figure of a person who “rejoiced and caused others to rejoice with him” despite crushing sadness, and this becomes a kind of a model for his own wartime leadership. The “self-overcoming” [hitgabrut] he describes is certainly important in psychological terms as a means for overcoming despair, yet I am hesitant to join Henry Abramson in arguing that these Ghetto essays present a “therapeutic model” for extreme trauma, because of the way in which therapeutic language tends to medicalize Rabbi Shapira's profound moral and cosmological concerns.Footnote 101 He sought a multivalent ritual efficacy that cannot be subsumed under the individualistic rubric of psychological constructs.Footnote 102 Medical language tends, moreover, to remove the author from the scene of the suffering in which his writing is embedded, and to exaggerate his optimism that even divine intervention would suffice to heal the Ghetto's worst wounds.
Whenever Rabbi Shapira describes the importance of psychic “strengthening” or “self-overcoming” in his Ghetto writings, in fact, he also insists that these practices act theurgically to transform divine “judgment” [din] into mercy [rahamim]. “This strengthening itself acts to transform evil into good, and bring blessing upon Your [i.e. God's] people Israel.”Footnote 103 In the language of Lurianic Kabbalah, this is another way of saying that self-overcoming [hitgabrut] helps to modulate and reduce the flow of vitality in suffering, and so avoid a “shattering of the vessels,” which appears to be a literal rather than merely metaphoric concern. Even careful scholars like Nehemia Polen, Eliezer Schweid and Mendl Pierkarz, each of whom note the presence of these themes in 'Esh Kodesh, tend to underestimate their overall significance—perhaps because of their preoccupation with the extraction of propositional meanings of a theological or discursive nature, and perhaps also because most historical and theological writers are ill accustomed to thinking about ritual in theoretical terms.Footnote 104 By contrast, I am arguing that these texts should be read as the literary pole of an embodied practice aimed at shifting the entire habitus of divine and human relationships. Making suffering “sufferable” through symbolic or theological articulation was at best only secondary to this goal, and was sometimes frankly discarded as impossible.
In a diary entry from February 1941, the Ghetto historian Emmanuel Ringelblum describes Hasidim dancing in the Warsaw Ghetto:
In the prayer house of the Pietists from Braclaw on Nowolipie Street there is a large sign: Jews, Never Despair! The Pietists dance there with the same religious fervor as they did before the war. After prayers one day, a Jew danced there whose daughter had died the day before.Footnote 105
For a secularist like Ringelblum, this scene evokes many attempts by Ghetto inhabitants to maintain an air of normalcy despite their situation, yet it is worth noting that the “pietists [Hasidim] from Braclaw” (Breslov) to whom he refers are known precisely for the redemptive significance they attribute to joyous dance as a ritual technique for integrating the human body and personality with the divine anthropos, thus drawing blessing down into the phenomenal world.Footnote 106 Rather than an attempt to distract themselves from their situation, therefore, might this not be understood as an attempt to ritually engage and overcome it?
In June 1940, by the same token, Rabbi Shapira's celebration of the Jewish Shavuot [Pentecost] festival was described by a witness, Rabbi Shimon Huberband:
There was a crowd of about 150 people, but the traditional dairy meal wasn't served as it was in earlier years. The Rebbe said words of Torah, including many words of strengthening and encouragement. Various zmiros [traditional melodies] were sung. When the gathering concluded, the traditional dance—with one person standing behind the other—began. During the dance, the Rebbe wept profusely.Footnote 107
Rabbi Shapira's dance may have been less exuberant than the dancing that Ringelblum describes, but neither his dancing nor his tears were any less spiritually ramified. In a 1928 letter to his son who was living in the land of Israel, and who had complained in a pre-Shavuot letter to his father of a certain spiritual dullness, Rabbi Shapira writes:
A person prepares himself before the festival for the festival, and on the festival itself he penetrates according to his level the clouds [‘arafel] and draws down a little bit of the honey, and then when his joy breaks forth and he dances, his soul is revealed through this emotion [hitragshut]; but when a person is covered by dust all year long and he also dances on the festival, who can assure me that this is anything more than just a trembling of the nerves [‘atzabim]?Footnote 108
In a lengthy passage from his pre-war journal dated 1933 furthermore, Rabbi Shapira reflects upon his emotions [hitragshuyot] during the holiday dancing of previous years, which was also often accompanied by weeping and by the expectation of a divine response: “Lord of the Universe who hears the voice of weeping,” he writes, “what will you do with all the tears that Israel has shed during these days of grace [i.e., the festivals]? … And what will You do with Your own tears that fall, as it were, each day, on account of our catastrophe and our affliction?”Footnote 109 The redemptive efficacy of such tears is construed as neither wholly mechanical nor purely metaphoric in nature, as the well-documented tradition of mystical weeping among pious Jews (and indeed, their Christian and Muslim counterparts) attests.Footnote 110
Ritual practice is doubly efficacious in this setting, in that it promises a divine response as well as forming a ground for the cultivation of embodied virtues like the dispositions through which emotional experience—glossed by words like hitragshut and hitpa‘alut—is managed. It is true that Hasidic texts like 'Esh Kodesh frequently attempt to join the disciplinary and discursive poles of ritual through reflection and exegesis on the sources of religious practice, but this should not lead scholars to conclude that ritual is primarily a symbolic code awaiting “interpretation” in a theological or cultural vein, much less an attempt to solve the puzzle of “meaning” in some abstract way.Footnote 111 On their own terms, the Ghetto writings strive to strike an appropriate balance between the necessity and danger of emotional experience, which is always framed as both a psychic and a cosmic dilemma.Footnote 112 Nor is it surprising that Rabbi Shapira engages this problem through the study and teaching of Torah, which is already a privileged site of ritual efficacy in Jewish mysticism.Footnote 113 The writer, the teacher, and the student do not merely describe the empathy of prophetic selfhood, as Rabbi Shapira explains already in his earliest pedagogical tract, but rather participate in such empathy to the degree that their training and spiritual adroitness permit.Footnote 114 The text itself becomes a fulcrum through which to seek a profound and efficacious meeting with the immanent divine.
Weeping in Secret Places
Meeting the divine within the text became more pronounced in Rabbi Shapira's corpus as the war progressed. While early sermons like the one about Sarah's death emphasized the source of suffering in divine agency, some of his later sermons shift their emphasis towards the perception of suffering as an unfathomable divine burden.Footnote 115 In a sermon from 14 February 1942, just a few months before the last of the surviving Ghetto sermons, Rabbi Shapira delivers what is perhaps his most searing and emotionally intense sermon on this theme:
Sometimes when a Jew is afflicted with suffering, he thinks that only he is in pain, as if all of his personal torment and the torment of the community of Israel do not touch [i.e., have no effect] above, God forbid. But the verse tells us, “In all of their pain, He is pained.”Footnote 116 And in the Talmud it appears that “when a person is in pain, what does the Shekhinah [i.e., divine presence] say? ‘My head is too heavy for Me; my arms are too heavy for Me.’ ”Footnote 117 In the sacred books it is written that much more than the person is pained, God is pained, as it were, by the afflictions that a Jew suffers.Footnote 118
In a note appended to one of his earlier essays, Rabbi Shapira had argued that “the strange afflictions and terrible, bizarre forms of death that the bizarre and wicked murderers have innovated for us since autumn 5692 [1941]” were without precedent in Jewish history.Footnote 119 This comment may well relate to the adoption on his own part about the relationship between Ghetto suffering and earlier precedents from Jewish history, may well relate to the adoption of an unambiguous policy of genocide throughout occupied Poland around this time.Footnote 120 Be that as it may, Rabbi Shapira's early preoccupation with the dynamics of human loss and resilience give way in several key essays from this period to the contemplation of God's own inner life.
Building on classical rabbinic and mystical precedents, Rabbi Shapira speaks to the experience of deep abandonment that must have haunted his listeners. His anxiety that God's silence in the face of genocide might be taken by Ghetto inhabitants to signify an absence of divine empathy resonates deeply with his own struggles over the collapse of empathy he feared within himself, and must be read in light of this dual concern:
It is possible that since blessed God is boundless and cannot be conceptualized within this world, so too His pain from the affliction of Israel is boundless. It isn't just that a person could never bear such great suffering as God bears, but that a person could never conceive properly of God's pain—never know His suffering or hear His voice: “Woe is to Me that I have destroyed My house and exiled My children!”Footnote 121
Only the finitude of human psychic “vessels” prevents sufferers from perceiving that God's unutterable pain is in reality linked to their own. The Talmudic passage to which the sermon alludes tells the story of a certain Rabbi Yose, who once sought shelter amidst the ruins of Jerusalem in order to pray. He heard a voice “cooing like a dove” and saying, “Woe is to Me, that I have destroyed My house and exiled My children!”Footnote 122 Later, Elijah the prophet tells Rabbi Yose in a vision that the voice he had heard was God's voice, and that it can be heard lamenting in this way every day, whenever pious Israelites gather in their synagogues to pray. Why then, asks Rabbi Shapira in his sermon, had Rabbi Yose never heard the voice of God before? His startling answer is that it was only when Rabbi Yose prayed in the ruins of destroyed Jerusalem that his own subjectivity could be “sufficiently annihilated, his own principle of constriction and boundary sufficiently destroyed” to allow the voice of God to break through. God may “roar like a lion,” as Scripture indicates, but Rabbi Yose could hear nothing but an echo of that voice “cooing like a dove” when he stopped to pray amidst the destruction. Just as a ruin may be the only house of prayer that truly opens itself to the heavens, so homo sympathetikos may encounter God's grief only in the expansive ruins of his own shattered persona.
