Holiness in Flesh/On Physical Exercise

A mystic, rabbi, philosopher, and Orthodox Jewish leader in Ottoman and British Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook is widely understood to be the founding figure of religious Zionism as a movement that sees Jewish sovereignty over the historic land of Israel and the active rebuilding of an Orthodox Jewish society there as Jews’ primary religious obligation and as an act of restoration essential to the messianic advent. Born in the Courland reaches of the Russian Empire (now Latvia), Kook had connections to the Hasidic world but studied in the premiere yeshiva of “Lithuanian” Orthodoxy, Volozhin. From his youth, he combined wide rabbinic learning, deep if agonistic interest in contemporary non-Jewish philosophy, and an intense mystical life. By the turn of the twentieth century, he began to forge his own then-unique version of religious Zionism and preach an unapologetic insistence on Orthodox Judaism’s superiority to other religions and its unique redemptive role in a fallen world. 

In 1904, Kook was invited to become a rabbi in Jaffa, and he arrived there in 1905. He spent the years of World War I in Germany and England but returned in 1919 to become the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, a post in which he served from 1921 to his death. In Mandate Palestine, Kook fought against forms of secular modernity he considered dangerous to Jewish piety, opposing, for instance, suffrage for Jewish women. But he also forged a uniquely positive view of the flagrantly secularist Zionist pioneers increasingly dominant in the Yishuv, who were conventionally the targets of Orthodox wrath: on the basis of his messianic religious Zionism that emphasized the role of human activity in bringing the messianic redemption, he argued that the secular pioneers were unwittingly but genuinely doing God’s work by settling the land and thus creating the necessary this-worldly conditions for the Messiah’s coming. 

Since his death, Kook’s legacy has been interpreted in divergent ways. He is regarded as a foundational figure by Israeli Orthodox Jews of many political inclinations. At the same time, in part through the radical messianic teachings of his son Tzvi Yehudah Kook before and after the 1967 War, Kook’s thinking became posthumously essential to the messianic settler movement Gush Emunim. In turn, their activist-messianic reading of Kook’s thought now dominates religious Zionism in Israel.