The Spiritual Diary of Religious Zionism’s Chief Theologian

In the early 1890s, Abraham Isaac Kook—later the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine—served as the rabbi of the Russian shtetl of Žeimelis, where he kept a Hebrew-language spiritual diary. Although about half of this material made it into his published works, the rest did not, until the manuscript was edited and published in Israel earlier this year. The diary, as Yehudah Mirsky explains, reflects a crucial period in Kook’s intellectual development: all the elements of his unique mystical theology are present, but without his application of these ideas to the spiritual rebirth of the Jewish people through the return to Zion, which eventually became the hallmark of his thought:

The notebook Kook called M’tsiot Katan freely mixes halakhic, philosophical, [homiletic], and kabbalistic discussion and affords an indispensable window into Kook’s development in those crucial years of his first rabbinate. We can, for now, present an overview of this work, and in particular of the first appearances here of philosophical and theological themes which set the terms of many of Kook’s future [writings]. This in turn helps us better understand the roots of his thought and its trajectory over time.

Two questions predominate in this collection. The first is the relationship between the body, mind, and soul, and its corollary of the status of nature in God’s creation. The second is the relationship between Jewish and Gentile morality. . . .

Most interestingly, Kook relates [his] concern with the relationship between the body and the mind to a more social and political question—the meaning and significance of disagreement, and of heresy, an interest of his echoing the vivid ideological disagreements of the time and a question that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life.

Of course, the natural body’s potential to corrupt the mind was for centuries a staple of Jewish ethics and moral philosophy. What is striking here, though, is [Kook’s view of this] failing as the corruption of a fundamentally good, God-given nature, a nature that includes moral sentiments. This [view] in turn makes possible, for him, a recasting of principled debate and disagreement as the working-out of the various elements of that God-given sense of the good. Thus, he says, peace is the fundamental character of the world, and the multiplicity of contending views of the good all point toward the final end point—peace—which will emerge precisely from the cauldron of disagreement.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Abraham Isaac Kook, Jewish Thought, Kabbalah, Religion & Holidays, Religious Zionism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF