Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
This episode is sponsored by Jewish Lives, a prize-winning series of biographies from Yale University Press. To learn more about Rav Kook’s life, identity, and legacy, you should check out Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution by Yehudah Mirsky at www.jewishlives.org and you can use the special promo code KOOKPOD to get 30% off.”
Okay, yalla, let’s do this.
Every fight raging inside religious Zionism right now, over the West Bank, over the Haredi draft, over whether nationalism needs religion to stay ethical, traces back to one man’s strange, brilliant, unfinished writings.
This is the final episode in our series on religious Zionism, but you don’t need to have heard the others to get everything out of this one.
My guest, Yehuda Mirsky, has spent decades, obsessively by his own account, trying to understand that man: Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the mystic, chief rabbi, and founding father of religious Zionism. Mirsky wrote the book on him, literally: Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution, one of my favorite books in the excellent Jewish Lives series published by Yale University Press.
Yehuda Mirsky, thank you for joining me.
Noam: Yehuda. It’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Yehuda Mirsky: Noam, thank you to you. Thank you to your colleagues and for everyone for for inviting me to have a little conversation today.
Noam: We’re sitting here in Jerusalem. A really remarkable city. I just spent the past week here doing and exploring and excavating all sorts of topics. But beyond topics, it was really like place as text. That’s that. That’s the experience. Oh, that’s absolutely true. And today I don’t want to do with you. Place as text, but I want to do person as text.
We’re going to be talking about a rabbi by the name of Abraham Isaac Kook. He’s somebody that you’ve explored tremendously deeply.
Yehuda Mirsky: Obsessively, one might say. And yet a friend of mine who’s also a professor type who works on Rav Kook had a great line a few years ago. He said, you write one book about him. You write the second book about them. When you write the third book, then you feel like you’re starting to really understand.
Noam: I’m so happy that you said it that way, because I am somebody who has spent years trying to study Rav Kook. And I find his writings are so difficult. I’m just so interested to know how you were able to master your way through them.
Yehuda Mirsky: Well, I mean, one thing you should know about when you read Rav Kook, and he’s very hard to understand, it’s because I mean, most of his his his theological writings, his famous writings, the things that are like uniquely his that are really dramatic. And compelling. He wasn’t writing them for me or for you or for readers. This is part of what’s so interesting is that they were taken from his spiritual diaries in that were for him. He had these like extensive, extensive spiritual diaries that were like his private bet midrash, and his private laboratory where he’s working out all kinds of ideas and thoughts and feeling and experiences. And also trying to create a new kind of Jewish religious literature in Hebrew. So I want to go when he’s hard to understand, don’t take it personally.
Noam: You know, I have found don’t tell anyone this, but I have found Claude to be an extremely helpful Haveruta for me in this area.
Yehuda Mirsky: Really?
Noam: Yes. Study partner. Whenever there’s ideas from Rav Kook that I don’t understand very well, I put it into Claude.
Yehuda Mirsky: Yikes.
Noam: And Claude helps me understand it. Well, sorry. Sorry, Yehuda. But what I’m interested in is how we got from I want to talk about the story, the person Rav Kook as text to understand today also. So let’s go back.
Yehuda Mirsky: OK. So the person we’re talking about, Rav Avram Yitzchakah Cohen Kook, he’s born in 1865 in Grievah, Latvia, which is sort of a suburb of Dvinsk. Dvinsk was the great big metropolis across the river. And he dies in 1935 here in Jerusalem.
What he’s most famous for, most known for is that he was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the land of Israel, because there had been Sephardic chief rabbis before. And also he’s crucial to the founding, the establishment of the chief rabbinate as it exists today. And that happens in 1921. And also he’s known as like the foundational thinker of religious Zionism.
But in many ways, those are, to my mind, some of the less interesting things about him, even though they’re his great historical significance, because part of what makes him so rich and compelling and enigmatic and inspiring a figure is that he’s the somebody who grows up out of the very heart of rabbinic Judaism and throws himself into all the struggles of modern Jewish life, especially the struggles of identity between universal and particular and religious and secular and more and more and more. And really tries to like figure things out and develop a way of looking at the world that is true to itself and true to the experiences of other people from within the resources of the tradition.
Now his mother, with whom he was very close, Perel Zlota, she was from a Chabad family, of Chabad Chasidim. And his father was from a very Lithuanian Talmudic family. And when he was a little boy, his parents used to have this running joke that he was clearly this special kid. And his mother thought that one day he would grow up to become a great Chasidic Rebbe and like mystic and all of that. And his father saw that he was like very smart and studious and everything. No, no, he’ll grow up to become like a great Talmudic scholar. And of course they were both right. But he did both in a way that doesn’t fit the conventional cliches about how either a Chasidic Rebbe or a Lithuanian Talmud is supposed to act and live.
Noam: So that’s fascinating. So that’s how he was raised from two different types of parents. Then he went to a yeshiva at some point called Volzhin. Well, before he does,
Yehuda Mirsky: You see, we will talk about the Yeshiva of Volozhin, which was like this great Yeshiva, the jewel in the crown of Eastern European rabbinic establishments. But like most people at the time, he was educated mainly in local batei midrash.
Noam: What is the bet midrash?
Yehuda Mirsky: Okay, Batemidrash is a house of study, so like an informal institution where people just sit and study Talmud together. And through much of Jewish history, that’s where Jewish study took place. Just in the synagogue, there’d be a room with a library and sometimes the rabbi would teach and sometimes not and people would learn together. And so when he’s a boy, his father decides he doesn’t have anything to teach him anymore. So at age 11 or so, he sends them across the river to Dvinsk, where he sort of apprentices with the local rabbi. And then he starts in the way young scholars do.
Noam: Is the rabbi a famous rabbi?
Yehuda Mirsky: It’s interesting, Rabbi Reuven Levin, he never became famous, but he’s like the rabbi’s rabbi. He’s like…
Noam: Does he have an acronym?
Yehuda Mirsky: Rav Ruble of Dvinsk. But the thing is…
Noam: He doesn’t have an acronym then…
Yehuda Mirsky: Right, no, but he’s one of these rabbinic figures who like, he doesn’t become famous, but when you read what the other famous rabbis of the time had to say about him, like, “Oh, Rav Ruble, he’s the guy.” He’s the person I ask questions. He was the real thing. Anyway, so he studies with him, then he studies in some other local batei midrash, and what’s really interesting is that in these other local batei midrash in different towns, he starts getting exposed to other bodies of literature and thought, right?
He grows up hearing about Hasidism and he grows up hearing about Lithuanian scholarship. And in some of these local batei midrash, in addition to experiencing other rabbis and teachers, he also starts learning about Haskala, the movement of Jewish enlightenment. Right? So like he has… There are these like religious figures who are quote-unquote “enlighteners.” Like they study Hebrew grammar, they read philosophy, they read history, and they do it as part… They’re sort of like this humanistic Jews, and he’s drawn a bit to that too. He’s always absorbing these different ideas and currents around him until he gets to Volozhin.
Noam: So we got humanism, we got Talmudism, and we got Hasidism, Hasidism all coming together, then he’s at Volozhin. And Volozhin is this… Why is it such a big deal?
Yehuda Mirsky: Volozhin is a very big deal. It’s this really big, important Yeshiva, like, Institute of Art, at its peak, a couple hundred students.
Noam: That’s crazy, because you think of Yeshivas now, you think of the mere Yeshiva, or you think of, I don’t know, Lakewood. You think of Yeshiva University. And the list goes on.
Yehuda Mirsky: So, the art of Volozhin… Volozhin was founded about 1812 or so, and what made Volozhin different is first of its organizational structure, modernity hits Jewish life like a train. And one of the things is people are trying to create new institutional and communal structures. Hasidic courts and dynasties is one kind, and of course Zionism is another kind, etc. But earlier than that, Volozhin is a Yeshiva that runs kind of like a modern university. The rabbi who’s the head of the… the dean of the Yeshiva in Volozhin is not necessarily the rabbi of the town. He’s a pure Talmudist, and his job is to teach and train young Talmudists, and most of whom, like, are not necessarily training to be rabbis, right? And so it’s a standalone institution.
Noam: How hard was it to get into Volozhin?
Yehuda Mirsky: You had to pass exams, and there were exams when you were there. You had to, like, be up to scratch. The classes were on a very advanced level. Most of the time you’re studying by yourself. And the classes… and the heads… the various heads of the Volozhin Yeshiva were themselves very great scholars. And for our purposes here, it’s like this greenhouse of intense, smart, young men. It was only men, right? There were no women there who
Noam: What’s the name of that film where the woman dresses up as a…? Yentl? Yentl, Yentl, Yentl. Yeah, no Yentls.
Yehuda Mirsky: No Yentls.
Noam: That we know of in Volozhin.
Yehuda Mirsky: To the best of our knowledge. No Yentls in Volozhin. And so you have these… so, like, among his classmates, literally his classmates when he’s there, and he’s about 18 years old, some of them go on to become, like, major ultra-Orthodox rabbinic figures. And some of them, like, Ravissir Zalman Neltzer, who’s a great Talmudist, and eventually, you know, he’s very important in Eastern Europe, comes here in Jerusalem. He’s one of the heads of Mu’tzit Gedoliah Torah. He’s regarded as, like, one of the very greatest Talmudi Chachamim.
Noam: That means “Haredi Judaism.” Haredi Judaism.
Yehuda Mirsky: Great leaders of Haredi Judaism. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. And at the same time, another one of his classmates is a fellow named Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, who also is from a Hasidic family.
Noam: If you’re talking about Berdyczewski, you have no idea what that does to him. I went to Tel Aviv, and I went to a Tel Aviv bookstore, and they had, like, six of his, like, I don’t know if his original writings or whatever. My wife and I went to Tel Aviv, and I was like, “I got it.” They were like, “I’m the only one that requested it.” So on my desk is writings of Mihayose Berdyczewski. So he was in Yeshivah with–
Yehuda Mirsky: And Berdyczewski, he’s like the enfantaribla of modern Hebrew literature in those years. He is the guy who figuratively and literally, like, translates Nietzsche into Hebrew, and he’s really into He says some wild things. We must be the last Jews and the first Hebrews.
Noam: Right. Right.
Yehuda Mirsky: We are the last Jews and the first Hebrews.
Yehuda Mirsky: And what’s interesting, he and Rav Kook, they know each other. And over the years, one of the things I’ve seen in my research is that they’re kind of following one another.
Noam: Rav Kook and Berdyczewski? They’re kind of, if you take a look, especially in the early years, 1880s, 1890s, they’re regularly writing about the same things. Like, you know, writing about the problem of curricula in Yeshivot, or writing about the poverty of religious language in our time, or something like that. And at every step of the way, Berdyczewski says, “The answer is revolution.” Right. And at every step of the way, Rav Kook says, “The answer is acknowledge the problem. Don’t pretend that there’s not a real problem here. And let’s deepen our understanding of the tradition so that we see if we can actually find ways of dealing with these problems within the tradition itself.” So, and Berdyczewski will say, “The curriculum in Yeshivot is too narrow. Throw it out.”
Noam: But he was very religious at a certain point in time, right?
Yehuda Mirsky: Oh, that’s the thing. And when he’s in Volozhin, he’s like, wearing tefillin all day. Wait, is that true?
Noam: Oh, Rav Kook or Berdyczewski? Which one? No, Rav Kook wore tefillin all day. He doesn’t work. Berdyczewski, but he was from a Hasidic family. Right. And these are the, if I recall correctly, in your book, you have the six R’s. Oh, different. Okay. This is getting designism. Well, I just like, I was just, because you just said, you just said that Berdyczewski was– This is one of them. Revolution.
