Last week marked the 80th anniversary of the death of the theologian and religious-Zionist philosopher Abraham Isaac Kook, who served as the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine. His biographer Yehudah Mirsky reflects on his legacy:
In the summer of 1904 Kook moved to Palestine after accepting an offer to become the rabbi of Jaffa and the surrounding colonies. . . . The year of his arrival [coincided with] the beginning of the Second Aliyah, the wave of migration that brought a small but influential cadre of young intellectuals and revolutionaries [to the land of Israel]. . . . In public, he became the leading rabbinic champion of [Zionism], and thus the target of traditionalist attacks. In private, . . . he wrote more and more furiously and extensively in his diaries, lost in a torrent of thought as he began to train the dialectical worldview—which he had developed to understand the complex mix of his own soul and the ideological debates of Eastern Europe—onto larger historical patterns. His thinking also became explicitly messianic.
[I]n his reading, which astonished and enraged many of his rabbinic peers, the rebelliousness of the [Zionist] pioneers [against traditional Judaism] was neither accidental, nor evil, but in fact nothing less than part of God’s plan to restore to Judaism a vitality and universal spirit worn thin during centuries of exile. The young rebels against tradition in the name of Jewish nationalism and social justice were nothing less than the bearers of a new revelation. . . .
On his return to Palestine, Kook became, first, chief rabbi of Jerusalem, and in 1921, the co-founder, with his Sephardi colleague Yaacov Meir, of the chief rabbinate. What was for the British an extension of established colonial policy of delegating religious services and some legal jurisdiction to local religious authorities was for him an opening to institutions that would gradually reshape the law into a new Torah for a redeemed land of Israel. He hoped to create institutions that would move the historical progression forward, creating the halakhah and institutions to guide the great changes to come.
The reality was more complicated. That which made him the obvious choice to head the rabbinate and indispensable to the burgeoning project of building the Jewish national home—his mix of erudition and piety, his engagement with modern thought and culture, a deeply conciliatory personality, and a theology and historical perspective to make that conciliation the basis of a new philosophy, [in short], his ability to square seemingly incommensurate circles—left him out of the political mix and unable to make headway on his most prized projects: the new rabbinate and bringing the Zionist movement into [serious and meaningful] dialogue with Judaism.
Read more on Seforim: http://seforim.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-man-who-tried-to-put-it-all_18.html