The 3rd of Elul, which falls on Motzai Shabbos this week, marks the 91st yahrtzeit of Rav Avrohom Yitzchok Kook. Most people view Rav Kook as the founder of a specific form of Religious Zionism. While that is certainly true, perhaps his greatest and most lasting contribution actually had nothing at all to do with Zionism.
Before we get to that thesis, there are a few questions that need to be asked.
Rav Yoseph Chaim Sonnenfeld embarked upon a famous trip with Rav Kook — across the width and breadth of Eretz Yisroel. How did that happen exactly? Could it happen now? Would, say, one of the Satmar Rebbeim take a tour across America with a leading Zionistic Rabbi — say Rav Shlomo Aviner?
Another question: how is it that the Chofetz Chaim had such a unique and special relationship with Rav Kook, and yet did not adopt his outlook on the Zionist movement? How was it that Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, who sat on the Moetzes of Agudas Yisroel, defended him publicly against his attackers? How was it that Rav Yitzchok Hutner had a picture of Rav Kook in his Sukkah in the early years? How is it that he initially printed Rav Kook’s Haskamah on his sefer?
The classic response from the Chareidi world will explain with something along the lines of “Oh, well they were unaware of his exact thoughts on the matter,” or “Yes, but his remarkable Ahavas Yisroel made him more acceptable to them,” or something else along these lines. The thesis presented below will answer these questions in a different way entirely. So here goes.
The Thesis
In Rav Kook’s lifetime, huge numbers of Jewish young people were walking away from Torah observance. The usual explanation at the time was that these young people had been badly taught, or badly influenced, or that they were simply weak. In other words, the perception in the Torah observant world was that the problem was with them.
Rav Kook, however, looked at the same situation and asked a far different question. He asked whether the way that Torah was being presented had somehow failed to show these young people what it really contained. He did not excuse the youth, nor did he state that they were right to leave.
Rather, he said that when Jews leave in enormous and unprecedented numbers, the first people who need to examine themselves are the ones doing the teaching.
That is not a political idea. It is rather an idea that exists in the domain of Mussar — the kind of honest self-examination that Jews have practiced for hundreds and even thousands of years using seforim like Sefer Devarim, Sefer Mishlei, Chovos HaLevavos and Mesillas Yesharim.
Those seforim teach a person to look at his own failures before he looks at anyone else’s. Rav Kook took that same discipline and applied it to an entire community instead of to a single individual. Saying “they weren’t taught properly” still puts the blame on the student. Rav Kook put the question to the teacher.
The remainder of this article will attempt to demonstrate that this is not a novel reading imposed upon Rav Kook from the outside, but rather what he himself wrote, and what those who have studied him most closely have understood him to be saying. A claim of this sort, however, can be tested in two directions — against what a man wrote, and against what he actually did with the years he was given. Both will be examined here, and it is the second that turns out to be the harder evidence.
In Rav Kook’s Own Words
Three passages, all from Rav Kook’s own hand, establish the point.
The first is from Shemonah Kevatzim 1:476, which appears also in Orot HaTechiya, chapter 51. Rav Kook writes there that the destructive wind of kefirah will purify the accumulated filth that had gathered in the lower realm of the spirit of emunah, after which everything will grow in purity and strength out of the firm and exalted kernel that no negativity can touch, and its light will shine upon Tzion as a new light.
There are actually two separate claims are being made at once. The first is that dross had accumulated — and not among the defectors, and not in the surrounding culture, but in the lower stratum of the spirit of emunah itself. That is to say, within the religious world’s own presentation of emunah. The second claim is the safeguard: the kernel is described as exalted and untouchable, immune to any negativity. Nothing whatsoever is being said against the Torah. What accumulated dross was the outer layer, the manner in which emunah was being conveyed.
The second passage is Arfilei Tohar 120. Kefirah, Rav Kook writes there, displays the power of life; and therefore the truly great in spirit draw out from it sparks of great chessed and turn its bitterness into sweetness. Note where the burden falls. Not upon the kofrim, who are not being asked to do anything at all in this sentence, but upon the gedolei ruach — upon those with the spiritual stature to do the work.
The third passage is the sharpest, and it is Arfilei Tohar 21, which was published also in Orot. Rav Kook writes there that the nefesh of the sinners of Israel in ikvesa d’Meshicha — meaning those who attach themselves lovingly to the cause of the nation, the Land, and the national revival — is in a more repaired state than the nefesh of the complete believers of Israel, who lack the essential feeling for the good of the people and for the building of nation and land.
A ben Torah reading that sentence for the first time may find it startling. But the passage does not end there, and the continuation is what makes it usable. Rav Kook writes immediately that the ruach — the higher faculty — is far more repaired among the yirei Shomayim and the shomrei Torah. The tikkun, he says, comes about through both groups together: the nefesh of the observant is corrected by the better transgressors in matters of communal life, while the ruach of those transgressors is corrected by the influence of the God-fearing and the great in emunah, and both groups thereby receive great light.
Rav Kook is stating in his own words that the shomrei Torah of his generation were missing something specific — and he is stating with equal clarity that in the higher faculty they were far ahead, and that the defectors needed them. He neither excused the youth nor said they were right to leave. He said each side possessed a chisaron that the other could repair.
The primary sources for the full model, for those who wish to go to them directly, are Orot page 129, the essay Milchemes HaDeios v’HaEmunos, together with Shemonah Kevatzim 1:16 and 1:71; the return of souls following the repair is at Shemonah Kevatzim 8:51; and the observation that a generation becomes dissatisfied with flaws that earlier generations had accepted is at Arfilei Tohar 2 and 68.
The question is not whether Torah contains what a searching young person needs. It obviously does. The question is whether those doing the teaching had shown it to him.
Rav Kook was formed by the Mussar controversy, not merely adjacent to it. Yehudah Mirsky documents this at length. Sitting in Boisk during the upheavals of 1897, Rav Kook was riveted by the drama. His conclusion was that something in Mussar was deeply precious and something in it had gone too far, and that the Mussarniks were right to insist on the disciplining of the mind and the middos. He wrote Mussar Avicha. He began Eyn Ayah as an alternative Mussar sefer, designed to channel the energies of Mussar into limud rather than into ecstatic recitation.
One detail of that project deserves notice now, because it will matter later. The sefer he sat down to write was a commentary upon the Aggados of Berachos and Shabbos — which is to say, upon precisely that portion of Torah that he believed was going untaught in the yeshivos of his day.
What Rav Kook then did with that discipline is the pivot of this entire article, and he states it himself. In Orot HaTeshuvah 15:10, written during the London years, he writes that the first teshuvah, the one that immediately lights up the darkness, is the return to oneself, to the root of one’s own soul — and he adds explicitly that this holds equally for a lone individual, for an entire people, for all of humanity, and for the tikkun of all being. Teshuvah without a return to oneself, he continues, is a fraud.
Two further passages from Orot HaTeshuvah complete the picture. In chapter 1, Rav Kook writes that natural teshuvah begins when a person becomes aware that he himself caused the damage, and only then moves to repair it. And in chapter 5:5 he describes the obstinacy of remaining with the same outlook and using it as the excuse for failings that have become entrenched — and calls that a sickness deriving from slavery, one that blocks the light of freedom.
Applied to a community rather than to a person, that last passage is the sharpest formulation available of what this article is arguing. Refusing to revise the outlook, and then using the outlook itself as the excuse, is a slave’s illness.
The Torah’s own model of teshuvah works the same way. The Gemara in Avodah Zarah 17a records that Elazar ben Durdaya, having resolved to return, first appealed to the mountains, then to heaven and earth, then to the sun and moon, then to the stars — his location, his human nature, his corrupt generation, his temperament. Every plea was rejected. Only when he said ein hadavar talui ela bi did the teshuvah take hold, and take hold so completely that a bas kol accepted him and Rebbi wept that some acquire their world in a single hour.
The structure of “they were badly taught, badly influenced, simply weak” is the structure of Elazar ben Durdaya’s first four appeals. It locates the cause outside the one doing the accounting.
Once the principle is seen, it turns out to be everywhere in his comments on Chumash — and the pattern is consistent enough that it can hardly be accidental.
Moshe Rabbeinu at the s’neh protests that the people will not believe him. His staff becomes a nachash, and the Midrash reads this as a rebuke: he spoke ill of Klal Yisroel as the nachash did, and they are ma’aminim bnei ma’aminim. His hand then turns white with tzaraas — a second punishment for the same evil speech. The people stood on a low madreigah; that was not in dispute. It was nevertheless forbidden to speak ill of them, because they were believers by nature, and what was required was a leader capable of turning latent emunah into a living one. And then: hashev yadcha el cheikecha. If the leader can bring them near to his heart, they return to their whole state.
Rav Yaakov Moshe Charlap, Rav Kook’s closest talmid, reads Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh in this light. A leader ordinarily sees the nation as it stands before him and perceives its present deficiency. The Ribbono Shel Olam taught Moshe to see instead what it will become. The failure being corrected is a failure of vision in the leader, not a failure of level in the people.
