Submitted by Congregation Sha’arei Torah
While the armed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is well known, the ghetto was also home to many other profound acts of spiritual and intellectual resistance. A group of poets, artists and historians — known as the Oyneg Shabbes collective — risked their lives to record the truths of daily existence under Nazi rule and buried these records so that future generations might one day uncover them. Among these buried treasures were the sermons of the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, also known as the Aish Kodesh. Rabbi Shapira continued to write, teach and deliver sermons even as his world was being destroyed around him, and in a note to readers he knew he would never meet, he urged that his works be shared “among Jacob and spread…among Israel” (Gen. 49:7), so that “each and every Jew will study my words.”
The final sermon we have from Rabbi Shapira — delivered in July 1942 — offers a haunting glimpse into his bold and compassionate theology. In it, Rabbi Shapira addresses not his people, but G-d Himself: “Look closely at the suffering of Your people,” he implores, urging the Divine to abandon any distant, utopian design that would justify present agony. His words echo as both a cry of pain and an act of spiritual defiance.
Please join Congregation Sha’arei Torah, the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center and visiting scholar Dr. James A. Diamond, as we honor Rabbi Shapira’s sacred wish to bring his words to life once more, to study them and to remember. Dr. Diamond holds the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo; his vast writings include “Jewish Theology Unbound,” “Maimonides and The Shaping of the Jewish Canon” and many other scholarly works. Diamond builds upon his broad expertise with Jewish thinkers to explore Rabbi Shapira’s meaningful confrontation of the theological implications of the Holocaust. His lecture, “Spiritual Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto: The Buried Sermons of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira,” will take place on Saturday evening, December 6th, 8:00 p.m. at Congregation Sha’arei Torah.
