Eish Kodesh--Piaseczner Rebbe

ATTENTION!!! By the grace of God. I take the honor to allow myself a request of the esteemed personage or the esteemed institute who will find these the following, my manuscripts... Please be so kind and take the pains to convey them to the Holy Land and to the following address: "Rabbi Yeshaya Shapira, Tel Aviv, Falestina (Palestine)," including with them the attached letter. If God will be merciful and I am among the remaining Jews who survive the war, I ask that you please forgive me and return it all to me, or to the Warsaw Rabbinate for Kalonymos. May God have mercy upon us, the remnants of Israel who are anywhere at all: Save us, restore us, and deliver us in the blink of an eyelid.
With profound and heartfelt thanks,
Kalonymos

...I beg of you my dearest beloved, that when God helps and these booklets reach your hands... that you endeavor to print them...Please print in all my booklets that I beg and plead with every individual Jew to study my books, and I am certain that the merit of my holy ancestors of blessed memory will stand by him and his entire household, in the present and in the future. May God have mercy upon us.

At the end of Lamentations (5:21) we pray: " Return us to You, O God and we will return." How dare we ask of God that He returns us? We sinned, we strayed,
and He should bring us about? Note that the text says "... and we will return." Let us both return, as it were. We both need to repent, because if we humans have sinned,
then the part of us that is God has also sinned... In agony such as ours it is difficult to repent properly, as we ought to do. So we beg of God, "Return us to You, O God, and we will return."

[Shabbat Nachamu 5701, 9 August 1941]

This, in general, is the difference between love and faith: a person can love God only when he feels the essence of God inside himself. As we say in the Shema , "Love God your Lord with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might." The commandment is to love "your Lord." You must love that part of yourself that is God. How else can a person love something intangible and unknowable? The opposite is true of faith; faith is always aimed at the unknowable and
intangible...

So, when a person finds the strength to access his most powerful faith, he
connects and integrates with all Jews. This is because faith at that level takes a person
beyond individuality; beyond private worship; away from the experience of"your
God," wherein every individual experiences God in himself, to the level of "our
God," which is much higher than any individual experience or knowing...

In the Shema... the emphasis is on the word "our" because the collective consciousness of the entire Jewish people is united in this faith, making God, one God.

[Shabbat Hachodesh 5702, 14 March 1942]

We also need vigor and joy in order to merit added inspiration. In times of desperate affliction, God forbid, when we lack vigor and joy, we are in a state of spiritual lethargy and feebleness. It is not, God forbid, that we have no faith, and to
insinuate as much would be grossly reprehensible. All Jews believe in God, but at
times they feel neither their faith nor the certainty it reveals.
Our teacher Moses said to God, "But they will not believe me... They will say, 'God did not appear to you.'" (Exodus 4: 1) Do not think for a moment that Moses the faithful shepherd was speaking ill of the Jews. He was defending them. He was saying, "The Jews in Egypt are in so much pain that their faith is only feebly experienced."

It could be asked: How Moses could have had a prophetic revelation, when to receive prophecy a person must be in a state of simcha (joy)? Aside from the fact
that Pharaoh was trying to kill him, Moses was anguished over the pain of the Jewish
people... This is the very reason why God appeared to Moses for the first time from within the burning thorn hush. Rashi (Exodus 3:2) explains the choice
of the thorn hush by quoting the verse (Psalms 91:15) "I am with him in his pain."

So long as God has only "Strength and rejoicing in His abode" (I Chronicles
111:27) then prophets too can prophesy only when they also are besimcha (joyous).
But when God is, as it were, together with the Jews in their pain and trouble, then
prophecy may also come to the prophet, who is likewise in pain over the plight of the Jews.

[Shabbat Hachodesh 5702, 14 March 1942]

In the Talmud (Hagigah 5b) we learn that while in the outer chambers of heaven there is always "strength and rejoicing" before God, within the inner chambers God weeps in His distress, as it were, over the pain of the Jews.

So, it is possible that at a time of hester panim (concealment of the Divine Face), which is to say, when God hides Himself within the inner chambers, a Jew may also enter and be alone with God there, each Jew at his own level. There within the inner chambers, Torah and worship is revealed to each person who enters.

There are times when a person wonders about himself, thinking, "I am
broken, I am ready to burst into tears at any moment," and in fact I break down in
tears from time to time. "How can I possibly learn Torah? ... But as we have said above, it is the Holy Blessed One who is crying within the inner chambers, and whomever presses himself close to God through Torah is able to weep there together with God, and also to learn Torah with Him.
This is the difference. The pain and grief he suffers over his own situation, alone, in isolation, can break a person... But the crying that a person does together with Gocl makes him strong... He is shattered and then emboldened to study and worship.