My Covenant of Peace

In recent years both the ideological Left and the ideological Right have fallen into a crisis of ideas. The dream of peace is growing ever more distant, while most of the public and its leaders have abandoned the idea of the Greater Land of Israel. Today, more than ever, it seems that only freedom from the simplistic, dichotomous division between camps and ideas will allow critical, creative and fruitful thinking – thinking that can shape a new ethical and religious foundation for our relationship to the Land and to the peace process.

My Covenant of Peace is a comprehensive collection drawn from the full breadth of Rabbi Shagar’s work, dealing with political questions such as territorial withdrawal, war, peace agreements, the Disengagement and more. In Rabbi Shagar’s view, the political is bound up with the philosophical, and so he discusses these current issues through fundamental questions such as the uniqueness of the Jewish people, being at home and being in exile, West and East, the religious standing of the State of Israel, and the meaning of redemption.

As is his way, Rabbi Shagar lays out and analyzes a wide range of sources: the Bible and the words of the Sages, the teachings of Maimonides and the Kabbalists, the great Hasidic masters and the writings of Rabbi Kook, as well as modern Jewish thinkers and Western philosophers, sociologists and historians.

My Covenant of Peace is essential reading for anyone seeking a way through the confusion and hoping to combine the best of the Right with the best of the Left, creating a new religious and spiritual approach that can strive for true peace without giving up a deep bond to the Land of Israel, Jewish uniqueness or religious strength.

Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg – Shagar (1949–2007) was a rosh yeshiva, a Zionist Torah scholar and a religious thinker, known as one of the leading teachers of Hasidut in the Religious Zionist world and as a thinker who carried on a lively dialogue with postmodern thought. He left behind many writings in a wide variety of fields of Judaism, which have been, and continue to be, published in recent years.

This volume is the second in the series “Tzirufim Chadashim: Thought on Contemporary Issues”. It contains the essence of Rabbi Shagar’s thinking on current political questions concerning the peace process and wars, the attitude towards the State, and the place of the Jewish people among the nations. The previous book in the series, Tablets and Broken Tablets (2013), has become a foundational work of contemporary Jewish thought.