Bnei Eli are the clearest case in Tanach. The kohanim seized meat by force, and the posuk states that they caused the people to despise bringing korbanos to Hashem (Shmuel I 2:17). The nation’s alienation from the avodah is charged to the account of those serving in the Mishkan. The priesthood was forfeited.
Yaakov Avinu’s rebuke of Shimon and Levi carries a second charge alongside the first. Achartem osi — you have made me repellent in the eyes of the inhabitants of the land. The consequence is that people would no longer be willing to come and drink from the spiritual wellspring that Yaakov represented; the nations would come to see the whole Torah as one more collection of barbaric customs. The entire concern is the effect of the representatives’ conduct upon those who might otherwise have drawn near.
And the affirmative case is Avrohom Avinu. Avodah zarah had removed the Divine from life and rendered it irrelevant to daily existence. Avrohom’s success came from living and presenting a worldview that fused the spiritual with the physical — and when he restored spirituality to the realm of the relevant, it became immediately attractive and was adopted in very large numbers. Read in reverse, that is this article’s claim: a Torah presented as irrelevant to a person’s actual life will not hold him.
Three further sources from Ein Ayah state the principle directly. In Berachos, chapter 5, note 33, Rav Kook writes that in order to influence a generation the leader must be near enough to them in stature to be capable of influencing them, and that a leader positioned far above the people will not be accepted and will be unable to persuade them in anything. In chapter 4, note 22, he writes that the leader must strive to understand each and every individual, and that by attending to the individual he raises the standing of the entire congregation, since the generation is composed of diverse individuals each of whom must be met according to his own need. And in chapter 5, note 31, he writes that leadership must concern itself not only with the nation’s present condition but with what it will become.
The Record of the Life
A thesis of this kind is worth relatively little if it rests only upon passages. A large enough body of writing can be assembled to prove nearly anything. The stronger test is whether a man’s decisions — particularly the ones that cost him something — line up with what the passages say. In Rav Kook’s case they do, with a consistency that is difficult to account for in any other way.
Begin with 1904. Rav Kook was thirty-eight, had held the rabbanus of Zeimel and then Boisk for seventeen years, and was an established figure in the Lithuanian rabbinic world. He left it for Yaffo and not Yerushalayim, or Tzefas, nor even one of the settled Torah communities of the old yishuv — but the port city that served as the entry point and the administrative center for the new agricultural settlements.
The single location in Eretz Yisroel where he would be surrounded daily by precisely those young people whose departure from observance constituted the crisis of the age. A man who has concluded that the fault lies with the defectors has no particular reason to go and live among them. A man who suspects the fault may lie in the presentation has every reason in the world to.
The Yaffo decade, 1904 to 1914, was the most productive writing period of his life. Much of the material later assembled as Orot and Orot HaKodesh was written there, as were Olas Re’iyah and Ein Ayah.
The more telling fact about Yaffo is one that is barely known, and is barely known because Rav Kook took deliberate steps to keep it that way. Somewhere around 1909 or 1910 he opened a yeshiva of his own in Yaffo. It ran until roughly 1915 and then vanished. No archive of it survives; reconstructing even a list of its talmidim required painstaking research, most of it done by Moshe Nachmani of the Hesder yeshiva in Ramat Gan, whose findings Rabbi Bezalel Naor has written about at length. What is established is that the curriculum included the Kuzari and the Rambam’s Shemoneh Perakim — both of them a departure from the standard yeshiva curriculum of the day. Nachmani’s explanation for the silence surrounding the yeshiva is that Rav Kook himself suppressed publicity about its internal life, out of concern that word of what was being taught would bring the zealots of Yerushalayim down upon it. The concern was not theoretical. His teaching of the Kuzari drew a sharp public attack from Rav Yeshaya Orenstein of Yerushalayim.
Rav Meir Goldberg was born near Kiev around 1890, boarded a ship from Odessa to Yaffo before the war, sought out Rav Kook’s yeshiva, and lived in Rav Kook’s own home. He later settled in California and died in 1992 at over a hundred years of age. In 1977 he told Rabbi Bezalel Naor what he had carried away from those years. Before encountering Rav Kook, the term yiras Shomayim had conveyed to him only something constricting — a narrowing, a closing down. Rav Kook used that identical term to convey the opposite: the enormity of the universe, its vastness, its endlessness.
That is this article’s thesis in a single sentence, delivered by a talmid who had no thesis to defend. The term was not altered. The obligation was not lightened. What changed was that a young man who had been handed the concept in a form that felt to him like a cage was handed it again in a form that opened outward — and it held him for the next seventy years.
Rav Kook also committed the critique of yeshiva education to writing. In Oros HaTorah 9:6 he addresses the curriculum of the European yeshivos directly: the near-exclusive concentration upon the halachic sugyos of the Gemara, to the practical exclusion of Tanach and machshavah. His claim is that this drove people out. A talmid whose neshama was drawn toward Aggadah was nonetheless required to spend his day elsewhere, and grew estranged from the world of Torah altogether — whereas a schedule that answered to what his soul actually wanted would have left him with a healthy relationship to all of it. Every talmid, he argues, needs some exposure to each of the chambers of Torah, since each contributes a different quality to the building of a Torah personality.
In 1911 he opened a correspondence with the Jews of Yemen. He put twenty-six questions to their rabbanim, addressing them as the honorable shepherds of Hashem’s congregation, and sent the letter by way of Shmuel Yavne’eli, a Zionist emissary. Two observations. A man persuaded that his own world has nothing left to learn does not send out questionnaires to distant communities. And the choice of courier reflects a willingness to use whatever instrument was at hand to reach them.
Then 1914. In the summer of that year Rav Kook boarded a ship for Europe. His destination was the Knessiah Gedolah of Agudas Yisroel, the newly organized movement of European Orthodoxy, and his purpose in making the trip was to press the delegates on the religious importance of building Eretz Yisroel. Where a man carries his argument tells you whom he believes needs to hear it. He was not sailing to a Zionist congress to persuade the chalutzim. He was sailing to the assembled Torah leadership of Europe in order to argue with them. The conference was cancelled when the war broke out on Tisha B’Av; he was stranded on the continent for its duration, first as a private guest in St. Gallen and afterward in London as Rav of Machzikei Hadass in the East End. Yaakov Rosenheim, who had organized the Knessiah and issued the invitation, subsequently wrote him a letter of apology for having been the indirect cause of his exile.
It was during those London years that Oros HaTeshuvah was written — the sefer containing the sentence, quoted above, that the first teshuvah is the return to oneself, and that this holds for a nation exactly as it holds for an individual.
Then 1924, which supplies two facts from a single year. In March, Rav Kook travelled to America together with Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein of Slabodka and Rav Avrohom Duber Kahana Shapiro, the Rav of Kovno, to raise funds for Torah institutions in Eretz Yisroel and in Europe. It is worth registering the company: the Rosh Yeshiva of Slabodka spent the better part of a year travelling the United States at his side.
And in that same year he founded his yeshiva in Yerushalayim. It had grown out of an evening program begun in 1920 by Rav Yitzchok Levi, a talmid from the Yaffo years, who had gathered young scholars to hear the newly appointed Rav of Yerushalayim deliver shiurim in halacha and in Aggadah, and who called the gathering Mercaz HaRav — the Rav’s center. Rav Kook’s own name for the institution was the Yeshiva Merkazis Olamis. He never succeeded in raising the funds for the full institution he had envisioned.
The point once again is what he built. By that stage he possessed a national platform, a chief rabbinate, and every opportunity a man could want to found a movement. He founded a yeshiva instead, and spent his last decade on it. That is where a man puts his final years when his diagnosis is that the teaching failed.
In 1904, after speaking at a memorial gathering for Herzl in Yaffo, Rav Kook wrote to his father-in-law describing what he had actually said there. He had spoken pleasantly and politely, he reported, but had laid out the fundamental failure of the entire Zionist enterprise — namely that the sanctity of Hashem and His great Name did not stand at the top of its list of priorities. He added that he had offered no tribute whatsoever to Herzl himself.
When Eliezer Ben Yehuda published the claim that the Jewish people had turned their backs upon their past and that this was to their glory, Rav Kook answered him at length and without softness, writing that Ben Yehuda was welcome to his dreams but not to testify publicly that the rest of the nation had severed itself from the source of its life.
He issued a public appeal against the desecration of Shabbos, against forbidden foods eaten openly and without embarrassment, against immodest fashions imported from a dying Europe, and against the wholesale adoption of the worst customs of other nations — an appeal whose opening words are a call to the children to turn back.
And in the 1928 letter to Rav Yoseph Messas of Algeria, written to correct the misquotations circulating about his Hebrew University remarks, he recorded that he had warned the university’s founders explicitly of the michshol that might come from their hands, brought them the precedent of the Berlin Enlightenment and the groups that had abandoned the source of living waters, and told them outright that Torah does not come forth from secular studies but from the holy yeshivos.
