Souls of Chaos

Abraham Isaac Kook was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, a post in which he served from 1921 to his death, and a mystical thinker. He was born in Latvia and first settled in the Land of Israel in 1904. He spent part of World War I in London but returned to Palestine. Kook forged a religious Zionism that emphasized the role of human activity in bringing the messianic age and, unusually, argued that secular pioneers, who were conventionally the targets of Orthodox wrath, were unwittingly doing God’s work by settling the land and thus creating the necessary material substratum for the Messiah’s coming. Long after his death his thinking was a major influence on the messianic Zionist movement Gush Emunim.