[Avodah] RAYK and the end of chol

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 03:28pm IST, R Michael Makovi wrote (on the
thread "R' Angel & Geirus Redux"):
: Rav Kook too I think implicitly held like this. His philosophy was
: that today, we are seeing people that are bad on the outside but good
: on the inside. They have tremendous neshamot yearning to improve the
: world (look at all the Jews in left-wing causes), and the Torah had
: been made into something so small and parochial...

RAYK believes that everything is qadosh. "Chol" is an illusion -- that
something isn't qodesh. The geulah comes from the loss of barriers
and thus the qedushah inherent in all becomes visible. Lesasid lavo,
Yeshaiah's "eretz chadashah" is one where olam hazeh and olam hava
merged.

Therefore, RAYK expected the masses to somehow show that progression to
universal qedushah. However, it could still be in a semirevealed form.
The misguided idealist who is holy in his idealism but a sinner in his
choice of ideal.

But the whole zerichas hashemesh model of geulah didn't stand up that well
to subsequent events. He wrote before WWII, after all.

And since his day, there was far from a rise in idealism. Here in the
US, the flappers gave way to the greenhorn who only wanted the American
dream and for Sammy to be a true American. Sammy's kid spent some time
in an Ashram in the late 60s and early 70s, but that was replaced by the
Me Generation, Yuppies, Gen-X... The competition to Yahadus is a vapid
culture, not what RAYK would forsee in the hayday of Communism. And over
in Israel, the Communism of the kibbutzim is over, Zionism gave way to
post-Zionism, Israel too had is Yeled vaKelev generation, etc...

RAYK thought that the world was in an accelerated path to the geulah.

:                                    ... Also, compare Torah im Derech
: Eretz to Rav Kook's view of learning chol, "sanctify the chol by
: infusing it with kodesh". Rav Kook and Rav Hirsch say the same thing
: on learning chol, but in different language.

First, TIDE is built around "Yaft E-lokim leYefet". The idea human
being is ennobled, raised above the animal -- both in Torah and in being
cultured. Far from RAYK's Zionism, I have no idea how TIDE is defined when
not living amongst a host population of Benei Yefes defining high culture.

Second, RSRH's TIDE is an entirely different paradigm. Rather than speak
of a cosmic fading away of the whole concept of chol, RSRH speaks in
terms of the ennoblement of high culture.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             In the days of our sages, man didn't sin unless
micha at aishdas.org        he was overcome with a spirit of foolishness.
http://www.aishdas.org   Today, we don't do a mitzvah unless we receive
Fax: (270) 514-1507      a spirit of purity.      - Rabbi Israel Salanter