The belief that God promised the Jews the Land of Israel is as old as the Bible itself. Already in the Diaspora, it was thought that a leader, the Messiah, a messenger of God, would reestablish Jewish rule over the Land of Israel at the end of time. The Jewish people should do nothing but simply wait for it to happen. In the 19th century, Zionist Jews, the vast majority of them secular, decided they would wait no longer and began settling in the Land of Israel. Orthodox religious groups considered this move blasphemous. Some ultra-Orthodox groups still consider it this way. They believe that when divine redemption comes, the world will witness the return of the Jewish people to their land and also to their God.
However, there were Orthodox rabbis who thought differently. In 1862, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer said that the salvation of the Jews, as promised by the prophets, could only come about through the action of the Jews themselves. Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner held the same view. But the main ideologue of modern Religious Zionism was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.
Rabbi Kook was born in 1865 in Griva, formerly Russia and now part of Latvia. At the age of 18, he began studying at the Volozhin Yeshiva, considered «the mother of Lithuanian yeshivot.» He was soon regarded as a prodigious student. In 1904, Kook moved to Ottoman Palestine to take up the post of rabbi in Jaffa. His responsibilities as rabbi included serving several largely secular agricultural settlements in the surrounding area. There, he became involved in the Kiruv movement, a program that sought to bring Jews closer to the Orthodox way of life. He was in Europe when the First World War broke out, allowing him to return to the Land of Israel until the end of the conflict. Upon his return, he was appointed Ashkenazi Rabbi of Jerusalem, and in 1921, he was appointed the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi in Israel. In 1924, he founded the Mercaz Harav yeshiva. Some 80,000 people attended his funeral in 1935.
Rabbi Kook believed that the modern movement to reestablish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel had profound theological significance and that Zionists were agents of a divine plan to bring about the messianic era. He explained this based on the ideas of Hegel, who viewed peoples as living organisms with souls. And that soul was the spirit of the nation, which was invisible, but lived and developed through the concrete history of each people. Kook called this spirit «Knesset Israel,» «the Assembly of Israel,» a term used in Kabbalah.
Kook understood that, in the world of mysticism and the subconscious, nationalism was a new version of religion, and he said that redemption would come not only when secular Jews returned to religion, but also when religion reached a new dimension thanks to secular Jews. It is said that when he visited Kibbutz Merhavia, its members saw his visit as an attempt to influence them to return to religiosity. A kibbutz member told him, «You will not succeed in influencing us with your ideas.» Kook replied, «On the contrary, we have come to be influenced by you with yours.» Kook was not just trying to be courteous; he truly believed that the way to remedy the evils of religion was to understand those who had rebelled against it. Without renouncing his beliefs, Rabbi Kook resolved the contradiction between Zionism and Orthodoxy.
By Marcos Gojman:
Bibliography: Articles by Micah Goodman, Rachael Gelfman Schultz, Daniel Shoag, and other sources.
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