REVIEW: Living Time
Rabbi Shagar, Living Time: Festival Discourses for the Present Age, edited by Alan Brill and translated by Levi Morrow (Maggid Modern Classics, 2024), 300 pp.
Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg (1949-2007, universally known as Rav Shagar) creatively broke new ground in Religious Zionist thought. Confronting modern challenges facing Israeli religious youth, he adopted an intellectual counter-cultural approach to teaching and Jewish thought. I first encountered Rav Shagar’s work when praying in the study hall of a large Dati Leumi seminary in Jerusalem. The Hebrew book Kelim ve-Shivrei Kelim sat on one student’s desk. I found the work engaging. In order to answer the questions he felt most bothered young students, he developed a complex mixture of traditional Jewish sources, Kabbalah and Hassidut, and his interpretation of postmodernism. His arguments are both contemporary and challenging.
As the volume’s editor Alan Brill points out in his extensive introduction that “[i]n the early 1990s, the Religious Zionist world in Israel started undergoing tremendous changes… [it] sought to reformulate Religious Zionism away from the messianic ideology of the prior decades toward a greater sense of individualism” (xv). “Shagar “became the thinker who gave this new Religious Zionist world the religious language it sought,” his contribution “included a new approach to Torah study, a turn to Hasidism, a use of existential themes, and a unique interpretation of concepts such as repentance and self-acceptance…. For Rabbi Shagar, non-legalist Aggada, Hasidism, and Jewish thought need to inspire Talmud study. We need to bring Western culture, philosophy, and literature into dialogue with the Talmud” (xvii-xviii).
[Read Alan Brill’s introduction and a sample chapter online.]
Rav Shagar comfortably quotes a wide range of thinkers who heretofore were not staples in Israeli yeshiva discourse. These include the works of figures such as Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, Rabbi Shnuer Zalman of Liadi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and even films such as “The Matrix.” Strongly influenced by Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook and similar thinkers, Shagar’s thought and the language he uses to express it are demanding. Recently, while reading this new English edition in my synagogue, a Hebrew speaker asked me if Shagar is any easier to understand in English than in Hebrew. His discourses in any language challenge the reader conceptually and linguistically (even in this volume’s excellent translation by Levi Morrow).
Faith Shattered and Restored: Judaism in the Postmodern Age(Maggid, 2017) introduced English speakers to Rav Shagar’s philosophy. That volume presents a selection of his essays from various works focusing on general themes. Living Time offers the reader a variety of essays and lectures about the Jewish holidays. Because the festivals and their themes are well known, this welcome addition to the English library of Rav Shagar’s essays presents his theology through a lens that, in theory, may be more familiar and accessible than the earlier one.
Organized according to the cycle of the year, Living Time covers the entire holiday cycle, from the High Holy Days to the three pilgrimage festivals, Purim and Hanukka, the tragedies of the three weeks, and the modern Zionist holidays as well. Most of these essays appeared in print in Hebrew and are often an amalgam of lectures delivered at various times crafted together into a coherent whole.
The second essay on Hanukka, “A Screen for the Spirit, a Garment for the Soul” (85-104), gives us a glimpse into the complex weave of Rav Shagar’s mind. This lecture combines oral addresses and written pieces, focusing on a discourse of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, delivered between 1986 and 2005.
Shagar begins by informing the reader that “many Hasidic rabbis have a custom on Hanukka to sit in front of the lit candles and contemplate them, sometimes for hours” (86). He believes that Rabbi Shneur Zalman, the Ba’al HaTanya, produced some of his lectures in his work Torah Ohr in the wake of just such an experience. The candles’ light represents two different ideas that struggle in tension, the commandments and the soul, and how they relate to an authentic approach to God. “The spread of Hasidism raised a difficult question: Must focus on inner service of God necessarily move a person away from the practical framework of halakha? To put it differently, does the focus of Hasidism on ‘the candle of the soul’ necessarily dim the light of ‘the candle of commandment’?” (86).
