rejection 505
Hebrew, but suspicion of Zionism was normal among the haredim of the
late nineteenth century because of the fear that secular nationalism based
on territory and state would supplant adherence to the Torah. In due
course, however, demographic movements in the early twentieth century,
with the inclusion of haredim in the migration of Jews to Palestine from
eastern Europe, and the development of religious expressions of Zionism,
encouraged a more complex response, and fierce arguments. We have
seen (in Chapter 18) how the establishment in Kattowitz of Agudat Israel
in 1912 sought to bring together all those determined to preserve tradi-
tional Judaism against the assaults of modernity ‘to solve in the spirit of
Torah and the commandments the various everyday issues which will
arise in the life of the people of Israel’, but coexistence within this new
organization served only to highlight the differences between the partici-
pants, not least in regard to the growing Jewish community in Palestine.
In the forefront of the development of a theology of haredi religious
Zionism compatible with the practical affairs of Palestinian Jews in the
twentieth century was the remarkably independent thought of Abra-
ham Kook. Kook was elected in 1921 as the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi
of Palestine, having migrated from Latvia to Palestine in 1904 at the age
of thirty- nine to become rabbi of Jaffa. He had received a traditional
talmudic education supplemented by independent study of the Bible,
philosophy and mysticism, and he had experience as a communal rabbi
in eastern Europe, but the theology he developed was original and it
proved controversial in both religious and secular circles. Kook regarded
the return to the land of Israel as the beginning of divine redemption
and urged religious leaders to see their task as the encouragement of a
spiritual revival alongside the material revival of Jewish settlement. A
deeply mystical thinker, Kook viewed the real world as a unity in which
the divine is incarnated, so that the return of the Jews to their land is a
link in the process of universal redemption. All Jews in the land of Israel,
including the most defiantly secular, have a role to play in the divine
scheme. Kook could even claim that attacks by secular idealists on reli-
gion should be cherished for their paradoxical religious value, using the
Lurianic kabbalistic concept of the ‘breaking of the vessels’ to assert
that ‘the great idealists seek an order so noble, so fine and pure, beyond
what may be found in the world of reality, and thus they destroy
what has been fashioned in conformity to the norms of the world ...
The souls inspired by the realm of chaos are greater than the souls
whose affinity is with the established order.’^12
Such tolerance set Kook at variance with other haredim – the rebbe