In this essay, I examine the intersection between the concepts of freedom, the self, God, and creativity in the works of one of the most prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook (1865–1935), exploring his use of these concepts through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I first draw a historical and thematic parallel between Bergson’s and Kook’s philosophies that to date has not been considered extensively. I then argue that five different interpretative puzzles related to the topic of freedom in Kook’s teachings can be explained against the background of Bergson’s thought. This Bergsonian interpretation enables the reader to appreciate in what way different aspects of Kook’s thought—the metaphysical, ethical, epistemological, and theological—are interconnected and can be understood as an organic whole. I thereby show that the Bergsonian philosophical and systematic models are an important, and yet unexplored, interpretative tool for the study of Kook’s theological and philosophical thought.

In this article, I argue that religious nationalism poses a unique challenge to the liberal theory of religious freedom. In arguing this, the article first develops and defines an ideal type of religious nationalism through an analysis of Hindu-nationalist and religious Zionist thought. I show that religious nationalism in states like India and Israel have the unique status of intimate rivals. They are intimate since they are able to successfully present themselves as the carriers of the authentic character of the nation-state and utilize modern political tools. As a result, they are free of much of the unifying pressures of state nationalism. And they are rivals because they promote a vision of society and politics that fundamentally challenges the political identity of the state. The paper then turns to the justifications and rationales of religious freedom—both in seminal cases and in political and legal scholarship—and applies them to religious nationalism. It argues that the status of intimate rivalry should, depending on which justification of religious freedom we adhere to, change the way in which we morally and legally understand religious nationalism. First, because religious nationalism is intimate—that is, acceptable and mainstream—it should be approached as a part of the culture of the majority. This implies that we should be less concerned about infringements of religious freedom in the case of the adherents and organizations of religious nationalism. Second, the rivalry of religious nationalism is in itself a good reason for the nation-state not to accommodate it.