In His Torah He Meditates

In this work Rabbi Shagar zt"l, one of the great Talmudic scholars and thinkers produced by Religious Zionism, sets out his teaching on the study of Gemara. This teaching grew and developed over many years. It began with a sense of distress that he, and many hesder yeshiva students of his generation, felt in their learning. Rabbi Shagar argued that this distress stems from the gap between the yeshiva way of learning and the world of the Religious Zionist community. By tracing the main lines of Torah study in the Jewish people over the last two hundred years – from the Vilna Gaon and Rabbi Chaim of Brisk to contemporary academic Talmud research – and analyzing their meaning in depth, Rabbi Shagar seeks to weave a way of learning suited to this community.
Rabbi Shagar proposes a unique approach to learning, one that continues the yeshiva tradition of study on the one hand, and on the other hand renews both the purpose of learning and its content. He argues that the Torah, as a Torah of life, demands constant renewal, as it is internalized into the spiritual existence of those who study it.
In this book Rabbi Shagar offers not only a deep engagement with the meaning of Torah study in our generation, but also a searching inquiry of faith into the path of the individual in our time.

Rabbi Shagar (1949–2007), a graduate of the Kerem B’Yavneh and HaKotel yeshivot, taught at Yeshivat HaKotel, Yeshivat Mekor Chaim, the Ma’ale Beit Midrash, Beit Morasha in Jerusalem, and Yeshivat Siach Yitzchak, which he founded and headed (together with Rabbi Yair Dreyfus).