This teaching transposes Rabbi Shapira's own ambivalence about emotional self-mastery onto God's ambivalence about restraining a grief whose expression the cosmos would not bear. “This also explains how the world continues to exist in its place,” Rabbi Shapira continues, “and is not destroyed by the grief and the voice of the Holy One blessed be He on account of the people of God who are suffering and His house [i.e., the Temple at Jerusalem] which has been razed. It is only because His great grief cannot enter the world.”Footnote 123 Yet this response, which is based on a profoundly spatial metaphor of God's “great grief,” is by itself indecisive because it begs the question of God's willingness to communicate divine grief in a frame that human beings could understand if God wanted them to. On the contrary, divine agency and silence were acute problems for Ghetto inhabitants, requiring sophisticated treatment.Footnote 124 Rabbi Shapira invokes a rabbinic motif in which the angels argue with God over the creation and sustenance of sinful humanity. This is a formulation that evokes deep and perhaps unprecedented pathos in Rabbi Shapira's teaching because of his characteristic insistence that the angels of the Midrash really represent nothing but competing impulses—which is to say ambivalence—within the divine persona.Footnote 125
An angel is pictured by a Midrash on the book of Lamentations arguing with God over the propriety of God's weeping in public.Footnote 126 It is disgraceful, states the angel, for a king to admit being aggrieved by his subjects, and so he offers to weep in God's stead, so that God will have not have any more reason to weep. What this really means for Rabbi Shapira is that since the angel represents that aspect of divine intentionality that demands an immediate redress of human wrongdoing, the angel's weeping would wipe God's cosmos violently and decisively clean through a variation on the redemptive (but also destructive) power of tears:
If the voice of God's weeping were once to be heard in the world, the world would hear it and explode. Even a spark of God's grief in the world would scorch all of his adversaries. At the Red Sea, the Holy One blessed be He exclaimed [to the ministering angels], “My handiwork [the Egyptians] are drowning in the sea, and yet you sing praises before me?” And now that it is the Israelites who are drowning in blood, can the world continue to exist? Footnote 127
For a moment, Rabbi Shapira allows the torrent of his own grief to burst the carefully woven exegetical strata of his discourse, as he openly identifies with the angels' demand for immediate divine intervention at the price of cosmic catastrophe. The desire for a cathartic expression of divine grief that would purge the world of human evil (“can the world continue to exist?”) seems almost overwhelming for Rabbi Shapira, yet Rabbi Shapira's God still chooses a path of infinite silence and self-restraint rather than assent to the angel's request. Refusing to weep in public allows the cosmos to be preserved, but must inevitably be perceived as lack of care and empathy by those who suffer.
Angels consistently represent the demand for absolute justice and truth in Rabbi Shapira's reading of rabbinic literature, yet God stands for the sustainability of human presence. “Since God sought to atone for Israel's sins, and the time for salvation had not yet come. … He answered [the angel] saying, ‘I will enter a place where you do not have permission to enter, and there [alone] I will weep.”Footnote 128 Underlying all of this is a reference to yet another Talmudic text in which the secret place of God's weeping (from the verse, “My soul shall weep in secret places”) is identified with battei gavei or “inner chambers.”Footnote 129 These in turn are identified by commentators with the highest of the sefirot in which differentiated being can be said to begin taking shape, namely binah.Footnote 130 Earlier commentators tended to read this Talmudic discussion in an essentially abstract and technical way that neutralized any hint of divine pathos, but Rabbi Shapira characteristically strives in this sermon to convey an experience of the unplumbed divine anguish that has been hidden away for the world's sake.Footnote 131 “Now God's pain,” he writes, “which is too much for the world to contain, becomes even greater and more sublime, so that not even the angel can perceive it.”Footnote 132
Sarah may have died by taking suffering “too much to heart,” in other words, but God reconciles infinite pain with the life of the cosmos by occulting grief in the most secret of cosmic or psychic recesses, where it cannot cause harm. This message may well have been intended to console sufferers in Warsaw by convincing them that the appearance of divine disinterest was actually keyed to the overwhelming force of God's grief pulsing imperceptibly through creation—a momentary glimpse into the divine pathos raging secretly on their behalf.Footnote 133 Rather than muting anguish, in other words, hidden weeping intensifies and authenticates pain while simultaneously shielding the world from its catastrophic effects. What is more, Rabbi Shapira argues in the lengthy and highly technical continuation of this sermon, that the battei gavai, or inner chambers where secret divine weeping is hidden, are ritually accessible within the text of the Torah, which “contracts” and modulates the infinite power of divine energy (which is to say, pain), much like a reactor core, into a form that finite humanity can perceive without shattering. It is certain that Rabbi Shapira refers not just to the text of Scripture 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.Footnote 134
The stakes of this conception are actually quite high, because divine grief over the fate of Jews in Warsaw shades into the primordial pain of divine contraction, or tzimtzum, through which existence itself is allowed a space in which to unfold, a “suffering for the other” on divinity's part that the Torah reveals only to its most intimate students.Footnote 135 It is axiomatic in Hasidism that both the Torah and the cosmos are created from the same divine speech, and this means that the divine weeping that is perceptible to scholarly adepts must also cause those adepts to reaffirm their consciousness of an ontic unity that encompasses both Torah and Ghetto in its purview. “When a man ascends and unifies with the voice of God that is in the Torah,” writes Rabbi Shapira, “he hears Torah from all the sounds of the world; from the twittering of birds and the lowing of cattle and from the tumult of human beings … and thus all evil is lifted up [i.e., transformed] into good.”Footnote 136 While this kind of unity certainly undermines the vision of absolute and irredeemable evil in the holocaust world, it does not in any way compromise the adept's capacity for strategies of spiritual or ritual activism, like hamtaqat ha-dinim, or “sweetening of judgments,” which is how kabbalists describe the “repair” of evil and suffering whose vitality must be “lifted” back to its divine source (in binah) before it can be “healed” through subsequent emanation.Footnote 137 This is a ritual-theurgic construct that has ample precedent in earlier mystical and Hasidic teaching, yet no one before Rabbi Shapira identified the standard metaphors of “light,” “abundance,” and divine “vitality” so forcefully and insistently with the almost unthinkable mystery of transcendent divine pain.Footnote 138 Ultimately, pain is just another expression of the divine effulgence.
This late Ghetto sermon presumes a high degree of spiritual virtuosity among its readers, but even readers who are unable to attain the deep perception of oneness that Rabbi Shapira describes are called upon to emulate God in self-mastery or hitgabrut, “provoking God, as it were, to master Himself as well, and send an influx of kindness to this world for all of our bodily needs.”Footnote 139 Issued only a week after he composed the “hidden weeping” sermon, this call for self-mastery returns to earlier and more modest demands upon listeners, since it is clear that hitgabrut (which is related to concepts like tzimtzum and “strengthening of the vessels”) depends more upon force of will than on contemplative attainment. The vital point for our purposes here is simply that both “self-mastery” and “weeping in secret places” pertain to the psychic and cosmological dimensions of mystical teaching simultaneously. The Torah holds up not so much a “therapeutic model” for Rabbi Shapira as a ritual-salvific one, in which human and divine subjectivities model and participate in one another continually, on a variety of levels. The careful phenomenological description and management of human subjective states that defined Rabbi Shapira's pre-war and wartime literary output, and the ritual-theurgic gestures of hitgabrut or hamtaqat ha-dinim that effect cosmic blessing in the Ghetto, turn out upon closer examination to be one and the same.
One important benefit of this ritual-theurgical model was, in fact, that it provided Rabbi Shapira with a set of ritual idioms like “shattering of vessels” and “blockage of vital flow” that also could serve as frameworks for talking about (and managing) dimensions of human experience that resist discursive elaboration, like the collapse of subjectivity in radical pain.Footnote 140 One of the reasons that scholars of religion have had so much trouble acknowledging and analyzing these experiential states is that they directly challenge the encompassing norms of discursive “meaningfulness” around which so many of our own intellectual practices revolve. The crucible of 'Esh Kodesh may help to point us towards a different set of strategies for writing about that which resists language in lived experience, and especially the experience of suffering. Elsewhere, I have argued that this realization should force us to rethink our assumptions about the relationship between suffering and ritual, which have been imbued since Weber with a bias towards secularized theodicy (the quest for meaning and coherence in the face of pain) at the expense of the multifaceted efficacy and ethical concern with which ritual is often associated in religious contexts.Footnote 141 In Rabbi Shapira's case, 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.
It was precisely in reflection upon the experience of the Holocaust that the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas formulated his own rejection of theodicy and other meaning-oriented responses to suffering in modern times. “Suffering,” he writes in phenomenological mode, “is surely a given in consciousness, a certain ‘psychological content,’ like the experience of color, of sound, of contact, or of any other experience. But in this ‘content’ itself, it is in-spite-of-consciousness, unassumable.”Footnote 142 Levinas refers to suffering as “useless” both because epochal modern atrocities like the Holocaust have outstripped the reach of secular and religious systems that purport to give them meaning and also because extreme suffering has always, in his view, resisted the imposition of meaning to some degree. “Taken as an ‘experienced' content, the denial and refusal of meaning which is imposed as a sensible quality is the way in which the unbearable is precisely not borne by consciousness, the way this not-being-borne is, paradoxically, itself a sensation or given.”Footnote 143 The “not-being-borne” of suffering jibes poorly with the triumphal and meaning-oriented themes of our secular and religious cultures, yet I know of no better way to describe Rabbi Shapira's vulnerable matriarch Sarah, or his immeasurably hidden divine weeping. Like Rabbi Shapira, Levinas argues intuitively that ritual practice may sometimes bear more similarity to the “medical gesture” of intervention to end suffering than to the realm of theodicy and meaning-making that always strives to make suffering “sufferable.”Footnote 144 For Levinas, this means that what he calls ethics, must come to take the place of theodicy in human life. Yet Rabbi Shapira surpasses the philosopher in his ability to give expression to this intuition in a way that is more readily compatible with the taken-for-granted religiosity of so many of those who suffered, and with the ritual frames of Jewish piety.
On Uselessness and Efficacy
Several factors have contributed to the neglect of ritual efficacy and “useless suffering” among readers of 'Esh Kodesh. In academic research, claims to ritual efficacy are often transmuted into claims about the “meaningfulness” of practice that reinforce deeply rooted religious and intellectual biases against the recognition of ritual power.Footnote 145 Along similar lines, anthropologists and others often try to sidestep the problem of belief that inevitably arises when claims to efficacy are examined by skeptical outsiders—e.g., “do they really believe in the power of witchcraft?”—because it is felt that asking this question will conjure nearly insurmountable ethical and epistemological dilemmas relating to the portrayal of other people's rationality.Footnote 146 Yet I would argue that ignoring such problems never really solves them, and that we owe Rabbi Shapira at least the honor of being faithful to his words and the spirit in which they were written. Academic Hasidic studies are still, with some exceptions, dominated by an intellectualist frame that resists the focus on ritual efficacy I have been advocating. And in Rabbi Shapira's case, there is also the added factor that claims to ritual efficacy in the Holocaust ring so crushingly hollow—and for some readers so plainly offensive—in its aftermath. In order to speak convincingly about efficacy in this context, we need to be prepared to speak with equal clarity about the potential for failure.Footnote 147
Yet ritual failure is infrequently assayed. “To have had that vision [of evil's transmutation into good],” writes Nehemia Polen, “to have had the courage to publicly expound it, at that time and in that place, was itself the ultimate triumph over, and transformation of, evil. By his example and by his teaching, Rabbi Shapira did indeed prevail.”Footnote 148 Moshe Idel, too, felt it necessary to conclude his innovative work on ritual power in Hasidism by suggesting that the resilience of Hasidic life after genocide testifies to the way in which “the ‘magic’ of language is sometimes able to prevail over the efficiency of technology.”Footnote 149 It is not difficult to sympathize with such claims, yet we may also feel compelled to ask what analytic work these assertions perform, and whether “magic,” to use Idel's term, really did prevail. Rabbi Shapira and all of his surviving compatriots were deported to a concentration camp following the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that began on Passover in 1943. They were later shot.Footnote 150'Esh Kodesh remains probably the last work of traditional Jewish and Hasidic scholarship ever composed on Polish soil, home before the war to over three million Jews and to one of the most vibrant centers of Jewish cultural and religious life. Perhaps more to the point is that Rabbi Shapira's own writing testifies on almost every page to the awful contingency of any and all such claims to overcoming. He calls our attention with endless and numbing regularity to the terrifying costs and ambivalence imposed even by survival in the Ghetto context, and to the fragility of those achieved and emergent faculties—such as confidence in one's own subjectivity and compassion for others—that create conditions for being human. Would Rabbi Shapira himself have written so casually, had he survived, about the “victory of language?”Footnote 151
