The agony bled by the sermons delivered by the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, and collected under the title Holy Fire, coagulates as the meeting ground in an unbridgeable distance between a divine vista and a human void. They are, without a doubt, a testament to the "life" lived beyond reason that the eminent philosopher Emil Fackenheim insisted Jewish thought after the Shoah must "go to school with." The account of the ten rabbinic martyrs, including most famously Rabbi Akiva, tortured and killed by the Romans, must forever be recounted in the shadow of the Rebbe's challenge to God just as the deportations from the Ghetto to the death camps begin:

"In truth it is incredible that the world continues to exist despite so many screams as these. For it is said that the Ten Martyrs provoked so many screams from the angels declaring this is Torah and this is its reward? Then a voice from heaven threatened, if I hear one more sound I shall turn the world into water. Now that innocent, angelic, pure children as well as great Jewish saints, who are even greater than angels, are being killed and slaughtered only because they are Jews, are filling the entire space of the world with these screams, and the world has not reverted to water, continues to exist as if nothing has affected it?"