In 1884—twelve years before Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, and thirteen before the First Zionist Congress—the Russian rabbi Shmuel Mohilever joined the secular Jewish physician Leon Pinsker in founding the Ḥibat Tsiyon, an organization dedicated to building a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. But it was Mohilever’s disciple, Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, who laid the foundations for religious Zionism as it is known today. Channa Lockshin Bob describes Reines’s thought in light of newly discovered unpublished manuscripts:
Rabbi Reines brought together the sacred and the profane in many areas of his life. He founded a yeshiva that combined traditional talmudic study with secular subjects, an innovation at the time. His scholarship combined talmudic virtuosity with broad interests including mathematics, philosophy, and logic. So he was perfectly cut out to initiate close cooperation between traditional Judaism and secular Zionism.
Rabbi Reines first got involved in the Zionist movement in 1899, when he participated and spoke at the Third Zionist Congress in Basel. In the coming years he continued to participate in Zionist Congresses. He met Herzl and corresponded with him until Herzl’s death in 1904. In 1902 Rabbi Reines founded the Mizrahi movement—a religious faction within the Zionist movement—with Herzl’s support.
Reines’s lectures from the years 1908 to 1911 are collected in a manuscript titled Yalkut Arakhim. . . . [One] of these lectures, [delivered on the anniversary of Herzl’s death], examines the topic of immortality. Surprisingly, Reines presents a fairly [rationalistic] view of life after death: “When we see that even after one’s death, his achievements are recognized, that is a sign of his immortality.” Later in the lecture, he adds that “those whose help is recognized even after their death have been made to be like God.” The last words of the speech are: “All signs of mourning are signs of immortality.”
Could it be that Reines’s final sentence about signs of mourning is not only a general statement, but also a reference to himself, as he continues to mourn the loss of Herzl even years after his passing?
Read more on The Librarians: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/rabbi-reines/