Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Jewish Lives) - Hardcover

Mirsky, Yehudah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300164246 ISBN 13: 9780300164244

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2014

Synopsis

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, the life and thought of Rav Kook, a forceful figure in Israel’s religious and political life

“Moving, invaluable, and indispensable . . . As a biography, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution is literature in its own right; and as a historical document, it startles with revelation after revelation.”—Cynthia Ozick

Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) was one of the most influential—and controversial—rabbis of the twentieth century. A visionary writer and outstanding rabbinic leader, Kook was a philosopher, mystic, poet, jurist, communal leader, and veritable saint. The first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine and the founding theologian of religious Zionism, he struggled to understand and shape his revolutionary times. His life and writings resonate with the defining tensions of Jewish life and thought.

A powerfully original thinker, Rav Kook combined strict traditionalism and an embrace of modernity, Orthodoxy and tolerance, piety and audacity, scholasticism and ecstasy, and passionate nationalism with profound universalism. Though little known in the English-speaking world, his life and teachings are essential to understanding current Israeli politics, contemporary Jewish spirituality, and modern Jewish thought. This biography, the first in English in more than half a century, offers a rich and insightful portrait of the man and his complex legacy. Yehudah Mirsky clears away widespread misunderstandings of Kook’s ideas and provides fresh insights into his personality and worldview. Mirsky demonstrates how Kook's richly erudite, dazzlingly poetic writings convey a breathtaking vision in which "the old will become new, and the new will become holy."

About Jewish Lives: 

Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present.

In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award.

More praise for Jewish Lives:

"Excellent." –New York Times

"Exemplary." –Wall Street Journal

"Distinguished." –New Yorker

"Superb." –The Guardian

About this title

About the Author

Yehudah Mirsky is Associate Professor of the Practice of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. He served in the U.S. State Department’s human rights bureau, lived in Israel for the past decade, and has contributed to the New Republic, the Economist, and many other publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rav Kook

Mystic in a Time of Revolution

By YEHUDAH MIRSKY

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Yehudah Mirsky
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-16424-4

Contents

To the Reader, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
1. "No Ordinary Rabbi": Grieva, Volozhin, Zeimel, Boisk, 7, 
2. The New Will Be Holy: Jaffa, 43, 
3. The Mists of Purity, 92, 
4. The Gruesome Rites of Spring: St. Gallen, London, and the Great War, 121, 
5. Dear, Wounded Brothers: Jerusalem, 157, 
Conclusion: Afterlight, 218, 
Notes, 241, 
Bibliographic Essay, 253, 
Acknowledgments, 257, 
Index, 261, 

CHAPTER 1

"No Ordinary Rabbi":Grieva, Volozhin, Zeimel, Boisk

He told me that his parents used to argue overwhether he would become an ascetic Mitnagdicrabbi or a Hasidic master.

—Kalman Frankel, Shemu'ot Reiyah

Lithuania, Liteh in Yiddish, was, from the late eighteenthcentury onward, an intellectual nerve center of Jewishlife, an empire of the mind whose sway ran through the RussianEmpire and touched the whole of European Jewry. In thestreets of its cities—Vilna (Vilnius), Kovno (Kaunas), Dvinsk(Daugavpils)—and in its small towns and shtetls, the multiplecurrents of tradition and change met, fought, coupled, and remadethemselves in a peculiarly passionate kind of intellectualism,an icy rationalism ringed with fire.

That cerebral ardor coursed through rabbinic circles wherehigh Talmudism exerted a powerful pull, not least through theeducational influence and moral authority of the great yeshivaat Volozhin. Founded in 1802 by Chaim of Volozhin (1749–1821),the yeshiva, unlike a traditional beit midrash, had no formalties to the local community and fostered an intense youthculture of full-time Talmudic study. A pioneering and vastlyinfluential institution, the yeshiva reflected the interests, passions,and contradictions of its time. Through its doors passedmany young men who later left their marks on all sides of theJewish ideological barricades. Its cultural hero and presidingspirit was Chaim of Volozhin's master, Elijah ben Solomon(1720–97), known as the Gaon—the Genius—of Vilna. TheGaon held no formal rabbinic post and acquired magisterialauthority by the sheer force of his scholarship and piety. Hisbrand of fierce Talmudism, marked by a unique mix of intellectualindependence, comprehensive knowledge of the whole ofrabbinic literature, and adherence to the plain sense of the text,was a departure from prevailing modes of study and religiouspractice. Of course, Torah study had been a staple of RabbinicJudaism for many centuries. Yet through the Gaon's teachings,and perhaps more importantly through his personal example,relentless and ascetic devotion to Torah study as the supremereligious act burned itself into the minds of his followers.

