Title: Living Time: Festival Discourses for the Present Age
By: Rabbi Shagar
Maggid
In his recent book Sacred Time (not to be confused with the subject of this review), Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik argued that “the Jewish calendar is a key that unlocks the very essence of Judaism.” By understanding what our holidays represent, we understand more about what it means to be a Jew.
This idea features prominently in the background of another new volume, Living Time: Festival Discourses for the Present Age, which collects several holiday drashot (sermons) of Rav Shagar (Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, 1949-2007). Though best known in the English-speaking world for his engagement with postmodern philosophy, his drashot were also an integral part of how he communicated ideas. In the words of his student, Rabbi Eitan Abramovitch, Rav Shagar’s drashot “do not aim to fully and clearly convey the discussed ideas or to explain the quoted texts, but to awaken the reader to the existential questions inherent in the illumination of each holiday. They seek to go beyond the realm of the intellect and address the heart.”
In Rav Shagar’s own words, a goal of his was “to create relevant, substantive meanings for the holidays and seasons which are meant to be times of depth and renewal” by integrating “modern ideas into chassidic lines of thought, in order to translate these chassidic ideas into our world.”
Living Time, therefore, provides an interesting challenge to the English-reading audience, especially to those who are used to the meticulous analyses of Modern Orthodox thought leaders and Litvish roshei yeshiva. Many of us do not know what to do with a book meant to be more evocative than explanatory. This also, however, provides an opportunity to connect to the upcoming holidays in ways that we may not have been able to before. One idea in a Yomim Nora’im drasha (first given in 1989), for example, captures a problem many can relate to:
We feel insincere and shallow during the Days of Repentance, and therein lies the problem. Do we really believe we can change? Do we even know what we are looking for? Unfortunately, we often do not feel like something significant happens to us during the High Holy Days because we do not really think of ourselves as sinners. Moreover, we really are not sinners at all! To sin, to truly and deliberately sin, we must first live a life that acknowledges there is such a thing as sin to begin with. In this sense, our greatest sin is that we do not live that sort of life. This is what we say in the confession of Al Het, “for the sin we have sinned of throwing off your yoke.” At some point, consciously or not, we threw off our yoke, discarding our awareness of a connection and covenant with G-d that makes us feel a sense of sin and transgression when we break the covenant.
While this idea is unpacked throughout the chapter, no step-by-step solution is offered. Statements like this throughout the book often do not lead to universal advice or conclusions but are instead meant to provoke an internal reaction in the reader so that we can say to ourselves, “Wow, that’s so true. How can I address it in a way that will actually make a difference for me?”
In that way, more than any other book, Living Time provides a much-needed service in guiding us to ask important questions and challenging us to think for ourselves about how to productively confront them rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution that few truly find comforting. A more controversial example of this can be found in Rav Shagar’s articulations of faith. In a Sukkot drasha, for example, he wrote:
Faith, as a shade that does not provide any shade, justifies itself only if you already believe – just like the sukkah which protects you only after you have entered it… It is therefore impossible to prove it, but also impossible to disprove it. You can always explain what happens according to faith. Does this empty it of meaning? To my mind, absolutely not! Faith permits the believer to relate to reality without being bound by reality.
This idea appears again in a Purim drasha in which he wrote that “faith is a remainder, a psycho-theological symptom manifesting as inexplicable stubbornness. It is a willingness to be on the losing side of the world simply because ‘this is who I am and this is who I want to be,’ without conscious justification.” These articulations are a result of Rav Shagar’s “soft postmodernism” which, in Dr. Alan Brill’s words, “denies the possibility of knowing truth but does not deny the existence of truth itself.” Objective truth exists, and faith in Judaism truly points to that objective truth, but we must each find our own pathways to embrace it.
In that sense, Living Time serves not as a rulebook but as a symphony meant to bring out feelings and thoughts in readers to facilitate those unique internal connections. Indeed, in the same Purim drasha, Rav Shagar wrote that the stories of Rebbe Nachman “expose the listener to a world of experiences that is entirely disconnected from the religious experience and its normal, accepted forms in the traditional Jewish world. However, because Rebbe Nachman, leader of a chassidic court and grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, is the one telling the story, this throws his religious listener into a fantastic literary world to which he himself does not belong.”
One might well view the drashot collected and translated in Living Time in the same way that Rav Shagar viewed the stories of Rebbe Nachman. While untraditional in some ways, the drashot expose readers to new ways of experiencing and thinking about how Judaism ought to impact our thoughts, speech, and actions. Rav Shagar, pictured on the book’s cover with his warm smile, long beard, and black hat, as well as his clear mastery of Torah sources, guides readers into new worlds of thought just as Rebbe Nachman did in his generation. The continued publication and translation of his writings is a true blessing.
