1 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock; Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) 44.

2 The school was named Daas Moshe after Rabbi Shapira's father-in-law, who took charge of his education at the age of three, when his father, Rabbi Elimelekh of Grodzisk, died. This was the first in a series of deep personal losses that characterized Rabbi Shapira's life before the holocaust, including the premature death of his wife, Rachel Hayyah Miriam. Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (London: Jason Aronson, 1994) 4–6.

3 Most recent studies of Rabbi Shapira's corpus have focused largely on his Ghetto writings and on his “theodicy” or beliefs about suffering. In alphabetical order, see Henry Abramson, “Metaphysical Nationality in the Warsaw Ghetto: Non-Jews in the Writings of Kalonimus Kalmish Shapiro,” in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman; New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003) 158–169; idem, “The Esh Kodesh of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalmish Shapiro: A Hasidic Treatise on Communal Trauma from the Holocaust,” Transcultural Psychiatry 37 (2000) 321–35; Mendel Piekarz, Ideological Trends of Hasidism in Poland During the Interwar Period and the Holocaust ([Hebrew] Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1990); Nehemia Polen, “Divine Weeping: Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro's Theology of Catastrophe in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Modern Judaism 7 (1987) 253–69; idem, “Theological Responses to the Hurban from within the Hurban,” in Jewish Perspectives on the Experience of Suffering (ed. Shalom Carmy; New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1999) 277–96; idem, The Holy Fire; idem, “Sealing the Book with Tears: Divine Weeping on Mount Nebo and in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (ed. Kimberley Christine Patton and John Stratton Hawley; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 83–93; Eliezer Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation [Hebrew], (Israel: Kibbutz ha-Meuhad, 1994); and Pesah Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought (Hoboken: Ktav, 1990). Exceptions to the focus on the holocaust writings are short essays by Shaul Magid, “Introduction: Beginning, False Beginning and the Desire for Innovation,” in Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid, Beginning/Again: Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts (New York: Seven Bridges, 2002) xvii–xxxvi; and Ron Wacks, “Emotion and Enthusiasm in the Educational Theory of Rabbi Kalonymos Kalman Shapira of Piacezna” [Hebrew], Hagut: Jewish Educational Thought 5–6 (2003–2004) 71–88. A collection of letters and other testimonies concerning Rabbi Shapira has been published as Zikhron Kodesh le-Va'al 'Esh Kodesh (Jerusalem: Vaad Hasidei Piasecno, 1994).

4 By ritual efficacy, I mean the ability of ritual to do “work” of different kinds for those who enact it. Sometimes this may well relate to the production of cultural and religious meaning, or to the enactment of social relationships that have been studied by anthropologists. But I will emphasize that ritual is also practiced for the sake of changes in the phenomenal world such as healing or destruction of enemies, or to render shifts in subjectivity that are not limited in any way to the promotion of symbolic coherence or the representation of cultural and religious tropes. A good overview is given by Thomas Csordas and E. Lewton in “Practice, Performance and Experience in Ritual Healing,” Transcultural Psychiatry 35 (1998) 435–512. For a related argument on the importance of shifting Hasidic studies towards a focus on ritual efficacy, see Don Seeman, “Emotion, Martyrdom and the Work of Ritual in R. Mordecai Leiner of Izbica's Mei Ha-Shiloah,” AJS Review 27 (2003) 253–80; Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). An ethnographic reflection that raises some of these issues in a powerful way is Roland K. Littlewood and Simon Dein, “The Effectiveness of Words: Religion and Healing among the Lubavitch of Stamford Hill,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 19 (1995) 339–83; also Don Seeman, “Subjectivity, Culture, Life-World: An Appraisal.” Transcultural Psychiatry 36(1999) 437–45.

5 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 104, emphasis added.

6 See Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). The shared genealogy of hermeneutic approaches to ritual in the social sciences and certain forms of modern Christianity has already been noted by Talal Asad in Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993). It may be objected that anthropologists focus on shared public meanings of ritual practice whereas theologians like Schleiermacher insist on the ineffably private nature of religious experience, yet both Geertz and Schleiermacher seek to defend the autonomy of a sphere called “religion” by asserting that it deals uniquely with matters that cannot be falsified through its claims to verifiable truth or pragmatic efficacy. For a more developed critique of the hermeneutic approach to ritual, see Don Seeman, “Otherwise than Meaning: On the Generosity of Ritual,” Social Analysis 48 (2004) 55–71.

7 Elaine Scary, The Body in Pain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

8 Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); idem, “The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity.” Daedalus 125 (1996) 47–65.

9 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” trans. Richard Cohen, in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, (ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood; New York: Routledge, 1988) 156–67. Seeman, “Otherwise than Meaning,” takes up the relationship between this essay and ritual theory in greater detail.

10 All of Rabbi Shapira's surviving publications are in Hebrew. The wartime essays, which were probably delivered orally in Yiddish on the Sabbath before Rabbi Shapira wrote them in Hebrew, were published as Kalonymos Kalman Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh (Jerusalem: Hasidei Piasezno: 1960) and subsequently translated as Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939–1942 (trans. J. Hershy Worch; Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson: 2000). His pre-war homiletic volume is published as Derekh ha-Melekh (Jerusalem: Hasidei Piasezno, 1991). Pedagogic works include Hakhsharat ha-Avrekhim, Mavo ha-She‘arim and Tzav ve-Zeruz, all of which are published under the same cover as Hakhsharat ha-Avreikhim (Jerusalem: Hasidei Piasezno, 1962). A meditative handbook, Bnei Mahashavah Tovah (Jerusalem: Hasidei Piasezno, 1989), has appeared in English as Conscious Community (trans. Andrea Cohen-Kiener; Northvale, N.J.: Jason Arononson, 1989). The only volume to achieve widespread publication during his lifetime was however his first pedagogic tract, Hovat ha-Talmidim (Jerusalem: Oraysoh, 1990), which has been translated as A Student's Obligation: Advice from the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (trans. Micha Oddenheimer; Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1991). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Hebrew in this article are my own.

11 See Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 377.

12 Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 15.

13 The “arrogance that heralds the coming of the Messiah” [hutzpah de-iqveta de-meshiha] is a Talmudic expression (b. Sotah 49a) deployed by many modern traditionalists struggling to make sense of the massive changes, desolations and large-scale defections of the modern period. For just a few examples from rabbis with a wide variety of different outlooks on modernity, see Shapira, Bnei Mahashavah Tovah 12; Rabbi Elhanan Bunim Wasserman, Kovetz Ma'amarim (Jerusalem: Gitler Brothers, 1991) 106–7 and Gershon Greenberg, “Elhanan Wasserman's Response to the Growing Catastrophe in Europe: The Role of Ha'gra and Hofets Hayim Upon His Thought,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 10 (2000) 171–104; Benjamin Ish Shalom, Rav Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook: Between Rationalism and Mysticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) 59, 89, 160. On the specific redemptive meaning of this term for Rabbi Shapira, see Schweid's convincing analysis in From Ruin to Salvation.

