Freedom, creativity, the self, and God: between Rabbi Kook and Bergson’s Lebensphilosophie

Journal article

Abstract:: In this essay, I examine the intersection between the concepts of freedom, the self, God, and creativity in the works of one of the most prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook (1865–1935), exploring his use of these concepts through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I first draw a historical and thematic parallel between Bergson’s and Kook’s philosophies that to date has not been considered extensively. I then argue that five different interpretative puzzles related to the topic of freedom in Kook’s teachings can be explained against the background of Bergson’s thought. This Bergsonian interpretation enables the reader to appreciate in what way different aspects of Kook’s thought—the metaphysical, ethical, epistemological, and theological—are interconnected and can be understood as an organic whole. I thereby show that the Bergsonian philosophical and systematic models are an important, and yet unexplored, interpretative tool for the study of Kook’s theological and philosophical thought.

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Language:: English
Keywords:: freedom

creativity

authentic self

philosophy of life

Rabbi Kook

Henri Bergson

modern Orthodoxy

religious Zionism
Pubs id:: 2086327
Local pid:: pubs:2086327
Deposit date:: 2025-02-16
ARK identifier:: ark:/29072/ora_2f3e0102818d4c348ec5e330afc9a514

Copyright holder:: Ghila Amati
Rights statement:: © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use.

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