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Tag: R. A.I. Kook

The Man who Tried to Put it All Together: A Hesped for Rav Kook on His Eightieth Yahrzeit

The Man who Tried to Put it All Together: A Hesped for Rav Kook on His Eightieth Yahrzeit

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The Man who Tried to Put it All Together:  A Hesped for Rav Kook on His Eightieth Yahrzeit  By Yehudah Mirsky  Yehudah Mirsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University, and the author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press), available here (link).   This is his first contribution to the Seforim Blog.  Jerusalem of the 1930s was boiled in fury….

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More on R. Kook’s Recently Published Writings

More on R. Kook’s Recently Published Writings

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More on R. Kook’s Recently Published Writings by Marc B. Shapiro In my post here here I mentioned that R. Kook argued that there is good reason to observe mitzvot even if one does not have a traditional view of the Torah’s authorship. On the one hand, there is nothing surprising in this. After all, would anyone tell a non-Orthodox Jew that it is OK if he eats on Yom Kippur?[1] R. Kook’s originality is therefore not seen in the bottom line, but…

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Rav Kook’s Missing Student

Rav Kook’s Missing Student

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Rav Kook’s Missing Student[1] by Bezalel Naor Recent years have seen a breakthrough regarding the elusive identity of “Monsieur Chouchani,” the mysterious vagabond who in the capacity of mentor, exerted such an incredibly profound effect upon the Nobel-laureate novelist Elie Wiesel as well as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in the post-war, post-Holocaust years in France. I am referring to the identification of Chouchani as none other than Hillel Pearlman, an early student of Rav Kook in his short-lived Jaffa Yeshivah.[2] Pivotal…

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Kalir, False Accusations, and More

Kalir, False Accusations, and More

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Kalir, False Accusations, and More by Marc B. Shapiro 1. I now want to return to Kalir and the criticism of me. To recap, I had earlier mentioned how Artscroll originally correctly identified Kalir as post-tannaitic, but later changed what it wrote in order to be in line with Tosafot’s opinion that he was a tanna. Some think that it is wrong to criticize Artscroll by using academic methodology instead of judging them by traditional sources, since they don’t recognize…

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The censorship of Rav Kook and other Hebrew books on Hebrew book databases

The censorship of Rav Kook and other Hebrew books on Hebrew book databases

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Today, censorship of Hebrew books takes place on many levels. Although previously the censorship of Hebrew books was driven in large part due to external concerns, today, most of the censorship takes place internally, by Jews for Jews. This censorship is generally driven by the false notion that Orthodox Judaism is and was monolithic. Of course, students of history know that this is entirely false; within the confines of Orthodoxy, there was diversity of opinion and practice (perhaps due to…

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The Head Movements of Shema’

The Head Movements of Shema’

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THE HEAD MOVEMENTS OF SHEMA’ by Bezalel Naor Rabbi Bezalel Naor is a multifaceted scholar, recognized as the leading interpreter of R. Kook in the English language. His newest book is The Limit of Intellectual Freedom: The Letters of Rav Kook. It can be purchased from his website, www.orot.com. The most important utterance in Judaism is the Shema’: Shema’ yisrael adonai eloheinu adonai ehad. (Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.) This declaration of the absolute…

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