At the edge of the town of Efrat, ten minutes south of Jerusalem, a yeshiva known as Siah Yitzhak sits on a dusty hill overlooking Bethlehem. The yeshiva is actually a collection of trailers, cold in winter and hot in summer. Inside its "study hall," young men wearing the knitted headgear typical of the Modern Orthodox learn the traditional fare: the Babylonian Talmud, its commentaries, and authoritative compilations of Jewish law. But there's a difference: at Siah Yitzhak, courses are also offered in meditation and in creative writing, and occasionally you can come upon a student poring over Jacques Derrida or Friedrich Nietzsche.
The spirit behind the yeshiva is Rabbi Shimon Gershom Rosenberg or, as he's popularly known, Rav Shagar, who passed away in 2007 at the age of fifty-eight. Rav Shagar lived an orderly and scholarly existence. He was married and the father of six children. Like many pious Jews, he prayed every morning with the rising sun. Then he would go for a swim at the neighborhood pool. The rest of his time was dedicated either to his family or to his religious search. In pursuit of the latter, he studied and taught deep into the night.
His search? While he taught the traditional forms of Talmud study, Rav Shagar rejected the exclusive use of rational categories in analyzing the text. Almost alone among Orthodox scholars, he brought to bear the critical insights of other modes of thought, including the post-modern. "Anyone who has eaten from 'the tree of knowledge,'" he said, is aware that all truth statements are rooted in relative perspectives. Thus he read the Talmud as a multifaceted composition that, in his words, "uses different arguments from a variety of worlds in order to establish its claims." In Rav Shagar's hands, the Talmud became a free-spirited text, propelled by its own intuitions and working, as they say in the circus, without a net.
So was Rav Shagar. A sensitive observer attending one of Rav Shagar's classes could not but notice that every so often the rabbi stepped into the abyss—but he wasn't afraid. Like his hasidic heroes, foremost among them Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav, he didn't hold on to history or nature or even reason for his support. Instead, he searched within, and he looked to God.
Rav Shagar left a massive amount of unpublished material when he died, and in 2009 his students and colleagues established a program to make these writings available. Much of what has been published thus far consists of learned explorations of the Jewish calendar. In his essays Rav Shagar sometimes appears as a virtuoso, deploying his immense erudition in biblical and talmudic literature, in the Jewish mystical and philosophical traditions, and in non-Jewish philosophy and psychology to gain access to the energy that animates the Jewish holidays. At other times, he writes with an arresting emotional directness.
Not surprisingly, the Siah Yitzhak yeshiva exists along the margins of Israel's national-religious establishment. There are those who will have nothing to do with it. Rabbi Yair Dreyfuss, Rav Shagar's student and lifelong friend and now the yeshiva's head, accepts this as a fact, perhaps a positive fact, of life; he is even reluctant to move out of the trailers. The key to his equanimity may lie in the introduction he contributed to a recent collection of Rav Shagar's writings: "Whoever studies this book is called upon to arouse inside himself the deepest, most fundamental questions of his existence, in the way the rabbi asked of himself all his life." By projecting naked honesty in the service of God, a man can inspire a generation.
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