To Love and to Mend

Rav Kook clarifies here that the love born of the light of faith is not a love that denies reality or blurs over evil, but a love that sees every person in a favorable light and, out of this, seeks his true mending. There is no whitewashing of evil deeds here and no surrender of moral integrity; on the contrary, precisely because the perspective is one of faith and of light, a person is able to see an evil deed as evil, and alongside this to see the person as a person. Therefore all his concern is for the elevation and mending of creatures, and the ways of mending are not ways of force or self-interest but ways "full of morality and integrity," for pure faith does not distort the world but illuminates it and makes repentance possible.

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