Yehuda Mirsky: Was revolution. But it was also, okay, this brings us to Zionism. Now, every– Wait, wait, wait. Before we get to Zionism,
Noam: we got Berdyczewski, we got Israel’s alma mater.
Yehuda Mirsky: It’s Roman Weltzer, and you have people like that. Now, I’m not Roman Bialik, who is like the great poet of the Zionist Renaissance. He gets to Volozhin, but a couple years later. Were they together at all? No. He’s a little younger. He, interestingly, Bialik and Rav Kook don’t meet until much later, though they follow each other a lot, and they’re also, they’re writing similar things at different times.
Noam: This is crazy academy. So this, and their leader was Naftali Zvi Yehuda of Berlin, right?
Yehuda Mirsky: Okay, they’re ahead of the Yeshiva Israel by Naftali Zvi Yehuda of Berlin, whose son Hebraized his name to Bar Ilan. Meir Bar Ilan, that’s why the university is called Bar Ilan University. And Naftali Zvi Yehuda of Berlin, the Netziv, was a very great figure. He was a great communist. He was also a very astute administrator. But also a person of fairly broad learning. He had, I mean, we could get into the weeds of this, but he believed that Talmudic proper rabbinic study meant broadening the rabbinic bookshelf beyond the Talmud to things like Midrash, to things like the literature of the Gaonic period, the early Islamic centuries. He was very interested in getting to the plain sense of the text and not getting too lost in
Noam: the– So someone in 2026, a layman in 2026, doesn’t sound that rebellious, revolutionary?
Yehuda Mirsky: But it was dramatic. But it was dramatic. In its time, it was dramatic. You know, Beth Nitsiev, and he’s called Nitsiev because it’s an acronym for his name, Naftali Tzvi-Yuhudov, Berlin, but Nitsiev also means “pillar,” that he was considered the “pillar” of Volozhin. A name that some other–that people watching this may have heard is the name Saloveitchik, like the great Rabbi Joseph Saloveitchik. Rabbi Saloveitchik’s great-grandfather had been himself the head of the Volozhin Yeshiva before, and then Rabbi Saloveitchik’s grandfather, Chaim Saloveitchik, was on the faculty here.
Noam: Wow. At this time?
Yehuda Mirsky: At Volozhin, at this time, yes.
Noam: Oh, my.
Yehuda Mirsky: So this is– This place is wild. It’s wild, except what’s really important to remember, like, every historical moment. Like, did they–if we were to walk in there and tap the shoulder, do you know that you’re in this incredibly famous Yeshiva, and, like, historians are going to be writing about you for, like, 150 years from now? Of course not. Right. What do you know–like, because something–especially when we look at Zionism today–it’s not just Zionism, but so many things in history today that are so conflicted, and people at the time are just living their lives and trying to do the best they can. And so, yeah, we look back at this and we say, like, “My God!” You know, all these people are sitting there in the same room and everything, but when–at the time that they’re sitting there, they’re just, like, these, like, intense 18-, 19-year-olds trying to figure out their lives.
Noam: And that’s–I’m going to hold on to that for later, but they didn’t know that they’re on the Mount Rushmore of early Zionist leaders. They don’t know their match–they don’t know– But they were. They didn’t know their– They don’t know their– They don’t know they’re on the edge of a volcano. They don’t–right, they don’t know anything that’s about to happen. No, they–they know the changes happen. They know the changes happen. They know the changes happen. Well, they’re making the change happen.
Yehuda Mirsky: And they’re opening to it. They’re reading things. They’re talking. They’re arguing. They’re–and they’re all starting to draw lines, right? Even back in Volozhyn, like, young Avraham Yitzhak Kook had a reputation for, like, outstanding scholarship and piety and also for marching to a different drummer. Right. You had students trying to tell the Rosh Yeshiva, tell the Nitzchipp to, like, kick him out because he’s, like–he’s, like, “We think he’s a heretic.” He’s what? “We think he’s heretical,” or something. Like, there’s a great story, okay? Yeah, tell me a story. There’s a great story. There’s a great story. One time he–sometimes this was, like, a time of revolutionary ferment, and it was not uncommon for young men to bring newspapers into the Bait Midrash, into that study hall and, like, hide them under their volumes of Talmud and read, you know, newspapers or literary periodicals while they should have been studying Talmud. And so they–some other people–other students noticed that Abram Yitzhak Kook had these papers underneath his Talmud that he was always looking at. So they thought, “Aha! Obviously he’s some sort of, like, heretical newspaper reader.” So they go to the head of the Yeshiva, they denounce him, he says, “Leave him alone. He’s a tzaddik. He’s very righteous. He’s this, that.” One time when Abram Yitzhak Kook is outside of the Bait Midrash, they go and they take a look at his newspapers, and he has these verses from the book of Psalms that are, like, “I keep God before me always. I must always remind myself of the presence of God.” So in this funny way, it’s like he’s more pious than his pious critics, but he’s pious in a way that’s different from them.
Noam: And that’s how he is all the way through. So I want to start understanding that. So what–he becomes known, like you said, as the father of religious Zionism. Right. And for people listening now, that’s a little bit confusing that that could be some sort of heretical thing, because it seems like that’s a very Jewish thing to be religious, to be Zionist. Right. It feels very Jewish. So what do you think brought him to become a religious Zionist?
Yehuda Mirsky: Or did he? Because it’s like this.
Noam: And I was going to ask, does the father of religious Zionism know that he’s a religious Zionist?
Yehuda Mirsky: No, no, he doesn’t. That’s a great way to put it, because–I’m great, your question is, like, nails it. So it’s like this. You know, Zionism arises as a movement. In late 19th century Europe, everybody’s talking about the Jewish problem, the Jewish problem, the Jewish problem. What is the Jewish problem? So the Jewish problem is really two problems.
Yehuda Mirsky: How do you keep Jews from getting persecuted in all of this, in the new kinds of Jew hatred that’s modern antisemitism, and the dramatically changed social economic political circumstance of modernity? How do you secure Jewish well-being?
But there’s also the problem of Judaism. Why go on being Jewish? Like, in a world that’s after modern science and modern philosophy and traditional Jewish communities become disestablished. And so there’s all so many modern Jewish movements arise in response to these challenges, challenge of Jewish physical survival, Jewish cultural and spiritual survival. And they offer different answers, and they mix and match. So, like, you know, reform Judaism gives one set of answers, and Jewish socialism gives another set of answers, and Jewish liberalism gives another set of answers, and Jewish nationalism gives another set of answers, and they mix and match. You’ll have Jewish nationalists, socialists, Jewish nationalists, liberals, and so on and so forth.
Now, when the Zionist movement comes along, most of the rabbis, most of the traditional rabbis of the time, totally reject it. Because for millennia, for as long as anyone can remember, the fundamental premises of traditional Jewish life are A, Israel is an exit, the Jews are an exile because it’s divine punishment for their sins. The exile ends when God says it ends, and presumably for good behavior, and as a reward for good behavior. And also, the fundamental Jewish political posture is not activist. It’s quiet. It’s you go along, you get along, you stay alone. The thing of the founding story of rabbinic Judaism is the Romans are about to conquer Jerusalem, and Rabbi Yochanan, in the Talmud, right, and Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai manages to sneak out of the city and talk to the emperor Vespasian. And says, please just give me the town of Yavneh and its sages. That’s what I need. I need to build this thing, this community of scholars, and just keep it apart from this. And that’s how I’m going to rebuild everything.
So along comes Theodore Herzl, who’s nobody’s idea of Mossad. He’s like totally assimilated, Viennese.
Noam: Great beard, though.
Yehuda Mirsky: Great beard, but journalist playwright. He has this idea of political activism, which runs counter to every rabbinic, healthy instinct of survival. And we’re going to start, we’ll work with this empire and that empire, and we’ll do this, and we’ll do that, and we’ll create a state and all these things. And you have the people who are along him for the ride culturally are people like Berdyczewski or Herzl’s partner Max Nordau, who says the problem with Jews is that they spend too much time studying and that they’re too religious and that they don’t get enough sunshine and exercise. So of course the rabbis are going to be opposed to this.
Noam: Kind of obvious.
Yehuda Mirsky: Then you have the rabbis who found in 1902, founded a religious party within the Zionist movement called the Mizrahi, which is like the historic institutional bearer of religious Zionism.
And they argue, look at the different programs that are being discussed and offered to alleviate Jewish social, economic, political suffering, this seems like the best one to us. This seems like a good idea for a whole bunch of reasons, but it has nothing to do with like religion, spirituality, culture. Just leave that to us.
Noam: It’s like a religious comma Zionist.
Yehuda Mirsky: Right. So that’s why I say if you so like one of the one of one, you know, Chaim Weitzman, who we know in this like, you know, marble statue kind of way as the first president state of Israel, but was this very important Zionist leader for bringing about the Balfour Declaration. Earlier as a leader, I was one of the people creating Zionism as a mass movement. Part of Weitzman’s innovation was to say Zionism is both a political movement and a cultural movement. And the rabbis were like very against that. So then you have them.
And then you have this, then you have Rav Kook, who interestingly in those years, he’s not involved in the Zionist movement. He doesn’t go to Zionist Congresses. Like when he gets this job in 1904, he moves to the land of Israel, Palestine, to be the chief rabbi of Jaffa. This is like several years before Tel Aviv, though Tel Aviv is like built as an extension of Jaffa originally, which is to say he becomes the rabbi of like the new land of Israel, the new yishuv, the new Jewish state. And when he first is offered this job, it’s really interesting you read things and like Zionist leaders at the time, they’re saying, who is this guy? Have you ever heard of him? Or like you have friends of his writing to him saying, like, why do you want to do this? You’re not a Zionist. You’re not part of this thing.
So why does he do it? He seems in addition to like, you know, you’re offered this rabbinic position in the land of Israel. OK, but it’s not just that in his early years. There are a few questions that are really preoccupying him and especially the rebellion against tradition that he sees all over the place.
And again, because he develops this complex way of looking at things when when friends of his like classmates of his like Berdyczewski, he doesn’t just say, oh, well, he’s a low life. No, like I was in Yeshiva with the guy. I know he’s like very principled. I know he’s very thoughtful. I know he has ideals. There’s something going on here with these principled young people who are casting away tradition and willing to make sacrifices. And they’re totally dedicated to the Jewish people.
And he really is intrigued by that. He is intrigued on the philosophical level by how can Jews participate in like the universal human project of marriage? The universal human project of morality and ethics while still being their own thing and maybe being in the land of Israel.
Noam: I read something that in your book you talk about how Rav Kook said and tell me if I say it wrong. You say that Rav Kook felt that nationalism without religion can lead to Nazi elicits.
Yehuda Mirsky: OK, yeah, so he is very alive.
Noam: And that’s a counter meaning I’m going to get into religious Zionism in a second. But he’s saying that religion will will make nationalism more ethical.
Yehuda Mirsky: Right. He thinks nationalism is really important. People live in. I mean, he’s a 19th century thinker in that way. And he’s a bit of a romantic and like but not only like people, you know, we know ourselves through language and through culture and language. And culture and culture is what we absorb in childhood. Right. I know myself through the language in which somebody spoke to me when I was a little kid.
Noam: Right.
Yehuda Mirsky: And so national identity is like very important. But making national identity your overwhelming principle, he thought, could also make you very violent. So like, what you’re quoting from is exactly right. And in one of the Hebrew essays of the time, he says, you know, the Hebrew word for nationalism is leumiyut, which is sort of even not nationalism, but it’s being national the way in Hebrew like like, you know, it’s new. It is being humble. It’s not humbleism.
