From VBM - R' Hillel Rachmani
Writes HaRav Kook - "Death is an illusion, its defilement (tum'a) is its deception; what people refer to as death is actually the epitome of life. Yet through the superficial vision into which man is plunged by following his inclincation, he paints the epitome of life as a dark and dreary picture which he calls death."
If death is good, why then does the Torah fight against the defilement of death? Why is the priesthood commanded to avoid any contact with death? Rav Kook continues:
"The holy priests must shield themselves from this falsehood, so long as this lie rules the world. They must protect their eyes from this vision which engrains this mistake upon the soul, hence they shall not come into contact with the dead, they shall not defile themselves."
The Kohanim remind us of the correct perspective on death. By distancing themselves from the dead and its defilement, they protest against our mistaken view of death. Death is not bad, but rather, it is the epitome of life.
This approach is the exact opposite of that of Rav Soloveitchik z"l and his "Halakhic Man": for him, death is feared and reviled. Through learning the laws of mourning, the approach of Brisk attempted to give death objectivity, in order to free themselves from the fear of death.
The Nazir, editor of Orot Ha-Kodesh, organized Rav Kook's philosophy in this order on purpose; the initial shock of chapter 40 will enable us to appreciate the contents of chapters 41 and 42, in which we discover that the resurrection of the dead is the holy of holies, transcending the greatness of death. Death functions as a necessary transition to the ultimate level.
In chapter 41, Rav Kook writes (ibid.):
"The fear of death is a general sickness of man, a function of sin. Sin created death. Repentance is the sole cure to obliterate death from this world."
Because of sin, man views death as final. This is readily understandable - when man is engulfed in a world of materialism, death represents to him the final end. What is perplexing, however, is Rav Kook's statements about sin having created death. If death should be understood as the epitome of life, then, on the contrary, the original sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden created life!
We seem to have discovered an internal contradiction in Rav Kook's approach to death. On the one hand, chapter 40 tells us how "great" death is. Yet, on the other hand, chapter 41 relates to death as a blemish, the product of sin.
To resolve this contradiction, we must skip to a paragraph in chapter 42 (ibid.), where Rav Kook describes the level of man before and after the sin in the Garden of Eden. Before the sin, man lived on the supreme level of the unity of body and soul. The taste of the tree was like the taste of the fruit. Then, man's sin separated the body and the soul.
It is important to distinguish between three different stages: this world, the world of death, and the resurrection of the dead. Our three stages represent the levels of the secular, the holy and the holy of holies. Our view of death (the holy) depends on our point of departure. If we look down upon death from the stage of the resurrection of the dead (the holy of holies), death indeed is a retrogression. However, if we look up at death from this world (the secular), we see death as a progression. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve existed on the supreme level of the holy of holies, the level of the resurrection of the dead. When they sinned and introduced death into the world, the reality of death was a tragic retrogression. Thus we have resolved the contradiction we encountered in Rav Kook's writings.
