New Article: The Fraud of SHAGAR Settler Zionist Post-Modernism Continues Unabated
David Shasha
The Fraud of SHAGAR Settler Zionist Post-Modernism Continues Unabated
I have addressed the very serious problem of using the term Post-Modernism to describe Ashkenazi atavistic Religious Zionism in the following SHU posts:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/shagar/davidshasha/JaCGbj6aTNU/a_p4YEkuBQAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/shagar/davidshasha/Dha5JInFRcQ/laDmOwkaCQAJ
We have seen how tendentious writers like William Kolbrener have sought to spuriously attach figures like Joseph B. Soloveitchik to the current philosophical trends, even when they do not at all line up with the Post-Modern weltanschauung.
Kolbrener showed his true CHUTZPAH in a recent article arguing that Liberal Education is being “poisoned” by BDS Anti-Zionism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/7uPoIkSe0wY
I particularly enjoyed that one, as Kolbrener’s deeply hypocritical full-throated defense of Liberal Education is made in the name of the staunchly Anti-Liberal Soloveitchik.
In his book-length essay The Halakhic Mind (part four, section IV, pp. 100-101), the Anti-Maimonidean Soloveitchik firmly castigated the Sephardic tradition as not being “Jewish” enough, in the same manner as his Modern Orthodox forerunner Samson Raphael Hirsch:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/hirsch/davidshasha/AQCL2KNg1So/n6WfU5WQBAAJ
It is indeed a thoroughly racist White Jewish attack on Sephardic cosmopolitanism and the tradition of Jewish Humanism that has been the bedrock of the work of Jose Faur, who has highlighted the complex rhetorical modalities of Midrash and its deep connection to Derridean philosophy and the Jewish writings of Edmond Jabes.
Indeed, as we will see below, the Modern Orthodox Ashkenazim have blithely ignored important scholarship from traditional Jews like Susan Handelman and Faur as they pretend that their Post-Modernism is the real megillah.
A key figure in this fraudulent linkage is Rabbi SHAGAR, who has become a central presence in contemporary Settler Zionism:
Rabbi Alan Brill has added to this litany of misdirection the following interview with Miriam Feldmann Kaye, who has provided an interesting twist to the fraud:
In classic PILPUL fashion this is how she characterizes the Post-Modernism of SHAGAR in her new book Jewish Theology in a Post-Modern Age:
In fact, I am not dependent on the term ‘postmodernism’ and would not have been opposed to using in the title the term “twenty-first century Jewish philosophy”, or even more specifically, contemporary. In the way in which I have used it, postmodernism refers to the temporal era of the end of the 20th and start of the 21st century A period after modernity – literally post-modern- in which we see the limits of modernity. In its most basic sense, postmodernism embodies a critique of different elements of modernity.
As with the SHAGAR book published by Maggid, Professor Kaye’s study is another case of false advertising, using the term Post-Modernism as a hook for a philosophical analysis that is mired in the religious and theological essentialisms of Modern Orthodox Zionist dogma, in direct contrast to the Derridean Open Text and its hermeneutical complexities.
As has become standard in such studies, the discussion is focused on the Da’as Torah icons of the YU world and ignores the pioneering studies of the aforementioned Handelman and Faur.
If you have the stomach for more of it, Brill posted this response by a graduate student named Levi Morrow:
Here is a sample of his wisdom:
Furthermore, the matter of Postmodernism quickly becomes a question of what we, and Rav Shagar, mean by it. Tomer Persico and Alan Brill have shown how Religious Zionist opponents of “Postmodernism” and Rav Shagar himself define postmodernism as liberal individualism. For all of them, “Postmodernism” is what comes after and/or attacks the ideas of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, a category that can include a lot more than what people typically call “Postmodernism” such as Buber, Sartre, and Rav Nachman.
It’s not incidental that Rav Shagar’s “postmodernism” is shaped by his Jewish theological context. He spent his whole life in the yeshivah system, never attending university, and was not shy about his unfaithful, ahistorical readings of secular philosophical texts: “We aren’t committed to ‘scientific,’ faithful-to-the-original, readings of Western or Eastern philosophy” (Luhot U’Shivrei Luhot, 132-133).
On some level, there’s something fundamentally strange about trying to identify Rav Shagar with a given philosophical stream, while he was so self-conscious and explicit about appropriating a variety of such streams for his own theological ends. Understanding Rav Shagar requires paying close attention not to his affiliations but to his appropriations, the way his readings of non-Jewish texts constructively shape both those texts and his understanding of Judaism, “the external light and the internal vessel.”(ibid.).
The PILPUL here is as thick as molasses – I cannot pretend to understand a fraction of it.
Affiliations, appropriations, my head is spinning like a dreidel!
