Al Reguel Ajat

Erich Seligmann Fromm (1900-1980) was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to an Orthodox family descended from rabbis. As a young man, he studied Talmud with several teachers, including Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic group. He studied law in his hometown and later moved to Heidelberg to study sociology, where he earned his doctorate in that field with a thesis on «Jewish Law.» He later entered the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where he met his first wife, Frieda Reichmann. Once married, the couple abandoned Orthodox religious life. They divorced in 1931, and in May 1934, Fromm emigrated to the United States. In 1944, he married Henny Gurland, and in 1950, they moved to Mexico, where he taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and promoted the practice of psychoanalysis. In 1974, he emigrated to Switzerland, where he died in 1980.

For Fromm, the Bible, the Talmud, and the teachings of the Hasidic masters always occupied a central place in his understanding of humanity. He considered the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise after eating from the Tree of Knowledge to be extremely important, an action that Fromm viewed as a virtue rather than a sin. What was valuable for Fromm was that humanity had dared to disobey the orders of a higher authority, and now it was up to him to decide, using his reason, his intuition, and his sensitivity, what was good and what was evil. Fromm argued that, by doing so, Adam and Eve evolved and became true human beings. He argued that humanity was created to grow and develop.

Fromm adds: the central theme of the Bible is the constant struggle against idolatry, and today, the history of humanity is the history of idol worship, from primitive idols made of wood and clay to modern idols such as the state, the religious leader, the politician, and consumerism. Fromm continues: idols were once called Baal or Astarte; today they are called honor, flag, fame, and artist.

Fromm distinguishes two systems of ethics: authoritarian ethics, where principles emanate from an external authority, and humanist ethics, which comes from our own conscience. For Fromm, authoritarian ethics is tinged with idolatry. People act under the orders of an authority they believe possesses absolute truth. It is not a true ethic. When we act in obedience to the instructions of a religious leader or a populist politician, because we believe they know everything, instead of listening to our inner voice, we are worshipping an idol.

Fromm, in his book «And You Shall Be as Gods,» says that in the Bible, God himself is a God who evolved. At first, he is an absolute sovereign, who does whatever he wants with his creation, man, to the point of nearly destroying him (the Flood). Later, he makes a pact with humanity (with Noah) and voluntarily limits his power. Finally, when he reveals himself to Moses, he presents himself as a nameless and difficult-to-describe God, something completely opposite to the concept of an idol, which does have a name and attributes (the rain god).

Fromm said that «the Bible is an extraordinary book with norms and principles that have remained valid for thousands of years.» One of those principles is the fight against idolatry, where there has been progress, but the battle is not yet over.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Erich Fromm «And You Shall Be as Gods» and other sources.

It is common to read in the media the results of surveys conducted by prestigious institutions such as PEW, PRRI, Brandeis University, and others to find out how members of a particular community identify as Jewish. These studies are routinely conducted in the United States and Israel, and sporadically in Jewish communities in other countries.

Reviewing some recently conducted surveys, we find that there is a significant group of respondents who, when asked what religion they practice, “tell us they are atheists, agnostics, or that they do not practice any religion.” This is commented by Greg Smith, director of religious surveys in the United States at the PEW Center. However, those Jews who did not answer with the word “Jewish” to the question: “What is your religion?”, later state that they are Jewish in another way. The PEW Center calls them “Jews of no religion,” secular, or cultural Jews. And these cultural Jews are on the rise. PEW says that among American Jews born before 1927, the so-called «Greatest Generation,» when asked about their religion, only 7% did not answer «Jewish.» In contrast, among American Jewish millennials, those born after 1980, 32% do not describe themselves as Jewish by religion. Instead, they identify as Jewish only on the basis of ancestry, ethnicity, or culture.

The Center for Cultural Judaism, established in New York City in 2003, maintains that cultural Jews have a deep passion for their Jewish identity, yet struggle to express it in a way that is consistent with their beliefs. These Jews do not find meaning in Judaism as a religion, but rather in Judaism as a culture, which is very meaningful to them. They are far from alone. In fact, a growing number of Jews around the world identify as cultural, not religious, Jews. The Center says: “Cultural Jews understand Judaism as the history, culture, civilization, ethical values, and shared experiences of the Jewish people. Their connection to their heritage is found in languages, such as Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, literature, philosophy, art, dance, music, food, and the celebrations of the Jewish people. It is not religious beliefs that connect them to one another, but the entire civilization of their extended Jewish family.”

