Religious Zionism has lost sight of Rav Kook’s ethics - opinion

Last year I attended a Religious Zionism conference in Tel Aviv. Nearly every speaker quoted Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook. Referencing that Kook established their Religious Zionist bona fides.

That is not as it should be, since today’s Religious Zionism is, in practice, more that of Kook’s son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, than that of his father.

The Jewish return was not political and religious, but cosmic Kook even claimed: “Our state, the State of Israel, is the foundation of God’s throne in the world” (Notebook 1:186).

Yet there was another fundamental theme in Kook’s thought, one intrinsic to his understanding of Zionism: the need for the Jewish people to strive toward ethical ideals. For him, “our state” must embody both righteousness and justice (tzedakah u’mishpat), which Kook frequently referenced.

Kook insisted that there could be no “fear of heaven” that violated ethical integrity, even though he recognized that sometimes religious people act immorally: “It is forbidden for religious behavior to compromise a person’s natural moral sensibility. If it does, then the fear of heaven is no longer pure. That fear of heaven is invalid” (Orot Hakodesh 3:11).

His vision follows the Torah’s commandments, which tell us what justice looks like: “You shall decide justly between one person and his fellow, between his brother and the outsider. You shall not be partial in judgment; hear the small person and great person the same” (Deut. 1:16-17). Justice is fairness, the absence of discriminatory inequalities before the law.

In summary, Kook’s Religious Zionism integrated the Land of Israel, the Jewish people, holiness, the state, and ethical striving into one indissoluble whole. Any fulfillment of the Torah and the divine commandment of settling the land must include all these values.

Tzvi Yehudah imbibed his father’s messianic passion and Zionism rooted in the metaphysical bond between God, the Jewish people, and the Land of Israel. When the Six Day War opened up the territories of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) to the Jewish people, