A Complete Torah

Continuing what we wrote yesterday, this time let us begin at the beginning – from the aspiration that gave birth to this whole movement. Rav Kook seeks a Torah connected to practical life and to life itself, not as a new invention, but as an aspiration to return to the source. To the Torah as it was studied and was part of life before the exile. A Torah that touches commerce, a person's business, the way he builds a home, raises a child, reports for service, contributes to security. A Torah that meets a person even when there is no overt holiness, in all his being and in all his life. So it was in the era of the Tannaim, in the era of the Amoraim, in the time when Jewish life was concentrated in one land and one heart. The Torah was not studied merely for the sake of study alone, but in order to clarify how to live rightly. As reality begins to return and be rebuilt in the holy land, the Torah too can return and act – not as an observation from the outside, but as a part of the very course of life.

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