Rav Kook: The Leading Thinker of Religious Zionism – Brandeis University
Posted By admin on September 11, 2022
Sept. 9, 2022
By Joseph Dorman
One of the most remarkable figures in Israeli history, Rabbi (Rav) Abraham Isaac Kook, who died in 1935, left a large and complicated legacy.
The country's first Ashkenazi chief rabbi and founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate of Israel, he is still the leading thinker of religious Zionism.
His large and complicated body of thought at the same time nationalist and universalist; rigorous in religious practice and open to modern society; traditional and revolutionary has led to his still being claimed by or attacked by both left and right.
In a series of books in English and Hebrew, including his most recent, "Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity, The Making of Rav Kook, 1865-1904," professor of Near Eastern and Judaic studies Yehudah Mirsky has sought to present a more richly nuanced and compelling picture of Kook than those presented by his acolytes and critics alike. In so doing, he also brings to life little-known chapters of Jewish thought and history.
Mirsky depicts Kook as a profound, subtle, deeply ethical thinker who sought to resolve the contradictions of Zionist thought and modern Jewish life into a universal messianic vision. In this vision, the Jews' return to Zion to create a just and better society was the first step of the messianic redemption that would save the human race.
"Kook was this magisterial authority of traditional Jewish law, philosophy, and mysticism, with a remarkable command of the entirety of Jewish thought," Mirsky said. "He plunged headfirst into the storm of modernity."
TJE spoke with Mirsky, a faculty member at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, about Kook and how the rabbi wound up so misunderstood and criticized.
He was born in 1865 on the western edge of the Russian Empire in Lithuania. The mass migration of Jews to the U.S. and the assimilation of both European and American Jews into gentile society were bringing about the collapse of the traditional Jewish world. At the same time, there was a remarkable Jewish creativity in spirituality, the arts, and communal life.
During his years in Europe, and even more so after he arrived in Palestine in 1904, he was riveted by the Jewish socialist revolutionaries and Zionists who thought of themselves as building a new Jewish society, culture, and eventually, a state and who rebelled against tradition in the name of ideals of social justice and care for Jewish welfare and, crucially, were willing to put their lives on the line for those ideals.
Most Orthodox rabbis of the time rejected secular Zionism. Some chose to work with it but were careful to distance themselves from its efforts to create a new Jewish culture. Rav Kook, alone among his peers but with remarkable stature, affirmed the effort to create a modern Hebrew culture in a new state of Israel as something to be embraced for the betterment of Judaism and the world.
He starts with this conviction that's very much rooted in the Jewish mystical tradition that there is no space devoid of God. And as far as he's concerned, that means that principled, idealistic movements working towards noble goals like a renaissance of the Jewish people and making a better world are expressions of God's presence in the world.
Kook was convinced that he lived during the apocalypse of authority, both secular and religious. He had the conviction that this remarkably dynamic, fluid, unstable historical period meant the world was on the threshold of the messianic era. God was jump-starting a new phase of Jewish history.
As he saw it, all the great contradictions of Jewish and world history were now rising to the surface en route to their final resolution. And so, even secular Zionism had a role to play.
The secular Zionists would undertake the enterprise of building a new Jewish society with vibrant social, economic, and political institutions and would provide a material basis for a greater cultural and spiritual renewal to follow.
For many colleagues, everything he's doing and saying is the worst kind of heresy. This major rabbinic figure is seemingly sanctifying the secular revolution, sanctifying secular Zionism.
Kook didn't put it in these terms, but a part of his argument with his rabbinic colleagues is him saying to them:
"Guys, look, these young people who are rebelling against us are not doing this because they want to eat cheeseburgers. They're moving to Palestine and draining swamps and getting shot at by Arabs.
"And they're saying that they're doing this because we haven't taken good care of the Jewish people, we've fallen down on the job. Our religious ideas are stale, and we have nothing to say about modern philosophy and art and culture. Our religion has become rote and ritualized. And they're right."
