Teshuvah and Heresy in Rav Kook and Rav Shagar
The argument of this essay is that Rav Kook and Rav Shagar both treat religious rupture as potentially internal to the drama of return, although they do so in different registers. Rav Kook places heresy within a cosmic and historical dialectic whose horizon is a more comprehensive holiness. Rav Shagar internalizes that rupture within the believing subject and refuses to make psychological or theological wholeness a precondition for standing before God. Read alongside Hegel and Slavoj Žižek, their work suggests that teshuvah after heresy cannot mean restoration of an untouched past. It is a return transformed by negation: a faith that has lost the fantasy of mastery and may therefore become freer, humbler, and more honest.