In Jerusalem, the College of Judaism as Culture, established in the wake of the 1994 Shenhar Commission, states that Judaism is a culture in motion. Its director, Martin Ben Moreh, says: “Judaism is a culture, not just a religion. There is a religion within that culture, but not vice versa.”

Whether or not we agree with the position of cultural or secular Jews, the fact remains that they represent a significant portion of the Jewish people today. In the United States, and especially in Israel, they represent more than 50%. Programs need to be implemented to nurture the Jewishness of this group before they declare themselves not Jewish culturally or religiously.

By Marcos Gojman.

References: Material from PEW, The Center for Cultural Judaism, and the College of Judaism as Culture.

Peretz Smolenskin (1842-1885) was born in Monstriczena, Belarus, to a poor family. He was orphaned by his father and also experienced the kidnapping of his older brother by the army of Tsar Nicholas I, events that marked his childhood. At the age of 14, he entered the Shklov Yeshivah, where he stayed for four years and later spent a few months at the court of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson, in the village of Lubavitch. Disillusioned with both life in the yeshivah and the Hasidic court, he spent the following years traveling around the Jewish community, settling first in Odessa and finally in Vienna.

In 1868, he founded the Hebrew newspaper «Ha Shachar» and turned his home into a meeting place for young writers. Thanks to his work as editor of Ha Shachar, he was chosen to lead the Alliance Israelite Universelle delegation to Romania. The delegation’s purpose was to investigate the plight of the local Jewish community, who suffered from antisemitism and pogroms, and to help them establish Jewish schools.

In his novels, Smolenskin criticized the social reality of his homeland and proposed progressive changes. His characters included wealthy philanthropists, beggars, rabbis, sages, Hasidim, young people seeking their future, assimilated Jews, traditional Jews, and modern women. Smolenskin was a maskil, a follower of the Haskala, the movement that sought to preserve Jews as a unique and separate community, but within a framework of moral and cultural renewal, where Hebrew would be revived as a secular language through modern journalism and new literature. The Haskala sought the integration of the Jewish group into the surrounding societies by speaking the local language and adopting its values, culture, and appearance.

He was critical of the Hasidim and religious Jews in general, but also of the new generation who sought to shed their Jewish identity and culture. He fought against the «guardians of tradition» who opposed modernization, but also sought to stop Jews who advocated assimilation and who, he believed, posed a danger to the unity of the Jewish people and its culture. Seeing the deterioration of Jewish identity in communities across Western and Central Europe, a result of religious reform, social and economic emancipation, the abandonment of Hebrew, and integration into the country’s culture, Smolenskin concluded that the maskilim had to change their priorities.

The anti-Jewish riots in Odessa in 1871 convinced him that the Haskala, the Enlightenment, had failed in its attempt to introduce humanistic values ​​into modern society and that, for the Jewish people, the only path was cultural nationalism, based on modern Hebrew, the spiritual rather than ritualistic qualities of the Torah, and the hope of achieving national redemption in a secular rather than religious territory. Smolenskin joined the nationalist movement Hovevei Zion and in his articles continued to attack both assimilationist and religious currents, while advocating for immigration to the Land of Israel. Smolenskin was able to summarize his Judaism in one phrase: he was an enlightened Zionist.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Articles by Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Encyclopedia, and other sources.

Every morning, during the Shacharit prayer, 14 blessings known as Birkot Hashachar, the morning blessings, are recited. In the version prayed by Orthodox Jews, there is a blessing where men thank God for not having made them women. Orthodox women, on the other hand, instead pray: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, for having made me according to Your will,” a formula dating back to the 14th century CE. Melissa Scholten-Gutierrez asks: How can I thank God for having created me according to His will, when I cannot pretend to understand the intentions of why or how God acts?

The obligation to recite these blessings is stipulated in the Talmud, some in tractate Berachot 60b and others in Berachot 6:23, where it says: “Rabbi Yehuda used to say: A man is obligated to recite three blessings each day… (one of them) for not having made me a woman…” The Orthodox explain that men recite this blessing not because they are intrinsically superior to women, but because they are obligated to fulfill a greater number of commandments, and are therefore grateful to God for this sacred duty. From positions like this, they argue that the tradition of reciting this blessing should be respected and maintained.

