Franz Rosenzweig – Novel Formulations

Shiur: Rav Shagar – Before Zionism: Haredism, and Zionism as a Revolution

The first part of what was supposed to be a much larger exploration of Zionism and Redemption in Rav Shagar’s thought. For scheduling reasons, this ended up being the only class on the topic, and it focuses on how Rav Shagar imagines Judaism existing before Zionism, the way that leads him to frame Zionism as a revolutionary movement within Judaism—articulating from an internal perspective the Haredi critique of Religious Zionism—and his idealized vision of Haredi society in Israel today.

This was the first part of what was supposed to be a much larger exploration of Zionism and Redemption in Rav Shagar’s thought. For scheduling reasons, this ended up being the only class on the topic, and it focuses on how Rav Shagar imagines Judaism existing before Zionism, the way that leads him to frame Zionism as a revolutionary movement within Judaism—articulating from an internal perspective the Haredi critique of Religious Zionism—and his idealized vision of Haredi society in Israel today.

Sources for the entire planned topical exploration can be found below, though the recorded shiur only explores the first few texts.

Exile & Redemption, State & Community

Bayom Hahu, 234–235

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 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… The Jew being connected only in himself, 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…

Panekha Avakesh, 165–166

Zionism was unquestionably a revolutionary, even rebellious, movement. Its revolution was not just political, but also spiritual and cultural. “Rejecting the exile” meant, first and foremost, rejecting the spiritual reality of the exilic Jew… When the Zionists rejected the exile, they rejected the life of the Jewish people in exile. Undeniably, for most secular Zionists this meant rejecting the Torah and the commandments, which they identified with exilic life. When the majority of the Jewish people’s leaders polemicized against Zionism, they did so because of this rejection… What I have said is true beyond secular Zionism as well. Religious Zionism was also a rebellious, revolutionary, movement… Religious Zionism and Zionism writ large are in this sense the same: they rejected exilic life, which means rejecting the life of Torah and commandments as it existed in exile.

Luhot U’Shivrei Luhot, 195, 198–199

Haredi suspension of reality is not ideological suspension. It does not deny reality and concrete existence; it consciously and intentionally disconnects from them. This suspension is itself existence, performed not through defensiveness but through estrangement… the construction of a heterotopic all, a realm which external reality does not at all enter. We could describe a traditional Jew as someone who lives in a heterotopic whole without any other, since this whole is the entire whole, and is its own boundary. This suspension alienates the Haredi Jew from reality… Haredi suspension of reality is built on the creation of a heterotopic space which suspends itself from everything around it.

Zot Beriti, 158

Religious Zionism is… a faith of hyphens… religion and state, religion and science, traditionalism and modernity. The hyphen plays an essential role in the creation of personal identity… Is the hyphen a “connecting and” that appropriates? An “and” of mixture or combination? Does the hyphen know how to preserve distinction despite its connecting function? Is this a Hegelian dialectic, or the identity of the hated other that becomes, through negations – as Sartre claims about anti-Semitism – my identity? … Personally, I like the “connecting and” of Rosenzweig, which is the crowning stone on which the rest of the framework depends, the keystone that gives structure to the form. This is the Maharal’s middle line, on which the Maharal locates the Jewish people. This is the nothingness (ayin) that lacks any content, and which therefore is infinitely varied.

Luhot, 10

The “connecting and” that is so characteristic of Religious Zionism – yeshivah and military service, yeshivah and academic education, Torah and secular studies, Torah and physical labor – is not an external synthesis… It should be explained the way Franz Rosenzweig explained the “connecting and,” as the keystone which holds up the whole arch and gives it its meaning…

Nahalekh Baregesh, 348–349

We must build Judea, but as a community, not a state… We will see in isolating ourselves (to a degree) in our community an exile in the midst of redemption, exile within the land of Israel… It is an exile that means recognizing the dream that is not yet realized, and that we are not willing to give up on it… we must maintain the boundary between secularism and religiosity. This will not lead to alienation and rejection of the covenant, but will preserve the “not yet.” … We are forbidden to forget the exile… We must internalize the exile into the state itself. There were and are Haredi Israelis, and non-Orthodox thinkers like Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, who for this reason opposed the very idea of a Jewish state. They claimed that authentic Jewish existence is exilic existence, and that Jewishness is inherently opposed to history and politics. The answer, they claim, must be establishing a state without rejecting the exile. It should be a dialectical—I would even say Hegelian—process that internalizes exile into the state and thus elevates it to the next phase of political existence, a state of justice and mercy… The current solution, fitting to the spirit of the age, is communal. It’s a solution within the framework of what they call the citizen society, which involves suspending the identity between religion and state. This does not mean that we’ll stop being Religious Zionists and loyal patriots… However, alongside this feeling of loyalty we will know that the state cannot now fulfill our dreams.

Living Up to Redemption

Panekha Avakesh, 163

What would happen if the state of Israel absorbed “the territories,” conquered the entire promised land of Israel and reigned over it? What if we really achieved political liberty and were politically and economically independent from other nations? Would this be redemption (ge’ulah)? Would all our sufferings really disappear? Certainly not. The basic suffering of the Jews is first and foremost a spiritual, mental, and religious suffering. It is the suffering of our distance from God. This is the suffering described by the terrifying curse, “I will surely hide my face” (Deuteronomy 31:18), when God hides his face. This is the suffering of a person who has no faith, a person drowning in despair, whose life is torn and imperfect, who does not “live in the light of the face of the king” (Proverbs 16:16), the king of kings, the king of life.

All the sages of Israel have agreed that the meaning of redemption, and not just the World to Come, which “eyes other than God’s have not seen” (Isaiah 64:3), which the human mind cannot comprehend, but also the lower redemption, the Messianic Era, cannot be summed up by physical or political redemption.

Bayom Hahu, 133–134

The idea that the state is the realization of the hoped-for redemption grates… because of the specific way the dream of the state has come to fruition in practice, in the past and present… An anecdote that emphasizes this grating encounter with the reality of the state came to me this week while I was listening to the radio; it was a report about the sinking of a Tamil rebel ship and the killing of some of its occupants by the Sri Lankan government, with the aid of Israeli weapons… Israel has become a significant weapons supplier… It seems that the will to abandon politics because of how it is bound up with bloodshed, has itself abandoned us.

Bayom Hahu, 228–230

The state decreed the Disengagement upon this strip of land, revealing the painful foundation of sovereignty, the violence that underlies its laws… More than anything, the Disengagement signifies the crime of the legislation of the law itself, the violence that it bears within it. It signifies the recognition that, in truth, violating the law is a less serious crime than making the law. The inner decay within the rule of law is expressed by the claim we constantly hear from those who support the Disengagement law: This is the law, and the law is the law! – And therefore, it must be respected. The legislation’s arbitrariness strengthens the law’s tautology. It lacks any “judicial wisdom.” … The law is justified not by ethics or judicial wisdom but by the simple fact that the majority legislated it. The violence required to enact this law, removing people from their land, is not an extraneous remnant from the process of legislation, but the very heart of law: the violent claim that the law is law… The love of the land and the sovereign violence of the state are clashing tragically before our very eyes – law versus love. As Religious Zionists, we experience this clash incredibly harshly. Just as Rav Kook implanted love of the land within Religious Zionism, he similarly implanted it with the understanding and the faith that the state is the greatest manifestation of, and pathway to, redemption… Faced with the Disengagement, it is impossible not to ask: Is the State of Israel really the beginning of redemption? Can it, or any state, really take part in salvation? The threat of exile hangs over the residents of Gush Katif, rooted in the forcefulness of the state, presenting us with the sharp contrast between the “idealistic content” full of light and love from the teachings of Rav Kook, and the opaque and unmoving law of the state.

