ב״ה.
הורני ד׳ דרכך, אהלך באמתך, יחד לבבי ליראה שמך.
ספר חובת האברכים שער הא׳, והוא מבוא השערים שבספר הזה
ספר הזה, חלק הג׳ של הקונטרס חובת התלמידים והכשרת האברכים הוא, ורק מי שעבר עליהם כולם, יוכל לעיין גם בזה.
קלונמוס קלמיש בהה״ק מוהר״א זצוקלל״ה מגראדזיסק
אב״ד פיאסצנא
With God’s help.
Show me your ways, O Lord, and I shall walk in Your truth. Designate my heart to fear Your name.
This is the book Hovat haAvreikhim. Section One, which is the introduction to this book, is called
Entrance to the Gates [Mevo haShearim].
This book is the third section of the work Hovat haTalmidim and Hakhsharat haAvreikhim, and only one who has read those may read this book.
Kalonymous Kalmish—son of the holy rabbi, our master and teacher R. Elimelekh of Grodzisk—
Av Beit Din of Piacezno.
Dr. R. Jon Kelsen, June 2022
Over the past three decades, the writings of R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapiro, the Piacezner Rebbe (1889-1943) have attracted increasing scholarly and popular attention. This is due, no doubt, to both the sensational circumstances under which his unpublished manuscripts survived the ghetto’s destruction, stored in what is now called the Ringelbum Oneyg Shabbes archives, and more generally to his role as what we might term anachronistically a Holocaust theologian. His sermons, delivered to his flock on Sabbaths and holidays during the dark years of 1939-1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto, were posthumously published under the title of Esh Kodesh (Holy Fire), translated into English twice, and analyzed by several scholars over the past three decades. The sermons are remarkable for both their theological weightiness and their homiletic interpretations of tragic contemporaneous events.
The Piacezner’s pre-WWII writings, however, are no less notable. These writings too have been celebrated in recent years for their sustained and pragmatic focus on spiritual praxis, including instruction in meditative techniques and general cultivation of religious consciousness within the context of a community of practitioners. These features render these texts a veritable treasure for some contemporary Jewish spiritual seekers, including those affiliated with the Jewish renewal and neo-chasidic circles.
These pre-war writings include (but are not limited too) a remarkable series of chasidic educational works. In fact, of all the chasidic authorities of the time, the Piacezner wrote the most prolifically and systematically on education. His series is explicitly educational in nature, addressed to young chasidic boys and men as they are imagined progressing along the chasidic path. These works include the trilogy of Chovot haTalmidim (literally, Students’ Obligations) the only one of these works published in his lifetime (1932); Hachsharat haAvreichim (Preparation of Young Students), and Mevo haShearim (Entrance into the Gates; henceforth, MH). MH was intended as an introduction to Chovat haAvreichim (literally, the Young Mens’ Obligation; henceforth CHA); tragically, R. Shapiro was murdered at Trawniki in 1943 before he was able to compose CHA and thus complete his series. Nonetheless, his textual legacy, alongside his active role as head of a large chasidic yeshiva in pre-war Warsaw, establish R. Shapiro as perhaps the most important educational philosopher and practitioner of prewar chasidism.
R. Shapiro’s vision for the spiritual formation of his reader entails directing him along the path of hasidism, which he identifies as the continuation of the path of the prophets. This understanding of hasidism as operating on the path of the prophets-- and of a genuine hasid as a type of prophet-- lies at the very conceptual center of Mevo haShearim, of R. Shapiro’s entire educational series, and indeed of his life’s work. His vision of an ‘educated hasid’ is one who has so cultivated his inner capacities that he has entered the world of prophecy.
What does it mean to enter this world, that is, to become a prophet in this sense? For the Piacezner Rebbe, this ‘becoming’ is by no means limited to what
one does, but refers primarily to who one is. In his own words, from Chapter One of Mevo haShearim:
[A]n erroneous impression regarding the essence of the prophet has been formed in our minds. We perceive him only in accordance with our needs, as a portender informing Israel in accordance with their needs (to locate the asses, or to bestow blessing onto a tin of flour and a flask of oil, or to advise them militarily as to which wars they should or should not engage in)… But just as we call an angel ‘a messenger’ and a ‘soul’ is named after the breath, though we know that an angel is not merely a messenger and the soul is no mere breath but rather has an ungraspable spiritual essence of which we perceive only its actions-- so too, though they were called prophets or seers…these things which the prophet did were not his entire essence. He was not there just to serve them…
R. Shapiro is here arguing against what he claims is a reductive definition of the prophet as one who foretells the future or issues political guidance. It is of course true, he concedes, that the prophets of old did fill these functions. Yet, we should not commit the error, he warns, of assuming that because the term for prophet (navi) derives from a root meaning ‘speech,’ the prophet’s definition of self hinges on his prophetic speech. To make this assumption would be to mistake the signifier for the entirety of the signified; that is, to assume that because the prophet’s primary activity involved speech, those speech acts defined his essence. It would be akin to defining a soul (neshamah) as a form of breath (neshimah); while accurate etymologically and, in some views, conceptually, this definition would be extremely reductive and misleading, and fail to convey the salient characteristics—the core definition—of the notion of ‘soul’ (e.g. a piece of divinity constituting the essential self of an individual). So too regarding the prophet: “These things which the prophet did were not his entire essence.” The
prophetic activity does not exhaust, nor even precisely correlate with the essence of the prophetic personality. What the prophet does is distinct from who the prophet is.
What, then, is prophecy, and who is the prophet? The Piacezner continues:
[Prophecy] denotes a level of divine service. It is impossible to claim that since we have seen him teach in public, that constitutes the essence of a master of Torah. This is merely one thing he does--but at his essence he is one soaked in Torah. Nor can we claim that the essence of a tzaddik is encapsulated in his good and righteous deeds. Even were we to say that he is a tzaddik because he has imbibed a certain degree of Torah and demonstrates a certain degree of righteousness, we would have still not described his true essence as such. Adjectives describing an essence are not the same things as the essence itself… (translation mine—JK).
R. Shapiro claims that prophecy is, more than a particular activity and form of public service, a mode of divine service (avodah). There is a long history of efforts to achieve (and testimony of having achieved) some sort of prophetic inspiration in Jewish history, even after the formal closing of the biblical prophetic canon, from Second Temple sources, through rabbinic and medieval texts106 and continuing well into the early-modern and modern periods. R. Shapiro’s point is to shift the focus of these efforts from a goal-oriented process, primarily designed to achieve a specific end (prophetic inspiration), and to instead understand them as forms of worship in and of themselves. To attempt to become
a prophet is, in this understanding, to attempt to become a type of person, to wit, someone who has achieved—and practices trying to achieve—a specific level of connection with the divine.
R. Shapiro elaborates at length in Mevo haShearim on the characteristics of this level. In fact, Mevo haShearim as a whole may be understood as a meditation on the nature of prophecy qua spiritual rung, as distinguished from a more specific spiritual capacity, and a claim for understanding hasidism as heir to the prophetic tradition. According to arguments put forth in Mevo haShearim, the prophet is not only one who is able to prophesize; that capacity is merely the expression of his spiritual stature. He is, rather, one who has achieved a level of consciousness and divine service in which the distinction between the material and the spiritual and, in a sense, the holy and profane become blurred. He is a transformed and realized individual, a human axis mundus, connecting heaven and earth.
a
At this point, scholars have taken only the initial steps towards full analysis of Piacezner’s writings and thinking through the prism of educational philosophy, asking broad questions such as: How might the discourse of western educational philosophy help frame R. Shapiro’s philosophy and educational efforts? How could analysis of R. Shapiro’s thought illumine the field of educational philosophy in turn? In my dissertation, I aimed to advance answers to these questions. Alongside this
synthetic analysis of R. Shapiro’s educational thought, a second major focus of the dissertation was the production of an annotated translation of Mevo haShearim, which has heretofore not been translated into English in whole. By doing so here, I hope to open it up to much more popular access and scholarly attention.
As is the case when composing any work of translation, one must make several stylistic determinations which determine the feel and tone of the final product. Does one translate relatively word for word, or paraphrastically? Are idioms and culturally specific terms of art translated or transliterated? Does one seek to preserve the author’s voice, ensconced in its syntactic frame, or to imagine how the author might have expressed her/his intended meaning had s/he spoken the language being rendered into?
