Abraham Isaac Kook was born in 1865 at Griva in Latvia, a prodigy of the Lithuanian yeshiva world who carried inside its rigor an unusual freight: kabbalah, Hasidic warmth, modern Hebrew letters and philosophy, all of which he read as one unfolding truth. In 1904 he left a rabbinic post in Lithuania for Jaffa, taking spiritual charge of the new agricultural settlements of the Second Aliyah, and there met the problem that defined his life: the pioneers rebuilding the land were, in large part, defiantly secular, and the Orthodox world had largely answered Zionism with condemnation.
Kook answered otherwise. The builders did not know what they were building, he taught, but the historian of the spirit could see it: the return to the land was the beginning of redemption, athalta di-geula, and the pioneers' very rebellion carried a holy spark that would return to its source. The First World War stranded him in Switzerland and London; in 1919 he returned as Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and in 1921 became the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine, using the office to build bridges, often under fierce attack from the anti-Zionist Orthodox of the old settlement, between religious and secular, new settlement and old. In 1924 he founded Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem, the yeshiva where his synthesis was taught as a curriculum, and he died in 1935, mourned across every camp he had argued with.