But not everyone agrees. Yoel H. Kahn says that, in Southern Europe, in the 14th and 15th centuries, women adopted a more assertive stance and, instead of the original phrase, would say: “who did not make me a man” or “who made me a woman.” By 1872, the original blessing, along with others, had been removed from Reform Judaism’s prayer books, and it no longer appeared in the 1895 edition of the Union Prayer Book. In Conservative Judaism, in the 1873 Siddur Avodat Yisrael, men said, «Who has imposed upon me the obligations of a man,» and women said, «Who enables me to win hearts for You, through motherhood or womanly devotion.»

In 1946, the Conservative movement published its prayer book for Shabbat and Holidays, where the wording was changed to read, «Who has made me in Your image.» The committee that drafted the new siddur was headed by Rabbi Robert Gordis, who explained in an article that the committee originally intended to eliminate this blessing (along with two others), but that «deleting the three preliminary blessings was unsatisfactory because they contained significant religious values ​​that needed to be preserved.» The new phrase, which Gordis attributes to Rabbi Max Gelb, has become the new text used by non-Orthodox movements since the mid-20th century.

The phrase «for not having made me a woman» is a text that many consider misogynistic in its content and also assumes that the person holding the book is a man. Elana Sztokman tells us that a 1471 siddur, housed in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, contains an alternative text. In this 15th-century siddur, the blessing reads: «Thank you God for having made me a woman and not a man.» According to JTS Professor David Kramer, the siddur was produced by the scribe and rabbi Abraham Farissol for a groom to give to his bride. It seems that the issue of equality for Jewish women is still unresolved. And thinking of our women, it would be better to say: «Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, for having created the woman.»

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Chapter by Yoel H. Kahn in “My people´s prayer book: Birkhot Hashachar”, articles by Elana Sztokman, Melissa Scholten-Gutierrez and other sources.

The minyan is the quorum of ten Jewish adults required to fulfill certain religious obligations. The requirement to have a minyan is not stipulated as such in the Torah. It is a halachic rule established by the rabbis, who deduced it after interpreting several biblical verses. One of them is Leviticus 22:32, which says: «And I will be sanctified among the children of Israel.» Another is Leviticus 19:2, which says: «Speak to all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say to them: You shall be holy.» A third verse is Numbers 14:27, which says: «How long shall I be able to bear this evil congregation that murmurs against me?» referring to ten of the twelve spies who returned with negative news about what they saw in the Land of Israel. From these and other verses in the Torah, the rabbis in the Mishnah concluded that a congregation of at least 10 members is required to sanctify God.

Rabbi Abraham P. Bloch explains that the first mention of the requirement for 10 to perform certain religious rites is in the Mishnah, in the second century CE. But it is known that in the Qumran sect, several centuries before the Mishnah, their codes stated “that wherever there were 10, a priest versed in the Book of Study should not be absent.” It is clear that the rule of having 10 men was firmly established even before Qumran.

In tractate Megillah 4:3 of the Mishnah, the rabbis established what religious obligations require having a minyan. These are: when reciting the «Shema,» in the blessing for the cohanim, for reading the Torah and the Haftarah, when saying Kaddish, Barechu, Kedushah, and the repetition of the Amidah, when consoling the mourners, when blessing the bride and groom, and when giving grace after the meal.

Bloch continues: The requirement of ten men for a quorum in religious services is more than a technicality. Indeed, this rule has had a far-reaching effect on the organization of Jewish communal life. This requirement mandated that there be at least ten families when Jewish communities were established in new places.

The Talmud itself does not directly address the question of whether women can count as part of a minyan for «devarim shebkdusha,» the religious rites that require a minyan. In Orthodox Judaism, only men can constitute a minyan. In liberal Judaism, women are also counted. Reform Jews were the first in Jewish life to include women in counting a minyan. At the 1845 Frankfurt Rabbinical Conference, Rabbi Samuel Adler proposed a resolution declaring that women «have the same obligation as men to participate from youth in the teaching of Judaism and in public religious services, and that the custom of not including women in the number of people required for the performance of a service is only a custom and has no religious basis.»

In 1973, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of Conservative Judaism voted that men and women count equally in a minyan. In 2002, the Committee adopted a responsum by Rabbi David Fine, which provides the official basis in religious law for women to count in a minyan. However, each Conservative community may decide whether or not to include women in the minyan. The word minyan in Hebrew translates as the noun «count» or «number» (the count or the number) and does not mean «ten,» although we all think of «10» when we say minyan. From the texts found in the Qumran caves, we know that the requirement of having at least 10 people in a religious rite is an ancient custom that, with some modifications, especially the inclusion of women, has been preserved by all religious movements.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Articles written by Abraham P. Bloch, Cyrus Adler, Lewis N. Dembitz, Michael Leo Samuels, Leon Morris, and other sources.