In composing the translation of Mevo haShearim, I am especially indebted to Arthur Green’s “On Translating Hasidic Homilies.” Green identifies core rhetorical features of chasidic homilies, some of which present challenges to the would-be translator. First, these texts were composed as oral texts, with the printed version itself a form of translation. Second, these oral homilies were often conveyed in Yiddish, so that, again, the Hebrew ‘original’ is already a translation. Third, these homilies contain allusions and references to a vast amount of prior textual history, from the Bible and rabbinic works to kabbalistic texts, up to contemporary works of philosophy. While there is no indication that the Piacezner’s educational writings were delivered orally before being written, nor that they are actually translations from Yiddish, the writing does have the feel of an oral discourse--with repetitions, stresses, and addresses to the reader most familiar from this genre. Furthermore, the syntax is undoubtedly influenced by that of Yiddish; it seems clear that the author was often thinking first in Yiddish and then writing in Hebrew.
I have adopted a hybrid technique, usually paraphrasing the text to translate the ‘yiddishized’ syntax into a more recognizable English one, yet at other times retaining a literal feel in order to preserve idioms, the strangeness of mystical references, and some of the cadence. I account for the overtly intertextual nature of these writings--with their constant citations, allusions, and interpretations-- through a combination of intra-textual explanations, conventions such as quotation marks and italics, and annotations in notes accompanying the base text itself. I have also consulted translations of R. Shapiro’s other works to identify the modus operandi adopted by other translators working with these texts.
For translations of biblical, rabbinic, kabbalistic, and chasidic texts, I have relied on a mix of adopting standard translations and composing my own. Specifically, I will utilize the Jewish Publication Society Hebrew-English Tanakh (1999) for biblical citations, and the newly published Pritzker edition translation of the Zohar for zoharic citations. Translations of talmudic, midrashic, and hasidic texts are my own, unless otherwise noted.
The primary purpose of the annotations is to direct the reader towards the text’s references and allusions, since the genre to which it belongs is highly referential and interpretive. If successful, these annotations will demonstrate the degree to which MH is in conversation with and innovative vis a vis earlier writings. Further, I have also clarified, as best I can, R. Shapiro’s intent within opaque passages in MH, with an eye towards rendering the text accessible to both the popular and scholarly reader. Finally, when relevant, I will explain the rationale for translation choices of multivalent or ambiguous phrases.
It is important to note a specific rub which emerges in the case of kabbalistic references and citations. Kabbalistic texts often express complex theosophical and theological notions which operate within a deep matrix of interlocking concepts. Full elucidation of these citations requires complete studies of their own and will go beyond the scope of my dissertation’s focus. I am mindful of the helpful framing provided me by Prof. Alan Brill (in an oral communication, July 2018). Prof. Brill pointed out that, for R. Shapiro’s intended readers, references to kabbalistic notions were taken as references to “siddur (prayer-book) kabbalah;” that is, they were meant to be understood on a pedestrian, lay-person’s level rather than signaling more scholarly, textual, expansive understandings as expressed in obstruse kabbalistic treatises. Bearing this in mind, I hew close to R. Shapiro’s apparent intent, and do not generate an elaborate excursus of kabbalistic notions whenever he references them.
Over the past three decades, the writings of R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapiro, the Piacezner Rebbe (1889-1943) have attracted increasing scholarly and popular attention. This is due, no doubt, to both the sensational circumstances under which his unpublished manuscripts survived the ghetto’s destruction, stored in what is now called the Ringelbum Oneyg Shabbes archives, and more generally to his role as what we might term anachronistically a Holocaust theologian. His sermons, delivered to his flock on Sabbaths and holidays during the dark years of 1939-1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto, were posthumously published under the title of Esh Kodesh (Holy Fire), translated into English twice, and analyzed by several scholars over the past three decades. The sermons are remarkable for both their theological weightiness and their homiletic interpretations of tragic contemporaneous events.
The Piacezner’s pre-WWII writings, however, are no less notable. These writings too have been celebrated in recent years for their sustained and pragmatic focus on spiritual praxis, including instruction in meditative techniques and general cultivation of religious consciousness within the context of a community of practitioners. These features render these texts a veritable treasure for some contemporary Jewish spiritual seekers, including those affiliated with the Jewish renewal and neo-chasidic circles.
These pre-war writings include (but are not limited too) a remarkable series of chasidic educational works. In fact, of all the chasidic authorities of the time, the Piacezner wrote the most prolifically and systematically on education. His series is explicitly educational in nature, addressed to young chasidic boys and men as they are imagined progressing along the chasidic path. These works include the trilogy of Chovot haTalmidim (literally, Students’ Obligations) the only one of these works published in his lifetime (1932); Hachsharat haAvreichim (Preparation of Young Students), and Mevo haShearim (Entrance into the Gates; henceforth, MH). MH was intended as an introduction to Chovat haAvreichim (literally, the Young Mens’ Obligation; henceforth CHA); tragically, R. Shapiro was murdered at Trawniki in 1943 before he was able to compose CHA and thus complete his series. Nonetheless, his textual legacy, alongside his active role as head of a large chasidic yeshiva in pre-war Warsaw, establish R. Shapiro as perhaps the most important educational philosopher and practitioner of prewar chasidism.