Exactly. At one point, Kook says, heresy is coming to our world like a bonfire. It's going to burn everything in its path. And on its smoking embers, we will rebuild the new Judaism.
There is another phrase that appears in his writings at different times "Everything is rising."
This means everything is making itself right. God is this motive force in human culture and history, and Judaism needs to be reborn. Traditional Judaism would open itself to modernity, and those who had fallen away from it, like the secular Zionists, would return to the fold.
A traditional Judaism imbued with a new and vital spirituality, embraced by all Jews and shorn of the narrowness that often pushed away the larger world.
He's not accepted by them either. They don't want to be celebrated by him.
They're like, "Rabbi, that's very sweet of you, but I am not part of your sacred revolution, okay? I'm not God's unwitting instrument for messianic redemption. Get over it."
Yes. But it was really after the Six Day War in 1967 and then the 1973 Yom Kippur War that Zvi Yehudah Kook emerged as a leader in religious Zionism.
He eventually became the spiritual leader of the settlement movement, saying the way to carry forward his father's program was to enhance the sovereign Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank].
Yes and no. Crucially, the [elder] Kook didn't live to see the Holocaust or the creation of the state of Israel. Also, his messianism was different from that of his son.
As the elder Kook saw it, God sent the Jews into exile to purge us of the desire for power and of wanting to rule over other people or use violence for political ends. We learned to be just from our own experience of oppression. When we return to Zion [Israel], we can be different than everyone else.
His son didn't disagree, but after the Holocaust and Arab-Israeli wars, he concluded that nothing was more important than bringing Israeli sovereignty and its messianic fight to all of the biblical land of Israel.
He was not a pacifist and recognized the necessity of violence. What he was and in many ways deeply resembled many other early Zionist thinkers and figures was a tremendous idealist. He thought Jewish politics would be essentially different from non-Jewish politics and more moral. He thought the rabbinic institutions he created would not become politicized but would light the way to the new vibrant Judaism of the future. He thought, as so many did, that the disputes with the Arabs could be resolved peacefully.
First off and as the vast scholarly and popular literature on him (almost all in Hebrew) attests he's a vital and deeply consequential figure in modern Jewish history and thought, and, I argue, in the history of modern religious thought in general.
The sheer richness of his corpus in law, theology, poetry, mysticism, social commentary, and more is worth a lifetime of study. And the institutions he created the Chief Rabbinate, his yeshiva, and in general, the model of rabbinic training and of Jewish education integrating faithfulness to tradition with engagement in society and the world are still very much with us today.
Second, almost nobody thought as deeply as he did about the profound continuities and discontinuities between Zionism and Jewish tradition. Whether one agrees or disagrees with him, dealing with those questions means sooner or later engaging in dialogue with him.
In some ways, if we're thinking for a moment not as historians but as political and moral actors in the present, that isn't the right question.
The question, rather, is, given who we are in the world we live in today and our responsibilities today, how do we, after studying all Rav Kook and so many other thinkers and figures have to teach us choose to act and live in the here and now?
That, as always, is the question, and each one of us has to answer it for ourselves.
See the article here:
Rav Kook: The Leading Thinker of Religious Zionism - Brandeis University
- Judaism - Wikipedia - February 11th, 2023
- The Jewish Denominations | My Jewish Learning - February 7th, 2023
- Judaism - Basic beliefs and doctrines | Britannica - January 12th, 2023
- Beliefs and branches of Judaism | Britannica - December 15th, 2022
- Judaism: Beliefs, Rituals, Celebrations And Symbols - Edubirdie - December 15th, 2022
- The Patient is best when it focuses on Judaism, not serial killers - Haaretz - December 9th, 2022
- The Great Revolt (66 - 70 CE) - Jewish Virtual Library - October 15th, 2022
- Wanting in, wanting out: Phoebe Maltz Bovy contemplates the soup of beliefs found in a new book called 'Bad Jews' - The Canadian Jewish News - October 15th, 2022
- THIS BEAUTIFUL FUTURE to Host Talkback with Jewish Faith Leaders This Month - Broadway World - October 15th, 2022
- The myth of the lost golden age - OnlySky - October 15th, 2022
- USAFA cadet forced to choose between her religion and key training told the issue is being Jewish - Daily Kos - October 15th, 2022
- The power of prayer - Cleveland Jewish News - October 15th, 2022
- Path of the Spirit: Our environment witnesses to the sacred - Las Cruces Sun-News - October 15th, 2022
- Judaism and Human Creativity - aish.com - Aish.com - October 6th, 2022
- Do Jewish converts have to believe in God? - Forward - October 6th, 2022
- 'The Patient': Why Ezra Converting to Orthodox Judaism Is Such a Big Deal - Showbiz Cheat Sheet - October 6th, 2022
- After 500 Years, Closing the Circle - aish.com - Aish.com - October 6th, 2022
- Sukkot Belongs to Every Jew - Jewish Journal - October 6th, 2022
- Judaism - InfoPlease - October 4th, 2022
- Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year in Judaism. Here's what that means - Rockdale Newton Citizen - October 4th, 2022
- Pro-abortion Stances Are the Norm Surveying Islam and Judaism - A Little Bit Human - October 4th, 2022
- As a Jewish new year begins, reflections on my career and faith | Greenbiz - GreenBiz - October 4th, 2022
- Student Voices: Celebrating Rosh Hashanah with the Second Gentleman - GW Today - October 4th, 2022
- The belated birth of a Jew - JNS.org - October 4th, 2022
- Graffiti in the Sukkah | Detroit Jewish News - The Jewish News - October 4th, 2022
- Jews. In Their Own Words. Review - LondonTheatre.co.uk - October 4th, 2022
- Calls to fear Soros and the globalists are nakedly antisemitic, and must be rejected - Colorado Newsline - October 4th, 2022
- My great-grandparents died in the Holocaust and were almost forgotten - Salon - October 2nd, 2022
- 'Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed' review: Chapter Eight - Freethought Blogs - October 2nd, 2022
- A new cookbook highlights women of the Talmud - Press Herald - October 2nd, 2022
- Messianic Jews vs. Orthodox Jews: Now a Libel Case (Over Allegations of a Non-Theological Fight) - Reason - September 27th, 2022
- Rosh Hashanah 2022: What you should know about the Jewish New Year - PennLive - September 27th, 2022
- Judaism's greatest mystery: Where are the ten lost tribes of Israel? - Ynetnews - September 27th, 2022
- How Rosh Hashanah compares to the coronation of a monarch | Opinion - Commercial Appeal - September 27th, 2022
- D.C.-based org ready to 'Gather' young Jews in Bay Area J. - The Jewish News of Northern California - September 27th, 2022
- Does pagan mean what you think it does? - Aleteia - September 27th, 2022
- This vintage video of a Jewish boys choir goes viral and you need to see it - St. Louis Jewish Light - September 27th, 2022
- Where to Worship for the High Holidays - Scarsdale10583.com - September 27th, 2022
- Martha's Vineyard and the high price of liberal Jewish 'compassion' - JNS.org - September 27th, 2022
- From the Shabba-tent: My Relationship to Judaism and the WJC Camping Trip - Wesleyan Argus - September 23rd, 2022
- Can Reform and Conservative Judaism support for Zionism be revived? - JNS.org - September 23rd, 2022
- Progressive Jewish group launches think tank to counter spread of right-wing ideas - JTA News - Jewish Telegraphic Agency - September 23rd, 2022
