Rav Kook at 90-From Global Teacher to Political Mascot
Aug 26, 2025
By Alon Goshen-Gottstein
The International Conference Center at Binyanei Haumah, Jerusalem, was plastered with a huge image of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, whose 90th anniversary is commemorated this Wednesday.
The two-day event was pitched as a tribute to the religious Zionist movement, implying that RavKook inspired it and finds expression in it.
Despite misgivings, I decided to attend — if only to see how Rav Kook’s image is used in the circles that carry his name as a source of authority. I have long been concerned for the integrity of his memory and its degradation, and so I braced myself for what I might learn.
There was much that was moving. Walking through images and names of thousands of fallen soldiers is a profound tribute to the people — and, in this case, to the sector from which they came. One cannot walk through this installation without crying.
A second installation, focused on hostages, is similarly affecting; walking through it, one cannot help but pray. Seeing thousands gather to celebrate Torah and idealism — the only sector that combines all these elements — is indeed admirable.
But where, in all this, was Rav Kook? Like God, who was the be all and end-all for him, he was present in his absence. An event that carried his name had next to nothing to do with him, his vision, or his teachings.
The sole installation dedicated to him, a virtual reality three-minute clip, revealed the key to his absence. It claimed he was a great teacher in Europe before coming to Israel (exaggerated), that he accepted the invitation to come to Israel without hesitation (contradicted by sources), that he wrote books, supported settlement of the land, founded a yeshiva, and had a massive turnout at his funeral.
In other words, we learned nothing meaningful — nothing that justifies the great festival bearing his name. He had been reduced to a mascot: an emblem to legitimize a movement, not a living teacher.
Marc Shapiro’s recently published Renewing the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook tells the story of a rich, original, complex, and often conflicted thinker. Someone who wrestled with halakhah, morality, science, and the boundaries of heresy. Rav Kook engaged with other religions, vegetarianism, and a host of issues that remain relevant a hundred years later. He emerges as a person of vision, depth, and complexity — qualities stripped from his public image.
Today, he serves merely to legitimate settlement and a particular stream of Torah study.
The real Rav Kook has been lost. A person of depth has become a mascot. He is no longer a source of teaching and guidance; he is an icon used to legitimate a movement, regardless of what he might have thought or how he might view reality today. He has been sold out for political ends.
His legacy has been co-opted by a political party that uses his image as a mascot, cutting him down to size. A mascot can be paraded without being heard — and that is precisely his fate here.
Rav Kook is one of the greatest spiritual masters in all of Jewish tradition. But when he is identified with a political movement and a narrow agenda, his message is flattened and silenced.
Those uncomfortable with the community that claims him project their alienation onto Rav Kook, as though he were the source of the present-day political movement. That a political party now holds the fate of the country in its hands — deciding matters of life and death for the Jewish people —raises the stakes. Rav Kook becomes a figure to be resisted rather than a source of inspiration and teaching.
The loss of the real Rav Kook matters for everyone.
It is significant for those who carry his name — they are no longer capable of hearing his message. They shape it and control it.
It is significant for the entire people, who lose one of the greatest spiritual sources for potential revitalization, so needed in times of crisis.
It is tragic for the ultra-Orthodox world, to which he belonged. Would Rav Kook join the political parties that now invoke him? Probably not. In his day, he was part and parcel of what is today haredi society. Today, his memory has all but been expunged from that society. He is not studied, not recognized, written out of history. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is thereby impoverished — a direct consequence of politicizing a great spiritual master and reducing his legacy to a single contemporary political message.
What would Rav Kook himself say to those who propagate this mascot-image of him? I imagine he would extend the same love he showed to secular settlers to those who carry his name in vain.
The slogan displayed at the exhibition — “The People of Israel in the Land of Israel, in light of the Torah of Israel” — is not his. It belongs to the movement, not the man. This too is a reduction, missing the heart of his teaching.
Rav Kook’s message was God-centered; ethics came before national pride, and a universal horizon always defined Israel’s history and particularity. Visiting an event dedicated to Rav Kook but learning only history, never God, signals that the core has been lost.
I believe the present state of Israel and of the movement that carries his name would be sources of great suffering and conflict for him. He would seek to recognize and elevate the light, while recognizing how far we have come from the ideals he envisioned. His, then, would not be a story of success to be celebrated. It would be a story of spiritual anguish at the complexities of the realization of a messianic vision that always seeks the high spiritual and moral ground, a process that that has often lost its divine moorings.
If we engaged with him as a teacher, not a mascot, he could provide the missing pieces to Israel’s soul — torn between camps and increasingly defined by a form of nationalism that would have been painful to him.
To reclaim his message, we must practice what was core to his teaching: teshuvah: recognizing who he was in reality and returning to the divine ground that has been lost.
As he wrote at the beginning of Ma’amrei Hare’ayah: “However far a person may run from the shadow, it will pursue him; only one cure exists: the infusion of light.”
Rav Kook is the master of infusing divine light. Until he is recognized as such, his message has been missed.