Though no less a Kabbalist than a Talmudist, the Gaoncalled for principled resistance to the mystically inclined Hasidicmovement, then beginning its extraordinary rise. In Hasidism'scelebration of ecstatic prayer and its theology of divineimmanence, in which God could be reached from within thegross matter of the physical world, he saw a reckless disseminationof esotericism, careless denigration of study and detailedhalakhic practice, and a dangerously optimistic faith inhuman nature's resistance to sin. In 1772, he declared Hasidisma heresy, thus becoming the first and archetypal Mitnaged—literally,"opponent," or more affirmatively, one who worshipsGod with study rather than rapture.

Chaim of Volozhin, one of the Gaon's leading disciples, inan influential treatise titled Nefesh Ha-Chaim, endowed Torahstudy with unique spiritual power. Since, as the Kabbalahteaches, the Torah in its most spiritual form is the very blueprintof the world, only Torah study offers transcendence, trueescape from the jailhouse of this corrupt and fallen world. Hesought to put that vision into practice by creating at Volozhin,in present-day Belarus, a trailblazing yeshiva that would train,in a university-like atmosphere, an elite corps of Talmudists,drawn from a broad geographic area and taught by rabbisunencumbered by communal responsibilities. It was throughthe yeshiva in Volozhin and the new yeshivot it inspired thatthe reigning ideal of Mitnagdism—of Torah study as the supremereligious act—received its institutional articulation andexercised much of its hold over Jewish life in Lithuania andsurrounding areas, including Courland (in present-day Latvia)to the north, Belarus to the east, and, eventually, Poland to thewest. Although Hasidism was not to Chaim of Volozhin's taste,he concluded that a heresy it was not. There were significantnumbers of Hasidim throughout the Mitnagdic heartland ofLithuania. They were largely followers of Chabad Lubavitch.

The founder of Chabad, Shneur Zalman of Liady (c. 1745–1812),was, like the Gaon, a distinguished scholar of both theTalmud and the Kabbalah. But unlike the Gaon, Shneur Zalmanbelieved that the divine presence was immediately accessible,even in this world, through ecstatic prayer and focused actionif one attained proper consciousness (hence "Chabad," anacronym for chokhmah, binah, da'at—wisdom, insight, understanding).Moreover, he believed that this consciousness couldbe taught to the masses—a distinctively Hasidic claim. Hissuccessors and followers, learned and philosophically minded,found a relatively congenial place in the highly scholastic landscapeof Lithuanian Jewry.

Just six years after Volozhin's founding, in 1808, a teachersseminary opened in Vilna, sponsored by the local university,which sought to train young Jews in the ways of Haskalah, Enlightenment.As Haskalah moved eastward, it projected, as ithad in the West, confidence in reason, general education, andprogress. It internalized non-Jewish critiques of Jewish society'sinsularity and economic insufficiency while asserting itsown continuity with elements of tradition, such as studying theHebrew language and medieval philosophy.

Through the nineteenth century, these three movements—Mitnagdism,Hasidism, and Haskalah—vied for the soul ofRussian Jewry, most of whom, of course, had their hands fullwith simply getting by. These currents flowed in multipleforms through communal politics and people's lives, and onlysometimes followed the neat, schematic patterns favored byideologues, partisans, and historians. Each philosophy representedthe steady transformation of tradition; Haskalah mostobviously, yet each projected a new form of authority and anewly privileged form of experience, since the familiar sway ofthe traditional rabbi had to contend at the time with the socialcriticism of the Maskil, the fierce intellectualism of the MitnagedTalmudist and the mystic charisma of the Hasidic rebbe.

The eldest of Perel Zlota and Shlomo Zalman Ha-CohenKook's eight children, Avraham Yitzhak, was born on September7, 1865, in Grieva (Griva), a small town in Courland, onthe banks of the Daugava River. Grieva consisted of one avenue,less than two miles long, and several alleyways, home to2,600 souls. Grieva's proximity to Dvinsk, a railway center onthe other side of the Daugava, midway between Warsaw andSt. Petersburg, gave it a slightly more urban flavor than usuallyprevailed in predominantly rural Courland, whose Jews wereregularly unlettered. Jews numbered half of Dvinsk's populationof some 23,000, roughly a third of which lived in poverty.

Shlomo Zalman, born in 1844, the son of a merchant andalumnus of Volozhin, was orphaned at a young age and raisedin the home of his stepfather, a local rabbi. His mother, FraydeBatya (nee Fellman), was the daughter of an early disciple ofChaim of Volozhin descended from a distinguished rabbinicalline. Frayde's brother, Mordechai Gimpel Jaffe (1820–1891),another alumnus of Volozhin, was a distinguished scholar andcommunal leader. Shlomo Zalman studied at Volozhin too.After further studies, he married Perel Zlota, the daughter ofa Chabad Hasid who had studied at Volozhin. They movedto Grieva, her hometown, where he taught the local boys andworked as a mendicant fund-raiser for religious institutions.

One can gather only a limited impression of Shlomo Zalmanfrom the few mentions of him in the writings of his son andothers. One obituary recalls his "love of truth and strong hatredof anything with a trace of lying or fakery" and his "gentledisposition and beaming countenance." Perel Zlota maintainedher allegiance to Chabad. When the third Lubavitcher rebbe,the great jurist and theologian Menachem Mendel Schneerson,passed away in 1866 and his disciples divided up his relics, shereceived a button and some threads from his cloak, which shesewed into her eldest son's skullcap.

There was in Grieva a Chabad preacher, to whom ShlomoZalman would weekly take his son Avraham Yitzhak for thethird Sabbath meal, done in the Hasidic manner, accompaniedby the singing of plaintive mystic hymns. Chabad youngsterswere among his childhood friends, one of whom recalled thatwhen Avraham Yitzhak would come to his house to sip a cupof tea, he would recite texts by heart as he drank. AvrahamYitzhak was an exemplary iluy, a rabbinic prodigy. These boysmade their own nursery rhymes from Talmudic passages, astoundedtheir elders with their powers of memory and concentration,and tended not to have many friends. In a culture thatset extraordinarily high store by education, they were groomedfrom boyhood for leadership. Avraham Yitzhak, beyond hisintellectual abilities, was highly emotional and early showeda lyrical sensibility and vivid imagination. His priestly lineage(hence, "Ha-Cohen") was a source of pride and a spur to boyhooddreams of one day serving in a rebuilt Temple.

Shlomo Zalman sent nine-year-old Avraham Yitzhak toDvinsk for an intensive rabbinic apprenticeship with ReuvenLevin, which lasted until he was fifteen. Levin, known as RavRuvele, was a much-revered and somewhat individualistic figurein Lithuanian rabbinic circles, a kind of "Talmudist's Talmudist"who never achieved quite the fame or communal authorityof some of his contemporaries. In his youth, Levin had studiedwith the most Haskalah-minded of the Gaon's disciples,Menashe of Ilya. One of Levin's specialties was to find novelhalakhic arguments for allowing agunot (grass widows) to remarry.When, in one such case, young Kook tried to outdohis master in argumentation and thereby undo his permissiveruling, Levin countered him with the Talmudic saying "Withexactingness like that, we'll never be able to study."

Before and during Avraham Kook's early life, change wascoursing through Jewish life in the Russian empire and in theelite rabbinic circles around him. The 1850s saw the emergencein the empire of traditional rabbis who had some secularlearning. They were willing to approach social problemswith new intellectual tools and gingerly to rethink traditionaleducational practices and long-held attitudes toward non-Jewsand the nonobservant. When the leading Maskilic (Haskalah-oriented)journal, Ha-Melitz, opened its pages to them, theensuing series of powerful and much-publicized exchanges onhalakhic change ended up radicalizing rabbis and would-be reformersalike. The debate drove a wedge between radicals andthe moderate rabbis, providing a powerful stimulus to the crystallizationof separatist Orthodoxy, which became more self-consciousand ideologically mobilized than before.

When, in the 1860s, the agitation for halakhic change thathad animated western European Jewish thinkers since the earlierpart of the nineteenth century attempted to migrate eastward,it encountered a rabbinic culture fortified by the Talmudismchampioned by Volozhin: intellectually self-confident, capable,and prone to resist innovation. Moreover, whereas liberalismin western Europe tried to help individual Jews adapt to asurrounding society that was at least somewhat welcoming, ineastern areas what was required instead of piecemeal reformwas a large-scale solution to the suffering of the masses.

Through the 1870s, Russian liberalism, such as it was, fellon hard times as the humanistic dreams of Alexander Herzengave way to an atmosphere more akin to the fevered nightmaresof Dostoevsky. Varieties of socialism and nationalismstepped in to offer solutions to the economic, political, andsociocultural disabilities of the Jews. By the 1880s, the cohortof Maskilic rabbis had effectively shifted their interests andthinking from working for moderate reform within Russia towardthe nascent idea of rejuvenating Jewish life by developingPalestine, under the rubric of Chibat Zion, literally, "Love ofZion." A group of moderate and sympathetic Maskilic rabbissaw there a potential path to productivity and a measured adaptationto modernity.

This was the setting in which Avraham Yitzhak Kook grewup, and these men were among his relatives and teachers.