Messianism of the Future

Bayom Hahu, 241

To truly rebel against force, you must abandon it. The ability to abandon the game of force and violence is truly a messianic option. We do not dream of a time when the right power will win out, but for a time when power and might will not make right at all. We seek pleasure (oneg) and not reality (metsiyut)—this is true messianism.

Bayom Hahu, 346

I don’t know how to depict this redemption, but Rebbe Naḥman’s words inspire me to think that, perhaps, if we stand vulnerable before God… this will enable a shift, something transcendent will reveal itself, something that is beyond difference. I am not talking about tolerance, nor about the removal of difference. The Other that I see before me will remain different and inaccessible and, despite this, the Divine Infinite will position me by the Other’s side. Again, how this will manifest in practical or political terms, I do not know. But Yom Yerushalayim will be able to turn from a nationalistic day, one which has turned with time into a tribalistic celebration of Religious Zionism alone, into an international day.

Bayom Hahu, 363-367 (derashah-letter from 2007)

We yearn for more than just “natural” redemption, which some of the rishonim, such as Maimonides, thought would be realized in the Messianic Era, differing from this world only in terms of “subservience to the Nations.” Our messianic pathos also contains the melody of the open miracle, what Rebbe Naḥman called the melody of the land of Israel, which stands opposed to the melody of nature. This miraculous redemption means the shattering of nature’s lawfulness. Reality itself will metamorphose. The world will shine differently, as reality’s crude matter will be purified and receive the translucency and illumination of the day that is entirely Shabbat and rest. […] This is redemption as described by the Kabbalists, the Hasidim, and all varieties of mystics, as well as by modern, anarchistic, utopians. The indwelling of the Shekhinah which they are waiting for is real divine presence, which not hidden behind the lawfulness of nature, no matter how pure it is.

Shiur: Rav Shagar – Revelation as Revolution

A 5-part class focusing on revelation as a fundamentally disruptive, rather than constructive, event.

This was a 5-part class, focusing on revelation as a fundamentally disruptive, rather than constructive, event. It was part of my Orayta ’21 Rav Shagar Habura. Below are parts 2–5, interspersed throughout the sources for the class. The first video is the audio from part 2, which began with a recap of part 1.

The Event

Rav Shagar, She’erit Ha’emunah, 122–123

Revelation is an event… It is a jolt that shakes up, rather than clarifying, what already exists. What does it mean to receive the Torah? It means suddenly experiencing an explosion of truth – “For my words are like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that shatters rock” (Yirmiyahu 23:29); “Something that happens in situations as something that they and the usual way of behaving in them cannot account for.” …
No specific revealed content stands at the center of revelation. The event of revelation is not an opinion, but rather “the name of the void” that in its nature “cannot be named entirely.” This is where the need for a covenant arises in revelation – “The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Ḥorev” (Devarim 5:2), a covenant that is fulfilled in the declaration “We will do and we will listen.” This covenant is the response to the “name of the void,” the requirement for uncompelled loyalty that creates “a new way of being and acting within the situation,” because “the event was excluded by all the regular laws of the situation.” The heart of revelation is therefore universal, in that it is free of any named content, leaving only singular loyalty to it; creating new laws and approaches, through which a person enables a “way of being” for the new event. This is true for more than just the giving of the Torah: scientific revolutions, like Einstein’s, for example; political revolutions, like the French Revolution; the revolution that is in constantly innovative artistic creation; religious and spiritual revolutions – these are all expressions of constructive loyalty to a revelatory event, the creation of a new language for the “name of the void.” These are illuminations from “the primordial intellect,” a dimension that precedes the intellect and renews it.
According to Badiou, truth appears as the commitment of the subject to the event – the combination of revelation and loyalty to that revelation. The event demands loyalty because it itself appears only as an excess, as a void with no place in language and disconnected from everything. The lightning flashes without context and disappears as if it had never been. It is to this lightning that we must be loyal, and this loyalty constructs the lightning as truth. This is what the Kabbalists and Ḥasidim called raising Malkhut to Keter, an instance of “the crown of sovereignty” (“Keter Malkhut”). Keter is the lightning bolt of reality and Malkhut, which has no independent content, is the loyalty and decisiveness that realize the event.

Rambam, Moreh Nevukhim, III:32 (Pines Translation)

…At that time the way of life generally accepted and customary in the whole world and the universal service upon which we were brought up consisted in offering various species of living beings in the temples in which images were set up, in worshipping the latter, and in burning incense before them – the pious ones and the ascetics being at that time, as we have explained, the people who were devoted to the service of the temples consecrated to the stars. His wisdom, may He be exalted, and His gracious ruse, which is manifest in regard to all His creatures, did not require that He give us a Law prescribing the rejection, abandonment, and abolition of all these kinds of worship. For one could not then conceive the acceptance of [such a Law], considering the nature of man, which always likes that to which it is accustomed.

At that time this would have been similar to the appearance of a prophet in these times who, calling upon the people to worship God, would say: “God has given you a Law forbidding you to pray to Him, to fast, to call upon Him for help in misfortune. Your worship should consist solely in meditation without any works at all.” Therefore He, may He be exalted, suffered the above-mentioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or imaginary and unreal things to His own name, may He be exalted, commanding us to practice them with regard to Him, may He be exalted. Thus He commanded us to build a temple for Him: And let them make Me a Sanctuary; to have an altar for His name: An altar of earth thou shalt make unto Me; to have the sacrifice offered up to Him: When any man of you bringeth an offering unto the Lord; to bow down in worship before Him; and to burn incense before Him. And He forbade the performance of any of these actions with a view to someone else: He that sacrificeth unto the gods shall be utterly destroyed, and so on; For thou shalt bow down to no other god. And he singled out Priests for the service of the Sanctuary, saying: That they may minister unto Me in the priest’s office. And because of their employment in the temple and the sacrifices in it, it was necessary to fix for them dues that would be sufficient for them; namely, the dues of the Levites and the Priests. Through this divine ruse it came about that the memory of idolatry was effaced and that the grandest and true foundation of our belief – namely, the existence and oneness of the deity – was firmly established, while at the same time the souls had no feeling of repugnance and were not repelled because of the abolition of modes of worship to which they were accustomed and than which no other mode of worship was known at that time.

Covenant vs. Revelation

Talmud Bavli, Bava Metsia 59b (Sefaria Translation)

And this is known as the oven of akhnai. The Gemara asks: What is the relevance of akhnai, a snake, in this context? Rav Yehuda said that Shmuel said: It is characterized in that manner due to the fact that the Rabbis surrounded it with their statements like this snake, which often forms a coil when at rest, and deemed it impure. The Sages taught: On that day, when they discussed this matter, Rabbi Eliezer answered all possible answers in the world to support his opinion, but the Rabbis did not accept his explanations from him.

After failing to convince the Rabbis logically, Rabbi Eliezer said to them: If the halakha is in accordance with my opinion, this carob tree will prove it. The carob tree was uprooted from its place one hundred cubits, and some say four hundred cubits. The Rabbis said to him: One does not cite halakhic proof from the carob tree. Rabbi Eliezer then said to them: If the halakha is in accordance with my opinion, the stream will prove it. The water in the stream turned backward and began flowing in the opposite direction. They said to him: One does not cite halakhic proof from a stream.

Rabbi Eliezer then said to them: If the halakha is in accordance with my opinion, the walls of the study hall will prove it. The walls of the study hall leaned inward and began to fall. Rabbi Yehoshua scolded the walls and said to them: If Torah scholars are contending with each other in matters of halakha, what is the nature of your involvement in this dispute? The Gemara relates: The walls did not fall because of the deference due Rabbi Yehoshua, but they did not straighten because of the deference due Rabbi Eliezer, and they still remain leaning.

Rabbi Eliezer then said to them: If the halakha is in accordance with my opinion, Heaven will prove it. A Divine Voice emerged from Heaven and said: Why are you differing with Rabbi Eliezer, as the halakha is in accordance with his opinion in every place that he expresses an opinion?

Rabbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said: It is written: “It is not in heaven” (Deuteronomy 30:12). The Gemara asks: What is the relevance of the phrase “It is not in heaven” in this context? Rabbi Yirmeya says: Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not regard a Divine Voice, as You already wrote at Mount Sinai, in the Torah: “After a majority to incline” (Exodus 23:2). Since the majority of Rabbis disagreed with Rabbi Eliezer’s opinion, the halakha is not ruled in accordance with his opinion. The Gemara relates: Years after, Rabbi Natan encountered Elijah the prophet and said to him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do at that time, when Rabbi Yehoshua issued his declaration? Elijah said to him: The Holy One, Blessed be He, smiled and said: My children have triumphed over Me; My children have triumphed over Me.

Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 142

The sovereign act, like other forms of revelatory experience, only achieves a stable place by transforming itself. To remember God’s presence is not the same as to experience God’s presence; to remember love is not the same as to be in love. At moments of revelation, we stand within the mysterium tremendum. Nothing can be more exhilarating or more threatening than to find oneself within a revolution. Sacrifice is the medium of sovereign presence. Permanent revolution is always a terrifying idea for just this reason. To succeed, revolution must transform itself into a regular political form, that is, it must produce a constitution. That constitution binds as long as it is seen as a remnant o f revolution. To see through the constitution to the popular sovereign whose act it records is what makes it literally our constitution, despite the fact that we, as finite individuals, neither wrote it nor approved it. This is not a matter of “implicit consent” but of a social imaginary that grounds faith. The constitution claims us not because it is just—although we want it to be just—but because it is a remnant of a politics of authenticity that we still imagine as our own.

Rav Shagar, Luḥot U’shivrei Luḥot, 140–142

I asked him, “Who truly fears heaven. Is it not the person who asks ‘What is God’s will?’? Who asks himself if it is really God’s will that he leave the Arab to die? Do I not need to ask this question, and answer with total sincerity? Some people obey without hesitation, totally self-confident, never once standing before God and asking themselves with respect and sincerity, directly and without intermediary, “What is God’s will?” Do these people really fear heaven?” I concluded, “I am unsure: perhaps they really don’t doubt what God’s will is, or perhaps they don’t actually have faith that he wants something.” … What had I done? Had I taken that boy who asked me about saving a non-Jew on Shabbat and thrown him into a world of uncertainty, chronic doubt, and undecidable misgivings? I had actually hoped that I opened up for him the possibility of faith and real contact with the divine. I quoted for him the statement of a Hasidic rebbe, the Mei Hashiloaḥ, who said that a righteous man (tsaddik) who consciously inserts himself into doubts is greater than one who avoids them.

Rav Shagar, She’erit Ha’emunah, 144

Rebbe Naḥman teaches us that a person must be open to experiencing revelation and responding to it, as well as to the price of this response. The reason people don’t experience revelation of truth isn’t that they seek it but don’t find it, it’s that they are never even open to its presence. They are not willing to pay the price of revelation. As Rebbe Naḥman says at the beginning of his sermon: “For in truth, the Torah is constantly proclaiming and shouting and admonishing” … Attaining truth demands a sort of openness, rather than intellectual effort. You have to be willing to set yourself free from all the typical ways of thinking and hear “the call of the proclamation.” You must give sensitive attention to the thunder of the event. This sort of awareness leads to dedicating careful attention to the events through which God speaks to each person. When things resonate with a person, he can discover that they came to awaken and illuminate him in preparation for a new Torah.

Resolutions

Rav Shagar, Shiurim Al Likkutei Moharan, vol. 2, 41–43

When Rebbe Nahman expresses the view that it is possible to create God’s will, he is not aiming for a religious “reform” that would enable a person to get rid of Torah and mitsvot for the sake of the individual’s will to do other things. What he is doing is giving the individual the option of holding on with all his strength to the truth in the depths of his soul, to follow it all the way through to the end, because this truth and the will that flows from it are a divine revelation. The idea underlying Rebbe Nahman’s words is that it is impossible to separate the Torah from a person’s inner will. However, it’s important to emphasize that Rebbe Nahman lived with a sense of belonging to Torah… and within it he found his inner truth…

On the one hand, we are born into the reality of tradition, halakhah and Torah. On the other hand, the Torah itself legitimizes renewal based on inner-truth, which is the only possibility for reaching the service of God. Living between these two poles demands that a person find his spiritual world, locates his level, his faith, and tries to understand what God wants from him, what his unique rectification is, what is his personal truth. According to Rebbe Nahman in this teaching, he doesn’t worry that this personal search will lead a person away from Torah and tradition; the assumption is that someone who learns Torah will find his spiritual world within it and will of course feel a sense of identification and belonging. Obviously, in practice, if a contradiction between a person’s inner world and the Torah were to develop, he must sacrifice his own will. However, this is only a theoretical possibility, for such a contradiction should not manifest.

Rav Shagar, Shiurim Al Likkutei Moharan, vol. 2, 28–29

What is the “yetser” in this context? In my opinion, it is a person’s fear of stepping outside the familiar in order to reach a higher space, his fear of the radicalization of the Torah. This the “religious yetser” that desires to stay within the lines of the familiar, “to be acceptable.” However, connecting intimately with God really requires breaching boundaries; you can’t stay within the well-mannered, normative realm, the familiar and the self-evident. Despite the negative way the religious world looks at this sort of rebellious assertiveness, it can in certain contexts require a religious act of submission no less intense than that required by simply obedience to halakhah… This act really is quite difficult, because this sort of overcoming clashes with the Torah’s social aspects. When a person is loyal to his radical faith, he is likely to pay a heavy social price. This is exactly why the act requires overcoming your yetser: you must overcome the yetser for honor (kavod), as well as your self-image, which is part of honor…Rebbe Nahman connects the illumination of the letters and the revelation of the Torah to observing the 613 commandments. The religious way of life provides the sensibility and spiritual inspiration that enable meaningful renewal. Only when you actively live a way of life shaped according to the mitsvot does Jewish religious language have meaning, and only then is it possible to innovate new concepts within that language. Rebbe Nahman’s words point in two directions: The first is to revitalize the halakhah through religious radicalism, and the second is to give the renewed religious structure the halakhic platform on which to rest… Without the halakhic mindset… the most you end up with is a weak sense of freedom.

Love/Law – A Wedding Derashah for Parshat Yitro

Love of Law, Law of Love

For Ari Ze’ev, my teacher and friend

The Jewish tradition has long depicted the revelation at Mount Sinai as the marriage of God and the Jewish people (Bavli, Taanit 26a). Going back at least to the Mishnah, the Jewish tradition sees the giving of the Torah as a moment when God comes together with the Jewish people under the mountain in love and intimacy (Shir Hashirim Rabbah 2:4; Mekhilta Derabbi Yishmael, Masekhta Debaḥodesh, Yitro 3). However, if we want to talk about love and the revelation, we would do well to travel back two chapters before Mount Sinai, to the arrival of Yitro and the appointment of judges.

The story is well-known, and the questions it raises are just as well known. Yitro arrives at the encampment of the Jewish people and promptly discovers that Moshe spends his days adjudicating the Jewish people’s legal issues, from dawn till dusk. Yitro proposes that Moshe select qualified individuals from among the people and appoint them as judges alongside himself, in order to relieve some of his own burden—a proposal which Moshe quickly enacts. Just like that, the Jewish people have a fully-formed legal system.

Or it would be fully-formed, if the Jewish people had laws yet, but seemingly they won’t receive any sort of laws for a few more chapters. So how was Moshe judging the people? Second, if these judges were so necessary, why hadn’t Moshe already appointed them? Why did it have to wait for Yitro to show up—unexpectedly, and from outside the Jewish people?

The first issue has driven many commentators on the Torah to assert that the chapters detailing the revelation at Mount Sinai are not in chronological order. They suggest that the story in chapter 18 actually happens after the revelations of chapters 19–20, or even after the more thorough revelation of civil laws in chapters 21–23, and that Moshe was applying the laws given by God in the immediately following chapters. Alternatively, some other commentators attempt to uncover subtle moments of divine revelation in the details of earlier stories in the Torah, such as in the “law and ordinance” God gave the people after they complained at Marah (Shemot 15:25).

While the details of this debate are occupied with questions of narrative chronology, it’s underlying themes are those of law, revelation, and—by association—love. On this level, the debate is about the structure of love: do moments of great intimacy precede the detailed construction of a shared life, or vice versa? If law necessarily comes after the great revelation, then it is moments of great intimacy and closeness that provide the basis for a shared life of love. In this line of thinking, love is like a burst of energy, and the couple need to try and construct a life which can contain and hold onto that energy. If law and judgment precede revelation, on the other hand, then the worked-out norms and behaviors can—and might need to—come before moments of romantic intensity. These norms and behaviors, the things the couple learns about one another and how to best interact with each other, provide the raw material for moments of great intimacy. In this sense, it doesn’t matter where the judges of Shemot 19 get their laws, because any time people come together they have laws and norms, even before they have moments of great intimacy.

This dichotomy is given dramatic new life in a piece by Rav Tsadok Hakohen of Lublin in his popular work, Tsidkat Hatsaddik. In teaching #231, Rav Tsadok explains the juxtaposition of the story of the judges and the giving of the Torah by saying that “All hierarchy and authority is a function of words of Torah.” However, he then distances hierarchy and authority from Torah, saying that because each Jew has their own “portion” in Torah, hierarchy and authority can never develop. Every Jew is equally valuable, because each is of singular, incomparable importance. Rav Tsadok thus speaks of two different kinds of Torah: 1. Torah that is the same no matter who learns it, so that when one person knows more of it than another person, the first person has a comparative advantage. This is the laws and texts of Torah, the raw material underlying Jewish life. 2. Torah that can be learned and experienced by only one person. This is the singular Torah a person encounters when they learn a text anyone else could learn, but which speaks to them uniquely, in a manner all their own, unavailable to anyone else.

A modernist, romantic reading of Rav Tsadok would emphasize his authority-shattering, individualistic idea of Torah. On this reading, Rav Tsadok posits the law and judgment of Shemot 19 as at best a fallen necessity, at worst a falsified, corrupted version of Torah. While there are elements of this in the teaching, Rav Tsadok ultimately does not point his readers in that direction. Instead, he associates the first form of Torah, the Torah of shared norms and laws, with the very material of this world. As long as Jews live a life shared together in bodies and communities, they must share texts, rules, and authorities. Only in the world to come—or in “world to come moments” in this world—can we live based on pure, individualistic singularity.

Rav Tsadok also answers the second question we raised above. Why does the appointing of the judges come about through Yitro? For Rav Tsadok, this emphasizes the way the Torah was given in a shared space. Yitro came from outside the Jewish people and introduced this element of hierarchy and authority into Torah. Similarly, loving relationships are never made up of just the couple involved. They always take place embedded within a network of friends and family. A love that shatters all connections with any other people is ultimately false, pretending as it does that the couple could ever exist without any other people. Love always gives rise to moments of intimate magic, where all the thirds melt away and only the two are left alone in all the world, but before and after those moments lies the broad social life of the couple in the world around them. The ideal spoken of at Jewish weddings is a bayit ne’eman b’yisrael, a faithful household within the Jewish people. It is within our people that our love comes together and ignites.

This two-fold Torah takes a slightly different form in the writings of one of Rav Tsadok’s contemporaries, the German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig. Living during and just after Rav Tsadok’s lifetime, Rosenzweig was similarly concerned with issues of the intimate and the shared, the passionate and the rote in revelation. Whereas Rav Tsadok saw these dichotomies as inherent in the nature of this-worldly life, however, Rosenzweig returned to the issue of time so prominent in the biblical depiction of revelation. He wants to determine if revelation is the starting point, or if it must always take place in a given context, and he gives different answers in different works.

In his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig identifies revelation with love. God reveals himself to the human in a great moment of encounter between lover and beloved. For the Jewish people, this revelation gives rise to the written word of God, the Torah, which shapes and guides the people throughout its history. This is same structure of love proposed by Torah commentaries that say the story of the Judges must come after Mount Sinai—law comes after intimate love. It is only once the Jews have directly encountered God that they can build a life and nation based on that encounter.

Years later, Franz Rosenzweig wrote an open letter to his friend and fellow thinker Martin Buber called “The Builders” on the topic of halakhah. In “The Builders,” Rosenzweig argues for the importance of keeping halakhah even in the absence of any previous experience of God. A Jew must keep halakhah not because they have experienced God telling them do so, but so that when they do experience God’s revelation, it will take place within the framework of halakhah. In order for revelation to be Jewish revelation, it must take place in a Jewish context, or, as Rosenzweig glosses on the midrash of Hazal, “in order to become builders, we must first become sons.” In essence, Rosenzweig claims that moments of intimacy always take place within broader lives which shape and define those moments. It is only if we first structure our lives in unison—with all the rule and norms that entails—that we can achieve moments of deep unity. If we build a life based on our shared values, ideals, and beliefs, then we can have moments true passion.

Yom Kippur 2019 – Being Together with Man and God

Yom Kippur approaches. The long day of atonement the ascetic quest for apology, catharsis, and, if we dare to hope, reconciliation. This quest is in some ways driven by the persistent drumbeat of prayer, particularly the vidui, the rhythmic recital of the sins we have sinned. Ashamnu.

According to Rav Shagar, this detailed enumeration of our iniquities is not self-important, it’s not about itself. What it is about is our underlying posture toward each other. We don’t commit interpersonal sins, stealing or lying, without first seeing ourselves as separate from and in competition with those around us.

“The sins of guilt and betrayal mentioned in the confession are not necessarily private, specific guilts, but forms of being connected to the metaphysical guilt and betrayal rooted in the foundations of our existence; betrayal of the Other is inherent in the very nature of the human situation. I will always care for my children better than I will care for your children. “Man is a wolf to man” — This law is not psychological but ontological — this is the meaning of betrayal.” (Rav Shagar, She’erit Ha’emunah, 188)

When we sin against our fellow man, we act out our underlying sense that it’s us or them, and we always choose us. We are always at war, and we have always been at war; there is never more than a cold peace between me and the enemy I see across the table, nevermore than a lazy ceasefire.

What we need then, is to reimagine the way we exist in the world, not our actions, but the underlying orientation toward other people from which our actions spring forth. We cannot keep seeing ourselves as competing with everyone else in a zero-sum game for existence and happiness. We need to learn to see the other’s gain as my own gain as well, to see ourselves as part of a larger unity.

“The choir represents the intentional intermingling of individuals , and that is what makes it so powerful. It is enjoyable because of the harmony it creates between individuals, and therefore there is no better way to create the unified collective of the congregation.” (ibid.)