14 The comparison between Shapira and Korczak is deserving of further study. See Janusz Korczak, The Warsaw Ghetto Memoirs of Janusz Korczak (trans. E. P. Kulawiec; Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1978); Bruno Bettelheim, Freud's Vienna and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) 191–206.

15 Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 23.

16 See Wacks, “Emotion and Enthusiasm”; Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 374.

17 Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling,” in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion (ed. Richard Shweder and Robert Levine; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 143.

18 Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 98.

19 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schoken, 1941) 341.

20 Ibid.

21 For example Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 98–99, 171. Rabbi Shapira himself claims that this is one of the innovations of Hasidic approaches to Jewish mysticism. It is worthwhile to compare this with the view of a late-nineteenth-century Hasidic master, R. Gershon Henokh Leiner of Radzin, who also wrote a systematic introduction to Hasidism. According to R. Gershon Henokh, Hasidism transcended medieval philosophy as well as Kabbalah by translating the intellectual and doctrinal concerns of these movements back into the existential or phenomenological language of Jewish devotional practice, from which they had originally sprung. I am fundamentally sympathetic to the presentation of this argument by Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) 72–108.

22 This principle is frequently associated by Jewish mystical writers with Ps 121:5: “The Lord is your shield [or shadow] at your right hand.” Citing a midrash that makes use of this idea, R. Moses Cordovero gives evidence of its adoption by kabbalistic writers in the sixteenth century: “Just as your shadow, if you laugh at it, it laughs at you, and if you weep for it, it weeps along with you, and if you show it a face of outrage or of pleasure this is what it gives back, so the Holy One blessed be He is [like] your shadow. … Therefore, according to the actions that arouse the lower [i.e., the human being], so the upper [divine] will be aroused, for good or for ill” (Pardes Rimonim, Toledot Adam Sha'ar ha-Gadol 5). See Idel's discussion of a parallel passage in R. Meir Ibn Gabbai's Tola'at Yaaqov, 4a in Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 173–81, as well as 80–88 and 197–99. Idel argues that the Hasidic reworking of this concept focused more on divine emotions that on putative body parts, and returned to a less mechanistic and frankly theurgic view than that of the classical Kabbalah. “The theurgical element … was not rejected as in the ecstatic Kabbalah,” Idel cautions, “but was transposed onto the spiritual-emotive plane” (ibid., 199). For Hasidic writers like Rabbi Shapira, this meant that the theme of broken-heartedness became relatively more important than the actual shedding of tears through ritual weeping.

23 See Arthur Green, “The Zaddik as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism.” JAAR 45 (1977) 327–47 and Idel, Hasidism. “[T]he founders of Hasidism,” writes Seth Brody, “are the heirs of what can only be described as a spirituality of cosmic blessing. The classical kabbalistic tradition presents mystical praxis as a process of entrance into the divine, in order to serve as a living conduit for the infusion of its creative energy into the cosmos.” Seth Brody, “ ‘Open to Me the Gates of Righteousness’: the Pursuit of Holiness and Non-Duality in Early Hasidic Teaching.” JQR 89 (1998) 3–44, at 22. On the specific importance of the tzaddiq in Rabbi Shapira's teaching, see Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation.

24 See for instance Shapira, Derekh ha-Melekh, 79–83. Rabbi Shapira's father was the Hasidic leader R. Elimelekh of Grodzisk. Other ancestors include important early masters like R. Elimelekh of Lyzansk, the author of No'am Elimelekh (Lemberg, 1874) and R. Kalonymous Kalman Halevy Epstein of Krakow, the author of Ma'or va-Shemesh (Lemberg, 1890), for whom Rabbi Shapira was named. His father-in-law and cousin was the Rebbe of Koznitz, who took over young Kalonymos's education after the death of his father.

25 Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 217–18.

26 It is true that Rabbi Shapira's contemporary (and fellow Warsaw Ghetto inhabitant) Hillel Zeitlin rejects the influence of Habad on Rabbi Shapira's Hasidism, but this appears to be a stylistic impression based only on Rabbi Shapira's first published book, Hovat ha-Talmidim. References to Habad writers are fairly common in Rabbi Shapira's broader corpus, as are certain terminological and conceptual influences whose description would exceed the scope of this article. See Hillel Zeitlin, Sifran shel Yehidim (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1979) 241–44. Some similarities with Habad teachings have already been noted by Polen, The Holy Fire, 17, 169.

27 Shapira, Hakhsharat ha-Avreikhim, 44b–46a.

28 Ibid., 14–15. See Wacks, “Emotion and Enthusiasm.”

29 The fact that hitpa‘alut can sometimes be translated as ecstasy means that its correct translation in particular contexts must be carefully specified. It sometimes implies a greater intensity of emotion than mere hitragshut, as in Rabbi Shapira's statement that while a student may be moved to hitragshut or agitation by the practice of specific divine commandments, a more intense experience of hitpa‘alut–ecstasy is occasioned by study of “the Torah and the light of God” in its more potent, undifferentiated form. Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 21.

30 On Aristotelian pathos, see for instance Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), (trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred; New York: Penguin, 1986) 117–18. Ibn Tibbon's explanation of the Hebrew neologism hitpa‘alut as an Aristotelian concept appears in his glossary of foreign and unfamiliar words printed in most editions of his thirteenth century translation of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed. Also see the glossary in Shlomo Pines's translation of Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

31 See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed I:54–55, at 123–29.

32 Maimonides, Hilkhot De'ot 2:3.

33 Rabbi Dov Baer Schneersohn, In Ma'amrei Admur ha-Emtsa'i: Derushei Hatunah (2 vols.; New York: Kehot, 1988) 1:192. Rabbi Shapira may have been more comfortable with open dissension from Maimonides in part because, as Polen (“Divine Weeping,” 262) notes, his great-great grandfather, Rabbi Israel Hapstein of Kozienice (d. 1814), once reportedly asserted that Maimonides' ruling on anthropomorphism caused “a great darkness” to overtake the Upper World, since “so many souls who had previously entered paradise were now banished on account of Maimonides' decision that they were heretics, only to be restored later through the intervention of Rabbi Abraham ben David” [i.e., Rabad of Posquières, Maimonides' most persistent twelfth-century critic]. Rabbi Shapira specifically urges his followers to rely upon Rabad against Maimonides in the use of anthropomorphic and anthropopathic imagery in spiritual training (Shapira, Bnei Mahashavah Tovah, 25).

34 Kuntres ha-Hitpa‘alut has been published in Rabbi Dov Beer Schneersohn, Ma'amrei Admur ha-Emtsa'i: Kuntresim (New York: Kehot, 1991) 37–196, and translated by Louis Jacobs, Tract on Ecstasy (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1963). Hitpa‘alut –ecstasy remains an important theme of Habad Hasidism and its offshoots. For another, more insidious use of this concept in twentieth-century Jewish mysticism, see Don Seeman, “Violence, Ethics and Divine Honor in Modern Jewish Thought,” JAAR 73 (2005) 1015–48.

