The Generation After

Rav Kook saw his generation as standing at the seam. Leaving behind the exilic instincts that had guarded Jewish identity abroad from generation to generation, and beginning to build in the Land of Israel a life of freedom, of decision, of inner awareness. In this leaving, some also abandoned the path, but the Rav, in his way, saw in this a part of a process of redemption. We live in a generation in which the form of national and spiritual life is being woven. True, what was once natural and clear has become, on the one hand, less self-evident, but on the other hand, within this gap a subtle and deep movement is being woven. More and more people are drawn anew to the Sabbath, to family, to modesty, to prayer. Not out of coercion and not out of an ordered ideology, but out of a feeling of truth, an intuition of belonging, a longing for something not yet said in words. This is a new and different movement, one that we ought to understand as part of the identity taking shape here, in the state of the Jews.

*