Summary
Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), appointed by the British in 1921 as Palestine’s Ashkenazic chief rabbi, whose mystical reinterpretation of Zionism Lustick presents as the doctrinal foundation of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 2, lines 1595-1650).
Details
- Kook taught, in the vocabulary of Jewish mysticism, that the mundane world of ritual observance, rationality and scientific inference is only a vehicle for preparing human beings to apprehend a more fundamental spiritual reality pervaded by the Divine psyche; the Jewish people’s distinctive excellence is the Divine sensitivity at the core of its being, which lets Jews express that illumination in pure, non-idolatrous form (Chapter 2, lines 1610-1645).
- Zionism for Kook was Jews returning from a long and spiritually purgative exile to reassume their Divine vocation and achieve the splendour of redemption. He welcomed a return to manual labour, physical culture and military valour even when most Zionists broke Torah commandments, holding that in times of redemption insolence and rebellion against everything hallowed are among the phenomena needed for the perfection of the world, and that the inner essence of Jewish holiness remains hidden in the hearts of children who have strayed from the Torah (Chapter 2, lines 1645-1680).
- Secular Zionists, in his teaching, carried out the divine plan simply by settling in the Land of Israel, working its soil and developing it for larger numbers of Jews, whether or not they believed their work had redemptive meaning; secular, mainly Labor, Zionism sought to use him for credibility among observant Jews while he understood secular Zionism as ultimately an instrument of his brand of religious Zionism (Chapter 2, lines 1660-1695).
- For Kook, Eretz Yisrael is part of the very essence of Jewish nationhood, bound organically to its life and inner being, and living and working in the Holy Land is a mitzvah equivalent in value to all the other commandments combined — the basis, in Lustick’s account, on which Gush Emunim justifies de facto annexation to force a permanent Jewish relationship with the entire Land (Chapter 2, line 1700, lines 1705-1745).
- He emphasized charismatic personalities, the zaddikim, as conduits of spiritual energy and redemptive guidance; his Jerusalem yeshiva was Merkaz HaRav, which slipped in stature after his death despite the presence there of his son Tzvi Yehuda Kook and barely managed to survive into the 1960s as an ordinary seminary with no more than twenty students (Chapter 2, lines 1745-1800).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Jewish Fundamentalism, Gush Emunim, Eretz Israel, Zionism