I invite you to listen to the other classes on Hadar's online Torah library at hadar.org. Let's listen.

I want to give us a little bit of a sketch of who the Rebbe was before we get into some of the writings from his work, the Aish Kodesh.

So you have a bit of an outline here of who he was.

He was born as part of an elite Hasidic ancestry, born the day after Lag BaOmer in 1889 in Grzywacz, Poland, the descendant of very prestigious Hasidic Polish dynasties.

His lineage included Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, the Seer of the Hosa of Lublin, and the Maggid of Kozhnitz.

His father, Rabbi Elimelech of Grzywacz, the author of the Imrei Elimelech, died when Kalonymus was only three years old.

He was raised and tutored by his uncle, Rabbi Yechiel Moshe Hapstein, and probably his early orphanhood shaped a certain kind of religious sensibility, which we'll see throughout his texts, an attunement to loss and suffering, but also a certain kind of independence.