280 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Religious Zionism versus Post-Zionism
Buber rarely discusses religious Zionism. His polemics were usually directed
against Labor and Revisionism, the primary Zionist camps in his lifetime. How-
ever, he devotes a few extraordinary pages to the praise of Rabbi Abraham Isaac
Kook. Buber did not fully endorse Kook’s position, which he saw as necessary
but one sided:
The significance of the regaining of the land of Israel by the people of Israel is
to be understood on three levels, each of which, however, only reveals its full
meaning in connection with the other two. On the first level it is acknowl-
edged that the people can only in the land achieve its own existence again; on
the second, that it is only there that it will rediscover its own work, the free
creative function of its spirit; on the third, that it needs the land in order to
regain its holiness. The first stage, taken by itself, results in a narrow political
view, the second by itself in a narrow intellectual view and the third by itself
in a narrow religious view. All three must be taken together if we are to under-
stand what is meant by the rebirth of the Jewish people.^157Buber associates Rav Kook with the third stage. This earns him the honor of be-
ing the man “in whose person, as in that of no other contemporary, the holy sub-
stance of Israel has been incorporated.” Rav Kook also acknowledges the “claims
of holiness in the national movement to a greater extent than anyone else in the
Zionist thought of our time, without making it the object of a constricting reli-
gious requirement.” Rav Kook recognizes that “the mysteries always teach us to
combine the holy with the profane.”^158 This leads him to understand the impor-
tance of reasserting the holiness of nature and the body, and to denounce both
the spirituality that stands aloof from the material as well as the secular rebellion
against that spirituality. In the future, these contending parties will realize that
they both need and complement each other.
Rav Kook impresses Buber by his understanding that the secular rebellion
needs to be radical, since it was caused by the prior repression of “pure” spiri-
tuality. For Rav Kook, this rebellion indicates the birth pangs of the Messiah.
Buber presents Rav Kook’s messianism as similar to his own; Rav Kook’s “I see
with my own eyes the light of the life of Elijah rising” echoes his own confidence
that the seeds of the future redemption are contained in the present. However,
Rav Kook’s messianism carries within it a strong sense of “the irony of history,”
which functions in a way similar to Hegel’s “cunning of reason.”^159 Individual
intentions are detached from their consequences, and they can contribute, unbe-
knownst to themselves, to a larger process. It is unclear whether Buber intention-
ally played down this feature of Rav Kook’s thought. Buber’s own position seems
much closer to that of the Gurer Rebbe, who said of Rav Kook that “his love of
Zion is so excessive that he deems pure what is impure and treats it favorably [BT
Eruvin 136,]... and this is the source of the strange things he says in his writ-