This is not a mystical, organic unity, however. We are not part of one solid organism called “the Jewish people,” “humanity,” what have you. This is individuals coming together as part of a larger project, with a shared vision of a brighter future, of the possibilities of transcendence.

That matters because this is a unity without difference. This is about different, separate individuals coming together out of choice. Consequently, I may actually experience another person gaining as my own losing; sometimes reality really is limited. This unity means taking a moment to re-evaluate what it means to lose.

“They say that love will win, but love cannot win. This is because where there is love there is no winner, and where there is victory there is no love. Quite the reverse, love loses, it is constantly losing, it is inextricably tied to giving up, to sacrifice and self-degradation.” (Rav Shagar, Nahalekh Beregesh, 336)

Losing is an inherent part of any relationship. Any time I commit myself to another person, I agree to make sacrifices for them. I recognize the importance, within my own life, of things and people other than myself. (For Rav Soloveitchik this was submission,;for Rosenzweig it was judgment; for Heschel ,self-transcendence; for Levinas, the infinite command of the other; and for Rav Froman, the true freedom that only comes from commitment.) This is all the more true when it comes to being part of a group. Choosing to be part of a collective means choosing to put the group before the self, at least in some areas and respects. It means choosing to lose for the sake of the group and the other people in it, because that itself is a kind of win. It may not take away the sting of the sacrifice, but it adds its own kind of sweetness, a pleasant aroma before God.

This sweetness is the theological horizon of unity. Yom Kippur is not just about society, and unity is not just interpersonal; our relationships with others are simultaneously our relationship with The Other, God who transcends human existence.

“The confession does not mention sins between man and God at all, something that gets to the heart of the confession; the guilt that it deals with is ethical-existential guilt of betraying the essence of existence, something that is manifest in societal wrongs, not in the religious realm between a person and his god. The social realm is the location of the kingdom of God, in it and through it the divine unity is realized – “Hear O’ Israel, the Lord is our god, the Lord is one.”” (Rav Shagar, She’erit Ha’emunah, 188-189)

Human unity and divine oneness are inextricably intertwined. Loving and losing can never be torn apart. Atonement begins with the recognition of fundamental sin. When we apologize to other people, when we begin to shift our basic posture toward them, we begin to reveal the kingdom of God. When we declare before God that we have sinned against other people, we declare the divine significance of the social realm. And when we begin to see others as collaborators rather than competitors, individuals for whom we would sacrifice rather than enemies to overcome, we begin to mend the tears in the very fabric being, both human and divine. Bagadnu, and no more. Peace, purity, and reconciliation.

Shiur: Tammuz 2019 – Do You Lie About God? The Meaning of Faith and Torah in a Time of Destruction

Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 69b:

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: Why are the Sages of those generations called the members of the Great Assembly? It is because they returned the crown of the Holy One, Blessed be He, to its former glory. How so? Moses came and said in his prayer: “The great, the mighty, and the awesome God” (Deuteronomy 10:17). Jeremiah the prophet came and said: Gentiles, i.e., the minions of Nebuchadnezzar, are carousing in His sanctuary; where is His awesomeness? Therefore, he did not say awesome in his prayer: “The great God, the mighty Lord of Hosts, is His name” (Jeremiah 32:18). Daniel came and said: Gentiles are enslaving His children; where is His might? Therefore he did not say mighty in his prayer: “The great and awesome God” (Daniel 9:4).

The members of the Great Assembly came and said: On the contrary, this is the might of His might, i.e., this is the fullest expression of it, that He conquers His inclination in that He exercises patience toward the wicked. And these acts also express His awesomeness: Were it not for the awesomeness of the Holy One, Blessed be He, how could one people, i.e., the Jewish people, who are alone and hated by the gentile nations, survive among the nations?

The Gemara asks: And the Rabbis, i.e., Jeremiah and Daniel, how could they do this and uproot an ordinance instituted by Moses, the greatest teacher, who instituted the mention of these attributes in prayer? Rabbi Elazar said: They did so because they knew of the Holy One Blessed be He, that He is truthful. Consequently, they did not speak falsely about Him.

Additional sources:

Devarim 8:7-10

For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the LORD your God for the good land which He has given you.

Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 131 – What makes The Star Jewish?

I have received the new thinking in these old words so, in them, have I given it back and passed it on. For a Christian, as I know, words of the New Testament would have come to his lips instead of my words, [while] for a pagan, I think, not words from his sacred books [would have come to his lips]—for their ascent leads away from the original language of mankind, not to it, like the earthly path of revelation—but perhaps [words] wholly his own. But to me, these [came]. And yet this is, to be sure, a Jewish book: not one that deals with “Jewish things,” for then the books of the Protestant Old Testament scholar would be Jewish books; but rather one for which, to say what it has to say, especially the new thing it has to say, the old Jewish words come. Like things in general, Jewish things have always passed away; yet Jewish words, even when old, share the eternal youth of the word, and if the world is opened up to them, they will renew the world.

Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metsia 59b

Exodus 23:2

You shall neither side with the majority to do wrong—you shall not give perverse testimony in a dispute so as to pervert it in favor of the majority.

לֹֽא־תִהְיֶ֥ה אַחֲרֵֽי־רַבִּ֖ים לְרָעֹ֑ת וְלֹא־תַעֲנֶ֣ה עַל־רִ֗ב לִנְטֹ֛ת אַחֲרֵ֥י רַבִּ֖ים לְהַטֹּֽת.

Avot 4:1

Who is mighty? He who subdues his [evil] inclination, as it is said: “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that rules his spirit than he that takes a city” (Proverbs 16:3).

What’s the Divine Part of Revelation? How Do We Find God in the Torah? Rav Shagar’s “Face to Face”

What’s the Divine Part of Revelation? How Do We Find God in the Torah?
Rav Shagar’s “Face to Face”

In a derashah for Shavuot from the year he died, Rav Shagar explores the complex relationship between the human and divine aspects of the Revelation at Sinai, as well as of the Torah. He points out the contradiction between verse that describes the giving of the Torah as speaking to God “face to face” and God’s own statement that, “no person may see my face and live.” Seemingly, revelation means encountering the divine, while encountering the divine is impossible for a human. Rav Shagar also quotes the Baal HaTanya, who points out that the Ten Commandments are a particularly human set of commandments. They’re all “banal matters that are necessitated by human intellect itself.” If the Revelation at Sinai was some sort of transcendent experience of the divine, then why are the commandments so very human? Simply on a practical level, what did revelation add? If these are intuitively obvious rules, then we didn’t even need revelation to know them. Why did God have to reveal simple, human rules?

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Moreover, what about this revelation is divine? Where do the human words and ideas end and the divine suddenly begin? In Rav Shagar’s own striking formulation, “What significance can revelation have if it must always be processed through human concepts and ideas? What connection could revelation create, when the very idea of a connection is a human idea?” If any way we try and formulate or conceptualize revelation will be unavoidably human, how can it be an encounter with, or revelation of, the divine? And what does that mean for the Torah, written entirely using human words?

As I will briefly explain below, Rav Shagar tackles each of these topics, revelation and the Torah, in turn (I’m not going to touch on every idea in the derashah, just trace out the main ideas regarding to these two issues). He explains revelation through the ideas of dialogic philosophy, which asks about how we encounter other people as unique individuals. Given that any words we could use to describe another person, or even speak to them, could just as easily describe or be spoken to a different person, how do we encounter that unique individual. Rav Shagar will conclude that the words of revelation provide a platform for the actual, wordless encounter with the divine. This will in turn lead to his understanding of the divinity of the Torah. He will argue that what makes Torah divine is not its words or ideas, themselves unavoidably human, but the way they provide a sort of linguistic space wherein we can encounter God. Moreover, this encounter “ensouls” us (Rosenzweig’s term), bringing our normally stagnant and unnoticed inner selves to the fore, as we study and create Torah from a most intimate space within us.

shagar4

Wordless Encounter in the Words of Revelation

Rav Shagar distinguishes between “indirect, theoretical knowledge” and “unmediated knowledge derived from direct recognition.” The former refers to any knowledge you could learn from a book, or hear about from another person. The latter refers to the sort of knowledge you can only get through personal experience. Revelation thus “lets you distinguish between the layer of what is common to others and the revelation of what cannot be conceptualized.”

