He Gets You

For Rabbi Kahane, it’s not hard to see why the Piaseczner Rebbe’s thoughts would strike a chord.

“There’s something magnificent about his seforim,” he says. “They’re unique. With Aish Kodesh in particular, it’s because of the circumstances under which he wrote it. A lot of the appeal of Aish Kodesh is the fact that you feel like he really gets you. His approach is not happy-go-lucky, ‘all is good, don’t worry about your pain.’ He really understands that.”

Rabbi Kahane says that Aish Kodesh shows a profound understanding of human nature, of the way people think, work, and grow. “It’s a sefer chassidus, but it really reads like a sefer mussar on many levels. And while many of the sifrei mussar — Mesillas Yesharim, Shaarei Teshuvah — were written for a different era, and you really have to work to apply the ideas to your own life, the Piaseczner gets it right on every single thing he says. How did he know you were scared about a certain issue? You feel that he understands you, and that’s extremely comforting.”

While the Rebbe understands his readers very well, Rabbi Kahane says the goal is really to make them work. His message is not always easy to absorb, but the journey of reading it brings people to confront the fact that inevitably they must follow the Rebbe’s advice.

“I’ll tell you something unique about his work that increases the impact from a mussar component,” says Rabbi Kahane. “In Chovas Hatalmidim specifically, but it’s really like this throughout his works, he writes with a tremendous amount of love for the reader — ‘talmidi hayakar,’ ‘talmidi hachashuv,’ ‘talmidi ha’ahuv.’ Then he’ll give serious mussar about how the yetzer threatens to destroy you and keep you from fulfilling your potential.

“There’s a certain detail here that I think speaks to people in a very deep way. The Rebbe himself is saying, ‘I care about you.’ And if you feel that he cares about you, then you can absorb the message. A lot of people mention that when they read Chovas Hatalmidim, they feel that although the Rebbe never met them, he really believes in them.”

There is nevertheless a challenge in presenting Aish Kodesh to a modern audience, mainly because of how the book came to be. Originally culled from drashos to his chassidim at Shalosh Seudos in the Warsaw Ghetto, the book never benefited from the Rebbe’s review and edits.

“Aish Kodesh is not very organized, but when it’s presented in a systematic way, it really clicks,” says Rabbi Kahane. “There’s no way that a standard teenager is going to be able to read Aish Kodesh and really get the maximum from it. These ideas are so crucial now, yet largely inaccessible to this generation.”

In trying to give structure to the ideas in Aish Kodesh, Rabbi Kahane’s first question was: Who was the Rebbe’s intended audience? Given the hopeless situation in the Warsaw Ghetto, he knew the chassidim attending his Shalosh Seudos would probably not be able to carry the message forward. So for whom did he stash away the manuscripts to be found after the war? Rabbi Kahane was left with only one possible answer.

“He wrote it for this generation,” he says. “This generation, who can’t access it, but who the Rebbe sensed would need it. So, I came to the conclusion that this was what I had to do.”

Under the Rubble

Rav Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe, was born in 1889 in a small town outside Warsaw called Grodzisk. He had a formidable yichus: His father, Rav Elimelech Shapira, was an outstanding rebbe in his own right, the great-grandson of the Noam Elimelech of Lizhensk (after whom he was named), and the Maggid of Kozhnitz. His mother, Chana Bracha Horwicz, was a granddaughter of the author of the famed sefer Maor V’shemesh, Rav Kalonymus Kalman Epstein — after whom the Piaseczner Rebbe was named.

When the Rebbe was three, his father was niftar. Left without a father, he and his brother — Rav Yeshaya Shapira, who would move to Eretz Yisrael in 1920 and become known as the Admor Hachalutz, the “Pioneer Rebbe” — gravitated toward the court of Kozhnitz. At age 15, the Rebbe would marry the Kozhnitzer Rebbe’s daughter, Rachel Chaya Miriam, and settle in Kozhnitz. When his father-in-law, the Kozhnitzer Rebbe, was niftar in 1909, the Rebbe and his wife moved to Piaseczno, a small town ten miles south of Warsaw. Although he was only 20 at the time, his wisdom and charisma quickly attracted a following, and he assumed the formal title of Piaseczner Rebbe. The chassidus flourished over the next few years, and the Rebbe’s reputation spread far and wide.