R. Shapiro’s vision for the spiritual formation of his reader entails directing him along the path of hasidism, which he identifies as the continuation of the path of the prophets. This understanding of hasidism as operating on the path of the prophets-- and of a genuine hasid as a type of prophet-- lies at the very conceptual center of Mevo haShearim, of R. Shapiro’s entire educational series, and indeed of his life’s work. His vision of an ‘educated hasid’ is one who has so cultivated his inner capacities that he has entered the world of prophecy.
What does it mean to enter this world, that is, to become a prophet in this sense? For the Piacezner Rebbe, this ‘becoming’ is by no means limited to what
one does, but refers primarily to who one is. In his own words, from Chapter One of Mevo haShearim:
[A]n erroneous impression regarding the essence of the prophet has been formed in our minds. We perceive him only in accordance with our needs, as a portender informing Israel in accordance with their needs (to locate the asses, or to bestow blessing onto a tin of flour and a flask of oil, or to advise them militarily as to which wars they should or should not engage in)… But just as we call an angel ‘a messenger’ and a ‘soul’ is named after the breath, though we know that an angel is not merely a messenger and the soul is no mere breath but rather has an ungraspable spiritual essence of which we perceive only its actions-- so too, though they were called prophets or seers…these things which the prophet did were not his entire essence. He was not there just to serve them…
R. Shapiro is here arguing against what he claims is a reductive definition of the prophet as one who foretells the future or issues political guidance. It is of course true, he concedes, that the prophets of old did fill these functions. Yet, we should not commit the error, he warns, of assuming that because the term for prophet (navi) derives from a root meaning ‘speech,’ the prophet’s definition of self hinges on his prophetic speech. To make this assumption would be to mistake the signifier for the entirety of the signified; that is, to assume that because the prophet’s primary activity involved speech, those speech acts defined his essence. It would be akin to defining a soul (neshamah) as a form of breath (neshimah); while accurate etymologically and, in some views, conceptually, this definition would be extremely reductive and misleading, and fail to convey the salient characteristics—the core definition—of the notion of ‘soul’ (e.g. a piece of divinity constituting the essential self of an individual). So too regarding the prophet: “These things which the prophet did were not his entire essence.” The
prophetic activity does not exhaust, nor even precisely correlate with the essence of the prophetic personality. What the prophet does is distinct from who the prophet is.
What, then, is prophecy, and who is the prophet? The Piacezner continues:
[Prophecy] denotes a level of divine service. It is impossible to claim that since we have seen him teach in public, that constitutes the essence of a master of Torah. This is merely one thing he does--but at his essence he is one soaked in Torah. Nor can we claim that the essence of a tzaddik is encapsulated in his good and righteous deeds. Even were we to say that he is a tzaddik because he has imbibed a certain degree of Torah and demonstrates a certain degree of righteousness, we would have still not described his true essence as such. Adjectives describing an essence are not the same things as the essence itself… (translation mine—JK).
R. Shapiro claims that prophecy is, more than a particular activity and form of public service, a mode of divine service (avodah). There is a long history of efforts to achieve (and testimony of having achieved) some sort of prophetic inspiration in Jewish history, even after the formal closing of the biblical prophetic canon, from Second Temple sources, through rabbinic and medieval texts106 and continuing well into the early-modern and modern periods. R. Shapiro’s point is to shift the focus of these efforts from a goal-oriented process, primarily designed to achieve a specific end (prophetic inspiration), and to instead understand them as forms of worship in and of themselves. To attempt to become
a prophet is, in this understanding, to attempt to become a type of person, to wit, someone who has achieved—and practices trying to achieve—a specific level of connection with the divine.
