Interview with Yehudah Mirsky: History and current events of religious Zionism

In this interview with Danny Trom, Yehudah Mirsky looks back at the intellectual and spiritual roots of religious Zionism, from its internal tensions to its contemporary manifestations. Underlying this is the figure of Rav Kook, a mystic and visionary who is now claimed by the most opposing factions of the Israeli religious Zionist scene. One question arises out of this exploration: how did a movement born of an ideal of reconciliation between tradition and modernity partly derive into becoming the vehicle for an aggressive nationalist messianism.

 

 

Danny Trom : To start the conversation, I would like to know what is the best definition we can have of religious Zionism?

Yehudah Mirsky : I think it’s best to think of Zionism here descriptively, as a term covering the common denominator of a wide range of currents who use it to describe themselves for nearly a century and a half by now. By that understanding, Zionism is the stance that Jewish survival, physical and/or cultural-spiritual, under present historical conditions, requires the existence of a Jewish collective of a new kind located in the historic Land of Israel. With that definition, we can encompass the entire spectrum, from Martin Buber to Meir Kahana. Then the defining internal questions become: what do you mean by physical survival? What do you mean by cultural survival? And what’s the relationship between them? A Jewish collective of a new kind – , but what do we mean by new? And there the arguments begin.

Well, Zionism arose as one set of answers to the “Jewish Problem” that wracked Europe, the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere in the late 19th century. But what exactly was the problem? In the magnificent formulation of Achad Ha’am^[1] it was actually two problems: The problem of the Jews (antisemitism, poverty etc) and the problem of Judaism (why go on being Jewish after the mind-bending intellectual, political, social and cultural transformations of modernity?).

So Zionism, then, arises as one set of answers to the distinct – but related – problems of Jews and Judaism. But not only Zionism; most of the modern Jewish movement, be it Reform Judaism, Bundism, Socialism, Ultraorthoxy, Jewish liberalism and more – and each with its countless permutations – arise as attempted answers to the problems of Jews and Judaism, and those answers emerge out of how each one defines the questions. 

So, when we talk about Religious Zionism past and present, we’re talking about yet another set of answers to the “Jewish Problem;” a set of answers, with lots of internal argument and variation of its own. Broadly speaking, then, self-described Religious Zionists, aren’t simply religious people who happen to be Zionists, but a group of religious traditionalists who nonetheless fundamentally affirm the Zionist enterprise as a whole, from within their understanding of Jewish religious life. 

DT : Could you go into more detail into when and how religious Zionism was developed?

YM : The 19th century groups and trends we refer to today as proto-zionist, working towards a new Jewish community and culture in the Land of Israel featured many religious figures. A personal autobiographical note: the first ancestor of mine to come here to the land of Israel arrived in 1811 from Lithuania as part of what is known as Aliyat Talmidei Ha-GRA^[2]. There’s much historical debate as to just what was motivating them, but they and their descendants were traditionalists who also worked to create new institutions along the lines of modern ideas about economic productivity and self-sufficiency, intellectual exploration, literary expression and so forth. And they were a part of other larger like-minded groups in Europe and elsewhere. 

DT : Could it not be argued that what you are deeming proto-zionism was in fact not Zionism yet, as there was no political project yet? 

YM : To be sure, I called it proto-Zionism, and once Herzl creates the Zionist movement these folks, like many others, need to decide what they will think and do about it. And any number of them are involved in the creation in 1902 of the first explicitly Religious Zionist Party within the World Zionist Organization, the Mizrachi. Whether they want to continue their religious-cultural work at reinvigorating traditional Judaism through the new Zionist movement or not will be one of the questions they grapple with. For the founders of the Mizrachi, the two were best kept separate: they clearly grasped Zionism’s dramatic departures from traditional religious life, even as they saw Zionism as the best answer at hand to Jews’ political, social and economic disabilities. They had for decades, in Hibat Zion^[3] and elsewhere, been talking creatively about integrating aspects of modern thought with Judaism, but didn’t see political Zionism as the vehicle for that kind of cultural and spiritual work.

The people of Hibat Zion, not all of whom were religious, their Eastern Europeanness notwithstanding, didn’t harbor national political aspirations, not least because at the time, so far as anyone could tell, Europe’s empires were here to stay, in Europe and around the world. This is a point that I make to students all the time. When Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897 he had no idea, not only that he’d be dead soon, but that the Ottomans, Habsburgs and Romanovs would vanish, that Great Britain would emerge as the ruling power in Palestine, and so much more – nobody did. Just as we today stumble forward in total ignorance of what our futures have in store. 

Many Orthodox thinkers astutely grasp that Zionism is a profoundly secularizing movement, a disenchantment of tradition.

DT : One of the interpretations of Zionism is that it was more a revolt against tradition, a modern political project. And you said religious Zionism is linked with tradition. So how could that discrepancy be responded to?