In 1880, at age fifteen, Avraham Yitzhak left home, in thecustom of budding Talmudists, to study with a series of rabbis insmall towns. During two years in Liutsin (Ludza), he divided histime between the beit midrash of a Hasidically minded Talmudistand the library of a cousin, a self-professed Maskil ("Enlightener")who regularly gathered around him youthful disciples.During his hours in the library, Avraham Yitzhak began to craftverse, including parodies of Maskilic verse. When, on his returnto Grieva for the High Holidays, he brought his notebookof poems, his father did not hide his disappointment. The nextyear, he brought home a notebook full of Talmudic glosses.

The detailed reminiscences of his study partner of the timeare revealing. Avraham Yitzhak dressed, wrote verse, and spokein grammatical Hebrew, like a Maskil. Yet he also regularly expressedOrthodox attitudes severely critical of modernizationand secular university education, and he did not know Russian.

He then spent another year in Smorgon (present-daySmarhon' in Belarus) studying, at his mentor Levin's suggestion,with a member of the Lithuanian rabbinic aristocracy.A lengthy, strikingly learned essay of his from that time onthe claims and merit of natural science affords a glimpse intosome of his preoccupations. The accomplishments of modernscience are obvious, he writes, yet are no match for rabbinictradition when it comes to grasping the ideas underlying theuniverse or the paths to human perfection.

On his return from Smorgon, in the spring of 1884, hemet with Rabbi Eliyahu David Rabinowitz-Teomim (1842/3?–1905),a renowned Talmudist and rabbi of Ponevezh, who waslooking for a husband for his eldest daughter, Batsheva Alta. Ina memoir of his life, Rabinowitz-Teomim, known by the acronymAderet, comes across as an immensely learned, gentle, andharried soul longing for the peace of the study hall and neverable to reap the rewards of his intellectual talents. His lifestory, an unrelenting chronicle of bereavement, poor health,premature deaths (nine of his thirteen children died at youngages), bitter squabbles with rival rabbis for decently paying pulpits,and promises broken by capricious in-laws and rapaciouscongregants, sheds a harsh light on the dire socioeconomic circumstancesof many Lithuanian rabbis of the time. Indeed, hewas sometimes forced to the extraordinary expedient of goingon strike, which consisted of refusing to answer halakhic questions.In this respect, the nascent socialist stirrings of the timeseem not to have passed Aderet by.

When it came time to find his eldest daughter a husband,he asked around and heard about young Kook, who, aside frombeing an upstanding young man and a pious scholar, had fineparents, to whom Aderet's poverty did not matter. He suggesteda meeting in Riga, and his reaction to his prospectiveson-in-law was immediate and moving: "And when I laid eyeson him and spoke to him for several hours, my soul cleavedto him, I loved him profoundly, as I got my first glimpse ofhim and his extraordinary talents and piety and (saw) that hewould become a mighty cedar." After the prospective couplewere introduced in Dobvelen (Dubulti, Latvia), where Aderetregularly went to take the waters, the betrothal agreement wassigned in Dvinsk in the fall. Avraham Yitzhak Kook set off fora year and a half's study in Volozhin.

In Volozhin, Avraham Yitzhak was thrust into a moredynamic yeshiva environment than he had known before—perhapsthe most dynamic one anywhere. Some 250 talentedyoung men came to Volozhin from all over Eastern Europefor intensive study year-round, generating a youth culture ofextraordinary intensity. "When I first entered the yeshiva andlooked around I was astonished by what I saw," another studentlater recalled. "In all my life, never had I seen a yeshiva of comparablegrandeur and beauty, a broad, long study hall, bookstandsarrayed along its length and width from end to end withonly a narrow aisle between them, the tables tapered along thesides so that the Talmud folio of one not touch that of the otherstanding in front of him."

At Volozhin, Avraham Yitzhak became a disciple of thedean, Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (1816–1893), known by the acronymNetziv, who combined staggering erudition, keen analyticpowers, and a felicitous writing style with administrativeacumen and charisma. He was in many respects the truest inheritorof the Gaon of Vilna's textual revolution, incorporatingthe whole of ancient rabbinic literature, well beyond the BabylonianTalmud, into the curriculum. Unlike the Gaon, Netzivdid not try to harmonize the various texts, but allowed eachits own distinctive voice. Also unlike the Gaon, he seems tohave had little truck with Kabbalah. But unlike most LithuanianTalmudists, he had a passion for the Bible. And he deeplyengaged in his own way the critical textual and historical studiesof the time.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Rav Kook by YEHUDAH MIRSKY. Copyright © 2014 Yehudah Mirsky. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300164246
• ISBN 13: 9780300164244
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288