Rav Shagar Goes Beyond the State: Rosenzweig’s Non-Statist “Jewishness” and the Primordial Torah

Rav Shagar Goes Beyond the State:
Rosenzweig’s Non-Statist “Jewishness” and the Primordial Torah

More thesis notes.

In the last post, I focused on a passage from Rav Shagar entitled “Not Yet,” wherein Rav Shagar said that Religious Zionism has to shift its focus from the state to the community. While not rejecting statist Zionism in toto, Shagar withdraws all Religious value from the state and relocates it within the classical body politic of the Jewish Diaspora, the community.

Shagar does not give us a full depiction of what this non-statist religious community would look like. However, Shagar often argued that the Religious Zionist community should adopt the Haredi community’s minority posture, wherein they do not define themselves based on the space in which they live or the other groups with whom they interact. In several of these passages, he appeals to Rosenzweig for a philosophical formulation of this mode of existence, and in the derashah “Love and Law,” he describes this as how Judaism looked before the emergence of Rav Kook’s religious Zionism:

What was the spiritual situation before Rav Kook’s teachings? What was that “religious Jewishness” that we mentioned? […]

Rosenzweig taught that Jewishness manifests as commitment and being rooted in the covenant, which are the fundamental acts of Judaism. According to this definition, the Jewish exile is when you create of a sheltered, a-historical, family space, without being concerned for surroundings or engaged in the rules of history. The Jews “lack the passionate attachment to the things that constitute the primary… ‘objects’ of other historical peoples and nations, attachments that ultimately constitute their vitality and endurance as peoples and nations: land, territory, and architecture; regional and national languages; laws [=state laws], customs, and institutions.” Their land exists only as a holy land for which they yearn, and their holy language is not their first language, not the language that they speak in their daily lives. Jewishness is bound up and connected only and entirely in itself. “Our life is no longer meshed with anything outside ourselves. We have struck root in ourselves.” “And so, in the final analysis, [the Jewish nation] is not alive in the sense the nations are alive: in a national life manifest on this earth, in a national territory, solidly based and staked out on the soil. It is alive only in that which guarantees it will endure beyond time, in that which pledges it ever lastingness, in drawing its own eternity from the sources of the blood.”

The Jew being connected only in himself, of the nation in its very existence, creates a two-fold relationship with the “outside.” Other nations and cultures, either do not exist from the Jew’s perspective, the “outside” does not enter his horizon at all…”

The Jews are always at home, because they are never in a home; their home is their blood. As Rosenzweig lays it out, the critical distinction between the Jewish people and other peoples is that the Jewish people don’t have a state, or all the laws, customs, and institutions that come with it. Rav Shagar argues that the Religious Zionist community should adopt this sort of posture within the state of Israel. The state should be a geo-political space in which they live but with which they do not identify.

This is the same sort of existence Rav Shagar attributes to Haredism (if not to contemporary Haredi communities, which fail to live up to his idealized “authentic” or “rectified” Haredism). They live in the state but do not attribute religious value to it. Their religious lives are entirely separate from the state, and they follow its laws, speak its language, and participate in its institutions only incidentally. (Notably, Rav Shagar also attributes to them an understanding of holiness as bound up in the past, which he finds philosophically formulated in  [Stephane Moses’s] Walter Benjamin).

Similarly, Religious Zionism needs to reorient itself around the community as the locus of religious life, following the laws of the Torah community, bound up in “the infinite Torah” (seemingly the primordial Torah of the Kabbalah). They need to become, and embrace being, a minority within the state of Israel, defined more by their Jewishness than by their Israeliness. To the degree that they do identify with the state of Israel, this will be in contrast with and perhaps even in contradiction to their religious identities. As Rav Shagar says, being a Religious Zionist means living in multiple worlds, having a split, “schizophrenic” identity, and affirming contradictory values.

Shiur: Masters of Disguise – Adar Alef 2019

Masters of Disguise

1. Rav Shagar, Zeman Shel Ḥerut, 68

To understand this piece from Rebbe Naḥman, we have to distinguish between ḥofesh and ḥerut. Rebbe Naḥman teaches us that ḥofesh is an introductory step which creates the ḥerut of Pesaḥ […] Purim and Pesaḥ parallel ḥofesh and ḥerut. Purim, when we celebrate the lottery (pur) and man’s anarchic freedom (ḥofesh), is when we freely choose the freedom (ḥerut) of Pesaḥ, of personal essence and identity. This is an experience of Jewishness as a self-enclosed world, which finds its justification in itself. It is the experience of divine chosenness. For Rav Kook, the anarchic, “Purim-style” freedom (hofesh) lets us elevate our nature, our Pesach-style freedom (ḥerut). Rebbe Nahman here says otherwise. He says that anarchic freedom (ḥofesh) enables us to create ḥerut-freedom. We can create our very nature! This path of creation does not depend on the facts; it creates them. Freedom, as Sartre understood it, therefore exists even within holiness.

