Ritual efficacy, hasidic mysticism and "useless suffering" in the Warsaw Ghetto

Harvard Theological Review

Volumn 101, Issue 3-4, 2008, Pages 465-505

  Seeman, Don ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 61249478640     PISSN: 00178160     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S001781600800196X     Document Type: Review

References (165)

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;
4. idem, "The Esh Kodesh of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalmish Shapiro: A Hasidic Treatise on Communal Trauma from the Holocaust," Transcultural Psychiatry 37 (2000) 321-35;
5. Mendel Piekarz, Ideological Trends of Hasidism in Poland During the Interwar Period and the Holocaust ([Hebrew] Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1990);
6. Nehemia Polen, "Divine Weeping: Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro's Theology of Catastrophe in the Warsaw Ghetto," Modern Judaism 7 (1987) 253-69;
7. N. Polen, 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;
8. N. Polen, 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;
9. Eliezer Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation [Hebrew], (Israel: Kibbutz ha-Meuhad, 1994);
10. and Pesali Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought (Hoboken: Ktav, 1990).
11. 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;
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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;
15. Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
16. 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;
17. also Don Seeman, "Subjectivity, Culture, Life-World: An Appraisal." Transcultural Psychiatry 36(1999) 437-45.
18. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 104, emphasis added.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. Elaine Scary, The Body in Pain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
22. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991);
23. idem, "The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity." Daedalus 125 (1996) 47-65.
24. 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.
25. 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)
26. and subsequently translated as Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939-1942 (trans. J. Hershy Worch; Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson: 2000).
27. His pre-war homiletic volume is published as Derekh ha-Melekh (Jerusalem: Hasidei Piasezno, 1991).
28. 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).
29. 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.
30. See Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 377.
31. Shapira, Hovat ha-Talmidim, 15.
32. 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;
33. Rabbi Elhanan Bunim Wasserman, Kovetz Ma'amarim (Jerusalem: Gitler Brothers, 1991) 106-7
34. 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;
35. Benjamin Ish Shalom, Rav Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook: Between Rationalism and Mysticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) 59, 89, 160.
36. 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);
37. Bruno Bettelheim, Freud's Vienna and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) 191-206.
38. See Wacks, "Emotion and Enthusiasm"; Piekarz, Ideological Trends, 374.
39. 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.
40. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schoken, 1941) 341.
41. 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.
42. 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.
43. 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."
44. 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.
45. On the specific importance of the tzaddiq in Rabbi Shapira's teaching, see Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation.
46. See for instance Shapira, Derekh ha-Melekh, 79-83. Rabbi Shapira's father was the Hasidic leader R. Elimelekh of Grodzisk.
47. Other ancestors include important early masters like R. Elimelekh of Lyzansk, the author of No'am Elimelekh (Lemberg, 1874)
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. Some similarities with Habad teachings have already been noted by Polen, The Holy Fire, 17, 169.
51. Shapira, Hakhsharat ha-Avreikhim, 44b-46a.
52. See Wacks, "Emotion and Enthusiasm."
53. 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.
54. Also see the glossary in Shlomo Pines's translation of Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
55. See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed I:54-55, at 123-29.
56. Maimonides, Hilkhot De'ot 2:3.
57. 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 imager)' in spiritual training (Shapira, Bnei Mahashavah Tovah, 25).
58. 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
59. 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.
60. 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.
61. Schneersohn, Kuntresim, 82.
62. 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.
63. Schweid, From Destruction to Salvation, suggests without elaboration that Rabbi Shapira was influenced in this regard by Kantian theories of sense perception.
64. M. Z. Feierberg, Le'an? (Tel-Aviv: Kitvei M. Z. Feierberg, 1949).
65. Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father's Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
66. Eliezer Schweid, "Prophetic Mysticism in Twentieth Century Jewish Thought," Modern Judaism 14 (1994) 139-74;
67. idem, Prophets for their People and Humanity [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999).
68. 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;
69. Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Joshua Heschel's Idea of Revelation (Atlanta: Georgia State University Press, 1989).
70. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (2 vols.; San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962) 1:11.
71. Compare Abraham Joshua Heschel, Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets: Maimonides and Other Medieval Authorities (Hoboken: Ktav, 1996)
72. and Benjamin D. Sommer, "Did Prophecy Cease? Evaluating a Reevaluation," JBL 115 (1996) 31-47.
73. 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.
74. Heschel, The Prophets 1:97.
75. "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).
76. Also see S. Don-Yahiya's somewhat hagiographic work on Rabbi Shapira's brother, Admor Halutz (Tel-Aviv: Moreshet, 1961) 295.
77. 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.
78. See Ira Robinson, "The Tarler Rebbe of Lodz and His Medical Practice," Polin 11 (1998) 53-61.