So he says, leumiyut is not Naziolismus, but he uses deliberately the German term because that is an excuse for chauvinistic violence. If Zionism, if Jewish nationalism doesn’t hook up in some sense, doesn’t find a way to connect in some way with religion, it could become very unethical. And also sooner or later, it will exhaust its own cultural resources.
Noam: And that’s ironic because when I’m going around the world speaking about the Jewish story, Zionism, religious Zionism, what oftentimes people say to me is, Noam, I understand liberal Zionism. What I don’t understand is religious Zionism because religious Zionism is taking this idea that the Jewish people should have a national homeland and invoking this biblical concept of– This Jewish homeland that you therefore have to settle and you therefore have to be the dominating culture throughout Judea, throughout Samaria. And that is their understanding of Zionism.
Yehuda Mirsky: Also because those are the religious Zionists, the self-described religious Zionist party that they see on the TV at night.
Noam: So how did–so that’s, how did we go from your articulation of Rabbi Kook’s understanding of religious Zionism, even if he didn’t use that language, to today? How did we get–
Yehuda Mirsky: So there’s a whole history here. And also crucial to–part of what’s striking with Rabbi Kook is that he’s also this really deep original theologian. And also the more you study his works and his philosophy and his theology, the more you see it doesn’t immediately translate into necessarily one political position or another. They seem like the greatest philosophers, the greatest Jewish thinkers, Maimonides. Can I tell you if Maimonides today, if he’d be like a Democrat or a Republican? Of course not. It’s not just because it’s in a different time and place. It’s because the thought is so rich and the thought world is so rich. Now, in Rabbi Kook’s case, central to him–and this becomes more central as time goes by–well, of course, is the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. And in the Jewish mystical tradition, right? I mean, there’s a lot to say about it. But in the Jewish mystical tradition, you know, God is very present in the world. And God is present in the world but in a very dynamic way. God is present in our world in all its multifariousness and all its differences. And so that’s how Rabbi Kook is able to look at people of wildly different points of view and say, you know, each one has a part of the truth because the greater truth is with God who has it all. Now, but crucial to the Kabbalistic way of looking at the world is the centrality of–is the–you know, the Kabbalah sees God as manifesting in earth in multiple different ways and through what are called sefirot, different spheres of divine manifestation. And a really important one is the Shechina, which is the divine presence at its most accessible. And in the Kabbalistic worldview, the Shechina is present in many ways in God’s felt presence in people’s lives.
In the people of Israel, in the Jewish people, in the land of Israel, and in the oral Torah, the Torah as interpreted and understood by human beings living in historical time, together they create sort of a manifestation of God’s presence on earth like the place where heaven and earth really meet. In its most ultimate form is the embodied Jewish people and the embodied land of Israel in the Torah as interpreted by living and breathing human beings. And that’s crucial to how he sees a lot of what’s going on in his time.
Now, also crucial to him is that he, like other 19th century thinkers, he’s like a great believer in progress, but even more than that, he begins to see the Zionist movement in messianic terms because–I mean, it’s a whole story how he gets to that, but so much of it. It’s not only that like so many people in the 19th and early 20th century thought that things like progress and enlightenment and science, et cetera, meant that the world was really going somewhere, but also that he began to see the rebelliousness of the youth around him and the mass abandonment of tradition as that is the apocalypse that precedes the messianic advent. But it’s an apocalypse that has something to teach us, these young people who are struggling for social justice and to preserve Jewish life in ways that are really dynamic and vital and meaningful to them have something to teach us, even though he himself is not about to join them. He’s not about to throw off his yarmulke and stop wearing his fill in and doing all these things. Now, what happens when you eventually get a state?
Noam: Yeah, so how do you–yeah, so again, he dies in 1935. He dies in 1935. So he never even sees the state of Israel come to fruition.
Yehuda Mirsky: He never sees the actual state of Israel, and not only that. I mean, he doesn’t think that the British, you know, the British have the mandate over Palestine from the League of Nations. He doesn’t think they’re going to leave all that soon. Right? So like, by the–when the British eventually leave, of course, the Great British Empire is not going to leave without sorting everything out here. Okay.
Noam: Yeah. Okay. So I want to understand–without going into the specifics of the history, I want you to make the case for how the religious Zionists of today view Rav Kook as their ancestor. And I also want to hear you make the case for why people who are humanists often view Rav Kook as their ancestor.
Yehuda Mirsky: So religious Zionism–remember, like I said, there was the religious Zionist party, which he wasn’t really part of. And he wasn’t that–he wasn’t a party man, he wasn’t a political man. He didn’t think a whole lot about diplomacy and statecraft and that kind of thing. Now, the actual existing religious Zionist party, the Mizrahi, eventually becomes like a genuine player in the Zionist movement, and is very closely allied with the mainstream Zionist parties, which is to say, Mapai and the Labor Party of David Ben-Gurion. If you look at the famous picture of David Ben-Gurion announcing the declaration of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, sitting right next to him as a rabbi. That’s Rabbi Yuhuda Leib Hakohen Maimon, who in 19–was a great scholar in his own right–who in 1902 was like a young man at that convention where they founded the Mizrahi. And he’s there all the way. Jerusalem is under siege in 1948, and Ben-Gurion signs–has a plane, bring Rav Maimon to Tel Aviv so he could be there when they’re signing the thing. And that picture is very symbolic because he’s like, yeah, he’s like clearly he’s the junior partner to Ben-Gurion. He’s one of the junior partners to Ben-Gurion.
And that is very much how religious Zionists, especially the parties, saw themselves. They saw themselves as a moderating force in Israeli society. They saw themselves very much as a bridging force. They always used to say the most important part of religious Zionism is the hyphen. That you’re connecting different parts of the society to another. Rav Kook’s son, Rav Zvi Yehuda, who we’ll talk about more, for years he used to say that religious Zionists were like a bridge. And sometimes being a bridge means you have to let people walk on you. So their fundamental stances tended to be very moderate. They did inherit a lot of this classic rabbinic avoiding war and conflict. So in the eve of the 1967 war, when there’s a question, should Israel open a front with Jordan or not? And you might think, well, the religious Zionists must want that because then they can liberate the old city of Jerusalem, they can liberate the West Bank. And the religious Zionists are like, well, no, we don’t want to do that because, you know, why–you know, King Hussein of Jordan is a decent guy. And we want to start a war with him. And then eventually Hussein starts the war and answers the question that way. But they are historically very moderate.
So a few things happen. Part of it is obviously the biblical-like victory of 1967, but not only. So there’s a–Rav Kook, unlike the Mizrahi party, Rav Kook is very in touch with and channels and is alive to the radical sides of Zionism. The part that does want to create some kind of spiritual revolution, that does want to create a different kind of society, that does want to lead Jewish society into–and as part of life, and the human race into some better world.
His disciples, he starts–in addition to being the chief rabbi, he starts an important shiva, and that his son eventually takes over, and he has–
Noam: Merkaz Harav?
Yehuda Mirsky: Merkaz Harav, right. And he has disciples there who, after his death in 1935, they undertake this mission. Like, there’s somebody who nobody’s ever–very few people have heard of outside of these circles, Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria. Moshe Zvi Neria takes it upon himself to create high schools in the Rav Kook mold, and to create, along with other people, a youth movement. Like, youth movements are a very big deal in early Zionism, right? You know, everybody–you know, the revisionists have their youth movements, and the labor Zionists have their–and they said, “Religious Zionists need their youth movements, too.” So they create Bnei Akiva. So, like, they sort of educate these several generations of young people saying, like, “We are the true inheritors of the Zionist revolution, because we understand the Zionist revolution has to be a synthesis of old and new, and tradition and change.” And when they really have their moment, it’s actually after the 1973 war.
Noam: Gush Emunim started in 1974, right?
Yehuda Mirsky: Exactly right. If you know, the project of settling the West Bank and whatever–
Noam: And they say that their ancestor is Rav Kook, right?
Yehuda Mirsky: Well, they very much see themselves as Rav Kook’s disciples. So it’s like this. Also, because Rav Kook’s Zvi Yehudah’s son says he should go like that. We’ll talk about that in a moment. Well, we can talk about it now. Rav Kook’s son Zvi Yehuda becomes the head of the Yeshiva that his father founded. And Zvi Yehuda is a great man. His father is a very hard act to follow. Again, it’s like being the son of the Gaon of Vilna or something like that. What are you supposed to do? But also, Rav Zvi Yehuda has to face the Holocaust. And he begins to think, and based on things that his father had written about the importance of the Land of Israel and all, that, wow, maybe the Holocaust was God’s way of getting the Jewish people out of exile. And if that’s the case, then the Land of Israel is really more important than any of us could have imagined. And settling the Land of Israel really does bring the Messiah and make the world a better place. I mean, I was never a full-fledged member of Gosh-on-Wonim, the settlement movement, but I was sort of a, you would call like a fellow traveler of it in the late 1970s. And it was this sense, yeah, we’re part of this revolutionary vanguard that is really going to make the world a better place. We’ll create like the ideal Jewish state in the Land of Israel, and everything will be better, not just for Jews, but for everybody.
So there was a lot of that, but also crucially, and this is where it becomes very pertinent, the echoes are very pertinent today. In the 1973 October war, like the great Labor Party that had like the David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and all these people who were so central to creating the state and running the state, so that whole Labor Party establishment had just failed disastrously. And you had a lot of people in Israeli society were asking, “Where do we go wrong, and what was the problem? This is just a political problem, this is just a moral and cultural problem.” And you had these young religious Zionist activists saying, “We have the answer!” The answer is that Zionism needs to recapture itself as like the vanguard of the Jewish people leading the human race en route to the messianic future, and now here we go.
Noam: Judea, Samaria.
Yehuda Mirsky: Judea, Samaria, and all of that. So it’s funny, people talk about the settlers in the West Bank as though they’re like Bible-flumping fundamentalists from Midwest America, but that’s really not where their ideology comes from. I think sometimes I actually think some of them do think like that, or some of them talk like that because also their American funders and supporters like to hear that. But so much of it comes from this very subtle philosophy of history. We talk about the dialectic thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The thesis is the Judaism of the Bible, and the Bible is very embodied. The Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, God is very present and he’s immediate, and it’s a book full of passion and war and raw things. And then you have the Judaism of the Talmud and of the rabbis and of the exile, which is disembodied and it’s spiritual, and it’s really ethical because it doesn’t have the responsibilities of running a state. And in the messianic times you’ll have the synthesis, the Torah of the land of Israel, which will be as embodied as the Bible and as spiritual as the Talmud.
Noam: So how does… And so they think, “This is our moment.” This is our moment. To be current for a second, understand, is Bezalel Smotrich, who is the leader of religious Zionism, the party, is he the embodiment of Rav Kook?
Yehuda Mirsky: Well, you could ask me as a scholar, you could ask me as a believing Jew who writes… In my scholarly hat I have to say that he offers one of the… He’s one of the possible interpretations, right? He’s one of the interpretations. He’s one of the interpretations, you know, as myself like a religious Jew and a religious Zionist, of course, like in theological terms, I reject him entirely. But it’s like this. Religious Zionism itself, Rav Kook’s thought world is large and complicated and it’s regularly combustible because also, like I said, he doesn’t write systematic treatises. He writes these spiritual diaries where he’s exploring all kinds of ideas and then his disciples edit them and publish them in different ways. And there’s different themes, right? And by the way, philosophers read him and interpret him in different ways. Because also one of the things with Rav Kook is that he’s like as deeply immersed as he is in Jewish tradition, in all its levels, Talmud, philosophy, mysticism, you name it.
