Sacred Fire is unique among the voluminous Jewish literature of the last thousand years. Students or readers of the first chapters can have no inkling of the places they will visit, should they persevere with this book.
Sacred Fire is not a diary or record of three years in the life of a Rabbi caught up in the maelstrom of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is not a book of reflections upon pain, terror, and horror, or a book about agony, futility, and loss.
Sacred Fire is a collection of Torah on the Sidra, or Portion of the Week, a format at once so classic and cliché as to invite immediate and critical comparisons. It includes a number of lengthy sermons around major Jewish Festivals and a few elegiac discourses alluding to people loved and lost. Because writing is not permitted on the Sabbath, the Torah was transcribed from memory, after the Sabbath or Festival had ended.
Like hundreds of rabbinical efforts preceding it, die Torah in this volume has a formulaic structure designed and developed in the beis haMedrash (study hall) of Eastern Europe: Quote a verse or a passage from Scripture, pose a question, give a simplistic solution and then follow it with an alternative, a sophisticated pilpul—casuistry at its best or worst, depending upon the reader’s taste. But Sacred Fire defies any scholarly deconstruction or side-by-side comparisons and analyses. There are too many forces at work in its composition.
In addition to the classical norms constraining the format of this work as a Torah of the Week compendium, it is also informed by the less massive but no less influential genre of Chasidishe, Hasidic Torah.
The Rebbe of Piacezna, R. Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, was a Hasid, and who but a Hasid could have written this book? Having said that, it would be a mistake to attempt comparisons with any other Hasidic Torah—with, for instance, the books Noam Elimelech, Kedushath Levi, or the Tanya; or any one of the basic Hasidic texts often quoted in Sacred Fire. There is too much growth; too much gritty, real life; or else, too much pathos.
In an introduction of this sort, certain matters have to be addressed and discussed. For which readers or students was this book intended—to whom did the author address his thoughts? What was the purpose of the book—was it intended to convey a particular meaning? Was the manuscript thoroughly edited by the author—did he remove certain telling passages or sections?
The following is a quote from Sacred Fire, written December 6, 1941.
This explains the significance of the Torah we say in times of suffering. For when we say Torah, some of the pain, prayers, and salvation enter into the words of Torah, in the same way that they enter into our words during prayers, thus drawing down and revealing the chesed (loving-kindness) [hitherto hidden in the Mind of God] into the Universe of Speech. . . .
Almost all questions concerning the intentions and purpose of the book are answered on contemplating the single most significant thread running through its fabric: the martyrdom of R. Akiba and his affirmation of the unity of God. Another quote from the same passage written December 1941:
We learn in the Talmud (Berachoth 61b), When they took R. Akiba out to kill him, it was time for recitation of the morning Sh’ma. They tore his flesh with iron combs, while he took upon himself the yoke of heaven. His students said to him, ‘Our rabbi, this far?’ He replied, ‘All my days have I been at pain over the verse in Scripture (Deut. 6:4–5) Love God your Lord with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. ‘When will I ever have the opportunity to fulfill it?’ I asked myself. And now that I have the opportunity, should I not fulfill it?” He was drawing out the word “One” and meditating upon it when his soul departed.’ With total self-abandonment, and through the elevation of his thoughts, he unified the name of God as he meditated upon the word “One”.
Sacred Fire is a meditation upon the word “One” in the verse from Sh’ma, “Hear O Israel, God our Lord, God is One.”
In a nutshell, the whole thesis of the book revolves around a single thought. All is from God, and it is all happening to God. God is at the center, and He surrounds every event. There is nothing else, no duality. There is no evil power, no satanic insurrection, no forces fighting for supremacy. There is only God and hesed, loving-kindness. Sometimes it is unbearable, insufferable, unspeakable, uncontainable hesed—but it is ever only One God’s singular loving-kindness.