“The Rebbe had a face that shone like an angel, with eyes like an eagle. You thought that if he looked at you, he saw your inner being,” according to Reb Chaim Keimar, a talmid of the Rebbe when he was a young bochur.

The Rebbe became known as an expert on chinuch, and in 1932 he published his only work to be printed in his lifetime, Chovas Hatalmidim, written in response to the spiritual crisis sweeping through Jewish youth in Poland and still considered a classic today.

The Rebbe endured severe personal trials over the next few years. His wife passed away in 1937, and several weeks after World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, when the Rebbe was in Warsaw, his son Elimelech was struck by shrapnel from a German bomb and died of his wounds. The Rebbe also had a daughter, who survived that bombing but would later be killed in the Treblinka death camp.

On October 12, 1940, the Germans established the Warsaw Ghetto, cramming the city’s 350,000 Jews into a small walled-off area. Starvation and disease were rampant, and from July 1942, the Germans began deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka.

During this time, the Rebbe was assigned work in a shoe factory. He became a source of emunah and chizuk, continuing to give shiurim, and even performing bris milah, weddings, and building mikvaos in secret. He gave uplifting drashos every Shabbos at Shalosh Seudos that taught deep lessons in maintaining faith and building a relationship with Hashem even during periods of intense pain and grief.

“Only someone with such a profound understanding of people — how they feel and how they grow — and an absolute mastery of the entire Torah, both in mind and heart, could inspire such downtrodden individuals toward spiritual growth during such dark times,” Rabbi Kahane says.

There was a religious historian in the Warsaw Ghetto who led an effort to preserve documents and other materials as evidence of the Nazi atrocities. The Rebbe handed over the manuscripts of his Shalosh Seudos derashos, along with written instructions that survivors should convey his writings to his brother in Eretz Yisrael. The manuscripts were deposited in metal milk cans and buried at various locations throughout the ghetto.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on Erev Pesach 1943 triggered the massive final Nazi liquidation of the ghetto. Most of the remaining Jews were deported to Treblinka, while the Rebbe was among a smaller group sent to the Trawniki slave labor camp. On November 2, 1943/4 Cheshvan 5704, all the inmates at Trawniki, including the Piaseczner Rebbe, were ordered shot.

In 1950, a Polish construction worker digging foundations on the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto came across some buried milk cans. Looking inside, he discovered manuscripts written in Hebrew, which he offered to the Polish National Museum. A few years later, those manuscripts were discovered by some Jews, who came across the note: “Whoever finds this manuscript should please send it to Yeshaya Shapira, Tel Aviv, Palestine.” Reb Yeshaya had passed away a decade before, but his son Reb Elimelech, who maintained his father’s small shtibel in Tel Aviv, organized and printed the manuscript in 1960 as Aish Kodesh — a little-known gift for generations to come.

Born to Teach

Rabbi Meir B. Kahane’s background certainly provided him with ample preparation to write such an important sefer. Born in Memphis in 1976, he was raised in a Jewish community under the stewardship of Rabbi Nota Greenblatt and his nephew Rabbi Ephraim Greenblatt.

“The Greenblatts were a very big part of the Memphis community, and they changed a lot of lives,” Rabbi Kahane says. “They were very big people. Either one of them could have been a rosh yeshivah, yet this was their decision, to go to Memphis. Rav Ephraim would learn alef-beis with kids and with adults — it didn’t bother him. He was the crossing guard who helped kids across the street. It was all with a cheshbon —he wanted the kids to know how much he cared about them.”

After graduating high school in Memphis, Meir Kahane spent the next ten years in Eretz Yisrael at Toras Moshe — three years as a bochur and the next seven in kollel after he got married. He then switched to another kollel under Rav Simcha Maimon for five years, when he got pulled into teaching — a longtime ambition. He joined the Chedvas Bais Yaakov seminary as menahel when it opened, and it’s now set to begin its 18th year.

