Zvi Yehuda Kook (
Hebrew: צבי יהודה קוק, 23 April 1891 – 9 March 1982) was an
ultranationalist[1][2] Orthodox rabbi. He was the son of
Abraham Isaac Kook, the first
Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British
Mandatory Palestine.
[3][4] Both father and son are credited with developing Kookian Zionism, which became the dominant form of
Religious Zionism.
[5] He was
Rosh Yeshiva (dean) of the
Mercaz HaRav yeshiva.
Kook's
fundamentalist teachings were a significant factor in the formation and activities of the modern religious
settlement movement in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, largely through his influence on the
Gush Emunim movement, which was founded by his students.
[6] Many of his ideological followers established such settlements, and he has been credited with the dissemination of his father's ideas, helping to form the basis of Religious Zionism.
[7]
Kook presided for nearly six decades over the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva (lit. 'The Rabbi's Centre') founded by his father in Jerusalem, which became "the flagship yeshiva of religious Zionism",
[8] where hundreds of future militants, opposed to territorial compromises and promoting Israeli settlement of the
Occupied Palestinian Territories, received their formative education.
[1]
...
Ideology
Zionism began as a secular movement often led by disbelievers many of whom rejected Jewish religious traditions, one of which held that any collective 'return' of the Jewish people, as opposed to individual
aliyah, depended on the direct intervention of the Messiah. The Kooks' innovation consisting in elaborating a theology that bridged the gap between a faith that saw Zionism as a heresy, and the Zionist programme for the development of a secular state for Jews. As Kook's father phrased it, a Jewish polity must "build secularly and sanctify afterwards."
[27]
The process of redemption
Zvi Kook, together with Harlap, was heir to a tradition of messianic demonizing thought going back at least to
Judah Alkalai, in which the redemption of Jews in Israel was a premise for, and precursor to, the general uplifting of mankind. Whereas his father viewed Zionists as unwitting agents in the divine plan for redemption, – only a 'slim membrane' was all that separated
antinomian messianism, of the type disastrously exemplified by
Shabbatai Zevi, from authentic messianic redemption,
Zvi Yehuda Kook - Wikipedia- Zvi Kook went one step further. Believing that the secular state already embodied in nuce the hidden spark[28] of the sacred,[j] he argued that the messianic age of redemption had already arrived This task was to be furthered in the present age by extending Jewish rule over the land occupied by Israel in 1967, also by means of settlements.[3] This redemptive process across generations would, he argued, involve three stages, the first of which had already been achieved: (a) the establishment of the State of Israel, a contemporary expression of the Davidic Kingdom; (b)the restoration of complete Jewish sovereignty against Amalek;[k] and, once these two preconditions were satisfied (c) the Third Temple would be established on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem.[29]
Within Gush Emunim, now defunct,[30] his words were often reported and taken to be akin to prophecies.[25] In Kook's vision, Jews were unique, the yardstick for mankind, with Judaism forming the core of humanity and reality itself, and Israel analogized to the soul while the world at large was likened to the body.[31][l]In this context, Zvi Kook extended the ideas of his father[m] and his fellow student of kabbalah Harlap, who had an outlook of hostility to Gentiles and asserted that the failure of the peoples of the world to surrender to Israel would cause their downfall. Kook took this Jewish nationalism as in fact cosmopolitan, in the sense that the redemption of the world was contingent on Israel, an idea that proved influential with the early Hapoel HaMizrachi thinkers.[34]
Kook saw in the establishment of the modern State of Israel a major step in the redemption of the Jewish people (Atḥalta de-geulah). Many Torah scholars envision redemption as a future era that arrives complete from the very start, and not an ongoing process.[n] Kook claimed that the process was evidenced in the development of Israeli agriculture where every tomato and banana was invested with 'sanctity'.[35] He based this idea on (Ezekiel 36:24–28): But you, O mountains of Israel, will produce branches and bear fruit for My people Israel, for they will soon come home, and Rashi’s gloss on the way it had been interpreted as an indication of the End by Rabbi Abba at Sanhedrin 9. Rashi wrote: "When the Land of Israel gives its fruit nicely, then the End is near, and there is no more [to the] revealed End [than this]."[35][36][o]
According to his disciple, rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, who founded the immigrant organization Amishav in 1975, Kook himself advised him to search for dispersed communities of Jews who had lost contact with their roots, prepare them for conversion (giyur) and facilitate their 'return' to Israel. He believed he had discovered such lost Jews, putative remnants of the Ten Lost Tribes, in India and Nepal among Tibetan-Burmese peoples such as the Mizo and Hmar. Though initially considered a 'crackpot', Avichail succeeded, after conferring on these peoples the ethnonym Bnei Menashe, in having some two thousand relocated in Israel, especially in the Israeli settlement near the Palestinian city of Hebron, namely Kiryat Arba, through financial assistance from his philanthropical sponsor Irving Moskowitz.[37][38]