3 - Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the Mystification of Maimonidean Rationalism

Summary

Rabbi Kook's Defence of Maimonides

When modern Jewish thinkers staked out their own novel ground and advanced Jewish thought in the twentieth century, they looked back and engaged a foundational Jewish canon of scriptural and rabbinic texts. Maimonides looms so large in the development of Jewish law and thought that it is no exaggeration to consider his intellectual and jurisprudential legacy an integral part of that canon. Just as it is difficult to classify thought as ‘Jewish’ unless it engages in some way with the Hebrew Bible or the Talmud, the same can be said of thought that ignores Maimonides. To engage him involves, at the same time, a re-engagement with the biblical and rabbinic sources he interpreted, which make up the common library of authentically Jewish intellectual discourse.

One such embodiment of modern Jewish authenticity in the twentieth century is Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook (1865–1935). It would be hard to identify a more seminal and influential modern Jewish figure: virtually all Jewish intellectual, literary, and activist currents intersected in him, be they halakhic, mystical, poetic, midrashic, political, or philosophical. The elaborate complexity of his thought reflects the dizzying and often tormented drama of his life. His formative biography begins as a talmudic prodigy (ilui) in the elite yeshiva of Volozhin under the leadership of Rabbi Naftali Tsevi Yehudah Berlin, the most prominent of rabbinic scholars in his time, and to whom Chapter 1 of this volume is devoted. It then evolves through his passionate spiritual and political advocacy of Zionism, his rabbinic leadership of pre-state Jaffa, a stint as a pulpit rabbi in England, the establishment of his own independent political movement, and ultimately his work as the founder of the Chief Rabbinate under the British Mandate and the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi. Much like Maimonides in his day, throughout Rabbi Kook’s frenetic communal career his writing rarely ceased, leaving us a prodigious record of his thought. He was constantly driven by an irrepressible urge to disclose his most intimate reflections, no matter what the consequences might be: ‘I must deliberate without any restraint, to pour onto paper without limits all my heart's thought.’