“I always loved teaching, even when I was very young,” he says. “When I was in high school, I took part in a kiruv program with public school kids. When the Aish HaTorah Discovery Seminar came to my hometown, I wanted to go see their techniques, because that was the gold standard. I was enthralled by it, by the methodology and the way they went about it. I wanted to teach in Discovery — but I was 15 at the time.”

He would get another opportunity later on, though. After he was already married, he was approached by a Discovery leader who was looking for new speakers. Of course, Rabbi Kahane jumped at the chance.

Rabbi Kahane’s position with Discovery turned out to be fruitful in a number of ways. For one, it provided him with a career network; the other Discovery instructors worked as teachers in various institutions and provided him with employment leads. For another, once he was involved with chinuch in yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs, and students asked him about the provability of G-d, he could refer them to Discovery.

“It was really very helpful for them,” he says. “Listen, I’m a major, major fan of the yeshivah system and of the Bais Yaakov system. Mi k’amcha Yisrael, there’s hardly a more successful school system in all of world history. I began to see, though, that if I was going to continue to reach students, I was going to have to adjust my curriculum to deal with questions like, ‘Why would Hashem hurt me?’ ”

Upping His Game

Ultimately, Rabbi Kahane wrote A Fire in the Darkness to answer that very question. The book that he has produced is built around Aish Kodesh, but, in his words from the preface, it is “not a translation… but rather a development of the Rebbe’s words as a cohesive and organized system for growth for one undergoing suffering.” He’s left the Rebbe’s Shalosh Seudos derashos largely intact, but grouped them according to subject categories. The book’s ten parts carry titles like “Making Sense of Suffering,” “Growing during Pain,” and “What If Knowing This Does Not Help?”

In addition, Rabbi Kahane often spells out concepts that the Rebbe addresses only in shorthand. Because so many of the topics the Rebbe deals with are kabbalistic in nature, Rabbi Kahane takes pains to explain them to an audience unfamiliar with chassidic literature.

“With the Piaseczner, all these things are very nuanced,” says Rabbi Kahane. “You have to go through it very carefully. In A Fire in the Darkness, one of the major messages is that you don’t have to be scared of pain. It is what it is. What you have to do is make the pain worth it. And the way you make it worth it is from growth in Torah.

“Torah is the answer to everything. And if you start compromising on Torah, then you went through the pain and it wasn’t even worth it. If you build yourself through Torah, as a guidebook for development for what you’re going through, you don’t discard it but actually hold on to it.”

Like every mechanech, Rabbi Kahane has had to answer questions from students that cut to the heart of Yiddishkeit. But as he writes at the outset of the book, he has seen a shift in the kind of questions students ask over the decade or more. And that change was a primary motivation for him to write the book.

“When I first started teaching, the students were a little more inquisitive and a little bit more suspicious,” he says. “Their questions were more along the lines of, ‘How do I know there’s a G-d?’ or, ‘How do I know the Torah is from Sinai?’ You have to be willing to hear it, but that type of question can be answered. It shows that they’re thinking.

“Today there are a lot less of those questions. In fact, it seems like these days almost everyone believes in G-d, so it’s no longer a question of belief. Instead, it’s about negative feelings toward G-d — they hate Him, they’re angry at Him, or they think He’s angry at them.

“The fact that they’re upset at Hashem means they acknowledge He exists. But these new questions demand different answers. It used to be that people were looking for truth, and if you were able to prove the truth to them, they were able to accept it,” he says. “Nowadays, the world is less interested in truth, and much more interested in feelings and comfort and pleasure. So the type of things that bother people has really shifted as well.”

When people value pleasure or comfort over truth, says Rabbi Kahane, they feel confused by the idea that Hashem would create a world that involves discomfort and even pain. Why wouldn’t Hashem create a world that is completely pleasurable and comfortable? Why would He create a world with pain?

When he first started hearing these questions, Rabbi Kahane sought answers in the traditional seforim he was familiar with. But he struggled to find an answer to the specific questions he was hearing, in a way that could be accepted by today’s students.

“I wasn’t familiar with any sefer that dealt comprehensively and exclusively with questions such as, ‘Why would Hashem hurt me so much if He really loves me,’ these types of questions,” he says. “This was a challenge, because I really needed to up my game to help these students who were asking questions in a totally different league.”

And then he discovered Aish Kodesh.

Sitting with a Question

What caused this generational shift that Rabbi Kahane was observing? What changed “How do I know there’s a G-d?” to “Why does G-d want to hurt me?” Rabbi Kahane looks pensive for a moment, then leans forward earnestly.

“This is going to sound like a scripted answer, but I happen to think it’s accurate,” he says. “When smartphones came along, the whole world shifted. It became much more anxious, much more incapable of handling pain. What the smartphone has done is that it has allowed people not to have to deal with pain — they can always distract themselves. If they’re hurting, they’ll just watch a video , listen to music, or chat with a friend or a few.”

Before such distractions were available, Rabbi Kahane says, people dealt with discomfort, and grew in the process.

“You remember when you had to wait for the bus, and you never knew when it was coming?” he says. “No phone numbers, no digital signs, no apps — you just had to wait. And it might not come. And then, after waiting five minutes, you end up walking. You know what? We became bigger people because of that. Now, even calling up takes too long.”

Rabbi Kahane stresses that he is not opposed to technology and that there are many people in communities where the smartphone is not as prevalent who still have these types of questions. But the smartphone specifically, and technology in general, have generated a world that expects convenience, and that expectation of convenience makes people more susceptible to distress over minor irritations.

“A mechanech once said to me that nowadays, people think missing your bus is suffering,” he says. “Missing your bus is life. It’s not called suffering. It used to be when you came to learn in Eretz Yisrael, you didn’t call home. If your toilet was clogged in yeshivah, it was going to stay that way until you fixed it. No one was going to come fix it for you, that’s just the way it is. And you dealt with it.”

This intolerance for discomfort extends to an aversion to angst in the classroom setting too. “In this generation, you never really have to have a question, because you can always Google it. And there’s no such thing as not having an answer,” Rabbi Kahane relates. “If students have a question during class, it’s a real skill for many of them to learn to save it until after class. They’re heartsick, because they’ve never had to sit with a question.

“Don’t get me wrong, I am not down on this generation. The exact opposite. I am in awe of them. This generation are giants… the fact that they stay so strong is a testament to their greatness, and I often feel very small when I see what they deal with and how they deal with it. But this is the challenge they are confronting. Ironically, the more comfortable the world gets, the more challenging it becomes.”

A Strong Affinity

The Piaseczner Rebbe, in a way, offers the perfect foil to this mindset. The challenges he confronted during his lifetime were truly heartrending. His circumstances leave no room for a reader to say, “Well, he doesn’t really get me.” There was hardly a darker situation to be in than his.

“The Holocaust wasn’t the only thing he went through,” Rabbi Kahane points out. “His father died when he was very young. His own son was deathly ill at one point and had a miraculous recovery, only to be killed later on in the war. He lost his wife at an untimely stage. It wasn’t like he just went through the Holocaust. Even without experiencing the Holocaust, he would have been able to relate to the types of challenges that people go through.”

There were several threads in Rabbi Kahane’s own life that led him to the sefer Aish Kodesh and, ultimately, to writing A Fire in the Darkness. The first came when he was 17 and enrolled in a summer learning program in Eretz Yisrael. He joined a shiur given by Rav Dovid Schoonmaker, now the rosh yeshivah of Darchei Noam/Shapell’s, on Chovas Hatalmidim.

“It was very powerful,” Rabbi Kahane recalls. “From then on, I had this strong affinity for the Piaseczner that has never really left me.”

The second thread came much later, after Rabbi Kahane had become menahel of Chedvas Bais Yaakov. About 15 years ago, he was asked to join a group of mechanchim who were leading a tour of Poland. In preparation for the tour, he decided to expand on his rudimentary knowledge of the Piaseczner Rebbe’s life. His research sparked a desire to learn the sefer Aish Kodesh for the first time.