I doubt very much whether the author in his wildest dreams imagined that the manuscript would be translated for the English-speaking world at the end of the twentieth or any other century. In the directions accompanying the original manuscript written January 3, 1943, the Rebbe wrote:
I take the honor to allow myself a request of the esteemed personage or the esteemed institute who will find these the following, my manuscripts. “The Preparation of Young Men,” “Entrance to the Gates (of the Duties of the Young Scholar),” “Command and Exhort,” “Torah Novellae” on the weekly portions from the years 1939–42. Please be so kind and take the pains to convey them to the Holy Land to the following address: “Rabbi Yeshaya Shapira, Tel Aviv, Falestina (Palestine),” including with them the attached letter. If God will be merciful and I am among the remaining Jews who survive the war, I ask that you please forgive me and return it all to me, or to the Warsaw Rabbinate for Kalonymos.
Later in that same missive he made the following request:
I beg of you my dearest beloved, that when God helps and these booklets reach your hands . . . that you endeavor to print them, be it individually or together, as you see fittingly appropriate. Also that you deign and endeavor to “distribute them among Jacob and disperse them among Israel.” Please print in all my booklets that I beg and plead with every individual Jew to study my books, and I am certain that the merit of my holy ancestors of blessed memory will stand by him and his entire household, in the present and in the future. May God have mercy upon us.
Knowing that the author conceived, or at the very least prayed, that his manuscript would become a book studied by Jews everywhere, I have taken his words as permission to translate it into English.
The tone of the book is pedagogical throughout, never allowing the reader to forget for an instant that lessons are there to be learned, life’s challenges to be met, and character flaws to be rectified—all rather predictable, and in any other circumstances unremarkable. What elevates Sacred Fire quite beyond the ordinary are two features that beggar description.
The first is a foray into uncharted territory vis-à-vis the Torah itself. Sacred Fire is filled with exquisite, blinding, and breathtaking profundities. In the following example the author proffers simple sentences sketching the murkiest theological cartography in terse, daring periods. A passage from a chapter written August 9, 1941:
At the end of Lamentations (5:21) we pray, “Return us to You, O God, and we will return.” How dare we ask of God that He return us? We sinned, we strayed, and He should bring us about? But note how the text says “. . . and we will return.” Let us, as it were, both return. We both need to repent, because if we humans have sinned, then the part of us that is God has also sinned. . . .
The second is the portrait of a man, the subtext from which the author emerges, as insubstantial and persistent as the afterimage of a searing, bright flash of light. Imagine if you can, how devout is the person sharing the following insight, from a passage dated January 10, 1942:
And now, while every head sickens and every heart grieves, and some say that this is not the time to talk of piety, repentance, or fear—whether of this sort or that—that it is enough just to observe the simple, practical commandments. I say they are mistaken, for two reasons. First, because even now we must worship with all the means at our disposal, with every type of worship. The second reason—which argues quite to the contrary—is this: Any person practicing spiritual reflection, suffering the fears we have described, worrying about himself and whether he may be sinning this way or that, and always looking inside himself for any kind of blemish, eventually experiences the most profound joy. After periods of introspection such as these, he begins to feel elevated and, because his fear is pure, tastes the sweetest, most rapturous essence of fear, described in the Sabbath hymn “God I desire” (by R. Aaron the Great of Karlin). It is a supernal fear, which elevates the man.