35 Schneersohn, Kuntresim, 82.

36 Shapira, Bnei Mahashavah Tovah. Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation, 113, goes so far as to argue that Rabbi Shapira's careful attention to the spiritual attainment of the masses who cannot undertake complex training but can at least be filled with desire for intimacy with the divine, is “the whole of the new Hasidic pedagogic and didactic model” he innovated. How this differs from earlier Hasidic models however, awaits careful attention.

37 See for example Shapira, Hakhsharat ha-Avreikhim, 9b–10a.

38 Schweid, From Destruction to Salvation, suggests without elaboration that Rabbi Shapira was influenced in this regard by Kantian theories of sense perception.

39 M. Z. Feierberg, Le'an? (Tel-Aviv: Kitvei M. Z. Feierberg, 1949).

40 Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father's Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

41 Ibid., 69.

42 See Shapira, Hakhsharat ha-Avreikhim, 33a–41b

43 Eliezer Schweid, “Prophetic Mysticism in Twentieth Century Jewish Thought,” Modern Judaism 14 (1994) 139–74; idem, Prophets for their People and Humanity [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999).

44 On Heschel's phenomenology of religious experience, see Edward K. Kaplan, “Abraham Joshua Heschel,” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century (ed. Steven Katz; New York: B'nai B'rith, 1993) 131–50; Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Joshua Heschel's Idea of Revelation (Atlanta: Georgia State University Press, 1989).

45 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (2 vols.; San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962) 1:11.

46 Ibid., 1.89.

47 Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation, 112–14, shows that Rabbi Shapira viewed Hasidism as the culmination of a graded historical process in which biblical prophets, later rabbis and kabbalistic sages each contributed to a unique phase of cosmic tiqqun or repair. These movements continue and complete one another rather than marking strong institutional breaks. Compare Abraham Joshua Heschel, Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets: Maimonides and Other Medieval Authorities (Hoboken: Ktav, 1996) and Benjamin D. Sommer, “Did Prophecy Cease? Evaluating a Reevaluation,” JBL 115 (1996) 31–47.

48 Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 113–14.

49 Ibid., 160.

50 See Byron Good and Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, “The Comparative Study of Greco-Islamic Medicine: The Integration of Medicine into Local Symbolic Contexts.” in Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge (ed. Allan Young and Charles Leslie; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) 257–71.

51 Ibid., 166.

52 Heschel, The Prophets 1:97.

53 “In my meetings with people who knew Rabbi Shapira,” writes Polen, “interviewees would almost invariably place great stress on the Rabbi's medical knowledge, clinical expertise, and ability to write pharmacologically precise prescriptions” (The Holy Fire, 160). Also see S. Don-Yahiya's somewhat hagiographic work on Rabbi Shapira's brother, Admor Halutz (Tel-Aviv: Moreshet, 1961) 295.

54 Polen, The Holy Fire, 4. Healing was not uncommon among Hasidic masters in Eastern Europe, although we lack reliable accounts of the specific forms that this practice took. See Ira Robinson, “The Tarler Rebbe of Lodz and His Medical Practice,” Polin 11 (1998) 53–61. R. Gershon Henokh Leiner of Radzin was also an autodidact known for writing prescriptions that were honored by pharmacies. See David Margolit, “Great Hasidic Leaders as Doctors: R. Gershon Henokh of Radzhin,” Korot 7 (1977) 297–307; Alan Brill, Thinking God: The Mysticism of Rabbi Tzadok of Lublin (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2002) 38–40. For contemporary ethnographic studies of Hasidic healing, see Littlewood and Dein, “The Effectiveness of Words”; Simon Dein, “The Power of Words: Healing Narratives among Lubavitcher Hasidim,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 16 (2002) 41–63 and idem, Religion and Healing among the Lubavitch Community in Stamford Hill, North London (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2004).

55 See Sander Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 95.

56 Cited in Elliot Horowitz, “The Vengeance of the Jews was Stronger Than Their Avarice: Modern Historians and the Persian Conquest of Jerusalem in 614,” Jewish Social Studies 4 (1998) 3.

57 Ibid.

58 Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 93–94.

59 Ibid. Also see Shapira, Tzav ve-Zeruz, 9–10, where Rabbi Shapira writes that while the soul always seeks emotional agitation [hitragshut], the form that such agitation takes is subject to training and choice.

60 Shapira, Bnei Mahashavah Tovah, 14. Rabbi Shapira's adoption of nervous disorder should be compared with the adoption of neurasthenia by Chinese doctors during the first half of the twentieth century, when it had already begun to decline as a diagnostic category among Western psychiatrists. Neurasthenia proved durable in China precisely because it was assimilated to traditional Chinese concepts of socio-somatic imbalance, just as Rabbi Shapira was drawn to nerve theory because it linked traditional Hasidic cosmology with authoritative medical discourse. See Arthur Kleinman, Social Origins of Disease and Distress: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); idem, The Illness Narratives (Boston: Basic Books, 1988).

61 See for instance Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).

62 Shapira, Bnei Mahashavah Tovah, 14. Brill, Thinking God, 371, contrasts Rabbi Shapira's approach usefully with that of earlier Polish Hasidim like R. Zadok ha-Cohen of Lublin (1823–1900) as well as Lithuanian Jews like R. Israel Salanter (1810–1883), who had begun to translate the traditional metaphysics of the soul into a descriptive psychological language without, however, basing this on contemporary medical theories drawn from the broader Gentile society. “This development was short-lived,” writes Brill. “When modern Jewry accepted Western science, these Jewish psychologies came to an abrupt end.” By the time Rabbi Shapira formulated his ideas on nervousness, according to this reading, modernization of Jews in Poland had reached the point where a truly compelling religious psychology was likely to borrow more freely from the idioms of contemporary medicine. While this is an intriguing and intuitively correct view, it will require further comparative study across a broad spectrum of Hasidic (and other) Jewish thinkers.

63 Shapira, Derekh ha-Melekh, 406.

64 Shapira, Hakhsharat ha-Avreikhim, 10b–11a.

65 Levinas, “Useless Suffering.”

66 Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 145–68.

67 See Aharon Surasky, “Mi-Toledot ha-admor ha-Kadosh Maran Rabi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira z”l,” a somewhat hagiographic work published as an appendix to Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh; also described in Polen, The Holy Fire, 10–11.

68 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 11. “I marvel at the pious Jews who sacrifice themselves by wearing beards and the traditional frock coats,” writes Emmanuel Ringelblum in November, 1940. “They are subject to abuse.” Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum (ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan; New York: Schocken, 1958) 83.

69 See Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 14.

70 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 56, 64, 111–12, 198–99, 215. See Gershon Greenberg, “Redemption after Holocaust According to Mahane Israel Lubavitch, 1940–1945,” Modern Judaism 12 (1992) 61–84; Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation, 126; Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 379.

71 Shapira, Derekh ha-Melekh, 187–88. “The greater his desire [for the redemption] was,” writes Rabbi Shapira in this undated, pre-war sermon for Rosh Hashanah, “the more he falls and disintegrates, may God have mercy—as in ‘my soul is sick with the love of you.‘ ” Such a person is not wrong to be filled with love and desire, but grows ill from lack of strength to bear its weight—yet if he weeps with worry that perhaps God has cast him off, concludes Rabbi Shapira, this may paradoxically serve as a sign that God is drawing him close.

72 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 64 writes that “September 27, 1940, was the day on which, according to a nameless rabbi's prediction, ‘something would happen and the Jews would be really and truly saved.’ It was the date of the New Order Pact.” When the redemption (reputed to involve Hitler's death) failed to come and was actually the occasion of increased persecution, “a man called Fridlajn committed suicide with his wife.”

73 Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 378 asserts that 'Esh Kodesh is based on “ideas and fragments of ideas” drawn and paraphrased from earlier Jewish literature. He also asserts that Rabbi Shapira's biblical exegesis is “nothing more than an external framework meant to support his listeners, to strengthen their spirit and their power of resistance to the terrible decrees and especially to shape their faith in the God of Israel and his providence” (ibid., 377). Polen (The Holy Fire, xviii) responds with some justification that “Piekarz evidently reads 'Esh Kodesh as little more than a collection of unrelated homilies without a unifying center. While Piekarz does note the date of the derashot he cites, he misses what in our view is the central feature of 'Esh Kodesh: the diachronic unfolding of key ideas, which gradually crystallize to form a cohesive and characteristic theological response.”

74 b. Ber. 5a, which cites Lev 2:13 and Deut 28:69.

75 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 10.

76 See Ma'or va-Shemesh on Exod 6:3, citing an even earlier teaching by R. Menahem Mendl of Rymanov. The kabbalistic-theurgic context of this teaching in Ma'or va-Shemesh is far more explicit than it is in 'Esh Kodesh, where technical kabbalistic terminology is often slipped into discussions that admit of more prosaic readings, perhaps because of Rabbi Shapira's conscious effort to write for initiates as well as beginners. Similar language of the dialectic between din (judgment) and rahamim (mercy) is also evident in some other wartime writings, but these typically assert the inherent metaphysical balance of the universe, rather than the experience of utter imbalance and excessive suffering emphasized by Rabbi Shapira. See for instance Gershon Greenberg, “A Musar Response to the Holocaust: Yehezkel Sarna's Le'teshuva Ule'tekuma of 4 December 1944,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 7 (1997) 101–38.

77 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 10.

78 Without mentioning Rabbi Shapira, Aviva Zornberg argues that a long interpretive tradition links the exploration of Sarah's death to themes of meaninglessness and frailty in the face of near-catastrophe by Jewish authors. See Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg “Cries and Whispers,” in Beginning Anew: A Woman's Companion to the High Holy Days (ed. Gail Twersky Reimer and Judith A. Kates; New York: Touchstone, 1997) 174–200. A similar theme is raised by 'Esh Kodesh, 177, where Moses argues before God that the suffering of the Jewish people in Egypt will make it impossible for them to believe in his message.

79 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 10. The phrase on “full or partial death” is a paraphrase of b. B. Qam. 65a.

80 On the contemplation of martyrdom among the sixteenth-century kabbalists in Safed, see R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Joseph Caro: Lawyer and Mystic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) 151–54. This spiritual technique gained popularity among later Hasidim. See Michael Fishbane, “The Imagination of Death in Jewish Spirituality,” in Death, Ecstasy and Other-Worldly Journeys (ed. John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). It is important to remember, however, that martyrdom was a contested virtue even within the Hasidic fold, as described by Seeman, “Emotion, Martyrdom and the Work of Ritual,” and Schindler, Hasidic Responses, 59–66.

81 Among many other passages on this theme written before the war, see Shapira, Hakhsharat ha-Avreikhim, 15b, 28b–30a and 68a–70b, the latter of which include a set of imaginative exercises to accompany the recitation of the Shema Yisrael prayer.

82 While Rabbi Akiva's martyrdom by Rome does constitute a frequent theme of Rabbi Shapira's wartime essays (see Polen, The Holy Fire, 67–69), these include few exhortations to emulate or to visualize Rabbi Akiva in the manner of the pre-war tracts. One exception is 'Esh Kodesh, 8–9, which dates to the Sabbath of September 16, 1939, in which Rabbi Shapira notes that correct spiritual preparation can free a martyr of death's agony, a theme to which he returned briefly toward the end of his Ghetto writings.

83 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 71–74. Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 396 argues that this teaching is unprecedented. Compare Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation, 129.

84 On some of the important mainstream rabbinic responses, see Gershon Greenberg, “Ontic Division and Religious Survival: Wartime Palestinian Orthodoxy and the Holocaust (Hurban).” Modern Judaism 14 (1994) 21–61; idem, “Elhanan Wasserman's Response to the Growing Catastrophe”; idem, “A Musar Response to the Holocaust.” These responses included a pronounced messianism, alongside the argument that Jewish assimilation was to be blamed for arousing divine punishment and Gentile rejection, and that the terrible suffering being visited upon the Jewish people might serve to return them to the proper path. With respect to Rabbi Shapira, by contrast, Schweid (From Ruin to Salvation, 126–27) notes that “The bitter truth that became clear to him is therefore that sufferings do not generally bring a person to religious ascendance. On the contrary, beyond a certain level, they render [a person] insensitive.”

85 Ibid, 105–7.

86 This is made explicit in the eighth chapter of Hakhsharat ha-Avreikhim, 37a–38b, where Rabbi Shapira instructs students in a technique of “expansive thought” through guided imaging during the early stages of prophetic training. Following earlier Talmudic and mystical practice, Rabbi Shapira urges the adept-in-training to meditate upon the day of death, but he goes further than most writers in providing a detailed example of what such a meditation might be like, replete with images of the illness and suffering that precede extinction. Themes which later resurface in the Ghetto writings include “pain which is so great that his thought cannot contain it, for he never knew that such difficult and bitter afflictions existed in the world, and he cannot bear them. After a difficult and bitter night such as this, he feels as if his afflictions have already smashed his body and disincorporated his limbs. Death and the grave consume the body and destroy it, and he comes to know that this destruction begins with his affliction while he still lives.…”

