aspects of an anatomy of the Hasidic homily in which a biblical passage or law is severed from some significant aspect of its own context. That context might be the larger narrative to which it belongs or a detail clearly intrinsic to the biblical passage. And when a verse or narrative-fragment or law is severed from its more obvious context, the homilist connects it to a different context. That new context might be a specific value or theme found in Jewish tradition or in Hasidic teaching or a more unexpected theme. The reader can note that kind of substitution of a new context in the more impressive and striking homilies in Maʾor va-shemesh, homilies in which the preacher emerges as a true artist. And the artistry of Kalonymus Kalman is revealed most clearly when the master substitutes a significantly more sublime context for what appears as a rather prosaic passage from the Torah.
The volume, printed almost two decades after the death of Kalonymus Kalman Epstein, is structured as a continuous running commentary on the (Written) Torah as read in the synagogue over the course of a year and is composed of homilies or material from homilies, presumably delivered in a prayer-room in the residence of the preacher himself. Maʾor va-shemesh is a decidedly Hasidic reading of the Torah, but it also reflects the thinking of a particular person and the ongoing tensions within his own mind and consciousness.
Beyond questions of authorship and editing and beyond the preacher’s literary strategies, a text of this nature reveals the master’s personal understanding of the Torah itself and of its very nature and character. Throughout history and extending to the present day in any tradition, a sacred text is read in a way that mirrors something of the mind and the values, the sensitivities and inner wrestlings of the person engaged in reading it. Every example of transformation of meaning in Maʾor va-shemesh represents his reading the Torah in a manner consonant with the stirrings of his own soul, and in that sense Maʾor va-shemesh is a kind of profile of Kalonymus Kalman Epstein himself. While he drew in large measure from the literature of traditional Jewish lore, including Midrash, in his homilies—as in those of his Hasidic peers—homily itself becomes a kind of midrash as the master’s pietistic and mystic values are grounded in a creative reading of the Torah and of later texts.
His sensitivities include a powerful sense of the uniqueness of each person—and even the uniqueness of every blade of grass. They include, as well, a recoiling from thinking of the Divine as an agent of punishment. Kalonymus Kalman went to great lengths, for example, to retell the biblical account of the drowning of the Egyptians at the Sea of Reeds in a way that separates the fate of the Egyptians from any intentional divine, punitive action. And an emphasis on compassion and forgiveness colors even his readings of episodes in the Torah that themselves would clearly seem to exemplify judgment and wrath. In a remarkable stroke of transformation, the Kraków master, with recourse to g’matria (an interpretative strategy based upon the numerical value of letters), read the command in the Torah to obliterate the very memory of Amalek, a desert tribe associated with the extremes of cruelty and inhumanity, as a code to transform egotism and arrogance into love and into a sense of the all-pervading divine Oneness.
The homilies disclose the preacher’s ongoing inner tensions as he wrestled with the relationship between the innerness of the Torah and the “revealed” Torah, including both its surface-meaning and the tradition of interpretation and rabbinic law that it engendered. Similarly, he struggled, without resolution, but in highly interesting ways, with the question of the primacy of the group versus that of the individual, the values of the inner life in solitude vis-à-vis those of the community. The Kraków preacher’s insights into that polarity might prefigure some very contemporary discussion and issues arising specifically in our own time.
The very title given to the collection, Maʾor va-shemesh, points to an emphasis upon light. Identifying the Torah and its very letters as manifestations of divine Light, Kalonymus Kalman was instinctively driven to interpret any and every element in the text of the Torah in a way that he felt expresses and exemplifies that Light. And though Kalonymus Kalman Epstein was certainly a child and product of his time, significant elements of that collection of his homilies might also suggest some more modern sensitivities and can serve as a source of spiritual illumination to those living in our own hour of time.
NOTE: In the 1877 printing of Ma’or va-shemesh, from which the passages in this collection were translated, the homilies generally opened with a quotation from the appropriate Torah-portion, often in very abbreviated form with the assumption that the reader would easily and immediately associate the brief quotation with its larger textual context and its link with the homily. This edition has often expanded those very brief passages or fragments for the purpose of enabling the reader to grasp the actual connection between the quotation and the homily. Such additions are generally placed in parentheses, and certain explanatory additions, quite indispensable for grasping the precise meaning of the biblical text in terms of its relevance to the homily, are placed in square brackets. And when the particular nuance in the way the homilist read a biblical verse differs from the JTS translation, the homilist’s emphasis appears in parentheses within the translation.
1. See Stoffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism.
2. Dan, Sifrut ha-musar v’had’rush, 267.
3. Gries, Sefer, sofer vesippur, 27–30, 47–68; The Book in the Jewish World 1700–1900, 85–87.
4. See Margolin, Mikdash ʾadam.
5. Wineman, “How the Hasidic Masters Read the Torah.”
6. Note S’fat ʾemet, IV, 3b (B’midbar).
7. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 180, 196.
1
B’reiʾshit
The Need to Go beyond the Literal Sense of the Torah8
The first verse of the Torah, introducing an account of creation, consists of seven Hebrew words, and the combined numerical value (g’matria) of the first letter of each of those words adds up to twenty-two, the number of letters of the Hebrew alphabet, an allusion suggesting that all the worlds were created through those twenty-two letters of the Torah.
[According to g’matria, each letter of the alphabet has a numerical value. Hence it is possible to add up the numerical values of all the letters of a word and deduce meaning in terms of the equivalence of that word with another word having the same total numerical value. G’matria served as an interpretative strategy already in the rabbinic period and not infrequently served the same function in the Hasidic homily-literature. The mathematical observation mentioned above reinforced the concept that the Torah preceded the world and that God created the world(s) on the basis of the Torah and its letters, which served as a blueprint of creation.9]
Onkelos [who translated the Torah from Hebrew to Aramaic in the second century, C.E.] translated the first three words as “In the beginning / created / God,” but one must understand, as Rashi [acronym for Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitshak, the foremost medieval commentator of both the Torah and the Babylonian Talmud] explained, that grammatically it is not possible to interpret the first word, B’reiʾshit, simply as indicating “In the beginning.” It would appear, rather, that the words and their order intimate that God’s own Self is beyond
