The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto is a journey into the mind and spirit of a sublime hasidic master in his moments of joy and tranquillity, and later, in his time of personal and communal catastrophe. The reader takes a voyage into the rich and variegated world of twentieth-century Hasidism in Poland, a world destroyed by the Holocaust. This is a volume inspired by a deeply sensitive and poetic individual of faith who is grappling with an unfolding disaster. While the Holocaust has engendered a voluminous body of religious and philosophical writings attempting to probe the issues this unfathomable period raises in all their enormity, virtually all were written after the war, when a modicum of distance and reflection is possible. Contemporaneous diaries and chronicles written as the events were happening concentrate on the descriptive accounts of the horrors. The Holy Fire, however, engages a sustained theological reflection and stands alone as an extended religious response from within the heart of darkness itself while the catastrophe takes place, and is, for this reason, an extraordinary document and an astonishing personal achievement.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
An Angel In Hell:
There are two separate issues to discuss in this review: Polen's book, and Rabbi Shapira himself. Let me start with the former. Polen has really done a superior job with the material here. She has taken the last book written by Rabbi Shapira--the collection of his weekly "sermons" and his private notes that he compiled while serving as Rabbi in the Warsaw Ghetto--and she has made the contents comprehensible to a general audience. Rather than following Shapira's text chronologically, Polen has mined the... more info
an interesting book:
This book traces the spiritual journey of a Hasidic rebbe during the years between the Nazi invasion of Poland and the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. At first, Rabbi Shapira thought the Nazi invasion was no different from other persecutions, and suggested that perhaps Jews were being punished for something. But by 1942, he realized that "there has never been anything like [Nazism]" (p. 133) and abandoned the "punishment for sin" view of anti-Semitism. Instead, he admitted that the Holocaust was... more info
The Best Detailed Study of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira.:
This is the 1st detailed study of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. The book illuminates the real issues of faith and doubt in the Holocaust. Unlike most books, which were written AFTER the Shoah and by people who were NOT there, the Eish Kodesh was written and influenced by the Ghetto. Beautiful retelling of how Rabbi Shapira's ideas changed dramatically by the Shoah. THE HOLY FIRE is a great book for how to understand how bad things happen to good people.... more info
The Best Detailed Study of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira.:
This is the 1st detailed study of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. The book illuminates the real issues of faith and doubt in the Holocaust. Unlike most books, which were written AFTER the Shoah and by people who were NOT there, the Eish Kodesh was written and influenced by the Ghetto. Beautiful retelling of how Rabbi Shapira's ideas changed dramatically by the Shoah. THE HOLY FIRE is a great book for how to understand how bad things happen to good people.... more info