He’s also reading a lot of Western philosophy. He’s reading Kant and he’s reading Schopenhauer and he’s reading Henri Bergson and he’s reading all these things. And you have different streams of thought because there’s like different… He’s the kind of figure, thinker, who leaves behind a whole corpus the same way, say Maimonides. There’s Maimonides the philosopher and Maimonides the jurist and sometimes they seem to agree and sometimes not and they have like lots of different themes. And in him there’s parts of his… You find in Rav Kook comments about Jewish identity, like the Jewish people are the embodiment of God on earth, which is like shocking to contemporary ears. But you also find in him the most far-reaching universalist comments that you’ll find. Every religion is a different manifestation of God’s presence in the world. Art is how God speaks in the world. You know, sculpture, poetry, painting is how God speaks in the world, right? For a while he was stuck in World War I in Europe and he talks about visiting the British Museum and staring at the Rembrandts. And it’s like a religious experience for him to stare at the Rembrandts because he thinks in the Rembrandts he’s seeing what the Talmud talks about, the secret light of creation that God has hidden away for the righteous in the world to come.
So in evaluating, in trying to take his corpus of ideas and this like combustible body of ideas and also so much of the power of Rav Kook, it’s not just his charismatic personality and also his personal saintliness. I mean he lived in poverty, he was extremely self-sacrificing. He writes very beautifully. He writes this beautiful poetic idiom and it sort of really sweeps you along. So what is the most important element? Is it the ethical, which is very important to him? Ethics, ethics is the foundation of everything. All of religion starts with a foundation of like fundamental universal moral sensibilities, he says, right? Or is it the land of Israel or is it this great historical process? But then also do you read him as a kind of, because it was very tempting for people to see Rav Kook as a prophet. Why? Because modernity is so confusing.
And Rav Kook seems to have cracked the code. He could show you like, no, no, there’s really a divine lot in all this like crazy, nutsy stuff of modernity. There’s this beautiful divine logic at work. And so then the arguments become like, who’s the correct interpreter of the codebook? And also, like any great heroic figure, did he ever get anything wrong?
So Bezalel Smotrich is, you know, Rabbi Tzvi Kook took his father’s teachings in one direction. Yes, if my father were here today, he would be saying, let’s go settle the Hilt, Hiltops, in Judah and Samaria. And it’s an entirely defensible interpretation.
You know, my rabbi was Rabbi Yudam Yital, his yahrzeit was just yesterday, who discovered Rav Kook as a Yeshiva boy in Hungary before the war. And he smuggled a volume of Rav Kook into the Nazi labor camp where he was imprisoned. And he comes to Israel and he creates like he founds an important Yeshiva in Gush Etzion. And he’s one of the founders of this network of Yeshiva that integrate Torah study with the army service. And eventually he begins to sort of move, for lack of a better word, left in his political views because he thinks, you know, as he interprets Rav Kook, you know, ethics is the most important thing. And also preserving Jewish life is.
Rav Amital used to say when the Messiah comes, he’s going to ask us three questions: 1. Did you preserve the Jewish people? 2. Did you preserve the Torah? And then he’ll ask us, 3. did you preserve the land of Israel? And so for him, also like when he would, Rav Amital supports the Oslo Accords, for instance, which was very controversial at the time. But because he says, I’m a Jew who survived the Holocaust and I buried a lot of my students in wars. If this could maybe bring peace that I’m willing to go for, not because I have these like starry-eyed visions of the end of time. And also that he thought that the state of Israel had to entirely subscribe to deep moral commitments in order to maintain its very sense of self.
One last thing about Smutrich, the disciples of Rav Tzvi Yehuda have gone in multiple directions. And Smutrich, the current leader of the religious Zionist party, is in one, there’s one wing of the disciples of Rav Tzvi Yehuda who still fundamentally see themselves in partnership with the rest of the Jewish people and the rest of the state of Israel. And the others, and this is the school that Smutrich comes out of, doesn’t. Smutrich is of what they call Chardalim, Charedim Leumim, that they accept the Charedi, the ultra-Orthodox critique of Western culture and society and everything that goes with it, but see themselves as nationalists.
Noam: I’m going to ask you four quick questions that you’re going to give quick answers. And you’re going to have a lot to say in each of them. But you’re going to be super quick. You have five minutes for four questions. Ready? Do we do it one at a time? You’re going to hear one at a time. Okay. Ready for this?
Number one. In a sentence or two, what was Rav Kook’s relationship and understanding of Christianity? Comfortable with it, not comfortable with it. How would you describe it? It’s like this.
Yehuda Mirsky: In his earlier writings, he has interestingly favorable things to say about Jesus, whom he sees as kind of like an early version of these revolutionaries of his historical time. This young guy who had a passion for social justice and sort of his passion for social justice and his love of all of humanity got the better of him, and so he cast away the law.
Rav Kook is most critical about Christianity during World War I, interestingly, because where his real problem with Christianity is, by his understanding, the doctrine of renderer unto Caesar. What is Caesar’s? To his mind briefly, because Christianity abandons the law, the idea of the Torah as law as that through which you’re supposed to live your life, that opens the gates of hell for like practically how people conduct their affairs on earth.
Noam: Next question, Herzl, secular Zionist. Did he think highly of Herzl or not highly of Herzl?
Yehuda Mirsky: It’s unclear what opinion he had personally of Herzl. He thought Herzl was a very historically important figure in that Herzl, to him, represented an early stage, so to speak, of the messianic process of the renewal of the Jewish body politic.
Noam: Did he view him as the Mashiach Ben Yosef? Yes or no?