Students or readers looking for answers to age-old questions, for why bad things happen to good people, or any people, will find scant to satisfy them in this volume. Holocaust survivors looking for an indictment of God will find slim pickings. Consider this quote, from December 15, 1941:
In all honesty, what room is there, God forbid, for doubts or questions? Admittedly, Jews only endure suffering of the sort with which we are currently afflicted every few hundred years. But still, how can we expect or hope to understand these, God’s actions, and then allow our faith to be damaged, God forbid, upon finding that we cannot understand them? . . . So what excuse does a person have to question God and have his faith damaged by this prevailing suffering, more than all the Jews who went through suffering in bygone times? And why should a person’s faith become damaged now, if it was not damaged when he read descriptions of Jewish suffering from antiquity to the present day in Scriptures, or in the Talmud, or Midrash? . . . The reason why today’s suffering can damage someone’s faith more than it did in the past is only because he is more self-centered than he used to be. His pain affects him more than it once did. If someone says that he flinches only at seeing the torture of others, it may in fact be true that he is feeling compassion for his fellow Jews. But the truth is also that deeper down, inside himself his compassion is really terror of being forced to go through such terrible torture himself. It is this that damages his faith and feeds his doubts, God forbid. But, as we have already said, a person must relinquish his life, his self-centeredness and his bias, for only then will his faith be undamaged. He will be able to continue affirming with perfect faith that everything happening is just, and a manifestation of God’s love for the Jewish people.
In Sacred Fire we find passages of the most sublime self-awareness. From July 16, 1941: “We must resist becoming accustomed to the fact that Jews are suffering. The sheer quantity of Jewish suffering must not be allowed to blur or dull the compassion we feel for each individual Jew. On the contrary, our heart must all but dissolve, God forbid. . . .” From November 22, 1941:
When so many Jews are fallen—as casualties of various actions or killed by disease, may the Merciful One protect us—the person whom God does rescue and does heal cannot even find it in his heart to rejoice in his salvation. For, though he is a Jew—and why should he not rejoice when a Jew is saved from death?—nevertheless, he dare not rejoice. In his heart, he thinks “If I rejoice in my life, I am no better than the person described in the verse (Isaiah 47:8) ‘I, and no one else but me.’ I would be ignoring the destruction of the entire Jewish people, the multitude of men, women, and children who with long lives ahead of them have filled so many graves in the earth it is as though they had plunged alive into the abyss.”
While in the following quote from July 26, 1941, the subject of suffering is treated abstractly:
The Holy Blessed One is laboring to give birth through the Jewish people, and so the Jewish people suffer the birth pangs, losing their strength as part of them dies, for this is how they give birth to the Light of the Messiah. And for us, it is the same as with a woman squatting on the birthing stool. We know that the strongest contractions indicate that the delivery is progressing, that with each contraction the child is born and revealed a little more. So also, when seeing a Jew suffering greatly with the birth pangs of the Messiah, we know that a greater part of the Light of the Messiah is being revealed through that person.
We find moments black with the accretion and layered despair of year upon year in the Warsaw Ghetto, tinged with hopelessness at the thought of attempting to convey the depth of his feelings. The following, from the last Torah of the Jewish calendar year 5701, was written September 13, 1941:
Now, in our present circumstances, we can see that by comparison with the way we used to feel, we have become numb to all pain and suffering. In the past, we suffered every hurt, no matter how minor. But if we were capable of responding to all the pain of our current suffering with emotion and distress, as we once did, it would be impossible to survive, God forbid, even for a single day. The reason is simple, as our sages said in the Talmud (Shabbath 13b): Dead flesh of a living person does not feel the scalpel.
On January 14, 1942, he wrote: “We must strengthen ourselves and rejoice in the reflection that it could have been, God forbid, so much worse. . . . But when, God forbid, the suffering is so great that one is completely crushed and the mind has crumbled, when there is insufficient personality left intact to be strengthened, then in reflections like these, it is difficult to rejoice. . . .”
In places we find the blithest disdain for conventional thinking. October 3, 1940:
Even the best Gentiles think that truth exists in and of itself, and that God commanded the truth because the truth can be nothing but true. This is why they admit the verity of the rational commandments. They assume that God commanded them precisely because they are intrinsically true. It is self-evident that, for example, one really ought not steal or rob, etc. It follows, however, that regarding any commandments that they do not hold to be intrinsically true, the nations mock the Jewish people, saying, ‘What is this commandment?’ and so forth. (See Rashi, Numbers 19:2.)