87 See Polen, The Holy Fire, 97.

88 Ibid., 11–12. “Tish” literally means “table.” Schindler, Hasidic Responses, 82, supposes that it was during his sharing of food at tish that Rabbi Shapira delivered the sermons that later were published as 'Esh Kodesh. He also describes the heroism of various Hasidic leaders who maintained the custom of tish even once it had been outlawed by the Nazis. Rabbi Eliezer Horowitz is said to have conducted tish with his Hasidim at the edge of the open grave into which they were soon to be shot. Rabbi Shapira discusses the meaning of the Hasidic “table” at some length in his pre-war sermon for the holiday of Simhat Torah 1930 (Derekh ha-Melekh, 284–86). “[S]omeone who transforms his body and his eating into [divine] service,” writes Rabbi Shapira, “his table becomes for him like the priests eating [the sacrifices] … until the one who leads the tish and those who sit with him at his tish feel [margishim] a kind of trembling in holiness, since they feel love, fear, joy and connectedness all together at the table, ‘May the glory of God be forever, may God rejoice in His creations’ [Ps 104:31]—not a [divine] service that is in the heavens alone, but a service that is with the world of [mundane] action.” The Hasidic tish is thus an embodiment of many of the major themes of Rabbi Shapira's worldview and pre-war educational strategy. See Aharon Wertheim, Halakhot ve-Halikhot ba-Hasidut (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1993) 165–69, and Joel Hecker, “Eating and the Ritualized Body in Medieval Jewish Mysticism,” History of Religions 40 (2000) 125–52.

89 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 10. Suicide was not, of course, a purely metaphorical concern to rabbinic writers in Ghettos like Warsaw. Rabbi Efraim Oshry recounts that he was approached shortly before the liquidation of the Ghetto in Kovno in 1942 by a Jew who wanted to know whether it was permissible for him to commit suicide before deportation in order that he might be assured a Jewish burial, and also to avoid the worst of the torments that awaited the deportees. Rabbi Oshry responded by delineating the limited conditions under which he thought suicide would be permissible, even though he also felt that it would be irresponsible, under the circumstances, to publicize his decision. Rabbi Efraim Oshry, She'elot u-Teshuvot mi-Ma‘amakim (2 vols.; 2d ed.; New York: 1959) 1:42–50. Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 113 writes however that “suicides before the war were seven a week, now they're three or four.”

90 From the word regesh used in the pre-war essays as a technical term for the lower reaches of emotional agitation.

91 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 117. Emphasis in the original.

92 Ibid., 116, from an essay written around August 30, 1941.

93 Isa 47:8.

94 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 134.

95 Ibid., 178.

96 Polen, The Holy Fire, 58–59.

97 On the shattering of vessels as a depiction of radical suffering see Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 124. Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 397 points out that earlier mystical writers also applied the “shattering of the vessels” idiom to different catastrophes, including the slaughter of Torah scholars during persecution by Rome.

98 The expression is borrowed from Arthur Kleinman, “Everything that Really Matters: Social Suffering, Subjectivity and the Remaking of Human Experience in a Disordering World,” HTR 90 (1997) 275–301.

99 Shapira, Tzav ve-Zeruz, 16–17. See also Hakhsharat ha-Avrekhim 62b, where even before the war he compares “the enemies who make our lives exceedingly bitter from without” and “the coldness towards Torah and divine service from within.”

100 Kleinman, “All that Really Matters.”

101 See Abramson, “The 'Esh Kodesh of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalmish Shapiro.”

102 Don Seeman, “Ritual Practice and Its Discontents,” in A Companion to Psychological Anthropology (ed. Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 358–73.

103 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 62.

104 Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 392, 403–4 describes at least two examples of the “sweetening of judgments” theme in 'Esh Kodesh, yet he repeatedly summarizes Rabbi Shapira's goal in these passages as “explaining the meaning and significance [of divine justice]” or understanding “the meaning of the tribulations,” as if these depictions of ritual activism on Rabbi Shapira's part were really just idioms for an essentially cognitive concern. Schweid does a somewhat better job of emphasizing the ritual and theurgic components of Rabbi Shapira's Ghetto writings, noting for instance that he sought to “activate every one of Hasidism's educational-mystical-ritual tools of leadership within the context of the Nazi conquest” (From Ruin to Salvation, 106). Yet Schweid too retreats from this position by asserting repeatedly that Rabbi Shapira's fundamental motivation was the (failed) attempt to find “theological justifications for the Holocaust while it occurred” (ibid., 138). Schweid shows relatively minor attention to Rabbi Shapira's specific claims about the efficacy of ritual, which he too seems to treat as a homiletic device designed to raise the spirits of the Hasidim.

105 Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 125, dated 19 February 1941.

106 Michael Fishbane, “To Jump for Joy: The Rites of Dance According to Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997) 371–87. Schindler, Hasidic Responses, 84 cites a Lodz Ghetto testimony by Simha Bornstein, a Hasid who wrote to his brother that Rabbi Nahman had come to him in a dream and danced with him, and that he found upon awakening a passage in the Rabbi's book testifying that “he believes that dancing softens Din” [divine judgment].

107 Cited in Polen, The Holy Fire, 13. It has not to my knowledge been noted in this context that ritually efficacious or mystical weeping has been associated specifically with the night of the Shavuot festival. Already in the sixteenth century, Rabbi Shlomo Alkabets writes that a group who gathered at Rabbi Joseph Karo's house in Turkey on Shavuot heard revelations from Karo's angelic maggid that included a special order of study and prayer for the night (tiqqun Shavuot), as well as strong encouragement to ease the exile of the Divine Presence by emigrating to the Holy Land (which both Alkabets and Caro soon did). “All of us burst into weeping from joy,” writes Alkabets, “and also when we heard about the suffering of the Shekhinah [Divine Presence] because of our sins, her voice [i.e., that of the Shekhinah] like that of an ill woman pleading with us, and so we strengthened ourselves and did not pause in our study until morning.” It is noteworthy that this experience led to certain ritual innovations related to the intensification of mourning practices for the destruction of Jerusalem and the Shekhinah's exile. See R. Isaiah Horowitz, Shnei Luhot ha-Brit, Masekhet Shavuot: Perek Ner Mitzvah 6–13. It is clear that this practice bore strong affinities with the custom of midnight study and lamentation (tiqqun hatzot) which also were subjects of innovation by the Safed mystics at around this time. On the efficacy of Torah study joined to lamentation for the pursuit of mystical visions as well and hastening redemption, see Eitan Fishbane, “Tears of Disclosure: The Role of Weeping in Zoharic Narrative,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 11 (2002) 25–47; Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 308–320; Shaul Magid, “Conjugal Union, Mourning and Talmud Torah in R. Isaac Luria's Tikkun Hazot,” Daat 36 (1996) xvii–xlv; Elliot Wolfson, “Weeping, Death and Spiritual Ascent in Sixteenth-Century Jewish Mysticism,” in Death, Ecstasy and Other Worldly Journeys (ed. John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 209–47. With respect to Shavuot as an especially propitious time for these activities, see sources cited by Idel, Kabbalah, 75–88; also Rabbi Shlomo ha-Cohen Rabinowich of Radumsk's exceedingly popular Tiferet Shelomo (2 vols.; Warsaw: 1867–69; repr., Jerusalem: 1992) 2:321, and the comments of Rabbi Shapira's father, Rabbi Elimelekh of Grodzisk, in Kuntres Tiferet ha-Banim, 21–24, which has been published as a preface to Derekh ha-Melekh. Idel interprets an account of R. Israel of Ryzhin (1796–1850) weeping with his students after the evening meal one Shavuot rather than teaching them Torah as a statement about the decline of the generations in Hasidism (Idel, Hasidism, 239–44), but this episode too is rendered more coherent if we posit that both R. Israel and Rabbi Shapira were participating in a ritualized practice long associated with this holiday. Wertheim, Halakhot ve-Halikhot, 156, notes that many Hasidic leaders were willing to forgo the teaching of Torah at their tish because the communal sharing of food and song were considered equally efficacious with Torah study. He also cites R. Shalom of Belz, whose work on the reasons for Hasidic customs (Ta‘amei ha-Minhagim, 3:82) asserts the mystical equivalence of tish (the mystical sharing of food) and tiqqun Shavuot, the program of nighttime study on this holiday.

