Zvi Yehuda Kook (, 23 April 1891 – 9 March 1982) was an ultranationalist Orthodox rabbi. He was the son of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine. Both father and son are credited with developing Kookian Zionism, which became the dominant form of Religious Zionism. He was Rosh Yeshiva (dean) of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva.
Kook's fundamentalist teachings were a significant factor in the formation and activities of the modern religious settlement movement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, largely through his influence on the Gush Emunim movement, which was founded by his students. Many of his ideological followers established such settlements, and he has been credited with the dissemination of his father's ideas, helping to form the basis of Religious Zionism.
Kook presided for nearly six decades over the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva () founded by his father in Jerusalem, which became "the flagship yeshiva of religious Zionism", where hundreds of future militants, opposed to territorial compromises and promoting Israeli settlement of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, received their formative education.
Biography
Zvi Yehuda Kook was born on the eve of Passover in 1891 in Zaumel in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Žeimelis in Northern Lithuania), where his father served as rabbi and was a prominent local Zionist. His mother was his father's second wife, Reiza Rivka, the niece of Eliyahu David Rabinowitz-Teomim, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem together with Shmuel Salant. Kook was named after his maternal grandfather, Zvi Yehuda Rabinowitz-Teomim.
In 1896, his father, with his entire family, moved to Boisk, Latvia, where he ran a yeshiva and served as a parish rabbi. There Kook studied Talmud under the guidance of Rabbi Reuven Gotfreud, the son-in-law of Yoel Moshe Salomon, one of the founders of Petah Tikva. Later, from 1899 onward, Kook was also tutored by Benjamin Menashe Levin, a guest of their family. His father, until his dying day, was to remain Kook's principal teacher, though at this time he hired a private tutor to teach his son Russian.
In 1904, at age 13, Kook moved to Jaffa, when his father was appointed Chief Rabbi of the city, then part of Ottoman-controlled Palestine. Like his father, he would celebrate each year the date of his aliyah (emigration to the Land of Israel) on the 28th day of Iyyar.
In 1906, Kook, by then 15, went to study at Torat Haim under its rosh yeshiva, Zerah Epstein. Some years later he returned to his father's home in Jaffa, where he continued his studies. It was around this time that he developed a close relationship with Yaakov Moshe Harlap, with whom he studied Kabbalah. Harlap formed part of his father's close circle. In 1908, he began to edit his father's writings, a task he continued down to his death, as he considered himself the only person capable of authoritatively interpreting them. It has been claimed he contributed to the preface on halakha (Jewish law) regarding the heter mechirah (sale permit) for the Sabbatical year attached to his father's work Shabbat Haaretz, which was published in 1910.
Feeling that he had not devoted enough time to Torah study he first went to Porat Yoseph, the leading Sephardic yeshiva of Jerusalem. Then, on Binyamin Levin's suggestion, he left for Halberstadt, Germany to teach at the local yeshiva and study philosophy. In addition to his own studies, Kook taught Talmud, halakha, and Bible to young men in the area.
With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Kook was arrested as a citizen of the Russian Empire, an enemy of Germany. After several weeks in a detention camp in Hamburg, he was released and allowed to return to Halberstadt, where he needed to report once every two days in the local office. Only the following year, at the end of 1915, was he granted permission to leave Germany and join his father, who was stranded in St. Gallen, Switzerland, due to the war. There he continued to study under his father's guidance, until the latter left to fill a rabbinic position in London in 1916.
In 1920, he returned to Palestine (then under the British Mandate) and began teaching at Netzakh Israel school. A year later, he went to Europe to promote his father's new movement, Degel Yerushalayim () a spiritual complement of secular Zionism.
In 1922, he married Chava Leah Hutner in Warsaw. Chava Leah died childless in February 1944, and Kook refused to remarry, remaining a widower until his death nearly 40 years later. From 1923, he served as the administrative director of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva. After Harlap died in 1952, he became Rosh Yeshiva until his own death. The yeshiva assumed its present stature only much later.
Kook père had died in 1935, at a time when religious thinkers had a negligible impact on the Yishuv and his ideas had failed to attract much attention among both religious and Zionist Jews. The yeshiva's fortunes waned, and it struggled to survive down to the 1960s, when it managed to attract a spare 20 students. In the mid-sixties, its standing rapidly improved as a result of frustrations encountered among elite graduates of Bnei Akiva when their attempts to exert influence in the National Religious Party were met with a rebuff. Thereafter, this group, which constituted a secretive fraternity called Gahelet (including such rabbinical figures as Eliezer Waldman, Moshe Levinger and Haim Druckman) shifted their attentions towards Kook and his yeshiva. After the Six-Day War in 1967, of which he has been called 'the ultimate theologian,' he induced the Israeli government to approve the building of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and sent his students to that mission. He subscribed to his father's view that the Chief Rabbinate in Palestine was the precursor of the future Sanhedrin.