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was born in Warsaw into a distinguished family of Hasidic rabbis. He received his first smicha (rabbinical degree) from an Orthodox yeshivah in Poland and his second from a liberal rabbinical seminary in Germany. He escaped Europe at the beginning of World War II and came to the United States to teach, first at a Reform rabbinical seminary and later at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was classmate of Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. He accompanied Martin Luther King on the famous Salem March, and said that, as he did so, it seemed as if his legs were praying for him.

Few rabbis have been exposed, throughout their lives, to such a wide variety of approaches to and experiences with Judaism as Heschel. Professor David Biale says that Heschel’s theology is based on his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality in the light of modernity. For Biale, his most important works are: «God in Search of Man» (1955); «The Earth Is God’s,» his elegy on the Jews who died in the Holocaust (1949); and «The Sabbath» (1951), a work that ignores the numerous rules governing Shabbat observance and leads us to meditate on the true spiritual significance of this holiday.

In “The Sabbath,” Heschel wrote: “The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in the dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography. To understand the teachings of the Bible, one must accept the premise that time has a meaning for life as important as space. Judaism is a religion of time that aims at the sanctification of time. The Bible senses the diverse character of time. No two hours are alike. Every hour is unique.”

Regarding Shabbat, Heschel says: Work is a craft, but perfect rest is an art. The art of keeping the seventh day is the art of painting on the canvas of time the mysterious grandeur of the moment when God completed his creation. It is the result of an agreement between body, mind, and imagination. Shabbat is delight: delight for the soul and delight for the body. You can observe Shabbat by mechanically following its rules. But observing the seventh day is more than simply obeying God’s commandments. Sanctifying the seventh day does not mean mortifying yourself, but rather, sanctifying it with all your heart, soul, and senses. We sanctify Shabbat with things as mundane as special foods or beautiful clothes, not just with prayers.

Heschel says: Unlike the Day of Forgiveness, the Sabbath is not dedicated exclusively to spiritual purposes. It is a day where the soul as well as the body, comfort, and pleasure are integral parts of Shabbat observance. It must be the whole person, with all his faculties, sharing in the blessing of the Sabbath. Celebrating Shabbat must be more than a mere mechanical ritual; celebrating Shabbat must be an art.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: «The Sabbath» by Abraham Joshua Heschel and «Judaism» by David Biale.

It is written in Exodus 19:17: “And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the foot of Mount Sinai.” But in the Gemara, in Shabbat 88a, the rabbis explain it this way: “Rabbi Avdimi bar Ḥama bar Ḥasa said: The Jewish people were actually standing under the mountain, and the verse teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, turned the mountain over the Jews like a tub and said to them: If you accept the Torah, excellent, and if not, there will be your burial.”

The rabbis’ explanation in the Gemara was very different from what we read in the Torah. Therefore, the rabbis asked themselves: «If from this point on there is a warning that it is obligatory to fulfill the Torah, how does this explain the moment of Na’aseh V’Nishma (we will do it and we will listen to it), in Exodus 24:7, when Bnei Yisrael accepted the Torah unconditionally? Rabbi Mois Navon explains it by saying that the Jews in the desert were like children with respect to their relationship with God and His Torah. When children are developing, they need definitions for appropriate behavior, boundaries, in short, a system of morality. On the contrary, others, such as Rashi and the Mechiltah, explained it by saying that the giving of the Torah was like a wedding between God and the Jewish people, where the mountain was the Chuppah that united them in love, just as the Ahava Rabbah blessing in the morning prayer says, which speaks of integrating the love of God with His commandments.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik said: «Religious coercion is an oxymoron.» (An oxymoron refers to something absurd or incoherent, such as saying «luminous darkness.») When a ritual act is coerced by an external force, it ceases to have religious value or spiritual significance and, in fact, only increases anti-religious antagonisms and pushes the person to the opposite side.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin says: In a secular society, within the scope of laws governing relationships between people, the authorities who seek justice can and should use coercion and even force to establish a just society. People understand that these laws exist to help them comply with regulations they know are for the good of all. However, with regard to laws between people and God, forced adherence will have exactly the opposite effect and will only lead to resentment and anti-religious feelings.

