Book Review // Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution

Who was Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine? Many have tried to understand this complex, charismatic scholar whose embrace of modernism existed side-by-side with strict traditionalism. How to explain his contradictory mixture of tolerance and orthodoxy, nationalism and universalism, mysticism and activism? Kook was a poet, religious jurist, philosopher and communal leader. Was he a Zionist?

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