The Jewish people, on the other hand, say repeatedly in the liturgy of the High Holy Days, “You, God, are true.” God, blessed be He, is true, and nothing else is true. Any truth that exists in the world is only true because God commanded it so, and wanted it so. Because God, blessed be He, is true, therefore it, also, is true. We are forbidden to steal because God, Who is the Truth, so commanded. And because of God’s commandment, it became the truth. And when God commands the opposite, and the Jewish court declares property ownerless, making it legally ownerless and removing a person’s title to his own property, then this also becomes true. When He commanded our father Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, then the binding of Isaac became the truth, and if He had not later commanded Abraham not to harm him, then the truth would have been to slaughter him.
For its treatment of the immanent themes of pain and faith, Sacred Fire will have earned itself an unenvied place in the canon. But to describe it solely in those terms is to ignore all of its glittering and many-faceted gems.
Nowhere in modern Jewish literature are there such paeans in praise of womanhood as can be found in the oblique and kabbalistic references to his late wife, Miriam. In discussing the biblical narrative surrounding the death of Miriam the prophet, whose yearly cycle of readings coincide with his wife’s yahrzeit, the Rebbe makes some of his most innovative remarks. Beginning with a somewhat esoteric discussion of the effects of human emotions on the spiritual forces passing through the body, the Rebbe notes how man’s noblest spiritual ambitions may be thwarted by common frailties such as fear and self-obsession, and how man’s frail corpus can make spiritual concepts a physical reality. From July 5, 1941:
As is well known from the sacred literature, there are occasions when salvation has already been decreed from heaven on Israel’s behalf, but it tarries because it is abstract and cannot come down to this world and clothe itself in physical, practical reality. So, when a Jew knows, not just intellectually but also by feeling with the very core of his body, that he must support and help his fellows, then mercy becomes a part of his body. When next he prays on behalf of his fellow Jews, he prays with a body full of compassion. Then, the salvation that was stopped for want of a channel through which to flow finds in this person a perfect conduit and spreads to meet physical needs as well.
This is exactly what is meant in the Talmud (Megillah 14b): When King Josiah was in trouble, he sent for Hulda the prophetess (II Chronicles 34:22) even though the leading prophet of that era was Jeremiah. “But how could Josiah himself pass over Jeremiah and send to her?” the Talmud asks. Members of the school of R. Shila replied, “Because women are more compassionate.”
A woman has more compassion than a man has because her physical body is more compassionate, and therefore women can bring salvation down into this world faster than can men. . . . The Torah tells us (Numbers 20:1), “The Children of Israel, the entire congregation, came to the Tzin Desert in the First Month. The people settled in Kadesh, Miriam died there and was buried there.” Rashi (ibid.), interpreting the repetition of the word ‘there,’ comments, “It is as though in the Torah were written that Miriam died “at the Mouth of God [as did her brothers Moses and Aaron].” . . . And Miriam was like a mother even to Jews who were not her children. She is an archetypal mother, and this role did not end with her death. In heaven she is still our mother, continually arousing mercy on behalf of all Israel, even for those who are not directly her descendants.
The following year, in a discourse on the death of Miriam, there are some even more remarkable passages. Referring to the Mystical Kiss of God, whereby the pious give up their souls to their Maker and pass blissfully from life to death, the author breaks new ground. While Rashi, the medieval commentator, remarks that Miriam also died with the Kiss, but the Torah omits this information because it is not “the respectful way from on high” to credit God with kissing Miriam, Sacred Fire takes a unique and unassailably transcendental view of the whole matter. What it amounts to is this: The Torah does not say Miriam died at the Mouth of God because then one might be led to believe that she was only as great as Moses or Aaron. She was much greater than they were! Her inspiration was innate, while her brothers Moses and Aaron had to be inspired by God. They may have died when God kissed them, but Miriam died when she kissed God. June 27, 1942:
Every Jew needs to know that even when he believes he is having a spiritual awakening as a result of his own actions, it is still always God, infusing him with belief and desire from above, Who engenders his awakening from below. . . . It follows from this that if a woman becomes a saint, studying Torah and fulfilling the commandments, these must be counted as her own accomplishments, because women are not commanded to do such things. If she was not ordered to fulfill the commandment then she cannot have been inspired with an awakening from on high.