Raising this question, Rav Shagar wanders into what some might consider controversial territory. He refines this point further, “the tension between the two is clear: a person’s external obligations to do specific things at specific times clashes with an individual listening to his inner voice” (87). For some Jews, the notion that Jewish law might conflict with the realization of the authentic self resonates with their own feelings; however, for the traditionally-minded, this ventures into dangerous territory. As some accused Hasidim of entertaining antinomian ideas, Rav Shagar begins this essay by presenting the danger. He seems to embrace the conflict as part of the problem of Judaism today. He pushes further in an attempt to shed light on the issue:
This question has another dimension that may help clarify things: the chasm between objective and subjective realms. Should an individual seek out the truth through their own subjective experience, or should they rather find the absolute and objective realm of reality? When a person sees truth as a reflection of his own subjective internal experience, the concept of truth loses its absoluteness and becomes relative. Truth becomes dependent on a person’s particular perspective, his emotions, feelings, and personal experiences. In this dichotomy, halakha falls on the side of the absolute and the fixed – God commanded us to follow it, and we cannot be relativists about it (87).
Toying with this tension echoes other writings by Rav Shagar. The notion that truth loses its objective value appears at the beginning of what is probably his most well-known book, Luhot ve-Shivrei Luhot: “Giving up on [objective] truth also leads to giving up the need for [objective] truth.” Rav Shagar’s version of postmodernism rejects or modifies objectivity for a subjective and personal understanding of the world.
As is typical of the essays in the volume, we have strayed far from the common themes of the Hanukka holiday. Shagar, based on R. Shneur Zalman, is interested in investigating the nature of truth and the human condition.
In what I believe to be a critical footnote, Rav Shagar suggests that the opening to his postmodern understanding of the self in a religious context stems from the transition from classic Kabbala to Hasidism. According to Shagar, “Kabbala is primarily concerned with fixing the upper worlds, while the Hasid is primarily concerned with inner attachment” (87 fn. 3). Whereas Kabbala focused on the celestial realm and issues of cosmic concern, Hasidism centering on personal religious development and attachment to the divine more easily lends itself to modern psychological understandings of the self and subjective experience as the building block of that authentic self. This approach fits with many scholars’ interpretation of Hasidut and even a surprising statement by Carl Jung: “Do you know who anticipated my entire psychology in the eighteenth century? The Hassidic Rabbi Baer of Meseritz, whom they call the Great Maggid. He was a most impressive man” (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters , edited by McGuire and Hull [Macmillian, 1980], 271)
For Rav Shagar, what is needed today is a deeper understanding of the role of commandments in the spiritual life of the modern religious individual. He suggests that Chabad offers a solution to this problem. He melds concepts from R. Shneur Zalman into a complex tapestry and investigates the nature of performing commandments as a profound way to worship. “In our context he [R. Shneur Zalman] means that entering the normative framework of commandments comes from will not ‘inner vitality.’ A person does not accept the commandments based on some understanding, but rather because of an intentional decision that constitutes passionate commitment and sacrifice” (98). The decision to keep tradition comes at a psychological cost to the inner authentic self. One chooses to keep commandments because of what they are, not what they offer the worshiper. This view of commandments paradoxically leads to a more meaningful understanding of the self.
Having first read the Hebrew and having compared various passages to that version, the English accurately conveys the meaning of the original in all its intricacy. And yet, as with others in this volume, this is a long and challenging essay. The complexity is emblematic of the book as a whole and Rav Shagar’s work in general.
Like many Hasidic works, Rav Shagar’s discourses venture far from a simple discussion of the Holidays. This volume is best for those who want to dive deeply into the sophisticated theology of one of the most creative Jewish theologians of the turn of the twenty-first century. As Brill suggests, some caution is in order: “English readers should not take Rabbi Shagar’s ideas out of their context. Rabbi Shagar wanted to provide a specific corrective for the ideological narrowness of the Israeli Religious Zionist word. Given that Diaspora Orthodoxy integrated Western culture decades before Rabbi Shagar, readers may look for innovations in places he never intended…. In addition, Rabbi Shagar’s passionate personal quest and deep piety may not shine through the translations of his teaching” (xl).
This volume offers the reader a window into a thinker who is gaining posthumous significant influence in specific sectors of the Israeli landscape. It allows the English reader to think deeply about complex theological ideas as discussed by someone searching for a way to make traditional Judaism relevant to modern intellectual Jews.
Rabbi Todd Berman is the Director of Institutional Advancement and a Ram at Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi.