Abraham Isaac Kook

Abraham Isaac Kook was born in 1865 at Griva in Latvia, a prodigy of the Lithuanian yeshiva world who carried inside its rigor an unusual freight: kabbalah, Hasidic warmth, modern Hebrew letters and philosophy, all of which he read as one unfolding truth. In 1904 he left a rabbinic post in Lithuania for Jaffa, taking spiritual charge of the new agricultural settlements of the Second Aliyah, and there met the problem that defined his life: the pioneers rebuilding the land were, in large part, defiantly secular, and the Orthodox world had largely answered Zionism with condemnation.

Kook answered otherwise. The builders did not know what they were building, he taught, but the historian of the spirit could see it: the return to the land was the beginning of redemption, athalta di-geula, and the pioneers' very rebellion carried a holy spark that would return to its source. The First World War stranded him in Switzerland and London; in 1919 he returned as Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and in 1921 became the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine, using the office to build bridges, often under fierce attack from the anti-Zionist Orthodox of the old settlement, between religious and secular, new settlement and old. In 1924 he founded Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem, the yeshiva where his synthesis was taught as a curriculum, and he died in 1935, mourned across every camp he had argued with.

Kook wrote as a mystic, in notebooks of aphoristic, poetic Hebrew that his editors, above all his son Zvi Yehuda and his disciple David Cohen, the Nazirite, gathered into books: Orot, Lights, on the holiness latent in national revival; Orot HaTeshuvah, The Lights of Penitence, in which return to God is a cosmic movement rather than a private repair; Orot HaKodesh, the great collection of his contemplative writing. His central conviction was that holiness is not a fenced precinct: the secular, the heretical, even the rebellious carry sparks of the sacred, and the apparent war between faith and modernity is a stage in a larger harmony only teshuvah, return, will complete. Tolerance, in Kook, is a metaphysical position and not a temperament.

His legacy is contested in exactly the way his life was. Religious Zionism built itself on his teaching; after 1967 his son's reading of it, sharpened toward the sanctity of the land, powered the settlement movement, and scholars still argue whether the father's universalist mysticism authorizes the son's territorial politics. The atlas records the doctrine of Religious Zionism as its own entry, with Kook at its head, and the standard English gateway to his writing remains Ben Zion Bokser's Paulist Press translation of the penitence and holiness texts, through which readers far from any of these arguments continue to meet him simply as one of the twentieth century's great mystics.