That is not the record of a man making room. It is the record of a man who left the demands of Torah exactly where they had always stood and moved only the question of who is accountable when large numbers of Jews walk away from them. These are entirely different operations, and conflating them has done more to obscure Rav Kook than all the pashkevilin ever printed against him.
His own account of the division of labor is characteristically direct. He was perfectly capable of rejecting, he remarked, but since there were already enough people occupying that role, he preferred to fill the role of one who draws close.
Let’s return now to the questions with which this article began.
The trip with Rav Sonnenfeld took place in the fall of 1913, twelve years before the chief rabbinate existed. Rav Kook had a year earlier appointed Rav Ben-Zion Yadler to supervise the agricultural mitzvos in the settlements of the Shomron and Galil, and the masa grew out of that into a program of rabbinic visits for drashos and religious revival. Rav Kook had originally intended to travel only with local rabbanim from Haifa, Teveria and Tzefas. As he was preparing, he learned that one of the Yerushalayim rabbanim wished to join — the dayan who had by then emerged as one of his chief critics.
They were ten in all: Rav Kook and an attendant, Rav Charlap, Rav Yadler, Rav Sonnenfeld and his son, the local rabbanim, and a representative of the funders. They left Yaffo on the nineteenth of November 1913, traveled by carriage, horse and mule for just under a month, and made twenty-six stops, reaching as far north as Metulla.
Rav Kook told their hosts repeatedly, in settlement after settlement, that the rabbanim had come not only to exert influence but to be influenced in turn. That is the thesis of this article, spoken by Rav Kook himself, on the road, in the presence of Rav Sonnenfeld.
At Merchavia the delegation was asked to eulogize two murdered laborers, and Rav Sonnenfeld cited yadeinu lo shafchu; the evening broke up in argument. At Poriah, after the workers apprehended three thieves and then gathered around a fire to sing, Rav Kook wrapped himself in a watchman’s cloak and danced with them, while Rav Sonnenfeld sat by the fire and told stories of Yerushalayim rather than delivering drashos. By any measure the trip was less than successful. But it happened.
As for whether it could happen now — the trajectory in the sources runs from a shared month on the road in 1913 to a mock heresy trial staged by an Agudah youth chapter on Erev Purim 1932. And it is worth noting who did and did not do that. It was the work of a youth movement. Rav Sonnenfeld died days later, and his passing is described as having removed the last restraint upon the zealots.
As for the relationships with gedolim: the Chofetz Chaim is described as a revered tzaddik and family friend who encouraged the young Rav Kook to seek a rabbanus, which led to the position in Zeimel. He later condemned a pamphlet issued against Rav Kook and said of him that he was holy and pure, and that whoever harmed him would not be absolved. Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, a Volozhin classmate who sat on the Moetzes, defended Rav Kook publicly and was known for the line that any of them should daven on Yom Kippur the way Rav Kook davened on an ordinary weekday. He was at the bedside at the petirah. And more generally, a number of chareidi figures — especially those who knew him personally — privately expressed reverence for him notwithstanding their ideological differences.
The conventional explanation is that they did not fully know his views, or that his Ahavas Yisroel outweighed them. This article proposes something else: that what they recognized in him was not a political position at all, but a mussar posture toward their own generation that any of them could recognize, whatever they thought of Zionism. They were, after all, Volozhiners and Slabodkers themselves. A man who insists that the accounting begins at home was speaking a language they had been raised inside.
One further incident belongs here, because it shows that posture holding under conditions in which almost nobody holds a posture. Returning home from a bris in the Old City, Rav Kook’s group was set upon by a band of zealots and sewage water was thrown over him. Later that same day the Attorney General of the British Mandatory government came to his home to express his outrage and to press him to file criminal charges against the perpetrators. Rav Kook declined. He had no interest in legal proceedings, he said; he loved them despite what they had done to him, and would be prepared even to kiss them. The account appears in Simcha Raz’s biography.
A man who spends his life arguing that the correct response to failure is to examine one’s own side and add, rather than to prosecute the other side, has to be willing to do it on the afternoon when the sewage is running down his own coat. He did.
This is why a ben Torah from any background can take Rav Kook’s central insight seriously. Rav Kook put it more concisely than any paraphrase can. In Shemonah Kevatzim 2:99 he writes that the pure tzaddikim do not complain about wickedness but add righteousness; they do not complain about kefirah but add emunah; they do not complain about ignorance but add wisdom.
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