Mystical Zionism's Surprising Origins: Rav Kook's Early Decades

Spend an evening with Yehudah Mirsky, department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, and author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution.

Rav (Rabbi) Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) is widely known as the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the Land of Israel, an important theologian, a foundational thinker of religious Zionism, and the Zionist movement's most influential and controversial rabbinic advocate. His legacy and debates around it have played important roles in Israeli politics and society till the present. Yet the development of his views before his migration to Palestine in 1904 have not received scholarly attention. This lecture will examine how his very unconventional Zionism emerged from decades of meditation on questions of metaphysics, ethics, and the distinctive spiritual challenges of modernity.