Sacred Fire (review)

Don Seeman

Common Knowledge, Volume 9, Issue 3, Fall 2003, p. 547 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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lead to inhuman acts. Similarly, a climate of evasive thought, the moral inertia
that elicits unaccountability, and the escape of a nation’s military from civilian
control can all have dire effects. Glover’s prophylactic recommendations include

Little Reviews
the encouragement of respect for the dignity of opponents; the encouragement
of criticism of political authorities; the avoidance of social identities constructed
on the basis of a single parameter; and the development of an international mil-
itary force for policing the world. He also suggests modifying the concept
of nationhood to permit “soft-edged borders”— a reform that could lead, for
instance, to locating several national capitals in one city. Finally, the author feels
that the international community ought to take an interest in tribal relationships
internal to sovereign states. These recommendations may appear anemic in com-
parison with the anguishing, burning problems that the author raises, but one
dare not ignore his prescriptions, given the importance of the topic he so aptly
analyzes.
—Shlomo Deshen

Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, Sacred Fire, trans. J. Hershy Worch,

ed. Deborah Miller (Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 2000), 388 pp.

God’s pain would destroy the world were it not mediated by sacred textuality.
A woman who “allows” herself to be broken by suffering sends a protest message
to God about the nature of human frailty. These are some of the themes that
emerge in Sacred Fire, a collection of homiletic and interpretive essays thought
to constitute the last work of traditional Jewish scholarship ever composed on
Polish soil. Its author, Kalonymos Shapira, was a Hasidic mystic and communal
leader interned in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1939 until his deportation and mur-
der in 1943. The Hebrew manuscript was recovered in 1960 but has only now
been made available to readers in English. Clearly, this is a book that will help to
revise our view of Holocaust victims’ inner lives, but that is not all. Rabbi Shapira’s
wartime writing struggled to reframe the “problem of suffering” in phenome-
nological terms, as a quest for ritual efficacy rather than discursive “meaning”
alone. The work will be of interest to scholars of religion as well as literary the-
orists and theorists of human emotion. Worch’s translation and introductory
essay are very good. If read carefully and with due patience, Sacred Fire is one
of those books that burns through the world, and leaves it changed.
—Don Seeman