Abraham Isaac Kook: The Dynamic of Sanctification

The contraction of Judaism to a “religious” domain ran counter to one fundamental thrust of Jewish law. Maimonides articulated what was clearly an assumption embedded in the halakhic system when he spoke of Jewish law in terms of the creation of a socio-political order. The function of the Law is the ordering of a community. Torah differs in this respect from secular legal systems only in its concern to inculcate in its adherents correct religious opinions. It shares with secular legislation the shaping of a polity and the abolition of injustice and oppression.¹, II: 40; see Gerald Blidstein, Political Concepts in Maimonidean Halakhah [Hebrew], Bar Ilan University Press, 1983, 40, 93–96. Jewish civil law is thus an essential part of Torah. Torah belongs to the public domain.

footnotes: ¹ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed

The longing for a return to Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel had been a constant theme of medieval Jewish sentiment, reiterated daily in its liturgy, written into its self-definition as a people in galut (exile, both physical and spiritual). It had flared into passion in the writings of the poet-philosopher Judah Halevi and the halakhist-exegete Nachmanides.², New York: Schocken, 1947, and the essays by Shalom Rosenberg, Moshe Idel, Marc Saperstein and Michael Singer in Lawrence A. Hoffman (ed.), The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. Emancipation posed two quite distinct, if interrelated, challenges to this longing.

footnotes: ² For extensive treatments of the place of Zion in medieval Jewish thought, see Yitzhak Baer, Galut

The first was the need to establish the Jew as a loyal citizen of his country, a patriot who had no secret desire to leave and build a nation somewhere else. This led to the early Reformers’ decision to exclude from their prayers all traditional expressions of the hope for a return to Zion. The American Reform declaration, in 1885, was typical in this respect: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine…nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”³, Jerusalem: Keter, 1972, 14:26.

footnotes: ³ Pittsburgh Platform, 1885. See Encyclopaedia Judaica

The second was, as we have noted, the impoverishment of Jewish life itself, with the abandonment of kehillah self-government that had marked diaspora existence since talmudic times.⁴, New York, 1924. For a global history of Jewish patterns of self-government, see Daniel J. Elazar and Stuart A. Cohen, The Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present, Indiana University Press, 1985. Specifically Jewish experience was now confined to a small and well-defended compartment of identity, culture and social interaction. Hirsch believed that on such a slender base a viable Jewish educational and congregational nexus could be constructed. But as Charles Liebman notes, the contraction ran counter to one of the basic premisses of premodern spirituality. “Traditional Judaism constituted a total way of life. Whereas it recognized distinctions between sacred and secular, holy and profane, it aspired to encompass under the rubric of its norms all activity in which a Jew was engaged Nothing is foreign, irrelevant, or immaterial to Judaism.”⁵, University of Chicago Press 1983, 156.

footnotes: ⁴ See L. Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages ⁵ Charles Liebman, “Religion and the Chaos of Modernity,” in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Take Judaism, for Example

That Hirsch’s ideal Mensch-Jissroel could translate modern culture into Jewish terms of reference could not conceal the fact that the culture itself had a dynamic wholly independent of Judaism. Nor could the neo-Orthodox deny what was palpably the case: that the majority of Jews preferred a less demanding synthesis of identities. Hirsch himself recognised the predominance of non-Orthodox voices in the communal structures of his day, and fought fiercely and successfully to lead his Frankfurt congregation to secession from the global Jewish organisation.⁶, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. Neo-Orthodoxy was a minority of a minority, never consciously a programme for a collective Jewish renewal.

footnotes: ⁶ See Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838–1877

FORERUNNERS OF ZIONISM The mid-nineteenth century thus provided the context for an alternative resolution to the conflicts between Judaism and modernity: a focussed effort to turn the age-old dream of a return to Zion into a practical programme. There Jewish life would be restored to its wholeness. There Jewish law would once again reoccupy the public domain. There too, in the collective national endeavour, the schisms between Orthodoxy and contemporary heterodoxies would be mended.

The first stirrings came from two rabbis retrospectively identified as forerunners of Zionism,⁷, Jewish Publication Society, 1986, 104–115. Yehudah Alkalai (1798–1878) and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874). Alkalai, who spent his boyhood in Jerusalem, was a mystic who was energised into proposing Jewish resettlement of the land by the spectre of renascent antisemitism in, and the international Jewish response to, the Damascus Affair of 1840.⁸, New York: Atheneum, 1981, 103–107. Citing traditional texts, he argued that messianic redemption – though it would be secured by Divine intervention – had to be prepared for by human endeavour and natural means: by a slow process of migration, the revival of Hebrew, and the establishment of a collective Jewish polity, an “assembly of elders.” This would restore unity to a people whose current divisions were “an obstacle to the Redemption.”⁹

footnotes: ⁷ See Jacob Katz, Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation ⁸ Katz, 93–94; Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea ⁹ Hertzberg, 105–107.

Kalischer, who was born in Posen, halfway between the still undisturbed traditionalist communities of the East and the modernising Jewries of the West, took part in the polemics against Reform, in particular against its abandonment of references to the return to the Holy Land. His theories did not emerge fully fledged until the 1860s, when he began campaigning vigorously for the creation of agricultural settlements in Palestine. Like Alkalai, but even more forthrightly, he argued that it was a misreading of tradition to suppose that redemption was a matter of waiting passively and patiently for Heaven to act: “Cast aside the conventional view that the Messiah will suddenly sound a blast on the great trumpet and cause all the inhabitants of the earth to tremble. On the contrary, the Redemption will begin by awakening support among the philanthropists and by gaining the consent of the nations to the gathering of some of the scattered of Israel into the Holy Land.”¹⁰

footnotes: ¹⁰ Ibid., 111.

There is no doubt that these Orthodox figures, together with their socialist contemporary, Moses Hess (1812–1875), were influenced by the rise of European nationalism.¹¹ To some extent too they were prompted by the first signs of an incipient, ineradicable antisemitism,¹², 94–95, see also 141–152). Certainly it did not play the part it was later to do – under the impact of the Russian pogroms of 1881 and the Dreyfus affair of 1895 – in the thought of Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl. suggesting that the liberalisation of the modern world was not as benign as had been thought. But all three were moved by the prospect of a revival of the integrated world of tradition through such instrumentalities as the Hebrew language, agricultural labour, and the revival of national consciousness, none more so than Hess. The one-time colleague of Karl Marx and passionate admirer of Spinoza delivered, in Rome and Jerusalem (1862), the most incisive critique of Western Jewish assimilationism and of the spiritualising tendencies of Reform, which, he declared, had “sucked the last marrow out of Judaism and…allowed nothing to remain of this sublime phenomenon of history but the shadow of a skeleton.”¹³, translated by Maurice J. Bloom, New York: Philosophical Library, 1958, 49–50.

footnotes: ¹¹ All three cite the contemporary parallels. See Katz, 95–96. ¹² This is particularly marked in Hess’s work. Katz denies that ­antisemitism played a major role in the thinking of these precursors (Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation ¹³ Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem

Hess approached tradition from the outside, but his reading of the sources convinced him that Jews had, from the outset, “conceived their historic mission to be the sanctification not only of man’s individual life but also his social life.”¹⁴ The religious tradition had lost its vitality only in the modern era, when emancipatory pressures had led Jews, for the first time, to be ashamed of their nationality.¹⁵ “Only from the national rebirth will the religious genius of the Jews draw new powers, like that giant who touched the mother earth, and be again animated by the sacred spirit of the Prophets.”¹⁶

footnotes: ¹⁴ Ibid., 18. ¹⁵ Ibid., 74. ¹⁶ Ibid., 37.

The themes articulated by Hess receive their fullest expression from within the tradition in the work of Rav Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook (1865–1935). In his thought – a rhapsodic blend of rabbinic, philosophical and poetic motifs, held together by a transfiguring mysticism – the idea of religious revival through national rebirth takes on a compelling utopian grandeur. All the facets of modernity, positive and negative, can be embraced and transmuted by the power of a newly released Jewish religious energy. But not in exile.

RAV KOOK: THE INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND Rav Kook¹⁷, New York: Bloch, 1946, and Isidore Epstein, Abraham Yizhak Hacohen Kook: His Life and Works, London: Bachad, 1951. On his thought, see Zvi Yaron, Mishnato shel ha-Rav Kook, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1974; Samuel H. Bergman, Faith and Reason, translated by Alfred Jospe, Washington: B’nai Brith, 1961, 121–141; Natan Rotenstreich, Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times, Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1968, 219–238. Some of the writings of Rav Kook are available in English translation. See Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, The Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters and Poems, translated by Ben Zion Bokser, London: SPCK, 1979; Alter B. Z. Metzger, Rabbi Kook’s Philosophy of Repentance [a translation of Orot ha-Teshuvah], New York: Yeshivah University Press, 1968. Parts of Chazon haGeulah are translated in Leonard B. Gewirtz, Jewish Spirituality, Hope and Redemption, Ktav, 1986. was born on the margins of modernity, in the small town of Grieve in Latvia. This was still part of the as yet unshaken hinterland of Eastern European Jewish life celebrated by A. J. Heschel in his prose-poem The Earth is the Lord’s.¹⁸, Meridian Books, 1963. See also Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl, New York: Schocken, 1962. Early recognised as a talmudic prodigy and an unusually rarified religious personality, he received a conventional rabbinic education, which eventually took him to the great yeshivah in Volozhyn, then presided over by Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (Netziv, 1817–1893). Berlin was something of a paradox.¹⁹ 2:2 (May 1982), 173. On the one hand he maintained a fierce resistance to secularisation, so much so that he eventually closed the yeshivah in 1892 rather than comply with the request of the Russian government that it introduce instruction in the Russian language. On the other, the yeshivah over which he presided was a cosmopolitan intellectual centre, attracting such figures as the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) and the writer Micha Berdyczewski (1865–1921).

footnotes: ¹⁷ On the life of Rav Kook, see Jacob B. Agus, Banner of Jerusalem ¹⁸ Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth is the Lord’s ¹⁹ Samuel Heilman calls Berlin a “passive tolerator”: Samuel C. Heilman, “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy, Part II,” Modern Judaism

The dynamic of modernity took a different form in Eastern European Jewry than it had done in Germany. Ethnic, cultural, political and nationalist themes were prominent. Assimilation and religious reform did not present the direct threat that would have forced Orthodoxy into sharp philosophical self-definition. Berlin himself strongly opposed secessionist policies such as had been adopted by Hirsch in Germany and the followers of Moses Sofer in Hungary. Dividing the Jewish people into contending factions, he said, was “as painful as a dagger in the body of the nation.”²⁰ 1:42. He was sympathetic to the pre-Herzlian Chibbat Zion movement, and was one of its earliest members. The experience of Volozhyn and Rabbi Berlin was formative for Kook, and it provided him with a series of integrative themes that he was to make his own: unity, peoplehood, culture and Zion.

footnotes: ²⁰ Responsa Meshiv Davar,

After serving as a rabbi in the Lithuanian towns of Zoimel and Boisk, he left Europe for Palestine in 1904, where he became chief rabbi of Jaffa. He was stranded in Europe at the outbreak of the First World War and spent some years in London as rabbi of the Machzikei Hadas congregation. When the war ended he returned to Palestine as its first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi (1919), an office he held until his death sixteen years later.

Kook’s thought is a kind of antithesis of that of Hirsch. The two men differed in education, background and temperament. Unlike Hirsch, who had received a dual education and knew Western culture from within, Rav Kook’s intellectual upbringing was wholly bounded by tradition. He took an avid interest in the secular philosophies of his day, but his encounter with them took place at one remove, via their Hebrew-language interpreters and the literature of the Jewish enlightenment.²¹ 30 (Spring 1986), 107–117; Ha-Yahadut veha-Tarbut Chilonit, Kibbutz Hameuchad, 1981, 114–115.

footnotes: ²¹ See Eliezer Schweid, “Two Neo-Orthodox Responses to Secularization, Part II,” Immanuel

Temperamentally, Kook was a mystic, subject to sudden moods of illumination which he strove vainly to capture in language.²² He drew on the classic schemes of Jewish mysticism, and was particularly influenced by Lurianic Kabbalah and the thought of R. Judah Loew of Prague (Maharal, c. 1525–1609). But the constructions he wove, out of densely textured quotations from the entire range of traditional Jewish literature of which he had a prodigious command, are wholly original. His biographer calls him “virtually the first literary mystic of Orthodox Judaism since post-biblical days.”²³, Preface. His thoughts are unsystematic, held together by a unity of mood and theme rather than by analytic exploration, and were originally committed to notebooks in the form of extended aphorisms or meditations. Much of his writing was only edited and published after his death. He was also a halakhist of the first rank, best known for his legitimation of a device to exempt Jewish agriculture from restrictions of the sabbatical year,²⁴ His underlying motives are highly instructive. “In the matter of shemittah we must know that we are duty-bound to endeavour with all our power to so bring it about that eventually the sabbath of the land will be gradually established in all its sanctity on the holy land.… But how to achieve this holy objective, and with what means, requires careful study.… I believe that we need to approach our goal little by little.” Iggrot ha-Rayah, Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1962, vol. I, 330. and the author of several volumes of rabbinical responsa.²⁵, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1966; Da’at Kohen, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1969.

footnotes: ²² Kook frequently refers to this in his writings. For example: “Who impedes me,/Why can’t I disclose in writing all my thoughts,/The most hidden musings of my soul?/Who prevents me,/Who has imprisoned my thought in its shell,/And does not allow it to emerge into the world?,” Bokser, 385. ²³ Agus, Banner of Jerusalem ²⁴ The argument is contained in his work Shabbat ha-Aretz. ²⁵ Mishpat Kohen

EXILE AND DISHARMONY Kook was conscious of living in revolutionary times. “Our generation,” he wrote, “is extraordinary, a generation full of amazement, for which it would be hard to find a precedent in our entire history. It is comprised of opposites; light and darkness are intermingled.”²⁶, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1967, 108. Referring to the rabbinic statement about the messianic age, that “The Son of David will come only in a generation that is altogether righteous or altogether wicked,”²⁷ 98a. Kook avers that the present generation is “both altogether wicked and altogether righteous.”²⁸, 108.

footnotes: ²⁶ Eder ha-Yakar ²⁷ Sanhedrin ²⁸ Eder ha-Yakar

The paradox resolves itself in his thought in terms of the dual character of every movement in the life of the individual or society. What appears as evil or destructive is so only when considered in isolation. In the Divine economy it has its own constructive part to play in the orchestrated harmony which pulses through reality if we are attuned to it. Harmony and wholeness are, for him, the essence of the religious vision. Separation and division are the modes of alienation from the Divine.

These concepts permeate the whole of life. The individual Jew strives – though he may not know it – for harmony with himself, his people, his Torah and his land. The longing for one is a longing for the other. Wishing to be at one with oneself is wishing to be at one with Torah which is itself a wish to be united with the Jewish people and its holy land. Zionism is therefore central to Rav Kook’s thought in the most radical way. Nachmanides had maintained that the fulfilment of the commandments was metaphysically incomplete outside the land.²⁹ to Leviticus 18:25. Judah Loew of Prague saw exile as an unnatural dislocation.³⁰, ch. 1. But for Kook, galut is a systematic estrangement of the elements of Jewish life from one another, allowing for neither individual nor collective spiritual growth.

footnotes: ²⁹ Nachmanides, Commentary ³⁰ Netzach Yisrael

The disharmony can be traced back to the Babylonian exile, when for the first time a rift appeared between the religious and national spirit. Prophecy waned, and was replaced by the study of texts. Jewish nationalism, launched on an independent orbit, grew harsh and aggressive, a failing for which the second exile was a cure. In the course of the long dispersion there were periodic spiritual revivals, but “the nation itself is in a state of decadence in the diaspora.”³¹ Kook attributes a number of positive values to the period of exile, but it is clear that these are nearing their end. “Apart from the nourishment it receives from the life-giving dew of the holiness of Eretz Israel, 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.”³², Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1975, 62. Translation from Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, 429.

footnotes: ³¹ “The Road to Renewal” in Bokser, 301. ³² Orot

Hence the extraordinary evaluation Kook gave of the various Jewish rebels against tradition, “souls of chaos” as he called them.³³,” in Orot, 121. Three elements comprise his judgement. First, Judaism itself had become narrowed and confined by its alienation from the “higher piety” of direct religious experience. Against this even atheism had a kind of integrity: it “arises as a pained outcry to liberate man from this narrow and alien pit…it is needed to purge away the aberrations that attached themselves to religious faith because of a deficiency in perception and in the divine service.”³⁴, 126. Translation from Bokser, 264. Second, the intellectual and moral upheavals were part of the revolutionary moment that preceded the messianic age, “The souls inspired by a destructive zeal reveal themselves especially at the end of days, before the great cataclysm that precedes the emergence of a new and more wondrous level of existence, when the old boundaries expand, just prior to the birth of a norm above the existing norms.”³⁵, 122. Translation from Bokser, 257. Above all, when rebellion took the form of secular Zionism, Kook recognised in it a genuine religious value, a desire to be joined to people and land which was part of the process of penitence:³⁶, Jerusalem, 1966, 17:2; Bokser, 126–127.

