Is Religious Zionism Obsolete? Thoughts on Israel Independence Day based on Rav Shagar’s Sermon “Land and Exile: The Religious Community and the Pursuit of Peace” (1997)

On Israel Independence Day 1997 Rav Shagar addressed the students in his yeshiva Siah Yitzhak in Efrat on the West Bank. What is its relevance today in a post October 7 world?

On Yom Ha-Azma’ut 1997 Rav Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg 1949-2007) rose to address his yeshiva. As one might think, his sermon was devoted to Israeli Independence Day, but as we will see, not in any conventional way. This was 1997. Oslo II was signed two years before. The prospect of “peace” which meant the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank was in the air. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a supporter of the settler movement in 1995 because he promoted the peace-process. The religious Zionist sector was being pulled apart. On the one hand, “land for peace” was a dagger in the heart of the religious Zionist project. On the other hand, one of its own had recently assassinated an Israeli Prime Minister. The community was shaken, not knowing whether to admit it had gone too far, or to acknowledge that this was a necessary act to save its messianic movement. That is, since 1967, religious Zionism had negotiated a fragile balance between the “natural messianism” of the state project and the “apocalyptic messianism” of hastening the end. Rabin and Oslo threatened to upend that balance.

The Six-Day War in 1967 enabled a kind of amalgam between the natural and apocalyptic models while it also led settler advocates to determine that they were living in an acceleration of the natural process toward the end-time. Rabin’s assassination was a breach in that balance. Rabin was viewed as the force that was subverting the process that began in 1967. Rabin and Oslo were viewed, in some way, as the religious Zionist anti-Christs.

In 1997, Religious Zionism was in crisis, having to choose between trying to reinstate the balance, or to lean into the apocalyptic. The natural process was arrested by Rabin and Oslo. For Shagar, the problem was even more acute. For him, religious Zionism was basing itself on an outdated “modern” model of nationalism that was becoming obsolete. It wasn’t about which way to turn in its own internal ideational orbit. Rather, his question was whether religious Zionism could reconstruct itself beyond modernity. Was religious Zionism relevant at all? This was the context, and subject, of Shagar’s sermon that day in May1997.

This sermon was not a salve, and not a condemnation, it was a deep reflection on the reality on the ground and the ways in which the religious Zionist vision and movement was at a serious crossroads. Can it survive? Should it survive?

After an analysis of Shagar’s position below, I offer a post-October 7 reading of it. Has religious Zionism lost its raison d’etre in Shagar’s view and is its obvious success today indicative of its true failure.

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Shagar begins his sermon with one of the most cited prooftexts of the religious Zionist claim of ownership of the land, Rashi’s first comment in Gensis responding to his own questions as to why the Torah begins with creation. Rashi famously wrote:

“What is the reason, then, that it commences with the account of the creation? … He gave an account of the work of creation in order that He might give them the heritage of the nations.” For should the peoples of the world say to Israel, “You are robbers, because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan”, Israel may reply to them, “All the earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whom He pleased. When He willed, He gave it to them, and when He willed, He took it from them and gave it to us” (Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 187).”

Shagar then goes on to detail how his community misconstrued Rashi’s comment. He does this by showing how Rashi cut and pasted a series of three different and disparate midrashim that undermines the standard interpretation of his position. This comment, Shagar suggests, was not a mandate for ownership or even permanent inheritance of the land. Rather, for Shagar it was a testament that the land, in fact, belongs to no one save God. He concludes, “God gave us the land of the nations (goyim) according to God’s will, and God’s will can also take it away from us - God forbid - and return it to them.”

He begins this way to destabilize the entire religious Zionist project whereby residence in the land is not merit based but inheritance based. That sin can cause banishment, but never erase inheritance. In any case, Shagar cites this to set up his main argument, reflecting on Oslo and its implications for his community. He writes,

Israel stands today confronted with the biggest challenge of its history, the revolutionary events of the Oslo agreement. This is not merely a peace proposal with the Palestinians, but rather a challenge to refocus the entirety of the state and its citizenry. As Shlomo Fisher wrote, “A ghost-spirit is pursuing Israel. It is the ghost-spirit of the Israeli citizenry. From the establishment of the Labor government in 1992 there existed a revolutionary potential in Zionism. The Israeli project has revealed the possibility of instantiating Herzl’s dream that Zionism will nullify the antagonism between Jews and non-Jews.” This had become manifest in the shifting priorities of Prime Minister Rabin in allocating resources to the Arab sector [through the PA].

The problem for Shagar was that the religious Zionist movement did not have the ideological or theological tools to absorb this shift in priorities and adjust to the prospect of “land for peace” within its present Zionist vision. This was not a practical claim of security, this was a fundamental abrogation of religious Zionism’s very belief. In fact, the entire prospect pf peace contradicted the religious Zionism project. Before offering his critique, Shagar “sets the table” as it were, by articulating some of the basic principles of religious Zionism as he sees them.

“The religious Zionist vision is that the state of Israel has religious significance. In one way or another, it is in some way the manifestation, at least in part, of the prophetic vision, the realization of the divine promise of the ingathering of the exiles and redemption. This identification of Malkhut Yisrael (the kingdom of Israel) with the state of Israel is deeply embedded in the religious Zionist consciousness.”

The problem arises when this vision had to contend with the notion of “peace.” The underlying principles of the peace of Oslo or any two-state solution is not the peace expressed in tradition, but a peace expressed in “liberal, democratic, universal values.” These values are foreign to the religious Zionist mind-set. But the incongruity goes even deeper. This peace is also not founded on a modern notion of all humans being created in the “image of God” which functioned as the basis of Herderean nationalism to which religious Zionism adapted and added to it the religious foundations mentioned above. Here Avi Sagi and Dov Schwartz say it quite succinctly.

“Religious Zionists sought a balance between divine and human action. They never doubted God’s involvement in history…Human action to them was a reflection of divine action and vice-versa; consequently, messianic approach of religious Zionism could not be judged only in light of European national awakening. (Sagi, Schwartz, Religious Zionism and the Six-Day War, 111).”

Religious Zionism is definitively modern, European nationalism combined with some form of messianism. It is in modernity we find the belief in the intrinsic, and essential, existence of a coherent people, and legitimate rights to a homeland, components we can see in Ernest Renan’s 1882 essay “What is a Nation?”. The nation, many European thinkers believed, could be a context for “peace” that empires, in their expansionist ways, could not achieve. Religious Zionism (and here Abraham Isaac Kook was its architect) accepted this idea and merged it with a theological precept of redemption that could unfold through this national project. The creation of ethnopolitics that was happening in Europe at the time was a great fit for Zionism, ancient people cum modern nation.

However, this moment, argued Shagar, was different. This postmodern moment suggests that nations do not necessarily have lands to which they are intrinsically connected but rather envisions a world where all essences are destabilized, where all claims are constructed, where all myths of origin are questioned. This reality is one that religious Zionism, as it is, could not contain. The question was then not “land for peace” or not, but rather can this movement survive at all. It is important to note that Shagar is not simply proposing the postmodern turn as an alternative, but claiming it is simply where we are. He does, I think, believe that adapting to it holds the potential to succeed where the modern paradigm failed. For him, postmodernism is a template that is both descriptive and prescriptive. Part of the Zionist impasse as he sees it, is that it is still functioning according to an outdated model.

He then turns to a related question. Not whether peace is possible, but rather what is “peace” at all? And here he deploys the haredim, who he often believed got certain things right. Citing the medieval philosopher Joseph Albo (1380-1444) and the sixteenth century kabbalist Maharal of Prague (1512-1609), he represents the haredi position that peace itself is only a consequence of divine intervention. Human beings cannot make peace. They can resolve conflicts, they can sign treaties, they can procure certain freedoms, but those are all temporary and can falter. Real peace, Albo and Maharal argue, is unattainable by human hands. Real peace is a disembodied spirit waiting to unfold. The haredim, Shagar argues, hold by such a position. Thus, for them the state cannot be a vehicle for real peace, and thus they empty it of religious significance. The state is, for them (to borrow a term from Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, who Shagar read) “exile within sovereignty.” Many don’t deny the privileges of sovereignty, but they don’t view it in religious/theological terms. Shagar thinks this model can better serve the postmodern turn.

“For religious Zionists, the concept of “sanctifying the mundane” in an applied sense, lies at the core of the Kookean vision. That is, religious Zionism is founded on the notion of “harmonization.” But that may be of an earlier “modern” era. We are now living in a postmodern reality where harmony of the sacred and mundane is no longer even an aspiration, because the very categories have undergone revision.”

Shagar then makes an interesting observation.

“The response of religious Zionism to what is happening in the state today (i.e. Oslo, land for peace) is like the haredi response to Zionism itself: utter and absolute rejection…What then will happen to religious Zionism? Where will its younger generation turn in the coming years? It’s hard to tell.”

If in fact the reaction to his contemporary reality (1997) is, and in fact must be, rejection, and if the present state actualizes itself into a true “land for peace” reality, religious Zionism either radically re-tools, or reaches obsolescence. If Greater Israel dies, post 1967 religious Zionism dies with it. One can see this even more profoundly in Shagar’s response to the 2005 disengagement with Gaza, which he considers religious Zionism’s true “Nakba.”

It’s important to note that Shagar is acknowledging that this new era is something that religious Zionism, as presently construed, simply cannot bear. It cannot bear it because it undermines the very founding principes of its Zionist vision. He writes,

“There is no doubt that religious Zionism as it is today, cannot bring about peace. There are some in that camp that can see the other’s (the Palestinian) rootedness in the land, without nullifying one’s sense of rootedness, but we must find another kind of intimacy with the stranger, a harmony that is different than the harmony that was described earlier.”

The new harmony is not between the “sacred and the mundane,” but a harmony embracing two true claims of homeland (Jews and Palestinians). Shagar claims that Palestinian claims to the land as a homeland does not impact his belief in the Jewish homeland at all. He claims religious Zionism must find harmony in that. Postmodernism demands leaving the internal project among Jews (the secular and the religious/ sacred and profane) and addressing the external and transnational project between Israel and its neighbor, or alternatively, harmony between the religious significance of the state and the continuation of exile. That is, between what is, and what will be, but is “not yet.”

This is because, in part, the “modern” nationalist claim of people and land is no longer operative. Elsewhere Shagar notes how the liberal left got many things right in terms of what they wanted to achieve, but secularism in his mind did not have the tools to achieve it, in part because it remained bound to a modernist conception of liberalism and cosmopolitanism that he believed was obsolete. The secularists, he claimed, prefer to remove the sacred from the picture altogether and replicate the liberal state as a purely secular project. For Shagar, they abandon the particular for the universal, even as Shagar notes, the universal remains an integral part of any Jewish redemptive vision.

And the haredim got it right in rejecting the state as a manifestation of a reality they believe can only exist outside the state, that is, in the divine. In short, secular Zionists want to abandon the redemptive spirit, and haredim want to protect it by rejecting the state and retaining redemption as fully aspirational. Here the secular Zionist Yosef Hayyim Brenner represents the secular left quite well. “There is no Messiah for Israel, let us brace ourselves for a life without Messiah.” (Brenner “On the Vision of Apostasy,” in Writings, vol. 3). In fact, Shagar notes, both the secular left and the haredim are right in part, and for religious Zionism to survive it must draw from elements of both. He writes,

The reality of the land of Israel is that is can no longer simply remain in the state of aspiration. The occurrence of Zionism brought about the land’s reality and created a kind of harmony which inspires the religious soul. And yet, the notion of exile protects us from the danger of idolatry (worshipping that state or the land, sm) and a false sense of permanence. We can build a house, but not a child’s house of the worshippers of Baal (a biblical god) that has a sense of ownership of the land. This house would have to be in harmony with the sanctity of the land, but the Jew who dwells there would know that this reality is not, and cannot be, the complete redemption and the longing will maintain an important part of the project.

For Shagar, the secular left gives up too much (they abandoned the national aspect of redemption) and the haredim give too little (they rejected the state as having any religious value). But the secular left aspires to what is just, the universal, and the haredim are right in believing that real peace is a divine act that requires waiting. The haredim provide the necessary stopgap against the idolization of envisioning the end before its time which leads to the abandonment of the pursuit of peace in favor of the exercise of power. The haredim are thus right that the story remains unresolved; exile is the very template of the state.

The settler project includes a serious occupational hazard by infusing the state with religious meaning. To overreach it is to abandon the universal which abandons messianism for the sake of the false messianism solely of the particular. On the haredi position, Shagar writes, “The only way for messianism not to become a rigid ideology is to retain its utopian and miraculous dimension. Therefore, we should integrate the haredi position that redemption is aspirational without abandoning our religious Zionist perspective which identifies the state with the realization of the prophetic aspiration.”

Shagar also asks his listeners to adapt the secular position of creating a state, and the haredi position that this state is not the reality long promised – it is an exilic phase in and of itself. In order not to allow the harmony of religious aspiration and landedness to lead to justifying domination and conquest which are forms of idolatry, religious Zionism must live inside a mindset whereby the state is a vehicle for a yearning and not the instantiation of its realization.

The challenge in 1997 when the postmodern situation undermined a stable notion of nation, state, and land, is to reconceptualize harmony not as sanctifying the mundane but bringing together the reality of the land and the desire for redemption that is not fulfilled. The danger of sanctifying the mundane in the older modern model (which is the product of the Kooks (father and son) is that the holiness of the state easily yields both the state and land objects of worship, and the act of power to sustain that sacrality introduces idolatry. Earlier in the sermon, Shagar quotes Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s famous essay after the massacre of Qibya in 1953 where, reflecting on the Israeli massacre of 69 Palestinian civilians two-thirds of whom were woman and children, Leibowitz makes that very point that sanctifying the land or the state is the great tragedy of applied redemption in our time

Moving back to Shagar’s initial point about Rashi and ownership of the land, religious Zionism in his mind needs to abandon the certainty and embrace the doubt, the unfinished notion of exile, relinquish the state as redemptive and embrace the exilic mindset of what Franz Rosenzweig called the “not-yet.” This because for him, “Messianism includes two ideals: The ideal of universal peace and the ideal of a return to the land of Israel, a national ideal. And it is forbidden to abandon either of these.” And he would reject, I think, any notion that the national precedes the universal. As I understand Shagar, he is asking for nothing less than a religious Zionist Reformation for it to avoid not only failure, but irrelevancy.

Shagar concludes his remarks ominously with a question: “Since religious Zionism believes in natural redemption in combination with a national vision, so too it should be in relation to peace. Will it be possible to cultivate peace between nations without abandoning our national identity and home?”

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Reading Shagar’s 1997 “Land and Exile” in 2025

Shagar’s final question, arresting then, is even more so now. Perhaps ironically, after everything that happened since 1997, I submit the challenge remains, albeit the movement has chosen a different path, and the country has moved in a different direction. I know some will argue that it was a reaction to Palestinian resistance. Of course that is partially true. But a true Zionism would view itself sovereign enough, and responsible enough, to own the decisions it made in response to any provocation. That perhaps is the transition from mere freedom to liberty.

Below I offer some post October 7 reflections on this sermon and, perhaps, some implications for the future.

One way to read Shagar’s essay in 1997 is to mark a series of moments that bring us from there to here. From (1) Rabin’s assassination in 1995 (2) the Second Intifada in 2000 (3) the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 (4) the election of Hamas in 2007 (5) the Nation State Law in 2018 (6) the Israeli elections in 2023 and (7) October 7 and the Gaza War from 2023 on.

There are, of course many ways to mark time, but I think these may be helpful in assessing the current state of religious Zionism from Shagar’s perspective as I understand it.

For Shagar the great rupture of religious Zionism from which it has arguably not recovered was not Oslo but the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. This is not because he was opposed to leaving Gaza (in principle he wasn’t) as much as because he was opposed to how it was executed. Elsewhere in Briti Shalom he writes that he could not wish Ariel Sharon, who facilitated the evacuation from Gaza, a “complete healing” (refuah shelemah) after his stroke. For Shagar, Sharon’s error was that profound.

The government’s decision to forcibly evict Jews from their homes in the land of Israel (other cases like the Amona evacuation in the West Bank can be folded into this) led Shagar to conclude that this was the end of religious Zionism’s project of sanctifying the state. As one hilltop youth told me in Jerusalem in 2010, “We no longer study the writings of Rav Kook.” Why? I asked. They responded, “because Kook focuses too much on the state. And the state has abandoned us.” And indeed, on some real level, that is true, and the extent to which religious Zionism has not recognized that and restructured its program, is what Shagar believed was irredeemable.

That crisis led to the emergence of a new brand of religious Zionism that had always existed but was largely repressed, a Zionism that combined the romantic modernist harmony of Rav Kook, and the conquest militancy of Meir Kahane. That is, in some way, it sided with Yigal Amir’s decision to eradicate Rabin (even if they did not agree with the assassination itself) and not R. Yehuda Amital’s impassioned speech after the assassination that religious Zionism had to see itself as overextending, and thus is abandoning, its mission.

For Shagar, an unreconstructed harmonious Zionism of Kook was bound to fail because, as we saw above, it functioned in a past paradigm. The issue was no longer harmonizing the sacred and the mundane (the state), but the Jew and the neighbor, and the aspiration for redemption with its unfilled exilic reality. The militant Zionism of Kahane was, through Shagar’s lenses, not religious Zionism at all but the acquiescence of religious Zionism into a dark secular register of conquest. It held no authentic redemptive vison. It was not interested in peace. It was interested in state power and nationalist violence to achieve the desired end of control. Peace was no longer even aspirational. Peace was the illusion.

But even after 2005 the tension remained inside the religious Zionist camp. But as I read Shagar, it never really abandoned the Kookean model, and thus could never truly respond to the reality in which it lived. Until October 7. If 1995 (Rabin’s assassination) was a religious Zionist’s attempt to bring about the apocalyptic end by assassinating the figure who stood in its way, October 7 was Hamas’ attempt to accelerate the end by attempting to assassinate the state. Amir succeeded, Sinwar did not. But Sinwar did unwittingly succeed in something else.

Sinwar’s assassination attempt of the state largely ended the tension of religious Zionism’s messianism. In fact, one reading might be that it removed messianism altogether, replacing it with brute survivalism, leaving vengeance in its place, or, on the other hand, it enabled the apocalyptic messianism latent in religious Zionism to rise to the surface. A few weeks after October 7, there was a rally in the West Bank where a settler, in army fatigues, declared October 7 “a great and awesome day,” because now the apocalyptic floodgates are open. While not acquiescing to that ideology (I am sure most settlers would not agree with that assessment but could also see the messianic logic in it), the government has basically done its bidding. Religious Zionism has won at the price of abandoning its very purpose for existing, at least on Shagar’s terms.

Rav Shagar’s challenge remains as does the question with which he ended his sermon. That question still echoes in the psyche of a people. There are groups such as Ha-Smol ha-Emuni and Shorashim, religious groups on the left in Israel (some members identify as Zionists, some not) and The Halakhic Left in the US, who are actively trying to salvage a religiously informed vision from the grasp of trauma, vengeance, and hatred. Many use Shagar as a lodestar. But as much as I am with them, if they do not radically restructure the very nature of the project (Shagar offers one path) I fear they too will confront pre-mature, and tragic, obsolescence.

Independence can mean many things. Perhaps most fundamentally it presents an opportunity. It may be “freedom” but it is in no way “liberation.” It may offer sovereignty, but it does not end exile. If religious Zionism has any reason left for being, in my view it would require the radical restructuring Shagar suggests.

That morning in May 1997 Shagar questioned whether that was even possible. In 2025 it seems even less likely. Can Zionism survive the descent into brute nationalism and package it as a religious value (or necessity)? Sinwar failed in his attempt to assassinate the state. But has he wounded it beyond repair by robbing it of a path from freedom/independence to true liberation? The forecast is not great. But as Bob Dylan sang, “A change in the weather, is known to be extreme.” (“You’re a Big Girl Now”).