And so, if Miriam also died with the Mystical Kiss, why then does the verse not say that Miriam died at the Mouth of God? And how does the statement made by Rashi (ibid.), “Because it was not the respectful way from on high,” answer the question? The answer is as follows: We have established that Miriam attained her exalted level not as a result of an ‘arousal from on high,’ but entirely through an ‘awakening from below.’ In light of this it is simply not accurate to say of Miriam, “at the Mouth of God.” And because the source of Miriam’s worship originated within herself, flowing out of her, it was truly Miriam’s merit that provided the wellspring, the source from which flowed the living, holy water that sustained all the Jewish people. . . . While Miriam was alive, as we said above, she performed even those deeds that she was not obliged to perform. It was obvious that the force driving her to such exalted heights of piety was her own exceptional yearning, springing from within her. With it she was able to inspire the whole Jewish people with the longing to yearn for God, and with which they would be able to prepare themselves properly to receive the supernal Light that our teacher Moses was to bring down for them. As we have already quoted from sacred literature, ‘our teacher Moses was equerry to the King.’ His function was to bring down to the people the Light from Above. But once Miriam died, the Jewish people were no longer able to access this great yearning, and so they were no longer properly prepared to receive the Light that Moses brought down from Above. . . .
In talking of the death of his only son, Rabbi Elimelech Benzion, who died on September 29, 1939 after having been grievously wounded by gunfire, the Rebbe asserts that all Jewish martyrdom is part of an unfolding cosmic drama. On October 28, 1940, the first yahrzeit (anniversary) of his son’s death, he wrote:
The Akeidah (Binding of Isaac) was a test of the desire and intention of Abraham and Isaac. It was never actually accomplished or completed because the angel said to Abraham (Genesis 22:12) “Do not harm the lad.” For this reason, the murder of a Jew by idolaters, which as an action devoid of worshipful intention is in absolute antithesis to the Akeidah, actually consummates the Akeidah. The Akeidah was just the beginning, the expression of intent and desire, while the murder of a Jew is the conclusion of the act. Thus, the Akeidah and all the murders of Jews since are components of one event.
In the following year on October 7, 1941, upon his son’s second yahrzeit, he added another dimension to the tragedy. By connecting it with the talmudic Midrash of the martyrdom of the ten Tannaitic Rabbis in Roman times, the death of his son becomes one of the mysteries of Judaism that even Moses on Sinai was not given to understand. He wrote:
Besides the simple wish to be the first to die and not have to watch his friend’s death, perhaps R. Shimon b. Gamliel meant something more when he said, “Please, kill me t’chilah—first.” It could be that he wanted to initiate the new pathway in worship that was being worked out. The new pathway requires someone to have such profound love for Jews that he would rather die first than watch his friend die, even though the friend gains no reprieve from his death. . . . It is not just those who explicitly express this sentiment, the desire to die rather than watch a Jew be killed, who are included in the category of those walking the path of R. Shimon b. Gamliel by worshipping God in his footsteps. Many among those who have died or been killed in these last years, and also among those who died in the pogroms that occurred earlier—may God have mercy, and say, “Enough”—were saints who walked this very path. They were people whose love for Jews was so great they were always in the most profound readiness to give up their life rather than watch a Jew in pain. And so, it was arranged in heaven that they should die first. This kind of love for Jews comes of loving God with a powerful, self-sacrificial, self-abandoning love.
There are number of complex leitmotifs forming a background, almost a framework, for the whole tapestry of the Sacred Fire. The first, Yir’at Shomayim—Fear of God or, more correctly, Fear of Heaven—appears in the opening paragraphs and pervades the book. So that the reader not confuse the concept with fear of pain, fear of punishment, or fear of loss, let it be said at the outset that for the Rebbe of Piacezna, Fear of God and Rapturous Bliss seem to be synonymous emotions or states of consciousness. The highest goal, the prized and cherished reward for endeavoring to approach God, is the promise of heightened Fear of God.