footnotes: ³³ “Ha-Neshaniot shel olam ha-tohu ³⁴ Orot ³⁵ Orot ³⁶ “The renewal of the desire in the people as a whole to return to its land, to its essence, to its spirit and way of life – in truth, there is a light of penitence in all this.” Orot ha-Teshuvah

The lower soul [nefesh] of the sinners in Israel in the generation preceding the coming of the Messiah, of those who attach themselves in love to the things affecting the totality of Israel, the building of the land and the national revival, is more advanced than the nefesh of those faithful observers of Jewish law who do not evince as powerful an urge for the welfare of the nation and the building of the land. But the higher soul [ruach] is more advanced in the case of the pious observers of the Torah and the commandments.³⁷, Jerusalem, 1941, 72.

footnotes: ³⁷ Chazon ha-Geulah

This remarkable statement is intelligible only in the light of Kook’s belief that each represented a dialectical pole that would merge in a new synthesis. The secularists would endow the religious with a love of nation, while the religious would draw the secularists into their faith. Thus the various segments of the people – nationalist, socialist, religious – who existed in the diaspora in a state of conflict would be caught up in the collective dynamic of a reborn Israel, each remedying the deficiencies of the other. Exile was fragmentation; redemption a reunification.

UNITY AND CONFLICT At the heart of Kook’s philosophy is a mystical affirmation breathtaking in its simplicity: “The Jewish outlook is the vision of the holiness of all existence.”³⁸, 164. Between the unifying vision of faith and the fragmentation of empirical reality is a tension between the individual and the universal. Each individual – object, person, nation, religion – is unique. At the same time each is part of an interlocking pattern whose “consummate harmony”³⁹, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1963, vol. 1, 388. Kook constantly sought to expose.

footnotes: ³⁸ Orot ³⁹ Olat Rayah

The tragedy of human existence is that individuals do not understand themselves in terms of their place in the totality. Instead they understand the totality as a projection of themselves. Thus they take the fragment for the whole, and come into conflict with others who take another fragment as the whole. “All the defects of the world, the material and the spiritual, they all derive from the fact that every individual sees only the one aspect of existence that pleases him, and all other aspects that are uncomprehended by him seem to deserve purging from the world. And the thought leaves its imprint in individuals and groups, on generations and epochs, that whatever is outside one’s own is destructive and disturbing. The result of this is a multiplication of conflict.”⁴⁰, vol. 1, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1948, 120–121.

footnotes: ⁴⁰ Orot ha-Kodesh

The soul of the Torah is the mystical dimension in which conflicts are reconciled and the place of each element in the total scheme is revealed. No discipline, philosophy included, can penetrate to the heart of religion, since each embraces only a part of the whole. The individual who reaches beyond conceptual schemes to the sense of unity of creation is necessarily transformed as a moral being: “In the light of the mighty idea of the unity of existence there is eliminated the problem of self-love, which some have made into the source of all sin, and others as the source of all morality. There is only the love for all things, which is in truth an enlightened, nobler form of self-love.”⁴¹, vol. 2, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1948, 586. Ultimately this love is completely universal, expressed in the reconciliation between Judaism and its “brothers,” Christianity and Islam,⁴², vol. 1, Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1962, 142. and even in the messianic establishment of “justice for animals.”⁴³, translated by Aryeh Newman, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1980, 135–140. Kook speaks of the exalted individual who “rises toward wider horizons until he links himself with all existence, with all God’s creatures, with all worlds, and he sings his song with all of them.”⁴⁴, vol. 2, 458; translation in Bokser, 228.

footnotes: ⁴¹ Orot ha-Kodesh ⁴² Iggrot ha-Rayah ⁴³ See “Fragments of Light,” translated in Bokser, 303-323; Nechama Leibowitz, Studies in Devarim ⁴⁴ Orot ha-Kodesh

Kook’s is not a static mysticism. For this harmonic vision is both a Divine reality and a human unreality. Evil and conflict exist. Nonetheless, they are not natural states. All reality strives toward perfection. There is a perceptible moral evolution to increasingly universal visions: “Evolution sheds light on all the ways of God. All existence evolves and ascends.… It ascends toward the heights of the absolute good.”⁴⁵, vol. 2, 555; translation in Bokser, 221. In specifically religious terms, this forms the heart of Kook’s account of teshuvah (penitence). Sin creates psychological dislocation and distress. The individual is conscious of acting out of harmony with the creation. Thus there is an analogy between sin and illness, between penitence and the desire for a cure. “Penitence is the healthiest feeling of a person. A healthy soul in a healthy body must necessarily bring about the great happiness afforded by penitence, and the soul experiences therein the greatest natural delight.”⁴⁶, ch. 5; translation in Bokser, 53.