YM : Let me elaborate. Of course in some ways it is a rebellion against the tradition, yet still deeply, if dialectically, tied to tradition. Of course, Zionism couldn’t come into being without traditional longings for the Jewish return to Zion, etc. It’s hard to say that for Herzl his Zionism was a conscious revolt against the tradition because he himself had such a limited idea of what the tradition was to begin with. But yes, , much of the ideological vanguard especially in Eastern European Zionism are people who see themselves in open rebellion against Jewish tradition, made more intense by their having been raised in traditional, religious society, even as many of the traditional East European Jewish masses see Zionism as continuing traditions of Messianic hope by different means. Of course, many others didn’t see it that way, not least the many, many Orthodox rabbis who deeply opposed Zionism, and had excellent reasons for doing so. 

Those rabbis clearly saw Zionism as a set of renunciations: of the Halakhic law that had directed Jewish life for centuries ; of the rabbinic political tradition of accepting minority life under gentile majorities as a   divinely-decreed exile that ends only when God decides it’s going to end, and as a reward for faithfulness to halakha and the tradition. 

And of course when we come to Zionism’s cultural dimensions, many Orthodox thinkers astutely grasp that Zionism is a profoundly secularizing movement, a disenchantment of tradition. Take for instance the new use of Hebrew as a daily, spoken language. Eliezer Ben Yehuda^[4], the central figure in the creation of modern spoken Hebrew is openly defiant of the traditional texts he is mining for his new language. 

For instance, in the first chapter of Ezekiel, the skies open up and the prophet has a mind-bending vision of God. At the very summit of the divine display, hovering above God’s throne, is a mysterious light, called “Chashmal,” a word that appears only once in all of Hebrew scripture (Ezekiel 1 :27). And that is what Ben Yehuda calls electricity, and the common ordinary lightbulb. He empties the sacred words of their transcendence, as Zionism in general empties traditional ideas not only of language, but land, and peoplehood, of their sacred charge, precisely so that they now serve as tools for vehicles of nation building rather than vessels for the divine. That so many Rabbis opposed this was not at all surprising.

Now the rabbis who, as we mentioned, in 1902 founded the Religious Zionist party within the Zionist movement, the Mizrachi, were themselves already exploring the boundaries of modernism and Jewish tradition but didn’t see their Zionism as part of that. Their fundamental stance was that Zionism was the best available option to ameliorate Jewish social, political, and economic disability, on condition that it keep religion and culture out of it. By the way, part of what made Chaim Weizmann^[5] an interesting and important figure in the Zionist movement from early on was that he was one of the first to try to bring together Herzl’s political Zionism with the cultural Zionism of Achad Ha’am’s but unlike Achad Ha’Am, who was an avowed elitist, sought to build  a mass movement.

DT  : Could it be that Weizmann’s democratic faction in the early Zionist Congress sought to align Herzl’s political program with a cultural one, focusing on the promotion of the Hebrew language and not religion? And wasn’t the early Mizrahi stance, particularly that of Rabbi Reines^[6], one where messianism and the political necessities of the time were kept strictly separate in two different spheres? This separation allowed Rabbi Reines to join Herzl on a political basis. Rabbi Reines also stated that the mixing of messianic drive and daily politics should be avoided. What do you make of that departure from the original religious Zionism concept?

YM : As I said earlier, Religious Zionism has taken many forms, and of course Reines’s resolutely political, non-Messianic Zionism is a major part of the story. 

Mainstream Mizrahi was marked by great political pragmatism from the beginning, as in many ways was HaPoel HaMizrahi, the explicitly Leftish Mizrahi Workers Party which was founded 20 some years later, and did see itself in terms of Zionism’s cultural revolution.^[7] For several decades, you had these two parallel tracks of religious Zionists, bourgeois and socialist, increasingly engaged with  cultural and religious questions as the years went by. In 1956 they merged and created the National Religious Party, the chief vehicle of Religious Zionist politics for the next fifty years, and resolutely moderate until the mid-1970s before explicitly turning to Messianism after the October War. The National Religious Party began to splinter with the Gaza Disengagement of 2005, eventually yielding the varied Religious Zionist camps of today. 

DT: Do you think that mere pragmatism could actually temper the religious-messianic ideology?

YM : Not “mere” (by which I guess you mean technocratic, disenchanted) pragmatism; but principled religious pragmatism is a different story. Religious dimensions are never far from the surface in politics, certainly in Jewish politics; the question is how they do or don’t get translated into a philosophy of history and political ideology. 

That conceptual translation can take different forms; Reines and much of mainstream Mizrachi saw themselves as straightforwardly applying traditional rabbinic virtues of political moderation to the dramatically changed circumstances of modernity. Though, to be sure, by the late 1930s you have significant mainstream figures, like Judah Leib Maimon, or Chief Rabbis Isaac Herzog and Ben-Zion Uziel (all significant thinkers deserving careful study in their own right), seeing Zionism as a vehicle for all kinds of religious renewal, even without Messianic political theology. 

