Renewing the Old, Sanctifying
the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook (The Littman Library of Jewish
Civilization, 2025), by Marc B. Shapiro
Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim
Klein
Professor Marc B. Shapiro’s Renewing
the Old, Sanctifying the New: The Unique Vision of Rav Kook is not the
intellectual biography that some readers may expect. Those who approach it
hoping for a companion to Yehudah Mirsky’s Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of
Revolution will instead find a different kind of study: an episodic,
source-driven examination of recently published manuscript material, largely
from the Shemonah Kevatzim and related notebooks, in which Rav Kook’s
more radical, unpolished, and at times somewhat unsettling reflections are
brought to light. Shapiro’s aim is both archival and constructive — to recover
what has been omitted from the standard, sanitized Rav Kook corpus and to argue
that these private notebooks expand, rather than distort, our understanding of
one of modern Orthodoxy’s most complex thinkers.
Shapiro organizes the book into
nine substantive chapters, each of which treats a distinct conceptual terrain.
He devotes sustained attention to Rav Kook’s understanding of halakhah,
especially the claim that the commandments are not uniformly beneficial for
every individual and that excessive absorption in halakhic detail can
diminish spiritual stature. This is connected to what Shapiro calls the
“valorization of the masses”: Rav Kook’s conviction that the simple, unlearned
Jew often preserves a purer natural morality (mussar tiv‘i) than the
learned scholar, whose instincts may be distorted by legal and intellectual
abstraction. Shapiro traces the halakhic implications of this view: a
future Sanhedrin, in Kook’s vision, could rederive derashot, alter
positive commandments, and even authorize women to testify in rabbinic courts —
not as a modernizing capitulation, but as a legitimate theological mechanism
for encoding moral progress into Torah Law.
A second cluster of themes
concerns knowledge, science, and Biblical interpretation. Shapiro presents Rav
Kook as holding that the Torah’s purpose is theological and moral rather than
scientific or historical. Accordingly, the Six Days of Creation need not be
read as literal twenty-four-hour periods, early Genesis narratives may be
allegorical, and the story of Cain and Abel may be a moral paradigm rather than
a historical report. In these sections, Rav Kook emerges as a thinker who
regarded broad engagement with philosophy and the sciences as a religious
necessity, warning that a narrow curriculum produces stringency born of
ignorance and even diminishes the Divine image in those who refuse to study
what their mental capacities allow.
Dr. Shapiro also foregrounds the
redefinition of heresy. Rav Kook distinguishes between intellectual doubt and
deliberate rejection, creating space for the “unintentional heretic” whose loss
of belief is the product of inadequate formulations rather than malice (pace
Rav Chaim Brisker). This pastoral leniency is complemented by a strikingly
positive theology of other religions: Shapiro marshals passages in which Rav
Kook entertains the possibility that Christianity and Islam contain genuine
divine significance (taking Maimonides' famous comments about this to the nth
level), that their founders may have been divinely assisted, and that righteous
non-Jews need not abandon their inherited monotheistic traditions. Finally, the
book’s closing chapter examines the eschatological status of animal sacrifice.
Here, Rav Kook’s writings are internally tense: he can defend sacrifices as
pedagogically appropriate (like Maimonides does in his Guide for the
Perplexed), yet also envisions a Messianic future in which animal offerings
are abolished and only vegetable offerings remain.
Marc B. Shapiro’s scholarly
virtues are evident throughout. He treats the newly-available notebooks with
philological care, situates individual passages within broader Kookian debates,
and draws on earlier scholarship without simply repeating it. His comparative
approach —sometimes bringing voices that agree, sometimes voices that disagree,
sometimes setting Rav Kook against himself — is useful because it resists the
reduction of these notebooks to a single coherent doctrine. Shapiro's study is
a valuable resource for advanced students of modern Jewish thought and for
anyone concerned with the relationship between halakhah, morality, and
modernity.
Yet, the book also invites a more
cautious response. Its architecture is closer to a collection of annotated
excerpts and thematic reactions than to a systematic exposition, and readers
seeking a unified intellectual portrait of Rav Kook may find the result
episodic. More substantively, the very materials on which Shapiro relies raise
a hermeneutical problem that the book acknowledges but does not fully resolve.
Private notebooks are not finished works; they contain tentative formulations,
contradictions, and experimental lines of thought. Some of the passages that
Shapiro presents (such as the suggestion that mitzvot may be damaging to
certain righteous individuals, or that the founders of Christianity and Islam
may have been divinely inspired) read less like settled theological positions
than like unguarded jottings or musings. One can appreciate Shapiro’s archival
honesty while wondering whether their publication serves Rav Kook’s
intellectual legacy or, as some traditional readers will conclude, detracts from
it.
From a more Ultra-Orthodox
perspective, these texts provide grist for the long-standing suspicion that Rav
Kook was — God forbid — some sort of deviant or even antinomian figure. Within
some Religious Zionist circles, the opposite danger arises: a kind of Dati
Leumi daas Torah that accepts any statement simply because it bears Rav
Kook’s name. Shapiro is aware of both dangers, but his own interpretive default
is often to maximize the radicalism of a passage, rather than to quarantine it
as an undeveloped thought.
At times, the book reads as a
charitable attempt to make sense of material that may not have been intended
for such close analysis. One might even raise the possibility, however
diplomatically, that the sheer volume of Rav Kook’s writing — much of it unpublished
and unedited — means that not every line can bear the weight of theological
scrutiny. In other words, the possibility that Rav Kook’s nearly graphomaniacal
output included thoughts that were never meant to be doctrinal is not seriously
entertained. In fact, Shapiro’s project implicitly rejects that possibility,
treating the notebooks as "revelatory" of Rav Kook’s true thought,
but the evidence does not always force that conclusion.
All this makes Renewing the
Old, Sanctifying the New a fascinating curiosity, rather than a definitive
interpretation. It is not the place to begin for a balanced introduction to Rav
Kook, nor does it settle the question of which Rav Kook — mystic theologian or
restless experimenter —should command authority. But it will certainly pique
the interest of anyone interested in Rav Kook’s thought. Ultimately, as Shapiro
wrote in his conclusion, we can just take from Rav Kook's writings whatever
resonates with us and reject what clashes with our sensibilities. Shapiro has
performed an important scholarly service by bringing difficult, inaccessible,
and often deliberately suppressed texts into the light, and he has done so with
erudition, candor, and a willingness to let Rav Kook be as uncomfortable as he
actually was. For that reason, despite its unresolved problems, the book
deserves a place alongside the best recent work on modern Jewish thought.
