Letters of Light. Kalonymus Kalman Epstein
Hasidic homilists accused their opposition, specifically those devoted to the intense talmudic study of the academies (y’shivot), of often being driven by very impious, self-centered motivations, while the opponents of Hasidism, in turn, accused the Hasidim both of ignorance in terms of the level of their talmudic knowledge and of disrespectfully denigrating the scholar-class and talmudic learning itself.
Kalonymus Kalman claimed to find an allusion in the rabbinic agada of the two sea monsters to those two modes of study which differed in terms of their motivations. The one monster represents all-too-this-worldly considerations, while the other might be drawn to a life beyond the grave as he prefers death for the sake of a more complete sense of God’s presence.
The reader, however, can hear in his discussion a more conciliatory position according to which both modes, carried to an extreme, represent dangers to the world. The totally unblemished ideal of torah lishmah can remove its practitioners from this world through their total cleaving to the Divine in a way that could evoke a negative attitude toward life. And the blatent examples of torah shelo lishmah endanger the very existence of the world by the falsity masked in their study itself.
Realizing the pitfalls of both modes, the Creator placed both those modes themselves beyond the pale of reality, something the preacher felt to be symbolized in that much earlier agada of the two sea monsters.
The rabbinic agada itself, which would appear to echo ancient myths of a primeval sea monster (such as Tiamat),29 would not interest Kalonymus Kalman in its own terms, but he utilized that agada to engage an issue that acquired special importance in his own time and experience. His more complex reading of this cultural or spiritual conflict into that agada of a mythological character is an expression both of his creativity and of his ongoing struggling with the polarities involved.
The Function of Shabbat30
“And God saw all that He had made and found it very good. . . . On the seventh day God finished the work which He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day (from all the work which He had done.” (Gen 1:31—2:2)
Rashi explained that a person of flesh and blood, not knowing his hours and minutes in all their preciseness, must add from the profane (weekday) to the holy [as a precaution, one must begin a holy day, such as the Shabbat, at least somewhat earlier than required lest he might be violating the holy day], whereas the blessed Holy One, knowing His times and minutes, enters into a holy day at the precise split second, with the accuracy of a hair-breadth.31
That, however, still doesn’t suffice to explain, for God nevertheless completed His work on the Sixth Day and not on the Seventh Day. And a rabbinic reading maintains that the demons were created at dusk just before the Shabbat, and though there was need yet to create bodies for them, nevertheless the Creator hallowed the Day and refrained from creating bodies for them.32
. . . For the sake of choice and will, in order that the Israelites who accepted upon themselves the yoke/commitment of His Kingship might receive a reward for their good deeds, God contracted His Divinity in stages, from world to world, and made partitions and a screen separating one world from another. They limit the Light of God’s Divinity and holiness through a series of contractions culminating with the physical world, doing so, however, in a way that nothing exists even in this lower, material world in which the Light of God’s holiness does not glisten, for otherwise this lower world could not even exist. . . . And the person who accepts upon himself the yoke of God’s kingdom and comes to attach himself to one’s Root must remove all the partitions until one can experience the pleasantness of God, the sublime Light, the blessed Infinite One.
And concerning the quality of Malkhut [royalty, reign; the lowest of the s’firot], it is said “Her feet go down to death” (Prov 5:5, in reference to the strange, forbidden woman), meaning that it is the level closest to the realm of the ḥitzonim [demonic agents, the very word signifying “external”] and if, God forbid, the world would become materialized to any greater degree, then due to the thickness of the physicality of things, it would no longer be possible for man to turn to attach himself to the sublime Light. But certainly the merciful God who, desiring mercy, does not wish that anyone be banished (leval yidaḥ mimenu nidaḥ, a composite of words from Mic 7:18 and 2 Sam 14:14).
And accordingly, God said to the world “Enough” (dai),33 lest it undergo further materialization, so that even considering the contractions and evolving of the worlds, it might still be possible for God’s created ones both to attain a sense of Divinity and to raise up the holy Sparks from this material world to the higher levels of being. And for this very reason bodies were not created for the demons, lest the world become materialized to any greater extent.
And even now, it is necessary for each person to be careful to seek quickly to repair what he has damaged, because no person is able to grasp to what extent he has distanced himself from what is holy. It is concerning this that our wise ones intimated that God hallowed the Day and the bodies of the demons were not created, in order that the world would ascend and not become further materialized.
And this is the interpretation of the verse, “on the Seventh Day God finished . . .”: that with the Seventh Day, the holiness of Shabbat, God completed His work in the sense that it would not continue further. And as Rashi alluded, the blessed Holy One, knowing precisely His times and moments, entered into the Seventh Day as a hairbreadth, setting a very precise limit to the contraction, even to the extent of a hairbreath, and bringing down the holiness of Shabbat in order to halt the world’s process toward materialization. The divine Wisdom decreed that the world might assume physical character up to that precise point, but not beyond it. . . .
Comment: The master and preacher latched on to a rabbinic agada which explains the divine Name, ʾEl Shaddai, in terms of its last syllable, dai (“enough”), signifying God’s halting the expansion of the world immediately following the days of creation. The preacher, however, did not simply repeat a much older bit of cosmological lore.
He understood that motif in terms of a context gleaned from Lurianic Kabbalah which delineated the physical world’s evolving from the infinite state of the Divine. The vessels brought into being were unable to contain the Light, the manifestations of divine energy, and hence they collapsed. This cosmic scheme speaks in terms of a complex and uncertain relationship between forms and what they contain, presented almost on a mechanical level. The Kraków master, however, read both that example of rabbinic lore and its Lurianic interpretation in terms of the effect of such contractions on human consciousness and even on a broader consciousness pervading all of existence.
In Kalonymus Kalman’s reading of that agada in the context of Lurianic teaching, all that is spiritual in nature could have acquired a very precarious state-of-being. Hence, a critical need to halt the further expansion of the created world was crucial, lest it continue to acquire a more and more material, physical character to the point that it could fail to allow for any awareness of its more ultimate spiritual moorings.
A delicate balance between the material and the spiritual was in danger of being violated, and only a definite halt to the expansion of materialization could preserve that balance. The timing contributes a meaning to the Seventh Day as a way of preventing man’s drowning in his materialistic orientation and understanding of himself, something that could forever close the door to humankind’s reaching upward to its Root in the divine. Shabbat (the Seventh Day) preserves a sense of connection with a deeper spiritual reality, a connection that, however, continues to stand in danger of being conclusively lost. And the world hangs in the balance.
That sense of balance is heard and overheard in various passages in the collection of Kalonymus Kalman’s homilies. Furthermore, it will become evident that the balance is one that works in more than one direction as it guarantees that neither physicality nor spirituality would completely demolish the other, as only a proper