- Politics from the Pulpit | Detroit Jewish News - The Jewish News - September 23rd, 2022
- What Is The Significance of The Challah Cover? - aish.com - Aish.com - September 23rd, 2022
- The Mitzvah of Eating on Yom Kippur - jewishboston.com - September 23rd, 2022
- Who is the star on Rosh Hashanah; the pomegranate, apple or both? - The Times of Israel - September 23rd, 2022
- OPINION: Caught in the poignancy of an era-defining day - Jewish News - September 23rd, 2022
- How is it not our responsibility to help them?' - The Jewish Standard - September 23rd, 2022
- How Judaism and science come together every month in St. Louis - St. Louis Jewish Light - September 11th, 2022
- Concerns about Germans converting to Judaism carry resonance in land of Holocaust - The Irish Times - September 11th, 2022
- Opinion: We need stories that represent - The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle - September 11th, 2022
- Moroccan Muslims Are Reviving Jewish Heritage in Former Jewish Neighborhoods - The Media Line - September 11th, 2022
- The Fabelmans - Toronto 2022 - Solzy at the Movies - September 11th, 2022
- "A World Where Justice and Righteousness Prevail" in the Rosh Hashanah Amidah - Brandeis University - September 11th, 2022
- Yamma Ensemble will bring music of the Mizrahi Jewish Diaspora to Sheffield's Race Brook Lodge - Berkshire Eagle - September 11th, 2022
- To The Third And Fourth Generations - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com - September 11th, 2022
- Love is a Skeleton Key - aish.com - Aish.com - September 11th, 2022
- Congress of World and Traditional Religious Leaders to Address Social Status of Women - Astana Times - September 11th, 2022
- Creators Behind FX Series 'The Patient' Explain How the Show Explores Jewish Trauma, Themes of Intolerance - Algemeiner - September 6th, 2022
- Kenden Alfond Finds Culinary Inspiration from the Talmud - aish.com - Aish.com - September 6th, 2022
- Kirtans with the Bene Israelis - mid-day.com - September 6th, 2022
- At a time of conflict, religious leaders are coming together to stand for peace - The Parliament Magazine - September 6th, 2022
- The Black Jews of Ghana who discovered their roots through a vision - Face2Face Africa - September 6th, 2022
- Opinion: When Judaism Considers the Long Term, It Looks to the Past Detroit Jewish News - The Jewish News - September 2nd, 2022
- Rabbis of LA | Rabbi Laura Geller: Seeing Everyone in the Image of the Holy One - Jewish Journal - September 2nd, 2022
- What's the Most Pressing Issue Facing American Jews? Answers from a New Generation of Jewish Leaders - brandeis.edu - September 2nd, 2022
- In Ulster County, Service Beyond Politics With A Dose Of Judaism - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com - September 2nd, 2022
- Are We Ready to Show Up? - Jewish Journal - September 2nd, 2022
- Bishop Robert Stearns wants to reinvent evangelicalism without leaving it behind - Religion News Service - September 2nd, 2022
- Hillel in Hoboken: Perfect together - The Jewish Standard - September 2nd, 2022
- Liberal Jewish groups are the same as the Democratic Party - JNS.org - September 2nd, 2022
- Foley Library hosts Americans and the Holocaust traveling exhibit - Bulletin - September 2nd, 2022
- Netanyahu seeks to keep Haredi UTJ party united, but some prefer he not interfere - The Times of Israel - September 2nd, 2022
- Which Will Be Worlds Largest Religion By 2100 - NewsPatrolling - September 2nd, 2022
- Letters to the Editor | Opinion | dnews.com - Moscow-Pullman Daily News - September 2nd, 2022
- On Jews, Muslims, and Matters of Life and Death - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com - September 2nd, 2022
- The Fictionalist Approach to Religion | Gene Veith - Patheos - August 30th, 2022
- The Judaism And Zionism Of David Sarnoff - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com - August 30th, 2022
- New documentary, 'Illumination: Light of Am Yisroel on the World,' follows the stories of Jewish heroes - Cleveland Jewish News - August 30th, 2022
- Joseph D. Steinfield: Looking Back My holidays and the change of seasons - Monadnock Ledger Transcript - August 30th, 2022
Comments