Ghila Amati (University of Oxford), one of the visiting fellows at the center during the academic year 2021-2022, share with us a glimpse of her research:

Rabbi Avraham Itzhak HaCohen Kook is a Jewish theologian and he is widely recognized as the most significant representative of religious Zionism, an ideology that combines Zionism with modern Orthodox Judaism. On the other hand, the ‘philosophy of life’ (Lebensphilosophie) is a current of thought whose main interest is the concept of life. The main exponents of the Lebensphilosophie movement are Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Simmel, though the Frenchman Henri Bergson is also considered one of the movement’s central figures. Life-philosophers were interested in the connection between human beings and nature and the stream of life; they considered life as a whole and argued that life could only be understood in its deep sense from an interior perspective. Their philosophy was characterized by anti-intellectual irrationalism that foregrounded the power of intuition.

In my research I show how it is possible to understand the philosophy of Kook within the framework of the Lebensphilosophie movement. Kook’s theological production developed at a time in which the Lebensphilosophie flourished. Echoing the practice of contemporary life-philosophers, at the center of Rav Kook’s works, we find concepts such as will, life, freedom, creativity, nature’s vitality, irrationality, intuition, and history's constant ascent. In my dissertation, I show how Rav Kook’s views on these themes are related to Bergson, Nietzsche and Simmel's concepts of the self, self-affirmation, creativity, truth, mysticism, and music.