The second motif, appearing in the second chapter, is Cosmic Reciprocity: “as above so below, as below so above.” From September 16, 1939:
It is a well-known teaching of the Rabbis (Jerusalem Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 7b; Exodus Rabbah, Mishpatim 30:9) that God observes all of the commandments of the Torah. How then does He observe the commandment to repent, to do t’shuvah?
God fulfills this commandment when He repents of the evil that He has rendered, God forbid, to His people Israel, or that He has decreed to befall them. This is God’s repentance, His t’shuvah as it were. . . . But when God’s repentance is only for that which He has already done, or for what He has decreed, then the Jewish people remain, God forbid, in the same desperate straits as always. . . . They remain in the same very poor condition they were in before the troubles began.
We read in Psalm 90: “Return O God, how long? . . . Satisfy us in the morning with Your kindness. . . .” What we really mean when we say “Return O God” is “God, please repent.” . . . And we end by adding the phrase “Satisfy us in the morning with Your kindness, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days,” We mean “This is the repentance that we want of You, so to speak. Satisfy us in the morning with Your kindness. . . .”
But this is exactly the kind of repentance required of us, likewise. For when a person repents only of a sin committed . . . he still finds himself back in the state he occupied before he committed the sin. . . . The chief principle of repentance, however, is “Return, O Israel, to God your Lord.” Lest you think that contrition for your sins is all you need, the prophet cautions that the repentance must continue all the way, until you reach God. . . .
The next oft-appearing idea is the Martyrdom of R. Akiba, also introduced in the second chapter. Its chief sources are two talmudic midrashim. The first, already mentioned, is the Talmud Berachoth 61b, beginning with a discussion of the meaning of the Scriptural verse “Love God your Lord with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.” (Deut. 6:4–5) R. Akiba said, “ ‘With all your soul’ even if God takes your soul.” The Talmud uses the discussion as a springboard to launch into a description of how R. Akiba was arrested for teaching Torah in public and subsequently executed in the most horrible way imaginable. The second midrashic source is also talmudic, Menachoth 29b. Moses was shown R. Akiba and his Torah.
Moses said to God, “You have someone like this, yet You give the Torah through me?” God responded, “Silence! It arose thus in the thought before Me.” Moses asked of God, “You have shown me his Torah; now please show me his reward.” “Turn around,” commanded God. Moses turned around and saw them weighing R. Akiba’s flesh in the slaughterhouse. “Is this the Torah and its reward?” he asked. “Silence!” spoke God. “It arose thus in the thought before Me.”
The martyrdom of R. Akiba and his nine colleagues is the subject of much discussion in rabbinic literature, particularly in the Lurianic Kabbalah, where it is connected with the Genesis story of the sale of Joseph into Egypt by his brothers. Each of the ten martyred rabbis had to expiate the guilt of one of the nine brothers involved in Joseph’s kidnap and sale. R. Akiba, the tenth, stood in place of God, Who was the tenth conspirator in the sale of Joseph.
Another recurrent theme of Sacred Fire, is Loss of Self as a result of trauma. This is first remarked upon in a Torah written November 13, 1939, in a discussion of the difference between someone who has been cast out and someone who is lost.
When troubles are as great as they are at present and, as we see plainly, Jewish men have had their beards shorn off, they become unrecognizable as Jews from the outside. Then, as the terrible persecutions and unbearable tortures beyond description persist, we watch people becoming unrecognizable even from the inside. In these terrible circumstances, a person may lose himself completely and be unable to recognize himself at all (in Yiddish, ehrfahrliert sich). He can no longer recall how he felt on the Sabbath even one year ago, or how he felt during the week, before praying or after praying, etc. He has been stepped upon and crushed until he no longer feels that he is a Jew or knows whether he is a human being at all, or an animal without any faculties with which to feel. This is the level of being truly lost and absent. . . .