Another form of translation is the theological political critique of Zionism, which  sees it as a kind of nationalist idolatry. In many ways the best representative of that is Isaac Breuer (1883-1946)^[8], who articulates a critique of Zionism from within a mix of Ultraorthodoxy and neo- Kantianism (and unlike other Ultraorthodox anti-Zionists, does so from within deep engagements with modern philosophy and political theory). Breuer’s grandfather, the legendary rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888)^[9], had argued that Judaism, contra the Reform movement, is not a religion, but a Nation, but one constituted and ruled by God’s moral law. Expanding on this, Breuer argues that a political order of pure ethics understood as law i.e. Orthodox halacha, overcomes both liberal individualism and chauvinistic nationalism.

And then there was Rav Kook – the first major rabbinic figure and thinker to affirm the Zionist revolution, as he understood it, from within the terms of Rabbinic tradition and Jewish philosophy and theology.^[10]

In his youth, Kook, like many Rabbinic prodigies , studied at the great Yeshiva of Volozhin^[11], which was a kind of greenhouse for breeding outsized figures, from major Ultra-Orthodox Talmudists, like Chaim Solovetichik^[12], to literary revolutionaries, like Bialik^[13]. Micha Yosef Berdyczewski^[14] was literally Kook’s classmate and in the years after they had left yeshiva, they were reading and responding to one another, sometimes explicitly so. Through the 1880s and 1890s,  Kook, while serving as a communal rabbi, in addition to his Talmudic and Halakhic studies, immerses himself in philosophy and the Kabbalah and acutely feels the currents of change swirling around him, and within himself. He is also increasingly fascinated by these rebels, who reject tradition not for easier lives but for lives of principled struggle for the Jewish people and the masses. .. He comes to see God’s hand working through these Zionist revolutionaries, not just to improve Jews’ conditions, but to generate important correctives to problems (like religious stagnation, insularity and moral insensitivity) that Rabbinic tradition would not have been able to generate by itself.  His thinking on this dramatically intensifies after he moves, in 1904, to become the rabbi of Jaffa, which was the metropolitan center of the new Jewish community of Palestine, and from 1909 on, the nucleus of the radically new city of Tel Aviv.  

Rav Kook too is aware of the moral perils of unvarnished nationalism, especially in his earlier writings. Unlike Mizrahi, he was ambivalent at best about the Zionist political movement, which to him seemed soulless. On the other hand, the Jewish National, cultural, artistic, social and spiritual Jewish renaissance Zionism unleashed came to set him on fire. 

Like any number of people, he came to Zionism because it helped him with key philosophical and theological questions, or if you will, antinomies: body and the soul, the Jewish people and everyone else, the Judaism of the Bible and the Rabbis, prophecy and law. What’s more, it affords him a kind of theodicy of modernity. God is ever-present and His providence is always at work. So how do we explain the massive collapse of traditional Jewish life, accompanied by stunning Jewish creativity and movements for social justice? It is God’s way of bringing the Jews from exile to redemption, for their own good and for the good of the world. 

It’s important to note that he develops his theological thinking, not in conventional books and publications, but in personal notebooks, from which his later disciples culled and edited his canonical works. In the notebooks he works to develop not only new ideas but also a new literary idiom for exploring Jewish theology, drawing on almost every layer of Jewish textual history in a style mixing philosophical thought, personal experience and lyric poetry. That is no small part of the spell that his works can exert on readers, academic readers included. Reading him is its own kind of religious intellectual experience.

For Kook, Jewish history proceeds dialectically, in stages. The Hebrew Bible is all embodiment, full of politics, lusts, longings, human dramas, poetry, and flooded with the immediacy of prophecy.

DT : While those may be partly metaphysical questions, when it comes to his political vision, how do you interpret Kook’s departure from the Mizrahi stance, particularly his belief in the intimate relationship between religious hope and Zionism? Does he truly see the return to the land as the beginning of Israel’s redemption?

YM : Yes. For Kook, Jewish history proceeds dialectically, in stages. The Hebrew Bible is all embodiment, full of politics, lusts, longings, human dramas, poetry, and flooded with the immediacy of prophecy. That’s the thesis. Rabbinic Judaism, exilic, mobile, interiorized, spiritualized, legally rational, and because utterly removed from the moral temptations of government and statecraft, thoroughly ethicized, statement, that’s the antithesis. And the synthesis? That will be the Jewish national revival in the historic land of Israel, and its heralds are precisely the rebels and revolutionaries of Jewish Eastern Europe. 

DT  : Do you see Kook as having affinities with Berdyczewski? When Berdyczewski was reading Nietzsche, he thought that the Jews should act, act without God. That was the novelty of the stance of Berdyczewski and other Zionists: there is no divine providence, only activism. Kook on the other hand will look at them from an outside perspective: although Zionists are acting, they don’t know what they do because it’s providence that secretly guides them. Is that correct?

YM : That’s the thing! Like we said earlier, they were contemporaries and followed each other. Each responded to the contemporary sense of crisis, with Berdyczewski consistently urging revolution, and Kook consistently urging a more dynamic reading of the tradition that acknowledges the drives for change and channels them.

Rav Kook is also reading Nietzsche, whom he sees as a kind of Shabati Zvi, intuiting divine immanence and its explosive power, but not reckoning with how destructive that power can be. The secular Zionist revolutionaries, then, are creating new channels for divine passion, which will, if thought through with care, bring about broader healing and redemption.

This is heady stuff. Some early Zionists were deeply moved by the sympathies and support of this major rabbinic figure, who, unlike most all other rabbis, understood these young people’s spiritual dynamism and moral passion. Others, of course, terribly resented him, for seeming to plow their rebelliousness back into the tradition they worked hard to reject, and to understand them better than they understood themselves

DT : That’s right. Is that not the case then? Kook was pretending to better understand what they were doing, pretending they are doing the opposite of what their sincere motivation was? 

YM : Some, like Yosef Chaim Brenner, said exactly that. Others, like Berl Katznelson, saw themselves as still tied to traditional Jewish ethics and spirituality and appreciated Rav Kook’s trying to see them that way too.^[15]

 In these ways Kook is not a liberal thinker, an individualist pluralist. He was very much a fin-de-siecle century thinker, discerning in sweeping historical movements underlying progressions of ideas. At the same time, as a Rabbi to his marrow, he thinks the long-awaited synthesis requires care and time. 

DT : It requires a cunning of history, like in Hegel’s philosophy. People act, but they don’t know what they do, history will reveal the meaning of what they realized to them afterwards.

YM : Well, yes. Kook thinks that it requires a certain degree of self-consciousness that he thinks he and others like him can attain. And here he’s influenced by Hasidic ideas of the tzaddik as the spiritual mirror of the people around him. 

He sees the young people this way because he shares much of their spiritual discontent. He shares their search for individual forms of religious expression, for an individualized form of religious expression. Charles Taylor’s ideas of expressivism (by which much of modern thought and culture are attempts to find truth within oneself and bring it to expression rather than receive it from the outside) are extremely helpful here.^[16] Kook sees that he himself has been struggling to find new forms of expression and new ideas, and he sees in himself different and conflicting currents of personality and understands that other people are that way in the society. 

In a very famous passage from 1910 Kook writes: “Three forces are at work in the Jewish people, as indeed they are at work in all peoples and in every thinking and human being. A sense of group belonging, a sense of universal ethics, and a longing for a transcendence of the divine. In the Jewish people, today, each one has become a property of our heart”. You have then,  so to speak, the nationalist Party, a universalist Party, and a transcendence Party (which is the Orthodox). Ideally, the three of them need to work together. A crucial point to his way of thinking, is that this theological way of thinking aims at understanding human disagreements. Here, Kook in many ways is deeply influenced by the Kabbalah. He takes the extremely internally diverse world of the Sefirot as a guide map for walking through the Jewish, human and cosmic condition. The universe is structured by forces that seem to be in opposition and ultimately conflict, and are dynamically working through time. Part of one of Kook’s innovations as a Kabbalist, for better or worse, was seeing kabbalistic categories at work in the concrete social and political movements of his time. And here is influenced by Kabbalistic thinkers, and in particular Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, for whom redemption is a process that takes place in and through historical time.^[17]

DT : It seems to me that using Kabbalah as a lens to interpret the world might be quite distant from the spirit of modern Zionism, which emerged from the Haskalah. Could it be that religious Zionism represents an influence of anti-Haskala ideas within the Zionist movement?

YM : I would say two things. First, as far as using Kabbalah as a roadmap for modernity, we should recall that Kabbalah is deeply tied to neoplatonism. Take a look at Leszek Kolakowski’s magisterial Main currents of Marxism.  Before he even begins talking about Marx he has nearly one hundred pages about neoplatonism^[18]. Rav Kook kindles to neoplatonistic idealist philosophers, and let’s not forget that neoplatonism crucially shaped the Kabbalah as well. Kook, in other words, is also part of this larger story, of neoplatonism’s profound influence on modern philosophies of history. 

Secondly, as far as Haskala is concerned, there were varieties of Haskala, just as there were varieties of Enlightenment (think of the real differences between Enlightenment thought in Scotland, France and Germany) some highly rationalist,  others much more romantic, much more tied to the nation, certainly as we move towards Eastern Europe. Also, there is a subtle relationship  between Haskala and premodern rabbinic humanism. Throughout history, we have important rabbinical figures who are writing philosophy, grammar, or poetry. Haskala is what happens when those concerns become part of a conscious program to remake Jewish society, to bring or push or lead Jewish society along the lines of modern Europe.  . And as we said, it comes in multiple styles, rationalist, romantic and all kinds of variations inbetween. 