R. Shapiro elaborates at length in Mevo haShearim on the characteristics of this level. In fact, Mevo haShearim as a whole may be understood as a meditation on the nature of prophecy qua spiritual rung, as distinguished from a more specific spiritual capacity, and a claim for understanding hasidism as heir to the prophetic tradition. According to arguments put forth in Mevo haShearim, the prophet is not only one who is able to prophesize; that capacity is merely the expression of his spiritual stature. He is, rather, one who has achieved a level of consciousness and divine service in which the distinction between the material and the spiritual and, in a sense, the holy and profane become blurred. He is a transformed and realized individual, a human axis mundus, connecting heaven and earth.
a
At this point, scholars have taken only the initial steps towards full analysis of Piacezner’s writings and thinking through the prism of educational philosophy, asking broad questions such as: How might the discourse of western educational philosophy help frame R. Shapiro’s philosophy and educational efforts? How could analysis of R. Shapiro’s thought illumine the field of educational philosophy in turn? In my dissertation, I aimed to advance answers to these questions. Alongside this
synthetic analysis of R. Shapiro’s educational thought, a second major focus of the dissertation was the production of an annotated translation of Mevo haShearim, which has heretofore not been translated into English in whole. By doing so here, I hope to open it up to much more popular access and scholarly attention.
As is the case when composing any work of translation, one must make several stylistic determinations which determine the feel and tone of the final product. Does one translate relatively word for word, or paraphrastically? Are idioms and culturally specific terms of art translated or transliterated? Does one seek to preserve the author’s voice, ensconced in its syntactic frame, or to imagine how the author might have expressed her/his intended meaning had s/he spoken the language being rendered into?
In composing the translation of Mevo haShearim, I am especially indebted to Arthur Green’s “On Translating Hasidic Homilies.” Green identifies core rhetorical features of chasidic homilies, some of which present challenges to the would-be translator. First, these texts were composed as oral texts, with the printed version itself a form of translation. Second, these oral homilies were often conveyed in Yiddish, so that, again, the Hebrew ‘original’ is already a translation. Third, these homilies contain allusions and references to a vast amount of prior textual history, from the Bible and rabbinic works to kabbalistic texts, up to contemporary works of philosophy. While there is no indication that the Piacezner’s educational writings were delivered orally before being written, nor that they are actually translations from Yiddish, the writing does have the feel of an oral discourse--with repetitions, stresses, and addresses to the reader most familiar from this genre. Furthermore, the syntax is undoubtedly influenced by that of Yiddish; it seems clear that the author was often thinking first in Yiddish and then writing in Hebrew.
I have adopted a hybrid technique, usually paraphrasing the text to translate the ‘yiddishized’ syntax into a more recognizable English one, yet at other times retaining a literal feel in order to preserve idioms, the strangeness of mystical references, and some of the cadence. I account for the overtly intertextual nature of these writings--with their constant citations, allusions, and interpretations-- through a combination of intra-textual explanations, conventions such as quotation marks and italics, and annotations in notes accompanying the base text itself. I have also consulted translations of R. Shapiro’s other works to identify the modus operandi adopted by other translators working with these texts.
For translations of biblical, rabbinic, kabbalistic, and chasidic texts, I have relied on a mix of adopting standard translations and composing my own. Specifically, I will utilize the Jewish Publication Society Hebrew-English Tanakh (1999) for biblical citations, and the newly published Pritzker edition translation of the Zohar for zoharic citations. Translations of talmudic, midrashic, and hasidic texts are my own, unless otherwise noted.
The primary purpose of the annotations is to direct the reader towards the text’s references and allusions, since the genre to which it belongs is highly referential and interpretive. If successful, these annotations will demonstrate the degree to which MH is in conversation with and innovative vis a vis earlier writings. Further, I have also clarified, as best I can, R. Shapiro’s intent within opaque passages in MH, with an eye towards rendering the text accessible to both the popular and scholarly reader. Finally, when relevant, I will explain the rationale for translation choices of multivalent or ambiguous phrases.
It is important to note a specific rub which emerges in the case of kabbalistic references and citations. Kabbalistic texts often express complex theosophical and theological notions which operate within a deep matrix of interlocking concepts. Full elucidation of these citations requires complete studies of their own and will go beyond the scope of my dissertation’s focus. I am mindful of the helpful framing provided me by Prof. Alan Brill (in an oral communication, July 2018). Prof. Brill pointed out that, for R. Shapiro’s intended readers, references to kabbalistic notions were taken as references to “siddur (prayer-book) kabbalah;” that is, they were meant to be understood on a pedestrian, lay-person’s level rather than signaling more scholarly, textual, expansive understandings as expressed in obstruse kabbalistic treatises. Bearing this in mind, I hew close to R. Shapiro’s apparent intent, and do not generate an elaborate excursus of kabbalistic notions whenever he references them.