Whenever describing the effects of trauma or post-traumatic stress on those around him, the author’s language, while calm, may convey some desperation, as he gropes in vain to find the words for concepts essentially outside the scope of the classical Hebrew language. Bear in mind that Psyche is a Greek mythological personification, while the modern use of the term “psyche” follows an essentially non-Jewish attempt to distinguish among the “lower soul” or animal principle and the “higher soul” or spirit. The closest Hebrew approximations are “soul,” “spirit,” or “mind,” all of which are woefully inadequate in descriptions of the effects the Warsaw Ghetto was having on mid-twentieth century humanity. The phrase “cognitive dissonance,” while obviously applicable, may require more than a few sentences in Hebrew. From August 30, 1941:
A person in distress, who still has some spirit left in him, may respond to good news with joy and credulity. But if he has been so beaten and tortured that he is utterly broken and effaced by pain and poverty, then even if he is cognizant and believes that everything will turn out well, there is no longer a person capable of rejoicing. There is no one left to be convinced or encouraged. I have actually seen something like this happen. Therefore, the Torah informs us, “They did not listen to Moses,” even though they believed in him. “Because they were dispirited and because of their hard work,” there was no one left to be encouraged or to pay attention to the good tidings. . . .
The fifth idea treats a complex theological idea proposed in the Midrash and Zohar, quoted by Rashi, Genesis 1:1. Rashi says: “God originally intended to create the world to be governed with the rule of law. Upon seeing, however, that the world would not be able to withstand the pressures of Midath HaDin, Rule of Law, God preceded it with Midath HaRachamim, Quality of Mercy—making them both, Din and Rachamim, Judgment and Mercy, partners in governance of the world.” Discussion of this concept appears first on December 9, 1939, in a peculiarly prescient paragraph. “Why was it not enough for God to associate Mercy and Judgment, as He ultimately does when it is needed? Why do we need to be told that God preceded Judgment (Hikdim) with the attribute of Mercy? Perhaps this was necessary because there are situations when ‘on time’ is too late, times when the universe simply cannot stand another moment without Mercy, and so it has to come before its time.” Again and again he examines the midrashic quote from Rashi, as though it contains some essential cipher to explain events unfolding around him.
The final motif, God’s Pain, does not overtly appear until March 16, 1940, but once visible it can be found beneath all subsequent Torahs and can retrospectively be discerned, albeit vaguely, in earlier chapters as well.
God is connected to man, as it is written (Psalm 91:15), “I am with him, in pain.” In the Midrash (Exodus Rabbah 2:12) we learn, about the verse “God called to him from amidst the [burning] bush” (Exodus 3:4), that God called “Moses Moses!” without a comma punctuating the repeated name—while at the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, when God called to Abraham to still his hand from hurting Isaac, God used the comma and called, “Abraham, Abraham!” (Genesis 22:11) The Midrash explains this with the parable of a man foundering beneath an unbearable weight. He calls urgently to whomever is nearest, “Hey you you come quick. Help me shed this load!” So it was that God called upon Moses to relieve Him, as it were, of His burden; and Moses helped to relieve God of the unbearable burden of Jewish suffering.
