Q&A: Rabbi Kook
Rabbi Kook
Question
I wanted to ask the Rabbi for his assessment of Rabbi Kook. Does the Rabbi regard him as a rational person, or does the Rabbi perhaps see him as someone with a highly developed imagination? And how does the Rabbi relate to the interesting correspondence between him and Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Charlap, about the vision Rabbi Charlap had at the Western Wall?
Answer
I think he was relatively rational and clear-eyed, though some of his assumptions don’t seem plausible to me. There are quite a few gems in his writings (but anyone who writes such huge quantities of different, mostly unrelated passages will almost inevitably come up with gems), but it’s doubtful that there is a method there (yes, I know his students say there is. I’m not convinced). I’m not familiar with that correspondence.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t know. Maybe he really did have such a revelation??! Or maybe they were hallucinations.
The correspondence appears in Rabbi Charlap’s letters to Rabbi Kook. Rabbi Charlap mentions there several times some revelation he had at the Western Wall (he gives a date), and he writes that in the letter he is only hinting at it, and the rest he will say face to face. In connection with this revelation he writes several times that Rabbi Kook is from the root of Hezekiah, king of Judah (if I’m not mistaken; I don’t have the letter in front of me right now), and that it was revealed to him that Rabbi Kook needs to bind his thought to his student, Rabbi Charlap, in order to elevate him.
How does one relate to things like that? The difficulty is that I see both of these figures as genuine people, true to themselves (a look at "In His Chambers"—Rabbi Kook’s private writings in his diary—shows how utterly genuine and uncompromising he was).