PARSHAT RE’EH: RAV KOOK ON ‘HOW TO BE HAPPY’
The choice is ours:
“Behold- I am placing before you a ברכה-blessing and a קללה-curse. The blessing will come if you obey the directives of YHVH, your Elohim, which I am prescribing to you today. The curse will come, if you do not obey the commandments of YHVH your Elohim.” (Deut. 11:26,27)
Moshe Rabbeinu is explaining to Israel -shortly before he died and we entered the Land of Israel-that our future experience will depend on our actions. Actualizing the ‘mitzvot-Divine directives’ will bring blessing into our life. Ignoring and violating them will bring the opposite.
A few years after Rav Kook’s 1904 arrival to lead and guide the complete rebirth of the people of Israel in the Land of Israel, he wrote:
“A happy life—whether that of an individual or the community—comes into being to the extent that this life actually implements the practical steps that the most exalted ideals require of it.”
The Torah of course describes the exalted ideals and delineates the practical steps we need to implement in order to manifest the ideal life and world.
Rav Kook continued:
“Every practical ascent in the precise details of a person’s or a community’s activities, that is in line with the most exalted and expansive thought—thought that transcends all of the spheres of human constriction—leads to the crystallization of these exalted ideals and to our turning to their development and elevation.
Every such elevation elicits hidden blessings in the depths of life. It generates a great spiritual force, and it fortifies the power and victory of these ideals in the inner world of the individual and in the external world of the community.
…The ideal radiance will finally break out of imprisonment…and protest with all its might against the trampling of the ideal. It is demanding recompense for the spiritual insult that it experienced as the world grew impoverished and negligent.
This robust idealistic power will repair the breaches, will raise those who stumbled and will encourage the weak, until the ideal ‘Shechinah-Divine Presence’ returns to dwell with honor in the souls of human beings who are capable of absorbing into themselves the treasury of true life in all of its power and richness.
The more our awareness of the ideal rises, the more its branches proliferate… We find expansion of the branches of the ideal in the supernal heights, in the Divine ideal that exists at the heart of the configuration of existence.
Life in its purity, in its height, in its spirituality, in its ethics and its enlightenment, stands at the summit of the ideal….It’s branches are many and they propagate copiously..
Thus the needs of this worldly life are many and varied. All of their configurations are extensive, and they occupy an extensive place in existence, so that not even the most obscure need is lacking….We can thus fully actualize the exalted ideals of life.
The Torah of Israel is outstanding in crystallizing the idealism that will spread across all of the configurations of life.”
(Notebook 1:156-7)
The Community of Israel has come into history in order to be the agents of the world’s repair as humankind realigns with the Divine principles of goodness and morality. And we will then be very happy. It is completely in our hands.
May the illuminated Torah teachings of Rav Kook inspire us to ‘to manifest the idealism that will spread to all the configurations of life’.
BeMhera BeYamneu-Quickly in our days.
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Prepared by Rabbi Itzchak Evan-Shayish (Marmorstein):
