February 10, 2014
Abraham Isaac Kook Receives the Call
For a visionary rabbi in London, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 signified nothing less than the advent of the messianic era.
Yehudah Mirsky will discuss his new biography of Abraham Isaac Kook, from which this article is adapted, on Sunday, February 23 at the JCC in Manhattan.
On November 2, 1917, Britain endorsed the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. The news, contained in the document thereafter known as the Balfour Declaration, hit Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook like a thunderbolt.
A committed if decidedly unconventional Zionist, Rav Kook was then living in London, serving as the rabbi of an immigrant Orthodox community, continuing to elaborate the complex and dazzlingly original ideas that would fill volumes of philosophical, theological, and mystical writing, and building the reputation that would in time propel him to the position of founding chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine and one of the most enduringly influential shapers of modern Zionism and Jewish thought.