Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto

By Nehemia Polen

Book Overview

The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto is a journey into the mind and spirit of a sublime hasidic master in his moments of joy and tranquillity, and later, in his time of personal and communal catastrophe. The reader takes a voyage into the rich and variegated world of twentieth-century Hasidism in Poland, a world destroyed by the Holocaust. This is a volume inspired by a deeply sensitive and poetic individual of faith who is grappling with an unfolding disaster. While the Holocaust has engendered a voluminous body of religious and philosophical writings attempting to probe the issues this unfathomable period raises in all their enormity, virtually all were written after the war, when a modicum of distance and reflection is possible. Contemporaneous diaries and chronicles written as the events were happening concentrate on the descriptive accounts of the horrors. The Holy Fire, however, engages a sustained theological reflection and stands alone as an extended religious response from within the heart of darkness itself while the catastrophe takes place, and is, for this reason, an extraordinary document and an astonishing personal achievement.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765760266
• ISBN13: 9780765760265
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Jason Aronson
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Worth it.

Extended PhD of Rabbi Nechemia Polen, who teaches at Hebrew College. great insight into the Aish Kodesh.

An Angel In Hell

There are two separate issues to discuss in this review: Polen's book, and Rabbi Shapira himself. Let me start with the former. Polen has really done a superior job with the material here. She has taken the last book written by Rabbi Shapira--the collection of his weekly "sermons" and his private notes that he compiled while serving as Rabbi in the Warsaw Ghetto--and she has made the contents comprehensible to a general audience. Rather than following Shapira's text chronologically, Polen has mined the work and extracted six central themes. She has devoted a chapter to each of these themes, and then discussed the development of each theme in its own chapter. This type of organization accomplishes two important pedagogical goals: firstly, it enables readers to appreciate, in detail, the specific roots of Shapira's Jewish concerns and leanings. Polen brings into her discussion of Shapira's text, passages from Talmud, historical information about European Judaism (Hasidism, in particular), etc. Secondly, distilling each theme and tracing his own developing orientation toward it enables the reader to gain what I can only call a sense of awe regarding Shapira's increasing spiritual sophistication and maturity as his own life and the lives of those around him become more and more intolerable. And this brings me to the second aspect of what I want to write about here: the character of Shapira himself. It is very easy to approach a work like this from an intellectual perspective--the material is rich with historical information, it has a certain puzzle-like quality typical of Rabbinic writings that invites all sorts of back-engineering investigations, and it is painful. But Shapira himself did not approach things from any type of intellectual distance--he did not indulge in that kind of denial strategy. Instead, he fully acknowledged the evil and the agony occuring around him, and he--by some extraordinary spiritual means--found a way to make sense of it. Or something even beyond sense. He found a way to see everything that was happening as an expression of the Divine will, even while that same Divine Being was weeping with Israel. Shapira not only refused to give up on serving the people around him, but he refused to give up on Judaism, on the covenant between Israel and God, and he refused to give up on God. It is so shocking to come across such a person--even through the indirect medium of the pages of his book--that one is somewhat stunned at first. Is holiness of this kind really possible on earth? And especially in such dire surroundings? Simply hearing about him could make you think that he was crazy. But reading his work does away with such a notion very quickly, as his words show him to be lucid, compassionate, of the highest intelligence and education, and fully aware of the challenges--internal and external--being faced by everyone in the ghetto. Thanks to Polen's analysis, we can trace the progress of the spiritual refl

an interesting book

This book traces the spiritual journey of a Hasidic rebbe during the years between the Nazi invasion of Poland and the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. At first, Rabbi Shapira thought the Nazi invasion was no different from other persecutions, and suggested that perhaps Jews were being punished for something. But by 1942, he realized that "there has never been anything like [Nazism]" (p. 133) and abandoned the "punishment for sin" view of anti-Semitism. Instead, he admitted that the Holocaust was essentially incomprehensible. And at the start of the Nazi occupation, Rabbi Shapira urged his followers to trust in Divine intervention and in possible Messianic deliverance - but later on, he dropped this idea as well. This book was interesting not just because of it describes the evolution of Shapira's theology, but also as a description of the Nazi persecution. It is easy to forget that the Nazis sought not just to destroy our bodies but our souls as well, by doing their best to prevent the free exercise of Judaism.

The Best Detailed Study of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira.

This is the 1st detailed study of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. The book illuminates the real issues of faith and doubt in the Holocaust. Unlike most books, which were written AFTER the Shoah and by people who were NOT there, the Eish Kodesh was written and influenced by the Ghetto. Beautiful retelling of how Rabbi Shapira's ideas changed dramatically by the Shoah. THE HOLY FIRE is a great book for how to understand how bad things happen to good people. Understandability............*****_____________________________ Flow_of_Text..................****______________________________ Page_Format..................*****_____________________________ Historical_Accuracy..........*****_____________________________ Chapter_System..............****______________________________ BOOK*IN*ITSELF.............#####

The Best Detailed Study of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira.

This is the 1st detailed study of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. The book illuminates the real issues of faith and doubt in the Holocaust. Unlike most books, which were written AFTER the Shoah and by people who were NOT there, the Eish Kodesh was written and influenced by the Ghetto. Beautiful retelling of how Rabbi Shapira's ideas changed dramatically by the Shoah. THE HOLY FIRE is a great book for how to understand how bad things happen to good people. Understandability............*****Flow_of_Text..................**** Page_Format..................***** Historical_Accuracy..........*****Chapter_System..............**** BOOK*IN*ITSELF.............#####