Yehuda Mirsky: Yes and no. When Herzl dies, Rav Kook gives a famous eulogy for him, where he talks about the principle of Mashiach Ben Yosef, this character in rabbinic literature, who’s like the proto-Messiah, who then dies and gives way to the, makes way for the real Messiah, sort of the ultimate Messiah. So on the one hand he talks about Herzl as this proto-Messianic figure who’s like doing the first step of the man, but he never mentions him as a human being and he doesn’t say anything distinctive about him as a person. And so much is because the actual person of Theodor Herzl doesn’t matter, and this is a difficult part of Rav Kook. This is something that’s hard to live with, with Rav Kook, because often he sees people as living these like, he sees people as living examples of these like broad spiritual historical currents, but then he can lose sight of these individuals and who they actually are.
Noam: Number three, what would Rav Kook say to young people today who have a different understanding of Zionism and who are, I wouldn’t say rebelling against Zionism, maybe yes. How would Rav Kook deal with the young people today?
Yehuda Mirsky: Okay, that’s a great question. It’s hard to say, it’s always hard to say. I think, I think Rav Kook would say, as others would say, you know, the great prophets of Israel were relentlessly critical of the Jewish people and loved them. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, all these guys, they’re incredibly critical of the Jewish people and they love them and they stick with them. And I think he would tell them, yes, your ethical sensibility, your ethical sense, if you have like ethical problems with how Israel conducts itself, that ethical sensibility in you is a good and precious and holy thing. But don’t let it alienate you from your people, not just because like we like Jews, but because if you alienate yourself from your own people, then like you yourself are, you’re hurting yourself as a human being. You’re not a whole, you’re not a whole person. And also because our, and this is not unrelated to what he says, because your ethics have to have a foundation in real live people and they’re very ordinary lives.
Noam: Okay, last one. What do you think Rabbi Kook would say if he was alive today about the Israeli draft, about Haredim going into the Israeli army?
Yehuda Mirsky: I try very hard not to say, not to think what would Rav Kook say at about any given moment, also because in a sense, like I’m responsible for my own moral choices in the present.
Noam: Do you think some people try to answer questions by putting the moral conscious on somebody else and it lightens the load?
Yehuda Mirsky: I don’t know exactly what you mean by that, but no, but it’s more like I have to make my own decisions. Like when I die and I go to the heavenly gates and God asks me why did you do such and such, even though you knew it was cruel. And if I say to him, I thought Rav Kook said it was okay, God will tell me, don’t talk to me about Rav Kook, I’m not talking about him. Okay, I asked you. He’s good, I’m asking you. But about Rav Kook, for me personally, though again, I’m loath to say for Rav Kook, we’re live today, I don’t think he could abide or understand. I mean, we saw he was very supportive of Jewish self-defense organizations, he was very supportive of Jews defending themselves, and also for Rav Kook, his sheer love of Israel. I don’t think Rav Kook could wrap his head around vast communities of Torah scholars who are saying, yeah, you can go to war and fight and die here and I don’t have to.
And again, here I try not to put words in Rav Kook’s mouth, but it’s just inconceivable to me that he would just think, okay, I think it’s fair to say that Rav Kook would try to say that the ultra-Orthodox leaders are working from honorable motives even if he disagrees with them, but I can’t imagine.
Noam: American society today, is there one teaching of Rav Kook that you think, when you look at American society today, that if you think of a teaching of his, that this teaching could help fix the brokenness within American society?
Yehuda Mirsky:
Yes. I think it would be like this. Only God has the whole truth. And so much of what goes on, people want, people, he was very optimistic, not necessarily the word, but people aspire to good things, and some people aspire to good things through community, and some people aspire to good things through celebrating their individuality. Well, I need, I could just tell you like I with sort of Kookian eyes how I look at things in American society, right? If I look at things in American society that I find extremely disagreeable, say QAnon, or frankly the encampments in favor of Hamas, right? I very much reject their fundamental premises, but in Kookian eyes, I look at them and I say, people are looking for community, and they’re looking for idealism, and they’re looking for something to believe in something bigger than themselves, and this is what they get at because like it’s not, it’s not trained, it’s not tutored, it’s manipulated by other people, etc, etc. Other people are acting in good faith, people who are willing to, as I was real quick, people are willing to sacrifice for what they believe in, are acting in good faith, even if regularly, even if they’re disagreeing with you, right?
Noam: Even if they’re doing evil things potentially?
Yehuda Mirsky: No, I think we like, if somebody is doing something evil, but I need to think a lot, and this is also like where his being a halakhist is helpful, because again, part of his problem with Christianity is like, I don’t want to deal with these broad brush questions of good and evil. Like I need to attend to the details. Rav Kook is a very prophetic figure, but he has this beautiful essay on like this rabbinic dictum that the sage is better than the prophet. He says, why? Because the prophet can give you the great vision, but the sage has to work out the details. And so I think, I think just to stop, to try to see the other person as a human being, the very last thing that he writes in his lifetime is when the Jewish community of Palestine is tearing itself to shreds.
And he says, my dear wounded brothers, we’re all wounded, we’re all bleeding, we’re all hurting. You know, please just like, let’s look at one another. And the other thing with him is like, he doesn’t say that you have to agree. You know, but we could go on in principled disagreement, you know, as long as we’re respecting one another’s fundamental humanity. And I think that’s a challenge, I think it’s a challenge to all sides of the political aisles.
Noam: Yehuda, thank you so much for joining me on Unpacking Israeli History.
Yehuda Mirsky: Thank you for having me. There’s so much more I want to, I’m listening so patiently.
Noam: There is so much more I want to talk about with you. But this is just amazing to learn the story of Rav Kook from you. Thank you so much for being here.
Yehuda Mirsky: Thank you, Noam. And thank you to all your colleagues.
Noam: Thank you.
Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And as I always say, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Paula Kweskin, Jenny Falcon, Andrew Miller, Rob Pera, and Ari Schlacht. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week.