„...came to power in 1933, two years before the Rav's death; he delive…”
„...came to power in 1933, two years before the Rav's death; he delivered a sermon at the ruin of Rabbi Yehuda HeChasid in the Old City of Jerusalem. In the sermon he speaks of an evil that the redemption arouses. In these words Rav Kook joined the vision and the pleas of many of the fathers of Zionism, who called upon the children of the exile to return to their land. For the full sermon:”
Processes happen in the world; often it is in our hands to choose whether to accept the process in a straight way or in a crooked way. Sometimes we are the ones choosing, sometimes these are broad national choices, and sometimes there is no one who can foresee and choose how the process that comes his way will unfold.
The people of Israel became established in exile at the very hour when the shofar of the Land of Israel began to be heard and the gates of the Land began to open. In very many places they refused to hear the voice of that pure shofar — *far be it from us to judge them.* But when a pure shofar is not heeded, when we do not discern the signs in the good and simple way, we are sometimes forced to receive blows and suffering in order to understand. I do not know whether the Rav foresaw the terrible Holocaust with Hitler's rise to power (which occurred still in his lifetime, two years before his death) — whether there was any person who could have foreseen such wickedness and imagined that the rise of the Nazis would lead to the aim of the Final Solution. But this whip of the Holocaust was, in the end, part of the shofar of the Land of Israel — part of what compelled the world to affirm that the Land of Israel is a home for the Jewish people, and part of what led many Jews to choose the Land of Israel. The importance of the Land, the desire to ascend to it, the yearnings existed for thousands of years, and in the fifty years before the founding of the state, things were done on the ground that were the infrastructure for the state's establishment. But this evil shofar caused the world and everyone to understand the immediate need to establish a Jewish home in the State of Israel. On Holocaust Remembrance Day 5783, let us pray that we will succeed in passing through the coming processes in a straight and positive way, and that the Holy One will not place us under trials.
The words the Rav spoke were, as noted, written in 1933. There is in these words no criticism of that generation, nor any attempt to explain the terrible Holocaust. There is in them enough to teach all of us of the need to listen constantly to history and to the present, so that our future may be better.
*In memory of the six million Jews who perished in the terrible Holocaust, and for the healing of the survivors.*
From the community archive of Mishpetei HaRav Kook — studying Rav Kook's teachings since 2011.