Today, the 3rd day of Elul, marks the yahrzeit of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook. Tandem to his prolific essays and books on Jewish Faith and Belief, he wrote illuminating commentaries on the Torah, Gemara, and Halakha. In addition, his lofty and mystical spirit led him to compose many poems in which he gives expression to the yearnings of his spiritual soul which, he moans, was constantly held back from unfettered flight due to the endless mundane duties he had to fulfill as the head of the Israel Chief Rabbinate. One such poem is entitled “The Struggle.” In honor of Rabbi Kook’s yahrtzeit, we made a short cinematic adaption of the poem which premiers here on Israel National News.
The Struggle
How intense is my inner struggle.
My heart throbs with a yearning to ascend.
I crave that the delight of the Lord’s Presence
Will spread throughout my being,
Not because I yearn for its pleasures,
But because this is how it should be.
Because this is the real state of existence,
Because this is the true meaning of life.
And the yearning continually stirs within me.
I cry out from my soul with a thundering voice,
Give me the light of God,
The delight of the Living God,
The exaltation of visiting
The palace of the everlasting King,
The god of my fathers,
To whose love I am sworn,
With my total being,
By whose awe I am uplifted,
And my soul continues to fly higher,
To rise above baseness and all pettiness,
Above boundaries
That nature, and the body,
The laws of nature, and conformity,
Envelop it, constricting it in fetters.
A river of obligations arises,
Studies and analyzations lacking end,
Complex thoughts and intellectual reasoning,
Stemming from letters and words.
Duties come and surround my soul
Which is pure, free, light as an angel
That soars in a sea of light.
But I have not yet reached the point
Of perceiving light in the world’s darkness.
Filled with anguish am I,
Yearning for deliverance and light,
For loftier exaltation,
For the dawn of knowledge and enlightenment,
And for the showering of the Dew of Life.
Yet even through the confined channels
Which nourish me with light,
Delighting me in the pleasantness of the Lord,
I shall grasp at the purity of the Divine Ideal,
The hidden splendor, the ultimate might
Which infuses every letter and dot,
Every Talmudic analysis.
And I shall play with Your commandments
Which I love,
And I shall declare Thy teachings.