To borrow an example from R. Jason Rubinstein, there are two ways to learn about a rainbow. You can read about the technical details of its appearance and the scientific and atmospheric phenomena that give rise to it. However, none of that can tell you what it is like to actually look at a rainbow. In order to learn that, you have to experience it yourself. Experiential knowledge, like colors and flavors, can never be learned from another person, whether in writing or in person.

It is in this category of wordless, inexplicable, deeply personal experience that Rav Shagar locates the divine within revelation, in the “divine intimacy that is bared before the believer.” This bared intimacy evokes, demands, a parallel response from the individual (or nation, as it were) who receives revelation. For Rosenzweig, whom Shagar invokes, it is responding to divine revelation that the individual is “ensouled.” We only really become ourselves in responding to someone else, and to God above all. This is the intimate relationship of love, of עשיית מצווה לשמה as described by Rambam.

When we speak with someone we love (romantically or otherwise), the words we speak are often not what matters. Sometimes what we are talking about is much less important than the simple fact that we are talking. Spending time together with someone can be more important that what you do with that time together. Those topics you speak about or actions you do together are things anyone could do with anyone else. What makes the encounter a unique encounter between two unique individuals is the presence of those two individuals. What makes revelation divine is not it’s words, but their source in God.

Torah as a Linguistic Space for Encountering God

So if that’s revelation, where does that leave Torah? If the words and ideas of revelation are not what makes it divine, then what about the words and ideas of the Torah? And what does that mean for learning Torah?

“This idea requires us to change how we think about the truth of revelation. As the creation of a space wherein reality is revealed, the revelation of the Torah, like the creation of the world, cannot be evaluated based on external facts. The Torah is speech that creates, rather than depicting or representing. The words construct their meaning, which is not evaluated based on how close they adhere to reality, but rather based on internal coherence, on being substantive and not artificial.”

If revelation involves the manifestation of the divine within the human, then the divine can be encountered just as well within the human words and ideas of the Torah. What the Torah provides is not divine ideas or texts but a linguistic “space” within which to encounter the divine. It gives us a language and a set of topics to make our own, to obsess over the way a love-struck lover obsesses over a note from their significant other. The Torah becomes God’s love note, as it were, and we explore every jot and tittle for the sake of find God in it all the more.

Like the love borne within a note, the divinity of the Torah is not a function of the way the words depict some external reality. The words of the note create a sense of love independent of external reality, and the words of the Torah do something similar for divinity. The revelation of the Torah should therefore not be seen as God informing the Jewish people about reality, about objective right and wrong, but as the creation of a covenantal relationship within with God and the people encounter each other.

This has an important implication for how we study Torah. Studying Torah is not a search for objective, external truth. It requires “substance” and “internal coherence,” but beyond that it’s about the students deep, personal engagement with the text and the attempt to fing God within it. Moreover, these students can and should learn creatively, excitedly innovating new Torah ideas. The ideas have to make sense within the broader picture of Torah, but beyond that they should be very creative. The student should enjoy the process of innovation within Torah study. In revelation created this linguistic space, talmud torah helps expand and maintain it.

In conclusion, appreciating the Torah, and revelation more broadly, is not about being able to point to specific aspects of the Torah and claim they’re divine. It’s about seeing God behind those aspects, and seeing those aspects as a pathway to encountering God. When we learn Torah on Shavuot, it’s not a scientific study about the nature of reality; it’s a deep yet playful engagement with God within the platform of Torah, a platform we can help build.

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.

Rav Shagar’s Turn to Rosenzweig: Post-Liberalism and the Futurity of Redemption

More thesis notes.

Part of my thesis focuses on Rav Shagar’s turn to Rosenzweig in context of struggling with the state of Israel’s violent actions, “Violence in the struggle over the land [that] contradicts our tradition in a deep way,” most particularly the Disengagement from Gaza and the northern Shomron. Rosenzweig was famously a non-Zionist (in contrast with the anti-Zionist Benno Jacob) and believed that redemption was something we experience as inherently set in the future, rather than as something achievable in the present. The Jewish people cannot achieve redemption, they must wait for it patiently. In this, Rosenzweig self-consciously rejects the ideas of human progress and of the modern liberal state (note: “liberal” here does not have the same sense as in contemporary politics) as an entity capable of elevating human existence (cf. Yehoshua Arieli, “Modern History as Reinstatement of the Saeculum”). In this sense, Rosenzweig is a “post-liberal” thinker, in that he consciously rejects the liberal, modern framework. He is not ignorant of the possibility that people could redeem themselves, he is aware of it and believes it to be false. It is this post-liberal sensibility that Rav Shagar takes up in the passage I discuss here.

These two ideas, 1) the futurity of redemption and 2) the inability of people to redeem themselves are obviously connected. From one perspective, people cannot redeem themselves because redemption is a state that exists beyond history. From another, redemption lies beyond human history because people are incapable of achieving it.

Religious Zionism was built on the the idea that Jews can in fact bring the redemption rather than simply “yearning” for it, or “entreating” it, in Rosenzweig’s language. Hence the importance of the religious, redemptive nature of the contemporary state of Israel, because it is already the first step in the process of achieving redemption.

Most of the time when Rav Shagar appeals to Rosenzweig in context of Zionism, he presents Rosenzweig’s non-Zionism as one extreme, with Rav Abraham Isaac Kook on the other, enabling him to choose a middle position that he identifies with Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav. However, in an essay entitled “We did not Win in Amona” (Nekudah 288 (Adar 2006), 34-37; Nahalekh Baragesh, 330) he seems to embrace Rosenzweig’s position more whole-heartedly. He still does not propose moving out of Israel or anything, but he does talk about adopting an exilic existence within Israel (something for which he argues in a variety of contexts, and which his student, Yishai Mevorach, develops dramatically in his book, Yehudi Shel Haketsei). Moreover, he embraces the interlocking Rosenzweigian elements of 1) the futurity of redemption and 2) the post-liberal sense that people cannot redeem themselves. While Rav Shagar does not go so far as to say that redemption cannot be achieved by people, he does delay the religious nature of the state, seemingly indefinitely. Strikingly, the relevant section of the aforementioned essay is entitled “Not Yet,” the phrase Rosenzweig uses to denote the futurity of redemption.

In this text, liberal vs. post-liberal ideologies of redemption and progress are framed in terms of bitahon, a word referring both to the religious sense of trust in God and the secular self-confidence of human-driven progress and security. Rav Shagar criticizes the Religious Zionist community for replacing the former, religious meaning with the latter, secular one. Religious Zionists are too liberal (again, not in the sense of contemporary political discourse), believing too strongly in their capacity to create a redemptive state (cf. Dov Schwartz, “Religious Zionism and the Idea of the New Man” [Heb], Yisrael 16 (2009):143-164). They ought to reject this modernist ideology and “throw their lot upon the Lord.” While the appeal to Psalms and Haredi ideology might seem to echo pre-modern, pre-liberal ways of thinking, it is the conscious adoption of these approaches against modern, liberal ideology that makes Rav Shagar post-liberal.