In the end it is just more Jewish Separatism in the usual Ashkenazi Shtetl manner; the very antithesis of Post-Modern cultural multiplicity and its fractured narratives.
As has also become usual, it deploys the iconic figure of Abraham Isaac Kook, the founder of the eschatological Zionist school that led to his son Zvi Yehuda’s racist messianic theology, which was the foundation of the Gush Emunim, Bloc of the Faithful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gush_Emunim
I have addressed Kookism in the following SHU post:
What any of this has to do with Post-Modernism is anyone’s guess.
But it is definitely the core of the New Jewish Fascism.
Soon after the Levi Morrow post we got one more gem, this one from Shalom Hartman Institute White Jewish Supremacist Rabbi Zohar Atkins:
https://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2019/09/23/zohar-atkins-responds-to-miriam-feldmann-kaye/
Here is how Brill describes Atkins’ dismissive views on Jewish Post-Modernism:
Atkins does try to explain the use of postmodernism as a way of saying “God wants us to be incapable of finding God. Postmodernism is just another name for Galut Edom, the Roman Exile.” Yet, he concludes that: “these flights of poetic fancy are not postmodern, they are fundamentalist, mythic.” For Atkins, postmodernism has to treat every myth as an idol. Atkins defines the task of the contemporary religious philosopher to live “shuttling back and forth” with “an agon with myth for philosophy and an agon with philosophy for myth. Postmodern theology, thus, is a relishing of myth and a relishing of demythologization, yet it is an endeavor that, to me, seems like it can only be idiosyncratic, and a source of great dissonance.”
Finally, Atkins considers thinking “a form of avodah, is a holy, religious task” in which engagement with postmodern thought is necessary. He appreciated the “effort to amplify and beatify Torah (yagdil Torah v’adir),” by placing “it in conversation with the wisdom and insights of other traditions,” in this case postmodernism. He is deeply committed to the horizons of our lived Torah. For him, “Torah should speak to everything we know, love, and experience.”
This is an excellent encapsulation of the chasm that separates Ashkenazi Shtetl Separatism from the cosmopolitan Sephardic tradition of Maimonidean Jewish Humanism.
There is the “Torah” and there are “other traditions,” as we have seen in the thinking of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Binary opposition, not pluralistic integration.
The idea here is to “manage” the problem which serves to mischaracterize the hermeneutical complexity of Post-Modernism and its relation to Talmudic Midrash. It once again reifies fundamentalist dogma as doctrinal alienation.
Atkins’ conclusion is worth recounting for both its sheer ignorance and its implicit racism:
For those of us who aspire to think, who believe it is of the utmost import, and who, as Jews, or as religious folk, believe that thinking is a form of avodah, is a holy, religious task, engagement with postmodern thought is necessary. It may be necessary even as a Jacob’s ladder we climb and then kick away. I don’t believe postmodern thought often succeeds in “thinking,” yet I believe it helps us spot the ways in which we are not yet thinking, and this humility is needed today, not just for ethical and political reasons, but also for spiritual ones. To know that one is not yet thinking, is this not the awe of heaven?
I am grateful to Miriam Feldmann Kaye for introducing the question of postmodernism into the contemporary discussion of Jewish thought and theology, not because I believe postmodernism can save Jewish life or thought (I’m not sure any doctrine, even an anti-doctrinaire one could do this), but because the question of how to live a sincere, elevated, responsible, pious Jewish life that is critical, self-critical, and open-minded, is upon us.
First, it is crucial to note that SHAGAR and Feldmann Kaye did not “introduce” the question of Post-Modernism into contemporary Jewish thought and theology; it was done many years ago by figures who are not interested in turning it into a “Jacob’s ladder we climb and then kick away”!
That is a truly chilling assessment of Post-Modernism that rejects the Open Text of the rabbinical tradition and its Midrashic exegesis.
It is deeply disturbing because it teaches young Modern Orthodox Jews that there is only one way – the Da’as Torah way – to study contemporary thought. Any deviations are not the way of “Torah” – what the Modern Orthodox insiders now call “Off the Derech”:
https://www.thelehrhaus.com/commentary/rationalism-mysticism-and-the-off-the-derekh-phenomenon/#em
Atkins calls this Judaism “pious” and “elevated” and “sincere” while pretending that it is “critical” and “open-minded,” even though it is just another essentialist religious trap that is hermetic rather than pluralistic and truly tolerant of difference.
The idea is to set very strict parameters to Jewish thought and mark as “Treyf” ideas that do not follow the YU Da’as Torah.
Sadly, with the continuing dominance of such dogmatic Orthodox voices in the current Jewish discourse, the truly innovative work of scholars like Handelman and Faur will remain a closed book to Jewish students who truly want to find the links between Torah and Post-Modernism.
David Shasha