Now, Rav Kook is an acutely dialectical thinker. In the highly conflicted atmosphere of Palestine in 1910, he says that each camp needs to enter into a process of reconciliation with the other camp. Each one has to find the good thing in what they disagree with. The Nationalist challenges me, the Universalist, to care about my people. And I challenge the Nationalist by saying you’re not a complete human being if you only care about your people. Transcendence places a great divine question mark over all of us. Trying actively to learn from people you deeply disagree with is difficult – but, he says, absolutely necessary. At the same time, as a rabbinic thinker, Kook is a believer in the law, in Halacha. His critique of Christianity is that you can’t replace the law with love because law is the only way to make this world better. Zionism only makes sense in his religious historiosophy. Kook sees a role for tradition in helping prepare the way for some new Judaism that will transcend the familiar categories of religions, religious and secularity. And he sees all the currents participate in this vision, including the ultra-Orthodox people, who bitterly opposed and attacked him. He’s actually very noble.

DT : Can you say something about the land in Kook’s vision? We started with Reines who associated and separated the Jewish traditional worldview and political Zionism, in such a way that he voted for the Uganda plan in the Zionist Congress.

YM : The political leadership of religious Zionism was then in the hands of Mizrahi at that time, with whom Kook always had an uneasy relationship, since his understanding of what Jewish national revival could accomplish was so vast – and not easily translatable into politics. But Mizrahi needed him – as did for that matter the secular Zionists too. He was this colossal rabbinic figure (it’s worth recalling that he even most of his opponents regularly recognized him as immensely learned, and in his religious practice, a saint) who endorses the Zionist project and has a full-blown theology to work it out, but he very much is working on a different plane than Mizrahi. People like Reines’ successors such as Rabbi Maimon (who was among the signers of Israel’s Declaration of Independence) were skillful politicians as well as institution-builders while he, alongside being a jurist and communal leader, is above all visionary and thinker. 

WWI is a crucial moment here. Kook is from the outset of the war in Europe where, from refuges in Switzerland and England,  he witnesses the suicide of Western civilization. That’s when his criticisms of Christianity are at their most intense, as he lays ultimate blame for the war at Christian abandonment of the Law. 

He comes to see the Great War as, indeed,  the apocalyptic war, the clash of  Gog and Magog that precedes redemption.^[19]

Back in 1904, in the shockingly unexpected death of Theodor Herzl, he discerned an enactment of the idea found in Second Temple and Rabbinic texts that a first, political, Messiah, the Son of Joseph, would prepare the way for, and die before the coming of, the universal, spiritual Messiah, the Son of David. Many people saw the Balfour Declaration of 1917 as a Messianic sign, but, given his decades of thought on this, it struck Rav Kook with remarkable force. 

Interestingly, in his early writings, before his emigration to Palestine in 1904, the land of Israel doesn’t show up all that much. Of course, it appears, but  not as an independent theological category, as a lens through which to evaluate broader ideas. By contrast, the Jewish people are always a theological category for him, as they are the earthly, material basis for the divine. In the Kabbalah, the sacred community of Israel is seen as ontologically of a piece with the Oral Torah, the Land of Israel, and the Shekhinah, all of them manifestations of God’s presence in time and space. That is how for him, the actions, the idealistic actions of the Jewish people on their land are to him part of a national revival, its own ontological steps in the world. And that’s how you get his saying “The land of Israel is not some piece of property belonging to the nation.” It is its own dimension of God’s presence, to be settled by God’s community, for the benefit of all humanity.

DT : Here it is a complete fusion between theodicy and Zionism.

YM :  And yet, the place of the State in his vision is unclear. Some might be religious and think the Jewish State is really good and important and valuable and worthwhile, even crucial, necessary. For Rav Kook the land itself is sacred. It’s not significant because it will be helpful for Jewish agricultural productivity and it will advance the Jewish national enterprise. My body, behind the plow in the land of Israel, is part of the national revival, which includes Hebrew, spirituality, and is itself a manifestation of God’s presence. It is itself an attempt to overcome the alienation of God from the world as if suddenly transcendence and imminence come together. Zionism, so to speak, empties a cup full of tradition, a people, a land. The Zionist movement uses this empty cup for state building. The land is now its platform, and the people a nation who you can make for a state. The Hebrew language is a national language the same way every nation has its own. What religious Zionism does, especially in the years after 1973, is to put the older religious meanings back in, so to speak to refill the cup. 

To be sure, Rav Kook’s immediate successors as Chief Rabbi, Rav Herzog, Rav Uziel, had ideas about redemption, but fundamentally, idealistic and spiritual-minded as they were, they were  pragmatic institution builders. They don’t have these sweeping historio-philosophical visions like Kook has. After the failure of the 1973 war, the labor establishment has discredited itself and all kinds of groups who had felt secondary to or marginalized by the Labor establishment (like Sephardic Jews, Revisionist Zionists) began to assert themselves as never before so all of these young religious Zionists, second and third generation students of Rabbi Kook, took the religious content and poured it back into the vessels of state building so that the land of Israel is both a spiritual thing and a very concrete thing at one and the same time. To their mind, they were the true inheritors of the revolutionary Zionist pioneers. 