footnotes: ⁴⁵ Orot ha-Kodesh ⁴⁶ Orot ha-Teshuvah

TO SANCTIFY THE SECULAR Kook was not a naive evolutionist. The conflict between tradition and modernity, between the religious and the secularists of his day, was ­profound, and might continue if some synthesis could not be found between them. Kook believed that such a synthesis was not only available, but would occur. Nonetheless, he was acutely critical of the Orthodoxy of his day for failing to embrace it. “Orthodoxy in its present battle of negativism contents itself with illusions that are destroyed by life and reality, destroying those who entertain them together with them. We cannot find comfort in the fact that the element of our people that has yielded to heresy is even more vulnerable to destruction.”⁴⁷, vol. 2, 124.

footnotes: ⁴⁷ Iggrot ha-Rayah

He described the traditionalist group of the old Yishuv as being “absorbed in its quest for inner holiness, which thrusts aside whatever bears anything new in form, which excludes from its schools and yeshivot every foreign language, even the language of the government and country, and every secular study, even that which is most urgent for practical life.”⁴⁸ He believed that rabbinical leadership had to be equipped with wider and deeper knowledge than it presently had as a result of its concentration of halakhah. “The reaching out for worldly knowledge to the extent possible is a necessity. If every student of the Torah cannot be expected to master all branches of knowledge, he can be expected to attain familiarity with the general state of culture in the world and its impact on life, so that he may discern the spirit of his generation and thus be enabled to nurture it and improve it.”⁴⁹, 128–129.

footnotes: ⁴⁸ Ibid., 79. ⁴⁹ Eder ha-Yakar

But precisely here we encounter a critical ambivalence in his thought. On the one hand he envisaged a new kind of yeshivah. Merkaz ha-Rav, the yeshivah he established in Jerusalem, would, he hoped, be a model for this innovative curriculum. He was convinced that “the Torah cannot be confined to research of practical halakhah alone.… Aggadah, exoteric and esoteric Midrash, works of research and study of Kabbalah, Mussar, philosophy, grammar, liturgy and poetry…these too are fundamentals of Torah.”⁵⁰, vol. 1, 187. The yeshivah would undertake the study of history, criticism, Jewish philosophy and poetry, establishing a new and genuine Chokhmat Yisrael (Science of Judaism). It would share the agenda but counteract the influence of the “Science of Judaism” propounded by the German-Jewish enlightenment, so that Jewish scholarship was no longer the exclusive preserve of “those who sought the destruction of Torah and faith.”⁵¹

footnotes: ⁵⁰ Iggrot ha-Rayah ⁵¹ Ibid., 148.

But this model, expansive though it is, does not embrace secular studies at all. Nonetheless Kook believed in a synthesis between secular and holy far more profound and thoroughgoing than that envisaged by Hirsch. “Each body of thought has its own logic and is tied to others by a systematic relatedness.… It follows that there is no such thing as a vain or useless thought; there is nothing without its proper place; for all emanate from the same source in the divine wisdom.… As man grows in the scale of perfection, he draws from all ideas, his own and those of others, their kernel of eternity, logic and good which derives from the source of wisdom.”⁵², vol. 1, 17.

footnotes: ⁵² Orot ha-Kodesh

This suggested a radical transformation of the relationship between sacred and secular. Their relationship was one of form to substance. The sacred would be established on the secular foundations.⁵³ The secular has no independent existence, no ultimate reality. Secular disciplines describe that which is empirically available. The task of the holy is to animate each discipline by relating it to its source, and thence to the whole, thus endowing it with life and moral force.⁵⁴ Which institutional framework was to be the context of this sanctification of the secular, if not the yeshivah? Kook appears to have believed that it would occur naturally in such institutions of the renascent Jewish nation as the Hebrew University, at whose opening ceremony he delivered an address along these lines.⁵⁵, 266–273. For Kook’s approach to education see Yaron, 199–202; Eliezer Schweid, Ha-Yahadut veha-Tarbut Chilonit, 135–142, “Mad’ei ha-Yahadut be-Michlol Mad’ei ha-Ruach veha-Chevrah,” Newsletter of the World Union of Jewish Studies, 26 (Winter 1986), 9–20; Norman Lamm, Faith and Doubt, 69–81; Jonathan Sacks, “Perspectives,” L’Eylah 22 (Rosh Hashanah 5747) 14–20.

