Letters of Light. Kalonymus Kalman Epstein
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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 the reach of comprehension, as no idea or thought is at all capable of grasping God. The words convey that all thoughts necessarily fail to grasp God’s own essence and selfhood, which remains hidden beyond the reach of any idea. In the holy books this conception is referred to as “the Light that is unknowable.”
Even those heavenly creatures who bear the divine Throne (referring to the vision in Ezek 1) and who hallow Him each day as they declare, “The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!” (Isa 6:3), still find it necessary to ask, “Where is the place of His Presence?” (Ezek 3:12). His Oneness, which fills all the worlds, is not subject to any limit or qualification, and His very Self cannot be likened to any image. When the thought to create the world arose within Him, God contracted His infinite Divinity and prepared an empty space (vacuum, ḥalal panui) for the worlds, and that contraction (Tzimtzum) then allowed for the appearance of the worlds.
This is what the tanna [generic name for the rabbinic sages of the period culminating with the editing of the Mishna, around 220 C.E.] Shmu’el bar Nahman said, “The blessed Holy One clad Himself with light and created the world.”10 Of course, due to the vast brightness of the Divine, within the very course of this contraction the vessels containing the Light lacked the sufficient strength to bear that Light, and so the vessels themselves could not endure but were shattered due to the infinitely greater brightness of the Primordial Light. [In this homily, the preacher refers not to the Primordial Light which, according to a midrashic interpretation, was later removed from the world as a result of the sin the First Man, but rather to the intrinsic Light of God’s infinite state itself.]11
Consequently the world was left formless, leaving it without any possibility to endure, and so the Emanator (the Divine in its infinite state) had further to contract its Divinity so that the vessels might then be able to bear that Light. And through the second Contraction, they were able, in some small measure, to contain the Primordial Light, and the World of Repair (ʿolam ha-tikkun) came into being in which the vessels, holding that Light, might endure.
And from this conception, we are able to grasp those first three words of the Torah, which Onkelos had translated as “In the beginning / created / God,” in terms of the contraction that occurred so that there might be an empty space for the worlds. The very name ʾElohim (“God”), as is known, connotes limitation and infers such contraction of the Light. [Hence, the name became associated with judgment.]12
But unable to bear that Light due to its intense and powerful brightness, the initial existence of the vessels was annulled by the Light’s very presence, and the world turned to chaos (“The earth being