Riskin questions those laws enacted in the State of Israel that compel a secular society to fulfill religious commandments by force, with «the mountain» above them, rather than with love. He suggests a different approach. It’s not the enactment of laws that secular Israelis neither understand nor accept that will increase respect for and observance of the Sabbath. Rather, it’s through getting the religious community to love and respect them, and seeking to get the religious to do their best, not so much to enforce the commandments, but to inspire. With halachic creativity, there would be a way, for example, in which the sanctity of the Sabbath could be maintained, and the beauty of our traditions, through songs, music, and food, could be brought to a large secular audience. Because by force, you cannot make everybody keep them.

By Marcos Gojman:

Bibliography: Articles by Shlomo Riskin, Mois Navon, Hannah Cowen, and other sources.

Gerhard Scholem (1897-1982) was born in Berlin to a Jewish family assimilated into German culture. His father, Arthur Scholem, opposed his son’s desire to study Jewish subjects, but thanks to the support of his mother, Betty Hirsch Scholem, he was able to study Hebrew and Talmud with an Orthodox rabbi. In 1915, Gerhard entered Frederick William University where he studied mathematics, philosophy, and Hebrew. That year he met Walter Benjamin, with whom he developed a close friendship that unfortunately ended with Benjamin’s death during the Holocaust. At the university, Scholem met Martin Buber, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Ahad Ha’am, and Zalman Shazar. Gerhard eventually specialized in Semitic languages, earning a degree from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. His doctoral thesis was on Sefer ha Bahir, probably the oldest known book on Kabbalah.

Attracted to Zionism and influenced by Martin Buber, Scholem emigrated to the Land of Israel in 1923, where he changed his name to Gershom. There, he devoted himself to the study of Jewish mysticism, worked as a librarian at the National Library, and eventually became head of the Department of Hebrew and Judaica. He later joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a professor, where he taught Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, a position to which he dedicated the rest of his life.

Gershom sought to teach these subjects with a different approach than before. He disagreed with the approach taken by the followers of the «Wissenschaft des Judentums» movement, the Science of Judaism, who, he believed, presented Judaism from a strictly rational perspective, much in the style of German universities. Gershom criticized them for studying Judaism more as a dead thing than as a living organism, and for forgetting that the foundations of Judaism included a part that could not be rationally explained, and that this was what made it alive. He argued that the mythical and mystical aspects of Judaism were the truly living core of Judaism and were just as important as the rational part, even more so than the minutiae of halacha.

Gershom Scholem is known as the founder of the modern study of Kabbalah, the branch of Jewish thought that seeks the ultimate truth about the nature of God, good and evil, and humanity’s role in the cosmos. George Prochnik says that for Scholem, Kabbalah preserves the framework of monotheism while shattering the idol that there is a single monolithic truth. Scholem often quoted Isaac Luria, a 16th-century mystic, who said: “Every word of the Torah has 600,000 faces, that is, meanings, one for each of the children of Israel who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai. Each face, each meaning, addresses only one of them; only that child can see and decipher it. Each has his own way of understanding Divine Revelation.”

Gershom Scholem was convinced, David Biale tells us, that modernity, by viewing everything through the lens of reason, had caused Jewish mysticism to practically cease to exist. Just as in pre-modern times, Kabbalah had been a vital force within Judaism, especially among the Hasidim, today, with few exceptions, its presence in the Jewish spirit has been diminished. And Gershom Scholem fought against this all his life, because for him, mysticism is what truly gives life to Judaism.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Articles by George Prochnik, David Biale, and other sources.

Mordechai Kaplan, one of the great Jewish figures of the 20th century, said that every Jew could express their Judaism through what, in English, are the three «B’s»: belong, behave, and believe. Belonging is the most common way of identifying as Jewish, through being part of, or a member of, community organizations. Practice is especially demonstrated by observing the commandments and customs, such as celebrating Jewish holidays or eating kosher. But believing is, for many, the most difficult way to express their Judaism because it involves defining what we believe and what concepts define us as Jews.

The matter of systematically defining a group’s religious beliefs is what scholars call theology. Rabbi Neil Gillman (1933-2017) was a rabbi who dedicated his entire life to the study of Jewish theology, especially Masorti or Conservative Judaism. Gillman was born in Quebec City, Canada. He studied philosophy at McGill University and was later ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In 1975, he earned his doctorate from Columbia University. He taught Jewish philosophy at JTS from his ordination until his retirement. He also served on the committee that drafted «Emet Ve Emunah,» «Truth and Faith,» the official statement of principles governing Conservative Judaism. In 1990, he wrote «Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew,» which won that year’s National Jewish Book Award.

Gillman was a student of Mordechai Kaplan at JTS. In one of his classes, he heard his teacher say, “Judaism is whatever the Jewish people say it is.” This phrase sparked an essay that led to a long conversation between him and Kaplan. That conversation led Gillman to seek his own definition of what he believed as a Jew. Gillman said, “How can I teach Jewish theology if I don’t understand it myself?” Every year, at the beginning of his course, he asked his students to write an essay about their personal Jewish beliefs, and at the end of the course, he asked them to do the same. Some continued to do so even after graduation.

Gillman said that sacred texts had to be understood beyond their literal and even historical interpretation. The Bible had to be viewed from a rather poetic and metaphorical point of view. He spoke of being a bit “naive,” not like a child or like his grandfather who believed that everything written in the Torah had happened exactly as it was, but like someone who understood that these myths had a much deeper meaning. For example, he said that one cannot believe that the dead will rise again, but at the same time, one cannot stop believing in a God who has the power to do so, because otherwise, he would be impotent in matters of life and death. The same is true of the Exodus from Egypt, Gillman said, a legend that has not been historically proven, but whose significance in Jewish theology is enormous.

With this approach, Gillman sought in each of his classes to awaken in his students that need to define their own Judaism, a task to which he dedicated his entire life.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Video lectures by Neil Gillman at JTS.

Kalonymus Kalman Szapiro (1889-1943) was born in Grodzisk, Poland, into a family of great rabbis. He was orphaned at the age of 3, and it was his mother, Hannah Berkhaha, who instilled in him a love for his Hasidic roots. He married at 15 and had two children. In 1909, after the death of his father-in-law, he became the chief rabbi of Piaseczno. In 1923, he founded the Daas Moshe Yeshiva, one of the largest Hasidic yeshivos before World War II. As head of the yeshiva, Kalonymus was concerned about young people dropping out of traditional education, assimilating into Polish culture, or joining secular Jewish movements such as Zionism and socialism. During those years, Hasidic schools had lost their creative spirit and had assimilated the rigid study format of Lithuanian yeshivot.

Rabbi Polen comments: Kalonymus, in his book Chovas haTalmidim (The Responsibility of Students), said that a child should be imbued «with a vision of his potential greatness» and be «an active participant in his own development,» and that teachers «must learn to speak the student’s language and express vividly the delights of a life close to God.»

In September 1939, after the invasion of Poland, Rabbi Szapiro was interned in the Warsaw ghetto, where he ran a secret synagogue. After the ghetto uprising in 1943, Rabbi Szapiro was taken to the Trawniki camp near Lublin, where on November 3 of that year, the remaining Jews there, including Rabbi Szapiro, were murdered.

The sermons Szapiro wrote during his time in the Warsaw ghetto survived thanks to Emmanuel Ringelblum and his group, who began gathering as much documentation as they could. They hid it in metal milk cans and buried them so that the world would know firsthand what had happened there. The collection of sermons was found and published under the title Esh Kodesh, Holy Fire.

Shaul Magid, in Esh Kodesh, distinguishes three groups of Kalonymus sermons: the first, where Szapiro is the rabbi who offers words of encouragement to his congregants, telling them that what was happening there was categorically no different from other times of suffering for the Jewish people. In the second group, Kalonymus has the difficult task of teaching his people to die with dignity and that despite the incomprehensibility of the situation, they were part of that divine drama. The final group shows us a radical theologian, especially when reading a note inserted in a sermon, where he writes that what he and his community were experiencing was unparalleled and unprecedented.

A student of Szapiro who survived the massacre said that Kalonymus had taught them that the best thing in this world was to do someone a favor. Thus, every time he thought about committing suicide or giving up fighting for survival, he remembered that he needed to do someone a favor and moved on. Kalonymus didn’t understand what had happened to God, but he knew that one thing that could save a person was to stop trying to explain divine behavior and do someone a favor.

By: Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: The Holy Fire by Nehemiah Polen, article by Shaul Magid, and other sources.