“When I started reading more about him, I thought, ‘Really? He wrote this sefer during the Holocaust?’ I bought the sefer and started reading through it. I quickly realized, even if this hadn’t been written during the Holocaust, it would still be a classic. But the fact that he wrote it in the Warsaw Ghetto put it in a different league.”

Rabbi Kahane started taking notes on what he was learning from Aish Kodesh. He wasn’t intending to write his own book at that point, but his notes became more extensive.

Rabbi Kahane also gives acknowledgment to Rabbi Zave Rudman, a renowned educator and talmid chacham, as well as an author and colleague at the Discovery Seminar.

“We had a Thursday night chaburah for many years,” he says. “He helped me very much to really understand sifrei chassidus. That wasn’t part of my yeshivah chinuch. He gave me very important skills for accessing sifrei chassidus that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

Then came the final thread. Rabbi Kahane had started giving a daily five-minute morning shiur at the seminary on hashkafah and chizuk. His reading in Aish Kodesh inspired him to dedicate every Thursday morning shiur to a discussion of the sefer. Around that same time, he had started giving shiurim on TorahAnytime and soon realized that his five-minute Aish Kodesh shiur perfectly fit the TorahAnytime format.

“I got feedback from people all over the world who were going through pretty difficult things,” he says. “And they said Aish Kodesh was such a chizuk for them.”

It was sometime afterwards that the idea of the book jelled. He began organizing his by now extensive notes in a more serious way and started writing. But it would be ten years before the book saw the light of day.

“There are always challenges in writing a book,” he recounts. “But then Covid hit. It actually gave me a lot of time to work on it. I thought, this would be a perfect time for the sefer to come out. But I wasn’t done with it. Then came a series of events, and with each one, I thought, this is the perfect time. But it still wasn’t ready. And I realized as time went by that the Rebbe’s message is, let Hashem run the show. It’ll come out exactly at a shaah tovah u’mutzlachas.

“And as it happens, Klal Yisrael is in a very difficult position right now as well. So HaKadosh Baruch Hu planned it to come out when it was needed. There were no missed opportunities from not having it come out earlier. Today the message is more important than ever.”

A Sign of Love

Although it was only released last month, A Fire in the Darkness — with the subtitle Guidance for Growth When Life Hurts — is already in its third printing. The horrific events of October 7, followed by the months of violent pro-Hamas protests in cities around the world, have brought a deep existential anxiety on Jewish communities around the world not seen since the Piaseczner Rebbe’s lifetime.

But relevant as the ideas in Aish Kodesh have suddenly become, the Piaseczner Rebbe’s advice is not always so simple to implement. He acknowledges our pain, and validates it — but ultimately, he bids us to accept it as a sign of G-d’s love. We can all recognize this as a Jew’s basic duty — but we can also understand that individuals will need to reach acceptance of this at their own pace.

The Piascezner Rebbe’s message in Aish Kodesh is that every rough spot is put in your path by a G-d Who loves you unconditionally, and that your personal  challenges have been tailor made to give you the opportunity to bring out your great inner potential and spiritual resources. Given the difficulty today’s generation has in living without answers, and the complexity involved with assimilating the Piaseczner Rebbe’s answers, does Rabbi Kahane run into challenges getting the Rebbe’s message across to 21st-century students?

“With people who are not having to work through traumas, no,” he says. “If what the Piaseczner says doesn’t sit well with you, it might be a signal for you that you have something that you need to address with a mental health professional.”

As with the provability of G-d questions of the past, Rabbi Kahane says, those inquiries can be dealt with philosophically — but today, the answer often doesn’t resonate, because the questions are more about personal trust than absolute truth. “They will say, ‘Okay, but that doesn’t help me. That doesn’t work for me.’

“So then you have a springboard to say, ‘Let’s talk about what happened to your trust. Why doesn’t this sit well with you? What’s under this?’ This question is sitting on a lot of stuff. Then we find out that there were important people in their lives who really hurt them. And so now Hashem sort of mixes into the picture.”

It works the same way with the Piaseczner Rebbe’s advice. For someone who hasn’t been hurt by trust issues, the answers offered by Aish Kodesh are satisfying. Yet those who feel that trust has been betrayed somewhere along the line now have a starting point for the next discussion.

Join the Club

Rabbi Kahane says a person approached him recently after having read the chapter on feeling Hashem’s love, the premise being that a person who is working hard at keeping Torah and mitzvos will feel loved by Hashem. This person told Rabbi Kahane she had been working on avodas Hashem, on halachah, on keeping Torah and mitzvos.

“I’m trying very, very hard,” she said. “But I just don’t feel like Hashem loves me.”

He asked her if she possibly had people in her life who had not paid enough attention to her. She replied, “Totally.”

“When a person has difficulty accepting the idea of Hashem’s unconditional love, there’s often a blockage caused by people in your life who should have loved you, who should have made you feel safe, but didn’t,” Rabbi Kahane explains. “Yet once you work through that, you can come to see the special love that Hashem has for you.”

Regarding the feeling of being angry at Hashem, the Rebbe basically says it with three words, while Rabbi Kahane gives it an entire chapter.

“The Rebbe’s punchline is: If you’re angry at Hashem, so… you are. So you have something to work on. You’re no different than anyone else, because everyone has something to work on and this happens to be your issue,” Rabbi Kahane relates. “Some people have to work on lashon hara. Some people have to work on keeping Shabbos. You have to work on being angry at Hashem.

“Now, that’s actually very validating, because the Rebbe isn’t making excuses for the person. He’s not saying you don’t have to work on it. But he’s also not saying you’re a bad person. He says: This is your challenge. So now you’re going to work on it.”

And if this person was using his anger at Hashem as justification for withdrawing from Yiddishkeit, Rabbi Kahane says, this now puts him on the hook.

“Look, it’s an understandable problem, but it’s a problem,” he says. “Now your job is to work on this. If you’re feeling this way, it’s got to be worked on. But it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Join the club. Welcome to humanity. You are now a member in good standing.”

It’s a message that everyone in Klal Yisrael needs to hear in these days of darkness. And the timing, Rabbi Kahane says, is propitious. In hindsight, it seems clear why the Piaseczner Rebbe instructed that the manuscripts of his derashos be collected in metal milk cans and buried in the Warsaw Ghetto.

“His directive, when he hid these, was that if someone survived, they give it to his brother, who was living in Palestine. He hoped his brother would print them. But his brother died in 1945, five years before the manuscripts were ever found. So even the Rebbe’s dream didn’t work out.”

The milk cans, discovered in 1950 by a Polish construction worker, also contained photographs and other documents, in addition to the Rebbe’s writings. The manuscripts were eventually published in 1960, exactly on Hashem’s time frame. And the new book is as well.

“The Rebbe wrote a tefillah for captives,” Rabbi Kahane says. “His daughter had been kidnapped by a Nazi in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he never saw her again. He wrote a tefillah for people who had been kidnapped by Nazis — that they should come home, just as all of Hashem’s children should come home to Him.

“That started circulating after the unfortunate events of October 7. It was like a sign from Shamayim — this is the time the Rebbe’s message needed to come out.” —

The Other Meir Kahane

Rabbi Meir B. Kahane runs in very different circles than did another Meir Kahane many years ago. So it doesn’t happen often that people confuse the two. It helps that Rabbi Kahane of Chedvas Bais Yaakov pronounces his name ka-hain, unlike the Meir Kahane (ka-hah-neh) who founded the Jewish Defense League and the Kach movement and who was assassinated in 1990. But every now and then, someone still mixes them up.

“People would come up to me — this is before A Fire in the Darkness came out — and they’d say, ‘We saw your book in the bookstore.’

“I’d say, ‘It’s not out yet.’

“They’d insist, ‘No, no, no, it’s there! The Jewish Idea, with your name on it!”

Once, when someone posted stickers all around the Old City with the slogan “Better a strong Israel than a strong Auschwitz,” attributed to “Rabbi Meir Kahane,” people approached Rabbi Kahane saying, “We loved the quote.”

“When I tell them I didn’t say that, they answer, ‘Well, it’s all over the Old City!’ But the one thing I do like is all the stickers that say, ‘Kahane tzadak.’ That, I wouldn’t mind being attributed to me too.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1023)