Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935)

Eretz Yisra’el is part of the very essence of our nationhood; it is bound organically to its very life and inner being.

Modern Zionist thought is the creation of a gallery of extraordinary leaders, but even among them a few stand out as originals. Abraham Isaac Kook is one. Kook cannot be explained from the outside in—if he can be explained, at all—by listing the facts of his life, the influences that touched him, and the antecedents of his thought. The essence of Kook is within. He was a mystic whose career was determined by experiences of inner illumination. He was a religious Zionist engaged not in defending the ritual observances—though he practiced them with unique fervor—but in living out an approaching “end of days.”

His view of Zionism, and his most important acts as the first chief rabbi of Palestine during the British mandate, make sense only if we understand his certainty, from foretold prophecy, that the present generation would experience the coming of the Messiah. He could therefore prepare himself to become priest of the restored cult in the Temple in Jerusalem and accept all builders of Palestine, heretics included, as unwitting instruments of the ever more manifest Redemption.

Even as a child, maturing in a small town in Latvia, Kook was known for unusual endowments of mind. But what distinguished him wherever he studied in adolescence were his fervor in prayer and his sense of the immediacy of God. When he arrived at the yeshiva in Volozhin at age nineteen, Kook had distinguished himself in another regard: He loved to speak Hebrew—then usually a sign of at least incipient heresy—without evincing any change in his rapturous piety.

At twenty-three Kook assumed the post of rabbi in the village of Zimel, where he remained for six years, until 1894. His next call was to the much larger city of Boisk, Lithuania. There, he published his first essay on Zionism in which he accepted modern Jewish nationalism, even at its most secular, as an expression of the divine endowment within the Jewish soul and as a forerunner of the Messiah. In the summer of 1904, he arrived in the Holy Land to serve as chief rabbi of Jaffa and the agricultural colonies nearby.

The years in Jaffa constituted the crucial period of Kook’s career. He increased his scope as a writer and a communal leader, laboring ever more self-consciously for a renaissance of Orthodox Judaism. In 1909 he championed leniency in a controversy over the biblical law of letting the Holy Land lie fallow on the seventh year. As Zionism splintered Orthodoxy, Kook tried keeping the peace—only to be attacked violently by many ultra-Orthodox Jerusalemites.

In the summer of 1914, Kook visited Europe—and found himself stranded when World War I began. Eventually he served as rabbi in London, from 1916 to 1919—amid the negotiations and controversy surrounding the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917. From that perch he urged British Jews to support a Jewish national home while denouncing anti-Zionists. As he proclaimed: “The entire debate whether it is our national or our religious heritage that preserves and sustains us [as Jews] is a bitter mockery.”

In 1919 Kook returned to Palestine to serve as chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem. Two years later he was elected as the Ashkenazi head of the new rabbinic court of appeals, becoming, in effect, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine—an office he held until his death in 1935.

The Land of Israel (1910–30)

Eretz Yisra’el is not something apart from the soul of the Jewish people; it is no mere national possession serving as a means of unifying our people and buttressing its material, or even its spiritual, survival. Eretz Yisra’el is part of the very essence of our nationhood; it is bound organically to its very life and inner being. Human reason, even at its most sublime, cannot begin to understand the unique holiness of Eretz Yisra’el; it cannot stir the depths of love for the land that are dormant within our people. What Eretz Yisra’el means to the Jew can be felt only through the Spirit of the Lord which is in our people as a whole, through the spiritual cast of the Jewish soul, which radiates its characteristic influence to every healthy emotion. This higher light shines forth to the degree that the spirit of divine holiness fills the hearts of the saints and scholars of Israel with heavenly life and bliss.

To regard Eretz Yisra’el as merely a tool for establishing our national unity—or even for sustaining our religion in the Diaspora by preserving its proper character and its faith, piety, and observances—is a sterile notion; it is unworthy of the holiness of Eretz Yisra’el. A valid strengthening of Judaism in the Diaspora can come only from a deepened attachment to Eretz Yisra’el. The hope for the return to the Holy Land is the continuing source of the distinctive nature of Judaism. The hope for the Redemption is the force that sustains Judaism in the Diaspora; the Judaism of Eretz Yisra’el is the very Redemption.

Jewish original creativity, whether in the realm of ideas or in the arena of daily life and action, is impossible except in Eretz Yisra’el. On the other hand, whatever the Jewish people creates in Eretz Yisra’el assimilates the universal into characteristic and unique Jewish form, to the great benefit of the Jewish people and of the world. The very sins which are the cause of our exile also pollute the pristine wellspring of our being, so that the water is impure at the source. Once the unique wellspring of Israel’s individuality has become corrupt, its primal originality can express itself only in that area of loftiest universal creativity which belongs to the Jew—and only in the Diaspora, while the Homeland itself grows waste and desolate, atoning for its degradation by its ruin. While the life and thought of Israel is finding universal outlets and is being scattered abroad in all the world, the pristine well of the Jewish spirit stops running, the polluted streams emanating from the source are drying up, and the well is cleansing itself, until its original purity returns.

When that process is completed, the exile will become a disgust to us and will be discarded. . . . The creativity of the Jew, in all its glory and uniqueness, will reassert itself, suffused with the all-encompassing riches of the spirit of the greatest giant of humanity, Abraham, whom the Almighty called to be a blessing to humanity.

Jews cannot be as devoted and true to our own ideas, sentiments, and imagination in the Diaspora as we can be in Eretz Yisra’el. . . .

This is the meaning of the Jew’s undying love for Eretz Yisra’el—the Land of Holiness, the Land of God—in which all of the Divine commandments are realized in their perfect form. This urge to unfold to the world the nature of God, to raise one’s head in His Name in order to proclaim His greatness in its real dimension, affects all souls, for all desire to become as one with Him and to partake of the bliss of His life. This yearning for a true life, for one that is fashioned by all the commandments of the Torah and illumined by all its uplifting splendor, is the source of the courage which moves Jews to affirm, before all the world, their loyalty to the heritage of their people, to the preservation of its identity and values, and to the upholding of its faith and vision. . . .

The Rebirth of Israel (1910–30)

It is a grave error to be insensitive to the distinct unity of the Jewish spirit, to imagine that the Divine stuff which uniquely characterizes Israel is comparable to the spiritual content of all the other national civilizations. This error is the source of the attempt to sever the national from the religious element of Judaism. Such a division would falsify both our nationalism and our religion, for every element of thought, emotion, and idealism that is present in the Jewish people belongs to an indivisible entity, and all together make up its specific character. . . .

Lights for Rebirth (1910–30)

Apart from the nourishment it receives from the life-giving dew of the holiness of Eretz Yisra’el, Jewry in the Diaspora has no real foundation and lives only by the power of a vision and by the memory of our glory, i.e., by the past and the future. But there is a limit to the power of such a vision to carry the burden of life and to give direction to the career of a people—and this limit seems already to have been reached. Diaspora Jewry is therefore disintegrating at an alarming rate, and there is no hope for it unless it replants itself by the wellsprings of life, of inherent sanctity, which can be found only in Eretz Yisra’el. Even one spark of this real life can revive great areas of the kind of life that is but a shadow of a vision. The real and organic holiness of Jewry can become manifest only by the return of the people to its land, the only path that can lead to its renascence. Whatever is sublime in our spirit and our vision can live only to the degree that there will be a tangible life to reinvigorate the tiring dream. . . .

Many of the adherents of the present national revival maintain that they are secularists. If a Jewish secular nationalism really were imaginable, then we would, indeed, be in danger of falling so low as to be beyond redemption. But Jewish secular nationalism is a form of self-delusion: the spirit of Israel is so closely linked to the spirit of God that a Jewish nationalist, no matter how secularist his intention may be, must, despite himself, affirm the divine. An individual can sever the tie that binds him to life eternal, but the House of Israel cannot. All of its most cherished national possessions—its land, language, history, and customs—are vessels of the spirit of the Lord.

How should people of faith respond to an age of ideological ferment which affirms all of these values in the name of nationalism and denies their source, the rootedness of the national spirit, in God? To oppose Jewish nationalism, even in speech, and to denigrate its values is not permissible, for the spirit of God and the spirit of Israel are identical. What they must do is work all the harder at the task of uncovering the light and holiness implicit in our national spirit, the divine element which is its core. The secularists will thus be constrained to realize that they are immersed and rooted in the life of God and bathed in the radiant sanctity that comes from above. . . .

The claim of our flesh is great. We require a healthy body. We have greatly occupied ourselves with the soul and have forsaken the holiness of the body. We have neglected health and physical prowess, forgetting that our flesh is as sacred as our spirit. We have turned our backs on physical life, the development of our senses, and all that is involved in the tangible reality of the flesh, because we have fallen prey to lowly fears, and have lacked faith in the holiness of the Land. “Faith is exemplified by the tracate Zeraim (Plants)—man proves his faith in eternal life by planting.”