Rabbi Shapira's books and their translations continue to grow in popularity in both Israel and North America. “To the best of my knowledge,” writes Kimmy Kaplan, “almost all Haredi and national-religious groups in Israel share a preoccupation with the writings of Rabbi Kalonimys-Kelmish Shapira … the Rabbi of Piaseczno.” Yet he also notes that they focus mostly on his wartime 'Esh Kodesh, and that each group “presents its readers with his writings, and interprets them in various, at times conflicting ways.”Footnote 152 A few years ago I stumbled upon a daylong public forum devoted entirely to Rabbi Shapira's teachings, held in Yiddish on a minor fast day commemorating ancient travails in one of Jerusalem's burgeoning ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Rabbi Shapira may well have felt at home in that scene of reconstructed Old-World piety, despite the chasm of time and circumstance that necessarily separates him from yeshiva students in contemporary Jerusalem or Bnei Brak. Yet looks can also be deceiving. The popular media of contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy tends to invoke the Holocaust primarily for its timeless and generalized icons of unshakeable faith and miraculous salvation, or as a way of calling attention to the human failings (Jewish sinfulness and Gentile anti-Semitism) that contributed to the catastrophe.Footnote 153
How does such a message sit with Rabbi Shapira's depiction of “faith” as a kind of vulnerable prophetic influx—a particular register of subjectivity on the divine–human continuum—or with his openly expressed doubt as to whether such an experience was still at all possible for himself and others in Warsaw? “Prophecy is impossible in a state of sadness,” he writes in his penultimate Ghetto essay of July 1942, and “even homiletic exegesis of the affliction [like that which constitutes 'Esh Kodesh] is impossible when a person is broken and fallen down. How then can a person strengthen himself at least a little until salvation comes?”Footnote 154 How, in essence, can a defiant post-Holocaust Orthodoxy absorb the twin fears voiced by Rabbi Shapira's 'Esh Kodesh, that all of his strategies for ritual efficacy might simply fail or that even their success might leave him guilty of a betrayal toward those for whom he cared the most?
Ritual failure is both too difficult and too easy to contemplate. Too difficult because the reader wants Rabbi Shapira to emerge in some way victorious, if only to believe that such victories are still possible. Yet too easy, because the language of technical, utilitarian efficacy that disavows “linguistic magic” in favor of a putative realism seems both descriptively and morally unequal to the burden imposed upon readers of a text like 'Esh Kodesh. The strategy I have advocated instead is one that recognizes efficacy as always “complex, differentially constructed, even contested in experience” and irreducible to any single cultural or theological template.Footnote 155 As readers, we need to focus on the contingency of the author's own struggle as revealed by the text, and resist the impulse to claim some elusive or simplifying resolution. 'Esh Kodesh is indeed an integrated work as Polen claims, but its successive sermons map the shifting, sometimes interrelated, and occasionally incommensurate forms of efficacy that Rabbi Shapira struggled to achieve over time in a ritual–experiential continuum, from the literal and physical salvation of Jews in Poland to the defense of prophetic empathy; from the “sweetening” of cosmic judgments to the most intimate modulations of emotional and moral life, and readers should engage the indeterminacy suggested by the text at each of these levels. There is power in 'Esh Kodesh to unsettle many of our habitual practices of reading and thinking, but this is only true when it is 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.
Like the classical Hasidic texts that Rabbi Shapira described and commented upon throughout his career, 'Esh Kodesh was intended to do more than just educate or console its readers, or to develop an articulate religious ideology that could in theory be abstracted from its literary frame. It was an intervention in subjectivity, a privileged site for the “revelation of the soul” and of the divine immanence that “fills and surrounds all worlds.”Footnote 156 Yet because of the devastating circumstances in which it was written and the vulnerable yet resilient humanity of its author, 'Esh Kodesh also served at least one other purpose in the Warsaw Ghetto that may be difficult for us at this cultural and historical remove to grasp. In making a space for thinking and living with pain in such extremity, this text also served as the one place remaining in which its author could still respond to an echo of the infinite divine grief he had come to perceive at the heart of creation, and deep within his own heart.