Notably, this text also presents us with Shagar pretty clearly identifying Rosenzweig (and Cohen) with what the Haredi community, something he does in other contexts as well. Ultra-Orthodox, Haredi Judaism is an intensive, minority culture which does not identify with the state of Israel in any religious sense, nor does it believe in human-driven redemption. While explicitly calling for Religious Zionism to remain Religious Zionism, rather than turning toward Haredi Judaism, Rav Shagar still critiques these elements that make Religious Zionism what it is, and argues for the adoption of a more Haredi/Rosenzweigian cultural posture. This leads him to a messianism that exists as dreams, and a Zionism that is most certainly not their fulfillment.

The final section of “We did not Win in Amona,” entitled “Not Yet,” is translated in full below.

Not Yet

We have to be faithful to our path; that is the meaning of covenant today. We must adhere to the Religious Zionist path, even in a world of betraying and being betrayed. I call upon us to be Haredim for our path; in my opinion, this is the correct meaning of being “National Religious Haredi” (hardaliyut). It’s not about moving away from the original Religious Zionist Torah, which takes the path of “Tiferet,” the path of combinations, integrations, and shades. Zionism, higher education, social sensitivity, modesty, and faithfulness. Our becoming-Haredi needs to be a becoming-Haredi into religious Zionism. Abandoning this path is itself corrupting the covenant (pegam habrit). Violence in the struggle over the land contradicts our tradition in a deep way. Moreover, a violent struggle just invites the next struggle. Hate nourishes hate. They make us evil, and we make them evil. The holy “Shlah” interpreted the verse “The Egyptians mistreated (vayare’u) us” to mean that the primary sin of the Egyptians was making us evil (ra’im). In my opinion, the only to change direction and start a revolution is the opposite approach. In war, everyone loses, while mercy and patience win even when they lose. In the present situation, any other fight ceases to be a religious fight, and is nothing other than a gross internalization of the crude aspect of the secular Zionist ethos.

We must build Judea, but as a community, not a state. We will remain faithful to the state, and as such to the nation of Israel, but while pointedly maintaining our unique approach and thus our distinctiveness. We will see in isolating ourselves (to a degree) in our community an exile in the midst of redemption, exile within the land of Israel. “After the Disengagement,” said one of the rabbis of Judea, Samaria, and the area around Gaza, “we will go out to exile with a book of kinot in our hands.” However, it is an exile of yearnings, of what is “not yet.” It is an exile that means recognizing the dream that is not yet realized, and that we are not willing to give up on it. This is as opposed to an exile of alienation and estrangement, alienation that comes from an inability to accept the fact that the dream cannot be realized here and now. Like relationships between the sexes, wherein the laws of modesty require us to maintain boundaries (mehitsot), which are sometimes thin and even transparent but always firm and tangible, so two we must maintain the boundary between secularism and religiosity. It will not lead to alienation and rejection of the covenant, but will preserve the “not yet.”

Ultimately, we are unaccustomed to this response. We Religious Zionists committed almost entirely to the Zionist activism of redeeming ourselves under our own power and the ethos of totally rejecting the exile. The confidence (bitahon) of the Religious Zionist is something different, it is the confidence that “he gives you the strength to create wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:18). All we must do, they taught us, is believe that it is not our power but divine providence. It is this belief that distinguishes between forceful violence and action that never loses track of the weak and weakness and grace. However, this activist confidence must pass through the confidence of “Cast your burden upon the Lord” (Psalms 55:23), which is the inner ability to relinquish and set aside; it is this confidence to which we are called at this moment. This confidence enables us to give up on victory today. In other words, we are forbidden to forget the exile. The ethos of rejecting the exile, the confidence in the IDF that replaced the confidence in God, is what I think made the state violent and forceful. We must internalize the exile into the state itself. There were and are Haredi Israelis, and non-Orthodox thinkers like Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, who for this reason opposed the very idea of a Jewish state. They claimed that authentic Jewish existence is exilic existence, and that Jewishness is inherently opposed to history and politics. The answer, they claim, must be establishing a state without rejecting the exile. It should be a dialectical, I would even say Hegelian, process, that internalizes the exilicness into the state and thus elevates it to the next phase of political existence, a state of justice and mercy.

In the past, Religious Zionism has resolved this tension by sheltering beneath the wide-spread wings of the secular Zionist state. This often involved intentional ignorance and self-deception, such as have been laid bare by ongoing events. The problem began when Religious Zionism tried to take the burden on itself. The shelter is broken now, and the tension between spirit and force emerges with full intensity. The current solution, fitting to the spirit of the age, is communalist. It’s a solution within the framework of what they call the citizen society, which involves suspending the identity between religion and state. This does not mean that we’ll stop being Religious Zionists and loyal patriots; Hatikvah will still send a shiver down our spines and connect us to two thousand years. However, alongside this feeling of loyalty we will know that the state cannot now fulfill our dreams. Its is exactly from a place of relinquishment, of separation without alienation, that we will be able to receive much deeper empathy for our path and our dreams.

Hanukkah 2018 Shiur – Where do we draw the line between Judaism and the Outside World?

Sources:

I. The Weather Outside is Frightful – Franz Rosenzweig’s “Apologetic Thinking,”

Translation from “Philosophical and Theological Writings,” eds. and trans. P. Franks and M. Morgan

Judaism indeed has dogmas, but no dogmatics. […] The community does not wish to be only a spiritual community, but wants rather to be what it actually is in contrast to other communities connected by spirit/intellect alone: a natural community, a people.
The Guide of the Perplexed, however, would disappoint one who approaches it in the expectation of finding a system. […] The defense is directed against the attacks of philosophy, not or only peripherally against other religions, by which the defense could therefore have been taken over. The apologetic nature of the fundamental attitude yields the completely unpedantic character, which still today is a fresh breeze for the reader and strikes him as in no way “scholastic”; this thinking has what systematic thinking cannot have so easily: the fascination—and the truthfulness—of thought reacting to the occasion; but therefore a limit is also set for it which only systematic thinking removes: exactly the limit of the occasional; only systematic thinking determines the circle of its objects itself; apologetic thinking remains dependent on the cause, the adversary.
And in this sense Jewish thinking remains apologetic thinking. […] One did not become a Jewish thinker in the undisturbed circle of Judaism. Here, thinking did not become a thinking about Judaism, which was simply the most self-evident thing of all, more a being than an “ism,” but rather it became a thinking within Judaism, a learning; thus ultimately not a fundamental but rather an ornamental thinking. Anyone who was supposed to reflect on Judaism had somehow, if not psychologically then at least spiritually, to be torn at the border of Judaism. Therefore, however, his thinking was then determined by the power which had led him to the border, and the depth horizon of his gaze was determined by the degree to which he had been carried to, on, or across the border. The apologetic is the legitimate force of this thinking but also its danger.
Why is the word “apologetics” particularly afflicted with such a bad odor? In this regard, it is probably similar to the apologetic profession par excellence, that of the lawyer. Against him, too, exists widely the prejudice that considers lying, as it were, his legitimate task. It may be that a certain professional routine appears to justify this prejudice. And yet, defending can be one of the noblest human occupations. Namely, if it goes to the very ground of things and souls and, renouncing the petty devices of a lie, ex-culpates with the truth, nothing but the truth. In this broad sense, literary apologetics can also defend. It would then embellish nothing, still less evade a vulnerable point, but would rather make precisely the most endangered points the basis of the defense. In a word: it would defend the whole, not this or that particular. It would not at all be a defense in the usual sense, but rather a candid exposition, yet not of some cause, but rather of one’s own [self].

II. But the Fire is So Delightful – Rav Shagar’s “Translation and Living in Multiple Worlds”

Translation by Levi Morrow, forthcoming

For better or worse, we are citizen of multiple cultures and we live in more than one world of values. We are not able to deny this situation, nor would we deny it if we could. Denying it would be self-denial, leading to deep, radical injury to our religious faith itself. Rebbe Naḥman’s approach to translation is therefore not only desirable, but also the only option for elevating the translation that is already happening anyway.
I see great importance in this characterization because we do not first experience the true problem of the encounter between Torah, religious life, and the Greek language – affecting us through the media, academia, literature, and much more – when we come across this language in our university studies after years of learning in yeshiva. Rather, much earlier, in the religious education that we received, in the foundation of our faith, and in the limited constructs that we make its content. We therefore need a substantial religious-spiritual-Jewish alternative, without which it is impossible to avoid internal contradictions that bear a heavy price.
The multiple, split identity model puts together different worlds without recognizing compartmentalized truth-values or different realms of truth. We should describe the Religious Zionist soul as a soul that lives not in one world but in many worlds, which it likely cannot integrate. It does not compartmentalize them – Torah versus Avodah, faith versus science, religion versus secularism – but rather manages a confusing and often even schizophrenic set of relationships between them.
A new type of religiosity has therefore developed nowadays, one that cannot be defined by its location on any graph; it is scattered across many different (shonim), you could even call them “strange” (meshunim), centers. This religiosity does not define itself with the regular religious definitions, but enables a weaving of unusual identities, integrating multiple worlds – in a way that is not a way. It presents a deep personal faith that, in my opinion, carries the potential for religious redemption
As per Rebbe Naḥman, the deep meaning of preserving the covenant (shemirat habrit) is eros. This is the significance of the small jug of oil with the seal of the high priest: the harmony of an individual with who and what he is, without locking himself into a specific identity; he can be who he is, whoever that may be.

Smashing the Aravot to Bits as a Reenactment of Jewish History

Sukkot is, to modern eyes, perhaps the strangest Jewish holiday, and its seventh day is by far the strangest. For the whole week of Sukkot, Orthodox Jews take a four-part floral arrangement and shake it in all directions. On the seventh day, known as “Hoshanah Rabbah,” they take one of the four parts, willow branches, and smash a bundle of them into the ground repeatedly. The original reason behind the ritual is unknown, but it’s energetic alienness demands explanation. While attempts to divine it’s reason abound, none can ever definitively claim to be the original reason. In what follows, I want to do something different, similar to what John Caputo has called a “short-circuit” (See the first few chapters of “The Weakness of God”) – I want to wire together this ritual with several texts that never had each other in mind, because they resonate deeply with each other, and because this short-circuit produces something true and worth saying. By the end of this process, I hope to have arrived not at the meaning of the ritual, but a meaning the ritual may bear today.

Jumping right in, there is a famous rabbinic text comparing the four species of flora use on Sukkot to four different types of Jews, based on their possessing or lacking A. Torah and B. good deeds (Vayikra Rabbah 30:12, which I have previously written about here). The last of the four that the text discusses is the willow: “‘And brook willows’ – these are [referring to] Israel. Just like this willow, which has no smell and has no taste, so too Israel has among them people that have no Torah and have no good deeds.” The willow branches, as opposed to the other plants, represent Jews who have nothing specifically Jewish about them. They are characterized neither by Jewish cognitive content, Torah, nor by Jewish actions. In short, they are Jewish in name only.

Being Jewish in name only is a topic that Rav Tsadok Hakohen Rabinowitz of Lublin explores in Tsidkat Hatsadik #54 (English translation to come when the time allows):

עיקר היהדות – בקריאת שם ישראל. כמו שנאמר זה יאמר לה’ אני וגו’ ובשם ישראל יכנה. שלא יהיה לו רק מעלה זו שמכונה בשם ישראל די. ומצינו בריש פרק כלל גדול (שבת סח:) גר שנתגייר בין האומות ומביא חטאת על החלב והדם והשבת ועבודה זרה, עיין שם דלא ידע כלל שזה אסורה ואפילו על עבודה זרה ושבת. ונמצא שלא ידע כלל מכל התורה, ובמה הוא גר להתחייב חטאת, רק בקריאת שם ישראל די.

In this first paragraph, Rav Tsadok discusses the Babylonian Talmud’s statement (Shabbat 68b) that a convert who converted among non-Jews has to bring a sacrifice when they join the Jewish community, to atone for sins they may have committed unknowingly. The convert has no knowledge of even Shabbat or idolatry so in what sense have they converted, ask Rav Tsadok. His answer: they are called by the name “Israel” – they are Jewish in name, if only that. This, in fact, is the essence of conversion, for “the essence of Judaism is being called by the name ‘Israel.”

What does it mean to be Jewish in name, and even only in name, that it is so much more significant than having Jewish thoughts or actions? What is the advantage of the willow branches over the other Sukkot plants?

When you have Jewish thoughts or actions, then you have specific Jewish parts of who you are. You do Jewish acts and you think Jewish thoughts, and you may participate in non-Jewish thoughts and actions alongside these. When you are Jewish in name, then all of your thoughts and actions are Jewish by definition, regardless of their content. To be Jewish in name is to be all-pervasively Jewish; every part of you is Jewish simply by definition. It is this Jewish name that characterizes willow branch-Jews, as opposed to all others.

What does all of this mean for the Hoshanah Rabbah ritual, wherein the willow branches are smashed against the ground, coming apart with every blow? I would like to explain that in light of a passage from Frank Rosenzweig’s “The Star of Redemption.” In context of a discussion of Jewish chosenness, Rosenzweig states:

Judaism, and it alone in all the world, maintains itself by subtraction, by contraction, by the formation of ever new remnants. This happens quite extensively in the face of the constant external secession. But it is equally true also within Judaism itself. It constantly divests itself of un-Jewish elements in order to produce out of itself ever new remnants of archetypal Jewish elements. Outwardly it constantly assimilates only to be able again and again to set itself apart on the inside. (trans. William Hallo, p. 404)

Whereas other nations and religions maintain themselves by expanding, Rosenzweig says, Judaism maintains itself by contracting. Like other groups, Judaism constantly develops new forms, absorbs new ideas, and generally finds new ways to grow. Unlike other groups, however, Judaism quickly sheds all of these new manifestations, in a constant process of elimination, ever condensing toward a core Jewishness, a Jewishness that has no content, that is Jewish in name only. This core, which Rosenzweig identifies with the prophetic “remnant of Israel” (שארית ישראל), is what persisted throughout Jewish history, as all kinds of specific types of Judaism have disappeared or broken away. That isn’t to say that Rosenzweig identifies the remnant of Israel with traditional Rabbinic Judaism. Rather, he identifies it with Jews who are Jewish in name, whose whole existence is bound up in being Jewish, so that everything they do and say is Jewish, by definition.

Smashing the willow branches against the ground reenacts Rosenzweig’s vision of Jewish history. The willow branches, representing the in-name-only Jews, the Jews who are Jewish whether or not they know Torah or do mitsvot, are smashed against the ground of history. They slowly come apart, losing bits of leaf with every strike, but the core of the branch remains. So too the core of Judaism, the Jews whose Judaism has defined them inherently, regardless of their thoughts or deeds, has survived the travails of history. When we smash the willow branches into the ground, we may remind ourselves of the necessity of this in-name-only Jewishness. The ritual could challenge us, calling us to be “called by the name ‘Israel.’”

[as with many of my recent posts, much of my thinking and interpreting here is owed to influence from Yishai Mevorach, a student of Rav Shagar and an editor of his writings, and an interesting thinker in his own right. An English interview with Prof. Alan Brill about Mevorach’s new book, “A Theology of Absence” can be found here, and Mevorach’s Hebrew lectures on a variety of topics can be found on his youtube channel here.]