Summary
Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982), son of Abraham Isaac Kook, who elaborated his father’s doctrine into concrete stages of redemption and gave Gush Emunim its charismatic authorization (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 2, lines 1755-1950).
Details
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His father’s yeshiva, Merkaz HaRav, had slipped after 1935 and barely survived into the 1960s with no more than twenty students; in the mid-1960s Tzvi Yehuda attracted the Gahelet fraternity of Bnei Akiva graduates, which contained a very large proportion of the future leaders of Gush Emunim, including Haim Druckman, Moshe Levinger and Eleazar Waldman, after their 1964 rebuff within the National Religious Party (Chapter 2, lines 1755-1795).
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He specified the redemptive process as three stages of repentance: a return of Diaspora Jews to the Land initiated by a repentance of fear; a second stage made possible by the reunion of the Jewish people with Judea and Samaria, entailing complete resettlement and the actual fulfillment of inheriting the Land in Jewish possession and not that of any other nation; and a final repentance of love, in which increased observance brings the Messiah at a pace proportionate to that observance (Chapter 2, lines 1795-1845).
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He taught the sanctity of the State of Israel itself as God’s appointed instrument: it was created and established by the council of nations by order of the Sovereign Lord of the Universe so that the Torah commandment to inherit and settle the Land would be fulfilled, and Jewish government rule in the Land is what gives effect to the second stage of redemption (Chapter 2, line 1810, lines 1845-1880). His message was much more parochially focused than his father’s; the redemption of all mankind, in principle following Israel’s, was more prominent in the elder Kook’s thinking (lines 1880-1895).
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Some three weeks before the Six Day War, on the eve of Independence Day, he is recounted to have bewailingly sermonized on the partition of historic Eretz Yisrael — Hebron, Schechem, Jericho and all of Transjordan as ours, with not one millimetre surrenderable — and to have told students the scheduled military parade was the army of Israel that will liberate the Land of Israel; disciples took this as evidence of prophetic status (Chapter 2, lines 1895-1935).
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A student account describes Menachem Begin visiting him after the 1977 election victory, kneeling and bowing before him as if Tzvi Yehuda were God’s representative — a scene the watching students took as empirical proof of his authority (Chapter 2, lines 1935-1965). Some have argued his charismatic, quasi-prophetic image was created by a self-serving core group of students trading on their closeness to him (lines 1935-1945).
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He died in 1982; Lustick notes Gush Emunim was still feeling the effects of his passing (Chapter 2, lines 1965-1975).
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In Lustick’s Chapter 3, his endorsement of Yuval Neeman to head Tehiya in March 1979, and his teaching that the Land of Israel is neither religious nor secular and belongs to the whole Jewish people, overcame the founding group’s rivalries and religious differences; his death six weeks before the Yamit evacuation sharpened the movement’s divisions (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 2850-3000, lines 3100-3200).
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Chapter 4 makes his teaching the movement’s authority on the Arab question: he distinguished between an Arab national entity in the Land of Israel, for which no place at all exists, and relations to individual Arabs, who are also created in God’s image; and he cited Maimonides that the Canaanites had three choices — to flee, to accept Jewish rule, or to fight (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3850-3950).
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Chapter 4 quotes Tzvi Yehuda on history as God’s ordering: “It is God, and no other, who created the world and who creates peoples and kingdoms” and “the Temple Mount is in our hands” (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 4119-4400).
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Chapter 5 opens its leadership discussion with the vacuum left by Tzvi Yehuda’s death in 1982: he served even in his lifetime more as a charismatic focus than as effective leader, and since his death leading elements have used anecdotes, his transmitted homilies and his father’s writings to support contradictory positions; at a May 1983 Gush conference Rabbi Yaacov Ariel said that after his death “it is not possible to find a single leader, rather all together our public may perhaps be able to do what formerly one man could do” (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 4119-4850).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook, Gush Emunim, Jewish Fundamentalism, Moshe Levinger