108 From a letter dated “Fourth day of Parashat Shelah,” of the Jewish year 5688 (1938). See Iggerot Kodesh, p. 4, printed in Zikhron Kodesh le-va'al 'Esh Kodesh. On dance and redemptive consciousness in the thought of Rabbi Shapira's ancestor, R. Kalonymos Epstein of Krakow, see Nehemia Polen, “Miriam's Dance: Radical Egalitarianism in Hasidic Thought,” Modern Judaism 12 (1992) 1–21.

109 Shapira, Tzav ve-Zeruz, 22. Here we see that human and divine weeping are both described as potentially redemptive in a pre-war text. R. Shapira's grandfather, R. Epstein of Krakow, notes in Ma'or va-Shemesh (on the Haftarah for Mahar Hodesh) that a person who weeps for the exile of the Divine Presence can perform “great unifications” by raising the lowest sefirah (Malkhut) into contact with the “highest” places from which blessing is channeled. R. Shapira's close contemporary, R. Samuel Borenstein of Sochachew also writes (in his 1917 essays on Vayigash and Shelah in Shem mi-Shemuel) that the strong redemptive power of tears shed in prayer derives from the fact that tears originate in the “brain” (i.e., corresponding to the highest rungs of sefirotic emanation), and that this renders them “pure waters that wash away all filth.” Moshe Idel (Kabbalah, 75) refers to mystical weeping as a ritual practice “that can be traced back through all the major stages of Jewish mysticism over a period of more than two millennia,” but focuses his own important discussion (Kabbalah, 74–88, 197–99) on the theosophical Kabbalah of Vital and his contemporaries. On the redemptive power of divine weeping, see Michael Fishbane, “The Holy One Sits and Roars: Mythopoesis and Midrashic Imagination,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1 (1991) 1–21; Aryeh Wineman, “The Metamorphosis of Narrative Traditions: Two Stories from Sixteenth Century Safed,” AJS Review 10 (1985) 165–80; Polen, “Divine Weeping,” and “Sealing the Book with Tears.”

110 The extent to which mystical or theurgic practices like weeping are thought to have a nearly automatic or mechanical efficacy varies. Idel (Kabbalah, 198) shows that even a single writer like R. Hayyim Vital made contradictory statements on the subject in different contexts. Idel suggests, however, that Hasidism in general moved away from mechanistic conceptions toward a more profound reliance on emotional experience and anthropopathic correspondence. Rabbi Shapira pauses on several occasions to remind his readers that the efficacy of Jewish mystical study and practice depend entirely on the attainment of a transformed subjectivity which bespeaks authentic “revelations of the soul” that can later be attested through their long-term ethical and spiritual effects upon of the individual (see Hovat ha-Talmidim, 159–79). The problem of mechanistic performance vs. “spontaneity” (which relates in theoretical terms to a broader set of issues about the nature of agency in ritual practice) has been raised for ritual weeping in Christian and Muslim contexts respectively by Piroska Nagy, “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West,” in (ed. Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist; New York: Bergahn, 2005) 119–37, and Saba Mahmood, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Salat,” American Ethnologist 28 (2001) 827–53.

111 The idea that ritual symbols should be viewed as part of a shifting continuum between discursive and disciplinary poles builds on a distinction between discursive and “sensory,” or viscerally embodied symbols in Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967). See also Seeman, “Martyrdom, Emotion and the Work of Ritual.”

112 My approach to 'Esh Kodesh has been influenced by ethnographies like Unni Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Wikan challenges cultural anthropologists who study emotion to adopt a more experience-near perspective by asking what is at stake for people in the construction and management of their emotional lives. Her book deals, inter alia, with debates over the degree to which grief is a culturally dependent response to loss, and should be read with interest in this regard by students of religion. Also see Arthur Kleinman and Don Seeman, “The Politics of Moral Practice in Psychotherapy and Religious Healing,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 (1998) 237–50.

113 Idel, Hasidism, 171–88; Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Mystical Significance of Torah Study in German Pietism,” JQR 84 (1993) 43–78.

114 See for instance Hovat ha-Talmidim, 149–79. Moshe Idel marshals earlier sources to this effect in his “White Letters: From R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev's Views to Postmodern Hermeneutics,” Modern Judaism 26 (2006) 169–92.

115 Polen, The Holy Fire, 106–121.

116 Isa 63:9, based on a variant reading preserved alongside the Masoretic text. The Talmudic discussion in b. Ta‘an. 16a asks why the congregation carries the ark containing the Torah scrolls out onto the street and covers it with dust on days that have been declared public fast days due to prolonged drought. “Rabbi Yehudah ben Pazi said, ‘This is as if to say, I [God] am with him [Israel] in affliction.' Resh Lakish said, ‘In all of their pain, He is pained.’ Rabbi Zeira said, ‘When I first saw the rabbis cover the ark with dust, my whole body used to tremble.’ ”

117 b. Hag. 15b.

118 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 159.

119 Ibid., 113–14.

120 See discussions in Browning, The Path to Genocide.

121 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 159.

122 b. Ber. 3a.

123 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 160. My reading of this text as a transposition of Rabbi Shapira's own emotional ambivalence is supported by the fact that he cites many of the same proof-texts about divine weeping in his pre-war writings to describe human, rather than divine emotion. See for instance the essays on Sarah's death from 1931 and 1933 in Derekh ha-Melekh, 13–21. Rabbi Shapira is far from the first to use these texts about divine pathos in a discussion of human grief and emotional experience. To take just one example, Rabbi Samuel Borenstein of Sochachew invoked these themes in 1917 for a critical comparison of those Hasidic teachers who rely on heavy emotionalism and those (like Rabbi Borenstein and his grandfather, R. Menahem Mendl of Kock), who take a more intellectually and emotionally restrained approach. See his Shem mi-Shemuel, Vayigash 1917, as well as Seeman, “Martyrdom, Emotion and the Work of Ritual.”

