Abraham Isaac Kook was one of the most distinctive personalities and creative thinkers of modern Jewish history — a radical Orthodox rabbi, jurist, poet, community leader and mystic who devoted his life to synthesizing some of the most complex and contradictory trends in Jewish tradition. He was also the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of pre-state Israel and the most important thinker of religious Zionism, a multi-faceted Israeli political ideology, many of whose adherents see the establishment of modern Israel as an essential step in the dawning of the messianic age.
Born in present-day Latvia in 1865, Kook was an intellectual prodigy and soulful personality who early on combined talmudic studies with a lively interest in philosophy. After studying in the famed yeshiva at Volozhin, a breeding ground for both rabbis and revolutionaries, he took a rabbinic post in the Lithuanian shtetl of Zeimlis. After the sudden death of his first wife from pneumonia, he undertook a journey of introspection, deepening his study of Jewish mysticism and beginning a remarkable spiritual diary in which he worked to synthesize different spiritual traditions: philosophy, mysticism and rabbinic law. In 1896, he became rabbi of Boisk (Bauska), Latvia, where he wrote works focused on the relationship between body, mind and soul, and between Jewish teachings and universal morality. He also began to gingerly explore emerging ideas of Jewish nationalism.
In 1904, he moved to Palestine to become the rabbi of Jaffa and the surrounding agricultural colonies. Navigating between the secular Zionist pioneers and their Orthodox opponents, Kook argued that Jewish law needed to be flexible in engaging with modernity and that Zionism’s resolutely secular political and cultural objectives were deeply in need of the moral grounding and sense of purpose that only religious tradition could offer. This stance regularly infuriated his rabbinic colleagues — all the more so when he insisted that they needed to take seriously the principled criticisms of Jewish tradition being made by the pioneers, who he thought were themselves instruments of God’s plan for the redemption of the Jewish people and humanity. In his pithy formulation, “The old will be renewed, the new will become holy.”
Kook’s position derived not from political strategy, which was never his special strength, but from the dramatic mystical philosophy he developed in his journals. His writings — overflowing with allusions to a stunning range of Jewish (and sometimes non-Jewish) sources, engaging timely socio-cultural issues and perennial theological and philosophical questions, and written in a poetic idiom all his own — are not easily summarized. Kook believed that God is truly everywhere and that human longings for justice, truth, beauty and meaning are the means through which God effects redemption. The kabbalistic linkage between the land and people of Israel, the Oral Torah and the shekhinah yields a vision of dynamic Jewish physical and spiritual revival, a revival which emerges out of historical and social processes. Kook understood that the contradictions within Judaism — between the particular and the universal, religion and secularism, ecstasy and the law — were being felt so acutely precisely because the messianic age was at hand.
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An important feature of these ideas is a conception of broad tolerance for a wide range of views — not out of relativism or prudential accommodation, but because Kook believed all good faith positions are facets of God’s revelation and are ultimately in harmony with one another. All the different ideologies and theologies serve a larger truth, just as the fierce arguments of rabbinic tradition all in the end deepen the Torah, whose truth derives from God.
Kook’s effort to reconcile these competing truths reflected not only his deep study, but also his own mystical experiences. In Shemonah Kevatzim, a set of journals he wrote between 1910 and 1919, he writes:
What do I see in a vision? I see the supreme thought, the thought that encompasses all… I see how all the great streams splash out from it, and from the pools proceed rivers, and from the rivers brooks, and from the brooks floods, and from the floods, currents, and the currents too, divide into smaller channels…and if the flood is narrow it holds on to the stream, and if the stream is narrow it holds on to the river, and if the river is too narrow it takes hold of the God-stream filled with water, that is tied to the thought that has no narrows, and there is the place of the watercourses great and wide. (Psalms 104:24).
The outbreak of World War I caught Kook and his wife in Europe attending a rabbinical conference. Unable to return to Jaffa, the couple found refuge in Switzerland and then in London, where Kook became the rabbi of the city’s Eastern European community. His wartime journals express horror at the massive suffering all around and the hope that a better world would emerge at the end, which seemed to come true with the electrifying announcement of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 declaring British support for a Jewish homeland.
After the war, Kook returned not to Jaffa, but to Jerusalem. In 1921, along with his Sephardic colleague Rabbi Jacob Meir, he became the chief rabbi of Palestine. By this time, Kook had become an indispensable public figure thanks to his intellectual stature, deep piety, sympathy for secular Zionists, deep ties to traditional rabbis and conciliatory personality. That distinctive synthesis won him the love and admiration of the masses, along with that of many rabbis, writers, political leaders and intellectuals.
Through the 1920s and 30s, Kook’s unique talents were sorely put to the test. His principled refusal to identify wholeheartedly with any political party, or even with the World Zionist Organization, frustrated many of his supporters while his resolute traditionalism sat uneasily with militantly secular Zionists. Moreover, the haredi Orthodox community, to which he was deeply tied, renounced and persecuted him for what they saw as his heresy in supporting Zionism and affirming general culture.
Like many early Zionists, he did not foresee the emergence of Palestinian Arab nationalism and thought that the Zionist project could be achieved peacefully. As conflict emerged, he did his best to calm the waters and resolutely refused to be drawn into the rhetoric of religious war.
Kook died in 1935, before the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Despite his stature, it took some decades for the full force of his teachings to impact Israeli politics and culture — mainly through scholarly writings and the Central World Yeshiva he founded in Jerusalem (renamed the Rav Kook Central Yeshiva, or more commonly Mercaz Harav). His students made their mark as educators, raising generations of young people who combined religious fervor with Zionist commitment.
His son and successor, Zvi Yehudah Kook, declared the State of Israel a concrete, if incomplete, realization of God’s plan for redemption — and that full redemption required extending Israeli sovereignty over all of biblical Israel. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War discredited the Labor party leadership, Zvi Yehudah’s disciples, seeing themselves as the true inheritors of the Zionist pioneers, took upon themselves the realization of that vision and became the vanguard of the settlement movement. Other latter-day disciples of Rav Kook, most notably Rabbi Yehudah Amital, argued that Rav Kook’s ethical universalism was the heart of his message, and that even in times of redemption, sober pragmatism and not messianic hope should determine policy.
Recent decades have seen deepening interest in Kook’s thought. More of his writings have been published, networks of educational institutions inculcate his vision, and his idea that God speaks and works through cultural creativity has influenced writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers. More deeply, his works are a touchstone for serious discussion of the deepest tectonic connections between Zionism, ethics, Jewish tradition and world history. And his uniquely conciliatory personality stands as a road not taken, but still beckoning and inspiring, in Israel’s deeply divided society.
