Letters of Light. Kalonymus Kalman Epstein
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Gen.: B’reiʾshit rabbah
midr. Exod: Sh’mot rabbah
midr. Lev.: Vayikra rabbah
midr. Num: B’midbar rabbah
midr. Deut: D’varim rabbah
midr. Lam: Ekhah rabbah
midr. Pss.: Midrash T’hillim.
Pesiq. Rab Kah.: Pesikta deRav Kahana
Pirqe R. El: Pirke deRabbi Eliezer
Sipra: Sifra
Sipre: Sifre
Tanh.: Midrash Tanhuma
Yalqut: Yalkut
Introduction
Hasidism, the Hasidic Homily, and Kalonymus Kalman Epstein
This book is a journey through another book that was first printed in 1842 and was afterward reprinted numerous times. It includes material from homilies delivered by Kalonymus Kalman haLevi Epstein who lived in Kraków, Poland and was first printed some nineteen years after his death in 1823. The literal meaning of the title of the book, Maʾor va-shemesh, would translate into English as “Light (or Luminary) and Sun.”
Words expressing light are prominent in Hasidism and in the older tradition of Kabbalah in which it has its roots. The central literary masterpiece of medieval Kabbalah is the Zohar, the title-word meaning “radiance” or “brilliant light.” Light is a metaphor for the Divine and also for the Torah, grasped as a manifestation of the light of the Divine. The readings of verses from the Torah comprising Maʾor va-shemesh grew out of a conception that viewed the very letters of the Torah-text as forms reflecting a Light that itself transcends the more limited meaning of the words they comprise. It is in that sense that this collection of passages from Maʾor va-shemesh, along with its running commentary, is entitled “Letters of Light,” which would approximate the actual sense of the original Hebrew title.
The preacher, whose words we will meet, came, quite early in life, to identify with a stream of Jewish religious life known as Hasidism. The word ḥasid, a word with a long history, can perhaps best be translated for practical purposes as “pietist,” and the term “Hasidism” came to refer specifically to a pietistic stream that emerged in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. Historians view it as a transmutation of an earlier pietism, highly ascetic in nature, which was significantly transformed by the teachings attributed to the Baal Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer, d. 1760, known as the Besht) and which parted from that older asceticism in favor of an emphasis and even a requirement of serving God in joy.
Though the Besht did not write any books, he succeeded in gathering around him a circle of associates and followers. During the decade following his death, the Maggid, Dov Baer of Mezherich (d. 1772), went far to develop and crystallize a worldview based upon teachings ascribed to the Besht, as Hasidism began gradually to draw an increasingly larger following among Jews in certain areas of Eastern Europe. Though Hasidism emerged within the world of Jewish tradition as it had developed over many centuries, based upon talmudic law and learning, it took exception to the attitude that regarded talmudic study in itself as the supreme value in Jewish religious life. Hasidism evolved in a direction that came to express itself in a different type of religious leadership, that of the tzaddik or the rebbe, a holy man touched by spiritual illumination, rather than the traditional rav devoted primarily to study and known for his legal decisions.
Allowing for a considerably broader frame-of-reference, one might grasp Hasidism as an example within Jewish tradition of an inclination and ideological bent that is present also in the history of other religious traditions. Those traditions, too, experienced a temperamental split as some followers were drawn more to emotional experience than to intellectual formulations and creedal statements and sought attunement to a deeper level of the self. Sufism, in Islam, and medieval Christian mysticism are pronounced examples, and one might mention also the pietistic revolt that emerged within German Protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 And though Kalonymus Kalman haLevi Epstein of Kraków, like other Hasidic masters, was firmly and deeply rooted in the world of traditional Jewish texts and practices, certain tendencies evident in his homilies might well suggest an affinity with voices within other traditions that related to their own very different roots in terms of some of the same general inclinations.
Maʾor va-shemesh is just one example of a type of literature that voiced the teachings associated with Hasidism. Beginning in 1780, just two decades following the death of the Baal Shem Tov, a stream of books began to appear containing homilies or homiletical notes of the teachers of Hasidism. With rare exception, the Hasidic worldview and its ideas and themes were communicated principally in the form of sermonic discussions on the weekly Torah-portions, in itself a highly traditional form, even while the content of those same homilies might suggest, in various ways, a radically innovative understanding of the tradition.2
As a written statement of oral presentations the printed homilies might comprise an imperfect record of the sermonic discussions themselves; in addition, such texts were not the most widely printed and disseminated within the population influenced by Hasidism and, in terms of Hasidism’s growth, were likely less significant than legendary traditions of a very different character.3 The homily-texts, nevertheless, serve as the indispensable key to our understanding the religious thought of the Hasidic stream during its earlier period. Taken together, the Hasidic homily-texts might be approached as a highly creative reading of the Torah (the Pentateuch), the basic Jewish sacred text which is read in the synagogue and is also studied and discussed in more informal settings, especially on the Shabbat on which any particular Torah-portion is read.
Beyond its role as a vehicle of communication on the part of the teacher and preacher, the Hasidic homily reveals how the Torah-text lived within the consciousness of the Hasidic Masters and what they heard or overheard in it. Not only the meaning, but the very texture of the Torah-text underwent transformation in the Hasidic homily. Even as they utilized traditions of interpretation inherited from much earlier periods, the Hasidic Masters and teachers would expound a passage or verse from the Torah in the light of their own specific complex of values, revolving largely around the importance of p’nimi’ut—the innerness and depth-dimension of the self, of a holy deed, of the Torah or of any particular legislation included in the Torah, and of existence itself.
In expounding the text of the Torah, the Hasidic preacher tended to grasp the more ultimate setting and reference of any particular passage from the Torah to be the Jew’s inner life as it confronts both the complexity of the human make-up and the unique soulfulness present at the deepest level of a person’s psyche. Hasidism defies definition; it is many things that might even contradict one another and must be studied in relation to an entire complex of historical and social factors and inherited ideas, but central to the homily-literature of its teachers is this core theme and quality of innerness and interiority.4
In the Hasidic homily, what in the Torah-text itself would appear to relate to what is out there in the objective world is frequently read as an allusion to what occurs within the self. While a passage from the Torah might convey details of a particular type of institution or cultic or judicial practice, the Hasidic homilist overheard in the same text a call for inner transformation, for a happening and drama that transpires within a person’s own inner self. And furthermore, any passage from the Torah, irrespective of subject-matter, when sifted through the interpretative process of the Hasidic homily, tends to acquire a devotional character. This “character-change” in the texture of the Torah-text suggests an implicit understanding, to the homilist’s mind, that the tone of his homily reflects the real and more ultimate character of the Torah itself