Kook wrote little in his final years. His remarks were elliptical in their allusive references to rabbinical traditions many of his followers were unfamiliar with, and his authority rested more on his charismatic figure – charisma was something his father stressed – than his writings. He died in Jerusalem on 9 March 1982, which coincided with Purim that year, and was buried in the Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery. His passing created a leadership vacuum within Gush Emunim, which subsequently moved in the direction of collective decision making.
Ideology Zionism began as a secular movement often led by disbelievers many of whom rejected Jewish religious traditions, one of which held that any collective "return" of the Jewish people, as opposed to individual aliyah, depended on the direct intervention of the Messiah. The Kooks' innovation consisting in elaborating a theology that bridged the gap between a faith that saw Zionism as a heresy, and the Zionist programme for the development of a secular state for Jews. As Kook's father phrased it, a Jewish polity must "build secularly and sanctify afterwards."
The process of redemption
Zvi Kook, together with Harlap, was heir to a tradition of messianic demonizing thought going back at least to Judah Alkalai, in which the redemption of Jews in Israel was a premise for, and precursor to, the general uplifting of mankind. Whereas his father viewed Zionists as unwitting agents in the divine plan for redemption, – only a "slim membrane" was all that separated antinomian messianism, of the type disastrously exemplified by Shabbatai Zevi, from authentic messianic redemption,- Zvi Kook went one step further. Believing that the secular state already embodied in nuce the hidden spark of the sacred, he argued that the messianic age of redemption had already arrived This task was to be furthered in the present age by extending Jewish rule over the land occupied by Israel in 1967, also by means of settlements. This redemptive process across generations would, he argued, involve three stages, the first of which had already been achieved: (a) the establishment of the State of Israel, a contemporary expression of the Davidic Kingdom; (b)the restoration of complete Jewish sovereignty against Amalek; and, once these two preconditions were satisfied (c) the Third Temple would be established on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Within Gush Emunim, now defunct, his words were often reported and taken to be akin to prophecies. In Kook's vision, Jews were unique, the yardstick for mankind, with Judaism forming the core of humanity and reality itself, and Israel analogized to the soul while the world at large was likened to the body.In this context, Zvi Kook extended the ideas of his father and his fellow student of kabbalah Harlap, who had an outlook of hostility to Gentiles and asserted that the failure of the peoples of the world to surrender to Israel would cause their downfall. Kook took this Jewish nationalism as in fact cosmopolitan, in the sense that the redemption of the world was contingent on Israel, an idea that proved influential with the early Hapoel HaMizrachi thinkers.
Kook saw in the establishment of the modern State of Israel a major step in the redemption of the Jewish people (Atḥalta de-geulah). Many Torah scholars envision redemption as a future era that arrives complete from the very start, and not an ongoing process. Kook claimed that the process was evidenced in the development of Israeli agriculture where every tomato and banana was invested with "sanctity". He based this idea on (): But you, O mountains of Israel, will produce branches and bear fruit for My people Israel, for they will soon come home, and Rashi's gloss on the way it had been interpreted as an indication of the End by Rabbi Abba at Sanhedrin 9. Rashi wrote: "When the Land of Israel gives its fruit nicely, then the End is near, and there is no more [to the] revealed End [than this]."
According to his disciple, rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, who founded the immigrant organization Amishav in 1975, Kook himself advised him to search for dispersed communities of Jews who had lost contact with their roots, prepare them for conversion (giyur) and facilitate their "return" to Israel. He believed he had discovered such lost Jews, putative remnants of the Ten Lost Tribes, in India and Nepal among Tibetan-Burmese peoples such as the Mizo and Hmar. Though initially considered a "crackpot", Avichail succeeded, after conferring on these peoples the ethnonym Bnei Menashe, in having some two thousand relocated in Israel, especially in the Israeli settlement near the Palestinian city of Hebron, namely Kiryat Arba, through financial assistance from his philanthropical sponsor Irving Moskowitz.
Hostility to Christianity Though his own father was long tempted by the antinomian strain of Jewish messianism, World War I had led him to conclude that the great source of contemporary evil lay in the antinomian dispensation of Christianity. Zvi Kook's ideology, reflecting his father's "intense loathing" or theological disdain, is characterized by a staunch hostility to Christianity, which he regarded as a "crime against Israel", the "refuse of Israel", an image recalling Talmudic traditions of Jesus, "the criminal of Israel" (poshea Israel), being boiled in excrement. Christianity was a form of idolatry, a blasphemy against the divinity of Jews. He refused to back away from the antisemitic notion that Jews bore responsibility for Jesus's crucifixion. This apparently was one of his ways of repudiating the victim mentality ascribed to Jews in diaspora.