The Buried, Raging Sermons of the Warsaw Ghetto Rabbi

Where was God during the Holocaust? It’s a daunting question, and an appropriate one to raise as we approach Yom Hashoah, usually rendered as Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year falls on April 12. But it’s also one thing to contemplate this question from the comfort of an office or synagogue. It’s something else entirely to have addressed it from within the Warsaw Ghetto. That, however, is exactly what Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889-1943) did in sermons delivered in the ghetto between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1942, when mass deportations to Treblinka began.

Known to posterity as the Warsaw Ghetto rebbe, Shapira transcribed these sermons, which were subsequently buried in the hope that they would be passed on to whoever managed to survive. Published until now under the title Eish Kodesh (“Holy Fire”), they are far more than a collection of Sabbath homilies. Together they bear witness to personal theological upheaval and a spiritual struggle of almost inconceivable proportions, conducted not only under circumstances of unrelenting torment, starvation, and death but with a very deeply felt apprehension of divine absence.

As myself the child of two Holocaust survivors, both of whom lost many close relatives to the Nazis, I have always found the annihilation of European Jewry to defy adequate religious response. Whether God hid His face (to use a common biblical and rabbinic metaphor), or whether a new commanding Voice emerges out of Auschwitz (as the theologian Emil Fackenheim argued), or whether the Shoah spells the death or indeed the non-existence of God, nothing can soften or resolve the radical theological and philosophical crisis induced by the fact of systematic murder on so massive a scale.