footnotes: ⁵³ Ibid., 145. ⁵⁴ Ibid., 147, 1–3. ⁵⁵ Chazon ha-Geulah

APPROPRIATION In fact, none of these developments happened. Mercaz ha-Rav did not establish the envisaged broad curriculum.⁵⁶, 124. The schools founded by Rav Kook’s followers resisted the introduction of secular studies. Under parental pressure they eventually included them but forbade humanist study and the integration of the secular and religious programmes.⁵⁷ The Hebrew University, and advanced academic study in Israel generally, have shown no signs of the anticipated synthesis.⁵⁸.”

footnotes: ⁵⁶ Agus, Banner of Jerusalem ⁵⁷ Charles Liebman, “Religion and the Chaos of Modernity,” 161. ⁵⁸ Eliezer Schweid, “Mad’ei ha-Yahadut be-Michlol Mad’ei ha-Ruach veha-Chevrah

To understand why is to come to the heart of the problem of Rav Kook’s relationship to modernity. It seems that Kook conceived of the religious domain as a kind of meta-discipline, unifying the elements of a diverse and warring culture by disclosing to each its proper limits and place within an overarching pattern. Thus located, they would co-exist in harmonic symbiosis. Kook was not though he seems to have been taken to be,⁵⁹, 136. tolerant towards secularity in the modern, pluralist sense of allowing it independent legitimacy and accepting it on its own self-definition. He did not seek a synthesis in which each side, the holy and the secular, would modify the other in equal measure. Nor did he seek the modest co-existence envisaged by Hirsch in which the holy accommodated carefully screened elements of secular culture, and engaged with it in joint civil projects. He sought instead the complete absorption of the secular into the holy, its appropriation by the higher wisdom. Kook spells this out, together with the meaning tolerance held for him, in an important passage:

footnotes: ⁵⁹ Eliezer Schweid, Ha-Yahadut veha-Tarbut Chilonit

Every universal theory carries with it certainty to the extent of its universality, and together with its certainty, which rules out the possibility of doubt, there goes a refusal to share with others in any collaborative pluralism.… Idolatry was tolerant, while the belief in the unity of God is intolerant; being universal and not particular, certain and not beset by doubt, it is singular and not particularistic. The principle of universality is not tolerant according to the superficial conception of tolerance, but in its very intolerance is contained the essential basis of tolerance.… The basic thrust of its kind of tolerance is to find a place for every form of illumination, of life and of spiritual expression.⁶⁰, 130–131. Translation in Bokser, 272–273.

footnotes: ⁶⁰ Orot

The universality of Kook’s vision is one in which each individual and school of thought accepts the place allocated to it in the global scheme. Tolerance involves accepting every phenomenon on the Torah’s terms, not on terms autonomous to the phenomenon itself. But the very thrust of secularity, whether as academic discipline, political movement or social theory, is its essential autonomy, its insistence on its own internal criteria of evaluation. Kook’s reluctance or refusal so to understand it marks him as a characteristically premodern thinker, one who demonstrated with unique brilliance and imaginative sympathy how much it was possible for a traditional perspective to embrace. What it did not embrace was the critical problem of modernity itself, the declared independence of the secular from religious legitimation. Kook could not conceive that the secular might itself mount a similar challenge to religion, seeking to absorb it within itself through such analyses as those of Marx, Durkheim and Freud. He could not entertain the thought that it was launched on an independent trajectory, whose result might be further divergence instead of his hoped-for convergence. Such propositions are antithetical to his system and have no conceivable place within it.

Kook therefore left the dynamics of history to fill the gap at the heart of his system. Torah would fill the whole of Jewish culture with light, as fringes on the comers of a garment reveal the sanctity of the garment in its totality.⁶¹, Jerusalem, 1983, 6–7. The redemptive process would see a higher synthesis emerge, even if we could not as yet precisely specify the steps to be taken to bring it about. As such, his thought is utopian, a vision without a programme. This makes it no less inspiring, no less one of the great contributions of all time to the development of Jewish spirituality. But it was left to another thinker, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, to confront the irreducible tensions between tradition and modernity.

footnotes: ⁶¹ Arplei Tohar