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Rav Kuk's Path to Peace Within Israel:
“Ascend to the Roots. . . .”
- Abstract
“Son of man,” wrote Abraham Isaac Kuk in one of his rhapsodic bursts of prose, “let not names, words, phrases, and letters swallow your soul. They are in your power, and you are not in theirs. Lift upwards, rise! Fierce power is yours. You have wings of spirit, the wings of mighty eagles. . . .” But Rabbi Kuk was Chief Rabbi of Palestine from 1921 to his death in 1935, and so spent much of his life preoccupied with words, phrases, and letters, and more than that with the smallest minutiae of ritual law.
There were other paradoxes. Rabbi Kuk was raised in the ascetic world of the great Yeshivas of Russia and Lithuania. But continually he preached to his own students: “We will not increase the spirituality of our generation except through the enlargement of its fleshly qualities.”
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