79. 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;
80. Alan Brill, Thinking God: The Mysticism of Rabbi Tzadok of Lublin (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2002) 38-40.
81. 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
82. and idem, Religion and Healing among the Lubavitch Community in Stamford Hill, North London (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2004).
83. See Sander Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 95.
84. 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.
85. See Arthur Kleinman, Social Origins of Disease and Distress: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986);
86. idem, The Illness Narratives (Boston: Basic Books, 1988).
87. See for instance Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).
88. 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.
89. Levinas, "Useless Suffering."
90. Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 145-68.
91. 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.
92. 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.
93. " Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum (ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan; New York: Schocken, 1958) 83.
94. Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, 56, 64, 111-12, 198-99, 215.
95. See Gershon Greenberg, "Redemption after Holocaust According to Mahane Israel Lubavitch, 1940-1945," Modern Judaism 12 (1992) 61-84;
96. 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."
97. 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.
98. 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.
99. 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.
100. 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).
101. 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.
102. Compare Schweid, From Ruin to Salvation, 129.
103. 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;
104. G. Greenberg, idem, "Elhanan Wasserman's Response to the Growing Catastrophe";
105. G. Greenberg, 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.
106. "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.
107. See Aharon Wertheim, Halakhot ve-Halikhot ba-Hasidul (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1993) 165-69
108. and Joel Flecker, "Eating and the Ritualized Body in Medieval Jewish Mysticism," History of Religions 40 (2000) 125-52.
109. Rabbi Efraim Oshry, She'elot u-Teshuvot mi-Ma'amakim (2 vols.; 2d ed.; New York: 1959) 1:42-50.
110. 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.
111. Shapira, Tzav ve-Zeruz, 16-17.
112. 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."
113. Kleinman, "All that Really Matters."
114. See Abramson, "The 'Esh Kodesh of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalmish Shapiro."
115. 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.
116. 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.
117. 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.
118. 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;
119. Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 308-320;
120. Shaul Magid, "Conjugal Union, Mourning and Talmud Torah in R. Isaac Luria's Tikkun Hazot," Daat 36 (1996) xvii-xlv;
121. 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.
122. With respect to Shavuot as an especially propitious time for these activities, see sources cited by Idel, Kabbalah, 75-88;
123. 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.
124. See Iggerot Kodesh, p. 4, printed in Zikhron Kodesh le-va'al 'Esh Kodesh.
125. 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.
126. 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;
127. Aryeh Wineman, "The Metamorphosis of Narrative Traditions: Two Stories from Sixteenth Century Safed," AJS Review 10 (1985) 165-80;
128. Polen, "Divine Weeping," and "Sealing the Book with Tears."
129. 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).
130. The problem of mechanistic performance vs. "spontancity" (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
131. and Saba Mahmood, "Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Salat," American Ethnologist 28 (2001) 827-53.
132. 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).
133. See also Seeman, "Martyrdom, Emotion and the Work of Ritual."
134. 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.
135. 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.
136. Idel, Hasidism, 171-88;
137. Elliot R. Wolfson, "The Mystical Significance of Torah Study in German Pietism," JQR 84 (1993) 43-78.
138. See for instance Hovat ha-Talmidim, 149-79.
139. 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.
140. See discussions in Browning, The Path to Genocide.
141. 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).
142. 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.
143. and Rabbi Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimonim 8:12 identified the hidden battei gavai where God weeps with the sefirah of binah.
144. 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.
145. and Rabbi Isaac Luria, Sha'ar Ruah ha-Kodesh (the latter cited in Idel, Messianic Mystics, 315), and was well-established in Hasidic circles.
146. 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.
147. 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.
148. 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.
149. 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).
150. Seeman, "Otherwise than Meaning."
151. 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.
152. Also see Seeman, "Ritual and its Discontents," and Asad, Genealogies of Religion.
153. Some of the most provocative treatments of this problem are Byron Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
154. Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Medicine. Science and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
155. T. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
156. 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.
157. 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.
158. 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.
159. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
160. 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.
161. 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;
162. 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.
163. 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.
164. Arthur Kleinman, Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 10.
165. See Emily M. Ahern, "The Problem of Efficacy: Strong and Weak Illocutionary Acts," Man 14 (1979) 1-17.