DT : Let’s take your image of the cup. With filling the cup you put the traditional sense of the Jewish people to an end, because Jewishness and exile are inseparable. You are leaving the realm of exile. Jewish politics, pre-modern and modern altogether, has two faces. One face is politics in exile, and the other is politics to escape exile. The second face, besides short outbursts, was inhibited.  Until now my understanding of political Zionism was that it is a development of Jewish political life in exile and not abolishing it. After having listened to you now, does that mean that political Zionism is the politics of the end of history, what we call messianism?

YM: Like I said, Rav Kook is not clear on his vision for the state and its institutions.  What’s more, he’s a very large and capacious thinker which makes translating his theology into politics so difficult (even if many of his disciples think they can).

I hear what you’re saying, and it’s an attractive conception – that Zionism means to continue Exilic thinking, including its deep suspicions of power.

To be sure, Rav Kook, unlike other ZIonist thinkers, didn’t want to leave Diaspora Jewishness behind but to synthesize it into something new. You are raising two questions, one descriptive – what’s going on here – and one normative – how should we think and act about this ?  

Descriptively, it is hard to imagine a Jewish politics centered on the historic land of Israel and the creation of some Jewish collective there that is not inevitably going to bring all of these things to the surface, as Scholem wrote in his famous letter to Rosenzweig.^[20] Inevitably this stuff is going to come along or if you want to put it a little differently, political theology will become a very large question. Then there’s a normative question about what do you do once you have this movement to return to the historic land of Israel, especially because it is drawing on all these traditional ideas of the return to Zion.

DT : In that letter Scholem expresses concern about the potentially explosive and violent effects of the secularization of the Hebrew language, and therefore concern about Zionism – that it is like dynamite that might explode in your face…

YM : What happens after ’67, in 1973, is that the translation of Kook’s ideas by his son Rav Zvi Yehudah Kook^[21], puts him in a very definitive political position – that the Messianic advent is happening, in and through the State of Israel, and we know how to move it along. (Remember, Rav Kook dies in 1935, so we don’t know what he would have said about the Holocaust and the establishment and development of the State of Israel.)

Myself, personally, I’m a disciple of the late Rav Yehuda Amital^[22]. Rav Kook has this vast, sprawling corpus teeming with ideas in multiple directions. What’s the interpretive key? For my teacher, my master, Rav Amital, it is what Kook said about the overwhelming centrality of ethics, including the universal ethics that the Jewish people share with all people of goodwill around the world.

I see Smotrich as  a kind of Leninist with a kippa: he thinks he has the proper understanding of history and everyone else does not. This is because his teachers have translated Rav Kook’s relentlessly dynamic and unfolding thought-world into a set of dogmas.

DT : Does that mean that the work of Rav Kook is ambiguous? 

YM : Yes. Not ambiguous in terms of deliberately studied formulations. His writing is lyrical, sweeping, penetrating, with remarkable depth of feeling and sublime lyricism too. But he’s not a political thinker. He’s concerned with society, with culture, with national identity. He says very little about diplomacy, statecraft, political institutions but Rav Kook does sometimes write about democracy in his early writings. During World War I, he has this famous passage where he says, in an era where there is not a king, the people assume the authority of the king, what is called popular sovereignty. For Kook, messianism is a large process. Crucially for him, restoration of the temple is inconceivable without restoration of the Sanhedrin because it’s a total package; God’s renewed presence on earth will also be a revitalized legal process. In Rav Kook’s view you can’t have a temple without the Sanhedrin, without the law. That’s what Ben Gvir and his supporters don’t understand. Kook is aware of the violent potential of nationalism. But Jewish nationalism is guided by the Torah and divine providence that would not necessitate a return to Zion through violence. I admit, Kook is politically a bit naive here. Part of the success of religious Zionism in recent decades has multiple reasons, including the failures of secular Zionism to maintain its own cultural and spiritual vibrancy. Zionism derives so much of its power from its acutely dialectical relationship to Jewish tradition. When Ben Gurion saw himself as the inheritor of the Hebrew prophets, he was not kidding. 

DT : I understand that when Ben Gurion spoke of prophecy, he was referring to concepts like social justice and peace, which are accessible and understandable to everyone. However, if someone interprets God’s intentions through Kabbalah, do you think that could still be considered rational, even in a broader sense?

Mirsky : I don’t think we can classify Kabbalah as « irrational » in all its forms, though it certainly is saturated with myth. At the same time, much of Kabbalah is in deep conversation with philosophy, medieval of course, but modern philosophy too.^[23] 

Well, clearly, whether it’s rational or not, it’s illegitimate in a democratic society. If we take a look at Rav Kook’s view as an esoteric reading of history, the question is what legitimacy does it have in the public sphere? That’s one of the places where there is an unsurmountable divide between somebody like Israel’s current Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich and I.

I see Smotrich as  a kind of Leninist with a kippa: he thinks he has the proper understanding of history and everyone else does not. He thinks he’s the avant-garde, that he has to seize the reins of government and direct them according to the tracks it has to go, which you are incapable of understanding. This is because his teachers have translated Rav Kook’s relentlessly dynamic and unfolding thought-world into a set of dogmas. 

