"There is a saint who is good to all, so that even when judgment is aroused against the Gentiles his heart is pained within him. Sometimes he acts against his inner inclination out of love for Israel, so beleaguered by the oppression of the nations. Yet he must afterwards cleanse himself of the impure forces attached to the traits of anger and wrath. He then returns to his place, to elevate the horn of Israel in a form that is full of loving kindness and overflows with streams of loving kindness for the entire world, and liberates the entire world from judgment. “You [Abraham] loved to justify My creatures and hated to condemn them.”
[מאורות הראי"ה ירח האיתנים עמ' 55]
The subject is opposition to evil. R. Kook is not here talking about righteous indignation concerning policy issues where the religious community has a stake or about the perennial conflicts about fundamental political and moral principles. Naturally he sees the urgency in vigorous opposition to hard-core oppressors of Israel. The surprise is R. Kook’s statement that opposition even to Czarist minions or to the burgeoning anti-Semitic agitators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries goes against his inner inclination. And then R. Kook avers that the saintly person must cleanse himself of the stigma of anger inseparable from his opposition. One can only imagine his judgment about the divisions between garden variety Reaganites and Clintonites, or run of the mill liberals and libertarians. Does one need to react that passionate opposition to such wickedness is no vice? That, to the contrary, the absence of strong resentment in the face of evil is an abdication of moral and religious responsibility?
R. Kook fully endorses the struggle against evil, and yet, with the idealism that is perhaps a practical defect and surely is his spiritual glory, he aspires to be purified of the spiritual aftertaste of the righteous indignation in the name of an undifferentiated all-encompassing impartial love. Such desire as R. Kook expresses is a rare spiritual phenomenon. When adopted as a sentimental ideal by anyone but the spiritual elite for whom R. Kook speaks, it is a dangerous, pernicious ideal, because it dissolves hatred of evil in a warm bath of self-indulgent ersatz sanctity and quickly degenerates into tolerance of evil and indifference to evil. No wonder these lines were not published in R. Kook’s lifetime.
Nonetheless, the awareness that angry resentment, even when justified and morally necessary, is a spiritual diminution, strikes a deep chord within us. When people object to religious figures advocating a political position, perhaps it is not only out of annoyance at the intrusion of God into their secular, God-free lives, or the perception that the clergyman is not fully up to the task, or even the conviction that one’s own sensitivity and comprehension make such involvement unnecessary and meddlesome. Perhaps it is because the layman or laywoman, who is quite removed from the intense world of R. Kook’s notebook, is not totally unmoved by his aspiration. Perhaps such individuals yearn for the presence of a spiritual personality who transcends human partisanship, who embodies all-embracing love, and they project that yearning onto the local clergyman. Perhaps this impulse to imagine the man of God who is beyond human partisanship is even stronger for individuals whose own daily comportment lacks consuming spiritual vision or religious rigor, for whom the thought of spiritual completeness is transferred vicariously onto the improbable figure officiating in their local pulpit.
One is tempted to dismiss such thinking as the reflex of the attenuated, secularized Christianity in which we live, with its failure to come to grips with evil, its compulsive separation of religious ritual from real life, the mild, effete image of its clergy, its avoidance of God as a commanding and demanding presence. Yet we can hardly say this about R. Kook. Is it not possible that the drama in R. Kook’s study leaves some faint imprint on the dreams of the many? One significant reason that people want their house of worship non-political, as we noted, is their reluctance to confront religiously informed insights that challenge their own favored positions. Robust infusions of religious thinking, they fear, will disturb them. We now consider an additional reason: the partisan rabbi offends their idea of what a clergyman ought to represent. Offense is especially liable when candidates and particular policies, rather than general philosophical orientations, are endorsed or condemned because it is the advocacy of a “political platform,” with its characteristic pointed vehemence and triumphant jubilation that is experienced as partisanship, as taking sides, thus violating their wish to see the rabbi as above such things.
[Diveri Shalom 179-181]
Few of us are worthy of, or aspire to, the enormous, lofty servitude that R. Kook willingly bore. Few can fully comprehend the inner world of unconstrained love for humanity that enabled R. Kook to meditate on this universal love, and to feel “defilement” due to his righteous anger at the promulgators of unmitigated evil. In our time, one of increased polarization between the upholders of traditional religion and its ethical values and those who are indifferent or hostile, although we recognize our inadequacy in the light of R. Kook’s standard, there are many reasons to call attention to our commitments, even when the comfort-seeking audience in the concert hall of Jewish ritual finds the noise disturbing and distasteful. Yet the very same estrangement makes it ever more important, for us and for those we address, that we speak in a way that is not attention grabbing in a vulgar way and that enhances, rather than diminishes, the respect we bring to the human condition and the human being.