We are therefore faced with two paths. There is the path of “be who you are,” but there is also a more radical path: The ability to create your freedom (ḥerut), your “I.” Perhaps this was Rebbe Naḥman meant by the cryptic line that appears at the end of the teaching: “For in the beginning, all the beginnings began at Pesach, and therefore the mitsvot are all in memory of the exodus from Egypt. But now…” Today, all the beginnings start from Purim.

 

2. Adam Seligman, “Ritual, the Self, and Sincerity,” Social Research 76, no. 4 (2009)

To invoke ritual then is not to eschew change. It is, however, to value the past, to give credence to tradition, to accept that we, each and every one of us, are not the beginning and end of existence. It is to articulate a vision of autonomy that does not stand in negation of the past but, one where, as in the Jewish practice, “the ways of our fathers’ are in our hands.” Ritual in fact continues to provide an ongoing arena of creativity and tradition, acceptance and obligation. Ritual practice becomes the arena where the dynamic of that third space, the potential space within which cultural creativity takes place, is worked out. Here an analogy with the world of art is I think very appropriate. For artistic production certainly flows along similar lines and while the world of post-romantic artistic production in Western Europe is one where the aesthetic experience is almost equated with individual expressionism; there have been millennia of human aesthetic production that developed exactly along the lines I outline here. In fact, even the production of icons—that most formalistic and circumscribed of genres—has been shown to exhibit personal and idiosyncratic traits of each iconographer. In that context we can perhaps speak of the individual artist existing within the tradition. It may even be appropriate to talk of the individual artistic creation existing only through a tradition. (1093)

II. Torah like You Mean It

3. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 28a

It was taught: On that day they dismissed the guard at the door and permission was granted to the students to enter. For Rabban Gamliel had proclaimed: Any student whose inside is not like his outside may not enter the study hall. On that day several benches were added. Rabbi Yoḥanan said: Abba Yosef ben Dostai and the Rabbis disputed this. One said: Four hundred benches were added. And one said: Seven hundred benches were added.

 

4. Adam Seligman, “Ritual, the Self, and Sincerity,” Social Research 76, no. 4 (2009)

The sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the “mere convention” of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction. Rather than becoming what we do in action through ritual, we do according to what we have become through self-examination. This form of thought emphasizes tropes of “authenticity” and each individual thus takes on an enormous responsibility. (1079)

 

5. Rav Shagar, Chance and Providence, “The Mystery of Disguise,” 84-88

Translated by Naftali Moses

The first person we meet in the Bible to wear a disguise is Yaakov; Yaakov assumes the guise of Esav, his brother, his enemy. “The voice is the voice of Yaakov, but the hands are the hands of Esav.” Yaakov’s hands are wrapped in goat skin-the same goat that will be cast to Azazel on Yom Kippur. He also wears the garb of Esav, his outer appearance, in order to win the blessings of his father. […]

“For game was in his mouth”-Esav’s power lies in his mouth. Esav also inherits Yaakov’s voice. He wraps himself in his voice, the sound of the Torah. Esav lacks the truth of Yaakov. All of his actions are false. All are done merely for the sake of appearance-but he dares to be Yaakov. This is the religiosity of this world: religiosity founded on lies. […]

So Yaakov impersonates Esav who impersonates Yaakov. Back and forth. Religious truth in this world appears firmly secular. The large measure of self-negation that true religiosity demands from its adherents seems to arouse stern judgment’s opposition. The righteous must then clothe himself in the garb of false external religiosity so that he may appear as a tzadik in this world. Not only in order to gain from the material world must he lie, but even in order to retain his persona of spirituality. If he would be true to himself, he would not be thought of as righteous, nor would he be able to act in the world as such. He gives up that most dear to him-his own inner self-in order to be understood by others.

The wicked attempt to imitate his garb, making a mockery of righteousness itself. Dressed the part, the wicked man does not feel the absurdity of his situation. Judging all by external appearances, he truly believes that he is one of the righteous. The trickery of Esav is not simple. It is not conscious subterfuge, but runs much deeper than that. lt is utter self-deception. He sees this world as true; he identifies reality with mere appearances. From his point of view, the attempts to find favor in his father’s eyes are honest. They even bear fruit. The side of strict judgment, the source of this world, is satisfied with his efforts. Only the true tzadik is capable of seeing through the facade of the wicked. But cannot expose him lest he himself be seen as one of the wicked as well.

 

6. Adam Seligman, “Ritual, the Self, and Sincerity,” Social Research 76, no. 4 (2009)

Ritual concentrates on the performative nature of the act rather than on its denotative meaning. In fact, pure ritual puts questions of belief or truth aside in favor of the shared world that its action creates and requires. The very external, performative aspects of ritual—especially its repetition and recollection of places and times not given to purely rational or instrumental computation—give it a unique lability. Thus does ritual encompasses the ambiguity of life in a unique manner. It allows one to “play” with such ambiguity in a manner precluded by an undue concern with the authenticity of one’s actions and beliefs. Ritual unshackles the mind from a need to believe in a dogma of our choosing, as long as we act properly. (1076-77)