In contrast, Rav Kook, is a pluralist (but not a liberal). And also, he’s a great optimist. He sees people motivated by ideals. He almost never talks to those who are motivated by the lust for money or  power, he didn’t think that they were theologically significant. Similarly, Kook doesn’t see materialism as a spiritual force in the world. He doesn’t write about Marxism, he’s interested in Socialism and Anarchism because he sees those as spiritually significant beliefs. 

DT : In Kook’s vision, the people and the land are coupled. Redemption comes through the gathering of the Jewish people on the promised land.

YM : And that gathering is also what makes new kinds of art, literature, poetry, and religious practice possible. 

DT : You raise an interesting point about the legitimacy of the land. If the legitimacy comes from living on it as a majority and working the land, it seems to align with a modern nationalist perspective. But if the land is viewed as sacred, that might lead to more complex questions. You personally seem to have a liberal, universalistic interpretation of Rabbi Kook’s ideas, advocating for pragmatism and non-violence. But do you think the religious Zionist stance, by its nature, might create a framework that could logically lead to conflict?

YM :  I think that there are political-theological dimensions latent in the Zionist enterprise as a whole, as there are in so many political movements, and that Religious Zionism does force them to the surface.  How to respond to those theological-political dilemmas is a moral choice we all have to make. And there are all kinds of potential responses. 

Well, you see, Kook interestingly was very strict about the fact that Jews shouldn’t go to the Temple Mount. He was very affirmative on that, especially after the riots of 1929. Like many Zionists he was shocked by Arab violence. The dream of coexistence was collapsing. But yes, of course, Kook’s ideas might be dangerous. It is something that I struggle with in the decades that I’ve been reading him. His ideas are so compelling and they’re put so beautifully, and you never see celebration of violence for its own sake. This is the fundamental question: what do we do when our deep structures of legitimization and profound moral claims have a transcendent structure that is very dangerous in terms of maintaining a liberal policy? Sometimes I think there’s an analogy between Rav Kook’s ideas  and those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer^[24]. Bonhoeffer, finding himself working side by side with non-religious activists in the anti-Hitler resistance developed the idea of « unconscious Christians, », which Rahner elaborated on at greater length as «anonymous Christianity». Their concept isn’t that non-religious anti-Hitlerians had somehow  accepted Jesus in their hearts, but that their life’s work is a manifestation of Christ in history, and that the structure of their actions, their moral stance, is only, in some sense, understandable on the grounds of a prophetic critique of power.

This is the fundamental question: what do we do when our deep structures of legitimization and profound moral claims have a transcendent structure that is very dangerous in terms of maintaining a liberal policy?

DT : Nonetheless, subconscious motivation for resistance to evil is not the same as promoting a project with supposedly subconscious motives in the context of a democratic State and the possibility of conquest of that land by force.

YM : Yes. At the same time, religious ideas can have tremendous emancipatory potential in democratic societies, as we have the case with Martin Luther King. Liberal societies, even liberal politics, need, for their moral grounding, some connection to transcendence. The skeptical epistemology of modern science is driven by a moral desire to try and lower the volume of human disagreements so that people will at least not murder each other. Yet the human need for some ultimate, morally commanding horizon, does not go away. 

Those political-theological questions in Israel today are especially intense, acute and tortured. They resonate with the questions of political theology elsewhere. 

People regularly label Religious Zionists as Fundamentalist but that paradigm really doesn’t work here. Religious Zionist are very modernist. They have this theory of history and of revolution, of progress and change. And ideas of the expressiveness of art and culture as being a piece of the national revival and expressing spirituality. And of course this is connected to the broader question of public religion that’s been racking the world. There was modernization theory, and then the 1979 Islamic revolution after. There’s this thing called fundamentalism. It’s just people trying to push things back. But it’s more complicated: thanks to Isaiah Berlin, we know that 18th-century counter-enlightenment figures were not just plain old reactionary, they had their own affirmative conceptions. And the same is true today.

I’m in tremendous agreement with you on the need to maintain a diaspora sense of politics. But with the radicalization of religious-scientific politics over the decades, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum and is tied to broader crises of legitimacy, solidarity, moral commitment and their underlying values. 

DT : We had a lot of Jewish history of Messianic outbursts in Jewish history. And those come after deep crises. That was the case in the Middle Ages, it was the case with Shabtai Zvi and with Yacob Frank. Might it also be the case with Rav Kook, around WWI, with the pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe? 

YM : Yes. And above all the collapse of traditional Jewish life in modernity.

DT : And it also seems to be the case for Kook’s son Zvi Yehuda, with the Shoah. Messianism came from the profound struggle with the understanding of Jewish history, which came with the Shoah in a period of tremendous crisis. If you read what Haredim write or think about the Shoah, you see that they have an enormous problem coping with it. Their categories fall short. Don’t you think religious Zionist messianism is a backlash to the Shoah?

