Letters of Light. Kalonymus Kalman Epstein
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need to serve and worship God in the most comprehensive sense. Though often bypassing the textual context of any particular passage in the Torah, the Hasidic homilist read even single words or phrases as keys that open the listener or reader to introspective insight, reading such elements as existential comments upon human life, emotions, conflicts, and growth in spiritual awareness.
What the text of the Torah would seem to present as a record of the past is read in the Hasidic homily more commonly as an allusion to states of mind and to changes within the self, with the result that specific moments in the “sacred history” recounted in the Torah become archetypal events that might radiate any person’s life at any time. Words which, in the Torah-text, have a precise context in the life of a particular individual or even in the historical experience of the people of Israel are read by the homilist in a way to apply to every person at any time. One might express that tendency in the claim that the Hasidic homily aspired to read the Torah in the present (or “ever-present”) tense, as a narrative that is constantly occurring.5
Already in Toldot Yaʿakov Yosef, the very first printed Hasidic book, Yaʿakov Yosef, the preacher of Polonnoye, repeatedly insisted that the true meaning of any element in the Torah must have validity and relevance concerning all persons and all times. The most relevant meaning of a verse—the homilist assumed—is one that applies to all time, not exclusively to a single point-of-time in the past or limited to a specific occasion during the course of the year. In this light, Kalonymus Kalman, like others, explained that though something in the Torah-text may have been occasioned by a one-time happening or circumstance, it nevertheless contains a message that is not time-bound but rather speaks to all persons and to all of time. And accordingly, for example, the Kraków master, like some others, would interpret matza (unleavened bread associated with the exodus from Egypt) and manna (the wondrous food that descended for the Israelites during their wanderings in the wilderness) as having a meaning quite independent of the larger biblical narrative in which they appear in the Torah.
The mode of interpretation permeating the classical Hasidic homily-texts presumes that the surface-level of the Torah comprises a garment of the Torah’s deeper, inner character. Every letter in that garment is significant, even while the Torah, in its present form with which we are familiar, is a translation of that inner and more sublime state of the Torah to our own level of being in order to accommodate the nature of our own physical and finite reality, a theme of significance repeatedly brought out in Maʾor va-shemesh. That radical recognition, echoing some much older sources, echoes in the way the Hasidic homilists tend to go beyond the surface meaning (p’shat) as they read the text of the Torah as a network of allusions and overtones suggesting a deeper and more inner meaning. The Hasidic homily sought to understand the garment in the light of that more sublime core.6
Hasidism emerged in the small towns and villages of the Ukraine and Podolia, spreading afterward to other areas of Eastern Europe. Only closer to the onset of the nineteenth-century did Hasidism begin to make inroads in Poland. Kalonymus Kalman Epstein, who came to Kraków at a rather tender age, became a central figure in Hasidism’s emergence in Kraków, the second largest city in Poland.
The young Kalonymus Kalman once went to hear Elimelekh of Lyzhansk (d. 1772) when the latter was speaking in Kraków and was much moved by the words of that noted Hasidic master, himself a student of the Maggid, Dov Baer of Mezherich. In the homilies collected in Maʾor va-shemesh, Kalonymus Kalman frequently refers to statements of Elimelekh. Identifying himself as a follower of Elimelekh, he would have had to stand his ground against the leadership of the local community at a time when the conflict between the followers of Hasidism and their Opponents often resulted in various accusations and counter-accusations which were sometimes brought to the governmental authorities. At that time Kraków Jewry, which continued to live in the shadow of the memory of the reknown sixteenth-century rabbinic scholar, Moses Isserles, was not hospitable to efforts to introduce Hasidism in that city. In 1785 for example, the rabbinate in Kraków proclaimed a ban on adherents of Hasidism, and a dozen years later a similar ban was proclaimed there against reading Hasidic texts.7
While Kalonymus drew a following, only after his death did those followers succeed in establishing their own synagogue in the city, and he never established a Hasidic dynasty that would continue after him. Neither he nor his sons succeeded in building any kind of enduring movement that looked to Kalonymus Kalman as its forebearer. His real legacy is that collection of homilies that outlived him. In referring to him in this work as one of the Hasidic Masters, the term does not connote any official position of leadership in a Hasidic community (a tzaddik) but rather an exponent of Hasidic teaching.
Even when touching upon complex topics in his homilies, Kalonymus Kalman tended to speak in rather simple terms. And he employed a conversational tone, a trait that may have accounted for the popularity of that collection of his homilies. Together with that simplicity, however, the reader cannot but appreciate the artistry involved in the preacher’s reading a sacred text often clearly against its very grain to derive a startling, unexpected interpretation. Far from reiterating the obvious, he tended to draw from a biblical verse some insight exceedingly remote from what would appear to be conveyed in the source itself. That art of transformation with all its subtleties, along with the preacher’s occasional ability to unearth a precious note of paradox in earlier texts and teachings, assigns to the collection of his homilies a place among significant Jewish literary texts.
Upon analysis, the most memorable homilies of Kalonymus Kalman Epstein reveal 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