IN THE SHADOW OF THE PYRAMIDS The Motifs of Exodus and Moses’ Leadership in the Wartime Writings of Kalonimus Kalman Shapiro, the Piaseczner Rebbe

This article is an attempt at presenting the Holocaust sermons of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman Shapiro not only as a religious text, but also as a testi-mony of communal, and above all personal development, which the religious community of the Warsaw Ghetto gathered around the Rabbi and he himself underwent in the years 1939–1942. Therefore, in order to cut through the religious, historical, communal, and personal layers of the text, I use diverse tools, including literary analysis of motifs repeatedly used by the author, contextualizing them in his religious discourse, and treating the sermons as an EGO document, despite its formal genre being remote from a personal text. By those means I wish to present not only a great theologian and leader, whose theodicy has come to fill postwar commentators with awe, but also a deeply dedicated person, who stands up to the challenge laid before him, despite the crushing circumstances, despite the philosophically unprecedented complexity, and despite his personal fears and concerns.