Mirsky : For Zvi Yehuda Kook the Shoah was God’s way of ending the Exile and returning  the Jewish people to Eretz Israel. He’s very clear about that: Land is overwhelmingly significant and the State of Israel that grounds Jewish sovereignty there is indeed, and especially after the Shoah, God’s redemptive institution on Earth. My teacher, Rav Amital, started studying Rav Kook when he was in Hungary, before he was swept up in the Holocaust, in the Nazi labor camp. Throughout his life he was a  committed, profound interpreter of Rav Kook. And yet, he put a morally-driven epistemic humility at the center of his thought. Yes, Jews believe in redemption, but the question is, how can we know? 

Rav Amital would say, we’re in the hands of some bigger redemptive process, and that trying to discern the meanings of current events is the good and right thing to do. I can’t pretend to think I know the details of God’s plans for history. And in the meanwhile, I have to be pragmatic and take moral decisions. I agree with this. I don’t say I understand Rav Kook better than his son Zvi Yehudah did, but I know that I’m making choices here and now, and I have to take responsibility for my choices, including how I choose to interpret this great man. Especially after the Intifada in 2000. People still think about redemption, but redemption is being pushed to a farther and farther horizon. There’s a lot of grim struggle ahead. Another interesting thing that’s been going on in religious Zionism in recent decades is Kook’s reflections on subjectivity, personal self-expression, creativity, the arts, soulfulness and spirituality.

DT : Is that part of the Americanization of Israeli life?

YM : Not really,  because it’s not emerging out of liberal individualism. It is about finding your individual self-expression within the collective. 

DT : Is there a political party that expresses what you think is a good stance on Zionism according to the writings of Rav Kook? 

YM : I would say there’s not a party, but there are figures. There are figures in the Beni Gantz orbit, Hili Troper or Tehila Friedman. They fit very much into Kook’s humanist way of looking at things. And politics needs to be pragmatic. By the way, one of the interesting critiques that you’ll get from more right-wing religious Zionists is they’ll say, “You think I’m a Messianist?”, but what was Shimon Peres? 

One of the critiques of the Oslo process is that it is part of that post-cold war euphoria of the end of history. And it was also destructive. I used to think saying that was crazy, but now I think there’s something to it. Because now we see all over the West, how badly the post-Cold War euphoria, in which I participated in my professional life when I was in the State Department, has held up and how badly we misread so many aspects of world politics. 

I do think there’s a distinction to be made between utopianism and messianism. Utopianism is inherent in the three Abrahamic faiths. Because there is this sense that the truth of the religious message will require, at some point, the good to be realized here on Earth. The question is, does that necessarily translate into messianism, the idea that I am living in a historical moment and can I discern how this is supposed to happen and I’m supposed to help to move it along? 

We can illustrate the difference between utopian and messianism by looking at contemporary Israel’s Haredi sector. The Haredi stance is that we can have a society where everybody is a Talmudist, something unheard of in Jewish history. It’s utterly utopian. And yet rooted precisely in a rejection of the messianic theology of so much of Religious Zionism. 

Of course there are resources in Jewish thought for non-utopian messianism, above all the naturalistic messianic doctrine of Maimonides. To his mind, the great messianic advent is a just social and political order that enables people to philosophize, to have a good life that combines action and contemplation.

DT : A last question. In Kook’s vision, what was the place of the Arabs or Palestinians?

YM :  Like most early Zionists, Kook didn’t really pay much attention to them. Most early Zionists didn’t see the Palestinians as a separate nation, and  only shortly before WWI do we start seeing the strings of something like a distinctive nationalism, the first element of a Palestinian national identity. Even then, it’s taking place in the context of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the young Turkish revolution where everybody is trying to figure out who they are and what they are.  And after the British receive the Mandate from the League of Nations, nobody thinks they will be leaving Palestine anytime soon. 

In Kook’s writings you never find a clear political stance on this though he’s always taking pains to indicate that the non-Jewish and Arab inhabitants of the land are not enemies and should not be seen as enemies. I don’t know if he ever thought about what their citizenship status might be in a Jewish state because he didn’t think about what a Jewish state would look like. I think in his mind, presumably, it would be one the forms of national expression in the land of Israel that would be overwhelmingly Jewish. 

For him the Palestinian population was not one entity. There are the Christians, there are the Muslims, the Druze. Because he is also a cleric, he’s dealing with different groups, different kinds of people. He doesn’t think in hostile terms about them. The Mufti^[25] is periodically publishing these open letters, trying to draw him into some rhetorical combat, and Kook always refused to be drawn into it. 

Again, for me, Kook, is this overpowering figure. He is one of the most remarkable Jewish thinkers. What do you do with him as a political guide for the present? I’ll refer again, to my teacher, Rav Amital said: Rabbi Akivah was wrong about Bar Kochba^[26], it doesn’t diminish Rabbi Akivah’s greatness and what we have to learn from him even today. It just means you have to remember that even Rabbi Akiva wasn’t right about everything, and that sometimes he was wrong.

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Interview conducted by Danny Trom