The theme of God in Pain is given more and more attention as Sacred Fire develops, until it takes over from most other threads, absorbing them into its own fabric. December 14, 1940: “At another level, however, when the pain of Jews is so great that they have no strength to bear it, then the strength to endure, to remain alive in the midst of such terrible hardships and brutality, is provided solely by the Holy Blessed One. Then, the brunt of the burden is, as it were, upon God. It is not human, Jewish strength, that endures such agony and remains resolute; it is God’s strength, the strength that He has given to the Jewish people. God carries by far the greater burden of the pain, and so God calls out to the Jewish people, as He called out to Moses, ‘Come quick; help Me shed this load!’ ”
There is only one sin considered unforgivable by the author of Sacred Fire, and whatever harsh words he can summon are reserved for only one sort of person: someone who loses faith. Alluding to the traditional Jewish belief that even the wickedest sinners are not condemned to more than twelve months in Hell, on December 15, 1941, he wrote:
Faith is the foundation of everything. If the faith of a person is, God forbid, damaged, then the person is torn asunder and distanced from God. Souls condemned to Gehenna emerge purified and cleansed after having repented. We hope to God that all those suffering these tortures now will rise, cleansed, purified, and closer to Him. But the soul of someone whose faith is damaged is like a soul enduring Gehenna while continuing to add offenses to its sins. After a time, upon examining itself, the soul sees the situation and asks itself, “What have I achieved with all this suffering, if I am just as sullied now as I was before?”
One of the most astonishing facets of personality to emerge from Sacred Fire is the Rebbe’s ability to maintain perspective. He consistently distinguishes “personal” from “important,” and lives his life with this salient factor in the forefront of his mind. Throughout Sacred Fire he expresses the unbending principle of Tziduk HaDin, Justifying God’s Right, which obliges every individual to accept whatever is happening as Divine justice. From August 23, 1941: “A Jew must believe and perceive that everything happens at the hand of God, and that the Holy Blessed One does not execute judgment without justice, God forbid. This is fundamental. It is one of the Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith. . . . Besides this, it is also a source of strength and joy in times of suffering. . . .” However, the opposite applies when thinking about Jews as a nation. On December 15, 1941, the author emphasized what he thought made it all worthwhile, writing: “If only people would bear in mind that it is not because we robbed or did anything wrong to anyone that we are being persecuted, but because we are Jews—Children of Israel, bound to God and to His holy Torah.”—as though, somehow, with this thought in mind, the Jewish people could endure and survive anything the cosmos might throw at them. This theme takes on greater and greater weight as the escalating tragedy in the Warsaw Ghetto approaches its apogee.
Amid all this Torah of pain is a Torah of laughter. It comes at the beginning of the book, January 13, 1940, and deserves comment. It begins, as do many of the Sacred Fire chapters, with a quote from Rashi: “Rashi explains that the words ‘how I made a mockery of Egypt’ mean ‘how I played and toyed with the Egyptians.’ ”
The author brings midrashic proof that God never rejoices in destruction, even of the wicked. “So how can it be that in our text, God is saying, ‘You will tell your children and grandchildren how I made a mockery of Egypt, and laughed at their downfall?’ ” By distinguishing among punishment and educational correction, the author of Sacred Fire reconciles the difficulties. The first, he points out, is merely painful; the second is salutary.
Perhaps God doesn’t refrain from rejoicing in the downfall of the wicked, if the downfall also conveys an important lesson to Israel. Throughout history, Jewish people have suffered so much anguish, on so many occasions, simply so that they would be purified in the process, and aroused to the fear of God. But during the Exodus from Egypt, as the Jewish people approached redemption, God said, “This time, it is My great pleasure and joy to bring awareness and knowledge of Myself to the Jewish people, through tormenting and afflicting plagues upon the Egyptians, and not the Jews.” . . .
With this we can answer the question posed by our early sages, of blessed memory: Why was Pharaoh punished for being stubborn, when the text tells us plainly that he had no free will? God often says of Pharaoh, “I have hardened his heart, so that he will not obey.” But now we can understand it without too much difficulty. If the Jewish people can be punished, tormented, and abused so often without any fault to be found in them, but simply in order to make them aware of God and to awaken in them the fear of Him, then Pharaoh also can suffer a little, so that Israel may know that “I am God.”
In fact, the holy Piacezna Rebbe is indulging in a little Cosmic Reciprocity, laughing because God was laughing, mocking because God mocked. Throughout this Torah, there is the rumbling belly laughter of someone getting an insider’s joke. It is all the more tragic that of all the Torahs in Sacred Fire, this one ends with the words, “I am unable to recall any more of my words on this matter.”