124 In cultural terms, silence was often framed as the rupture or withdrawal from relationship among Jews and Jewish writers in Eastern Europe, and this was also sometimes transposed to the relationship between God and the Jewish people. Yet certain forms of divine silence could even be framed as redemptive in nature, through the suppression of catastrophic emotion, as in 'Esh Kodesh, or through the gathering of forces before decisive action to change the course of human history—as in the comment by an earlier Hasidic writer that God is like a powerful man, who absorbs insult after insult in silence before sweeping away His adversaries with an unstoppable rage (R. Gershon Hanokh Henikh [1839–1891], citing his grandfather, R. Mordecai Yosef Leiner of Izbica, in Sod Yesharim: Purim va-Pesah [Warsaw: 1901; repr., Brooklyn: 1992] 30, 80). For more on the themes of silence and redemption, and the gendered expectations relating to silence and speech, see Don Seeman, “The Silence of Rayna Batya: Torah, Suffering and Rabbi Barukh Epstein's ‘Wisdom of Women,' ” Torah U-Madda Journal 6 (1995–1996) 91–128.

125 In 'Esh Kodesh, 160, Rabbi Shapira refers explicitly to the angels as “agents of blessed God through whom His actions are carried out,” where the intent is to suggest that they do not have will or agency of their own.

126 From the twenty-fourth proem to Lamentations Rabbah.

127 Ibid. [Emphasis in the original.]

128 Ibid.

129 Jer 13:17, cited in b. Hag. 5b. “But if you will not hear it, My soul shall weep in secret places for the pride. Rabbi Samuel bar Inia said in the name of Rav, The Holy One blessed be He has a place and its name is ‘Secret.’… But is there any weeping before the Holy One blessed be He? For behold, Rav Papa said, There is no grief before the Holy One, blessed be He, as it is written, Honor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in His sanctuary [Ps 96:6]! There is no contradiction: in one case we refer to the inner chambers [battei gavei], in the other, to the outer chambers [battei barei].”

130 In the sixteenth century, both R. Samuel Edels (Hiddushei Aggadot Maharsha, ad loc.) and Rabbi Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimonim 8:12 identified the hidden battei gavai where God weeps with the sefirah of binah. Also see Rabbi Bahya ben Asher's fourteenth-century Torah commentary on Gen 6:6 and R. Menahem Azaria of Fano (Pelah ha-Rimmon, ch. 8). Nehemia Polen (The Holy Fire, 141–42) notes that some kabbalists preferred to identify the divine pathos with a lower order of the sefirotic structure, presumably to avoid imputing tumultuous emotion to divinity, but it seems unwarranted to refer to this preference as a “consensus,” since several Hasidic writers did in fact follow the opinion of Cordovero and Edels. Rabbi Shapira explicitly cites R. Edels as the source of his own teaching, although it appears that he was influenced by the formulation of Pardes Rimonim as well. Medieval opposition to the identification of “inner chambers” with divine weeping includes R. Todros ben Joseph ha-Levy Abulafia (Otzar ha-Kavod), R. Meir Ibn Gabbai (Avodat ha-Kodesh), R. Shimon Lavi (Ketem Paz) and R. David Ibn Zimra (Magen David), all of whom are cited in R. Reuven Margoliot's Nitzotzei Zohar to Zohar III:15b. Also see R. Menahem Recanati's commentary on Gen 6:6 with the supercommentary of Rabbi Mordecai Jaffee, Levush Even Yekarah in Levushei 'Or Yakrut (Jerusalem: Zikhron Aharon, 2000), 62–63. It is worth noting that this dispute may depend in part on a variant reading of the Talmud cited by R. Hananel ben Hushiel, ad loc., which seems to mediate against R. Cordovero's reading. Zohar I:65 can be read to support either position.

131 R. Moses Cordovero (Pardes Rimonim 8:12) for example, undertakes to elaborate the complex sefirotic architecture that underlies the Talmudic text according to the kabbalists, yet neglects the experience of grief implied by that text even when he describes the mystical significance of divine weeping. More striking still is the approach of his rough contemporary, Rabbi Judah Loeb (Maharal) of Prague, who also associates the “inner chambers” of battei gavei with the place of divine weeping, but writes that “weeping” is really just a metaphor of “lack” or “privation” (hisaron) in the philosophical sense, which can be attributed to the failings of human subjects who are unable to receive God's blessing in its fullness (Ba'er ha-Golah, Ba'er 4). Rabbi Shapira's contrary inclination is due not just to the distinction between the systematizer and the writer of Hasidic sermons, but also to the crucial role he attributes emotional and imaginative capacities in spiritual education, and his deep comfort with anthropopathic imagery.

132 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 160.

133 For a related argument about the intimacy revealed by divine weeping in a wartime sermon, see Greenberg, “A Musar Response to the Holocaust,” 105–107.

134 On the status of the Hasidic sermon as “Torah,” see Idel, Hasidism, 240–42. The association between Torah and battei gavei (the “secret place” of divine weeping) was already clear from earlier sources like Zohar III:109a; R. Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimonim 8:12; and Rabbi Isaac Luria, Sha'ar Ruah ha-Kodesh (the latter cited in Idel, Messianic Mystics, 315), and was well-established in Hasidic circles. See for instance Rabbi Shapira's ancestor, Rabbi Elimelekh of Lyzansk (No'am Elimelekh 65b, Parashat Behar), who notes that simple people who have not studied Torah do not have access to this dimension of divine intimacy. Rabbi Samuel Borenstein of Sochachew likewise insists in a 1916 sermon (Shem mi-Shemuel, Parashat Tetzaveh) that there is a deep, affinity between penitential weeping and the cognitive study of Torah (especially Jewish law) because both derive from mohin (the brain), which is in this context a designation for battei gavei or the sefirah of binah (see above, n. 109). Indeed, this may be implicit to Rabbi Shapira's decision to explore this theme in connection with the Torah portion known as mishpatim. On Torah study and mystical experience, see Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 164–220.

135 Both R. Moses Cordovero (Pardes Rimonim 8:12) and Maharal (Ba'er ha-Golah, Ba'er 4) argue on exegetical grounds that the divine weeping envisioned by b. Hag. 5b is “constant weeping” (bekhiyyah temidit), which R. Cordovero relates to the process of divine emanation and contraction.

136 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 163. On the study of Torah as an avenue to mystical consciousness and unity with the divine in Polish Hasidism, see Brill, Thinking God, 235–66.

137 This “merged vita contemplativa et activa,” writes Brody (“Open to Me the Gates of Righteousness,” 25–27), constitutes “a path that is both contemplative and active, in which the Hasid learns to perceive and experience the non-dual unity of phenomena within the divine and acts to sustain their existence … a reflection of the fact that kabbalah is a spirituality of cosmic blessing, using both mystical consciousness and ritual praxis as vehicles for the manifestation of divine presence and energy within the world.”

138 Many Hasidic writers before Rabbi Shapira identified the text of the Torah as the secret place in which adepts could attain privileged access to, and experience of, God's unmediated presence. See Idel, “White Letters.” But this is usually described as contact with a divine “voice” or “light,” rather than the infinite sorrow of Rabbi Shapira's sermon. Human pain is much more frequently and less guardedly depicted as intrinsic to the articulation of divine vitality in this world. Already in the first generation of Hasidism, for example, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye writes: “I heard from my teacher [the Baal Shem Tov] … that since the creation of the world was effected through din [divine judgment], which is contraction, and since in each and every world there was a contraction of His infinite light to a level that it could be received … [therefore] judgments and afflictions that a person suffers constitute a body to the soul and to the spiritual vitality that shines upon a person, which is His blessed divinity, the light of the En Sof that enlivens all, and that [therefore] when a person welcomes affliction with joy and love he performs a unification, joining the vessel and body … to the soul, which is joy and spiritual vitality.” (Toledot Ya'akov Yosef, va-Ethanan: 16). Pain is here described as a “garment” or “body” rather than as divine vitality per se, but it is well-known in Hasidism that the garment itself is also constituted by the influx of divine vitality in a “coarser” and less accessible form. Human suffering can be described as a “body” to the light of divinity because suffering represents the necessary “contraction” through which human existence is made possible, and this means that human grief or weeping can also be construed with proper intent as efficacious channels for this power. See Shimon Menahem Mendl Gowartchov, Sefer Ba'al Shem Tov al ha-Torah (2 vols; Jerusalem, [1937] 1993) 1:184–86, where a number of sources related to this theme have been collected. Finally, see R. Dov Baer Schneersohn of Lubavitch's nineteenth-century essay on the conscription of Jewish troops to the Czarist army (‘Inyan Lekihat Anshei Hayil, printed in Ma'amrei Admur ha-Emtsa'i, 261–277), where he cites many of the same proof texts as Rabbi Shapira in order to argue that “weeping in secret places” by human beings can help to draw vitality and blessing into the world.

139 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 169.

140 See Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Paul E. Brodwin, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman, Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

141 Seeman, “Otherwise than Meaning.”

142 Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 156. While I can only touch briefly on these themes here, I have argued at length elsewhere (Seeman, “Otherwise than Meaning,”) that the social science tradition of Weber and Geertz typically links ritual to theodicy by viewing ritual largely as a meaning-making or meaning-preserving response to the upheavals of suffering, and that this view may be challenged through a careful reading of writers like Levinas and Rabbi Shapira, each of whom associated ritual with the transcendence of self in responding to the pain of the other. For Levinas, theodicy is a false attempt to imbue suffering with meaning, and is related to Western philosophy's tragic privileging of ontology over ethics, or of the “problem of Being” over the problems of individual beings, which makes the fear of death more significant than the fear of committing murder. Levinas has in mind, of course, his one-time teacher Martin Heidegger, who became a proponent of National Socialism in Germany, but leverages this into a much broader critique of certain trends in Western thought. It is interesting in this context to note that while Levinas explicitly eschewed Jewish mystical cosmology, he sought to preserve the “inimitable resources” of this language. See Elliot Wolfson, “Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic Traces in the Thought of Levinas,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14 (2006) 193–224.

143 Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 156.

144 Seeman, Otherwise than Meaning.”

145 Ibid. Also see Seeman, “Ritual and its Discontents,” and Asad, Genealogies of Religion.

146 Some of the most provocative treatments of this problem are Byron Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Medicine, Science and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); T. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

147 By insisting on the possibility of ritual failure, my intent is certainly not the positivistic assumption that efficacy can be judged only from a standpoint of technical, utilitarian rationality. On the contrary, I am arguing that we need to attend to the ways in which efficacy and claims about efficacy emerge in the texts that we study. How do Hasidic texts themselves portray what is at stake in the efficacy that they seek? See Kleinman and Seeman, “The Politics of Moral Practice”; also Douglas Hollan, “Suffering and the Work of Culture: A Case of Magical Poisoning in Toraja,” American Ethnologist 21 (1994) 74–87. The problem of efficacy from the outsider's perspective is a different problem entirely—see Brian K. Smith, “Ritual Perfection and Ritual Sabotage in the Veda,” History of Religions 35 (1996) 285–306.

148 Polen, The Holy Fire, 135. Polen acknowledges (ibid., x) that his research on 'Esh Kodesh was slowed by the difficulty of gazing at “the awesome pain of that period for extended lengths of time. The work often proceeded by off-axis vision, as a naked-eye astronomer might view a heavenly body, except that in this case the phenomenon radiated darkness rather than light.”

149 Idel, Hasidism, 223. “Today it is sufficient to observe,” Idel writes, “even superficially, the descendants of the various nineteenth-century trends of Hasidism to see that the terrible encounter between their ancestors, in their strongholds in Poland and Russia, and the bearers of scientific-mythological Nazism, was unable to extirpate their vital religiosity.”

150 The best account, while necessarily somewhat speculative, remains Polen, The Holy Fire, 152–56.

151 Jews have not of course been the only people in modern times to oppose “the efficiency of [a murderous] technology” with recourse to the “magic of language,” nor have they been the only people who arguably failed to attain their salvation in this way. For just one ethnographic example of what may be considered a paradigmatic modern catastrophe, see Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), where the anthropologists describe some of the “magical” and conceptual defenses of the Tswana against political, techno-military and conceptual conquest by Europeans. It is worthwhile in this context to ponder Jonathan Boyarin's provocative suggestion that European Jews be compared with other colonized people as the “internally colonized” people of Europe. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

152 This is an observation that calls out for further ethnographic investigation. Kimmy Kaplan, “The Holocaust in Contemporary Israeli Haredi Popular Religion,” Modern Judaism 22 (2002) 168.

153 See Ruth Ebenstein, “Remembered Through Rejection: Yom Ha-Shoah in the Askenazi-Haredi Daily Press, 1950–2000,” Journal of Israel Studies 8 (2003) 141–67; Kimmy Caplan, “The Holocaust in Contemporary Israeli Haredi Popular Religion”; Dina Porat, “Amalek's Accomplices—Blaming Zionism for the Holocaust: Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel during the 1980s,” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992) 695–729. Piekarz, Ideological Trends, and Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation, 126 have also noted the apparent difficulty of reconciling 'Esh Kodesh with many contemporary myths about religious life and “spiritual resistance” during the holocaust.

154 Shapira, 'Esh Kodesh, 191.

155 Arthur Kleinman, Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 10. See Emily M. Ahern, “The Problem of Efficacy: Strong and Weak Illocutionary Acts,” Man 14 (1979) 1–17.

156 Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 159–78.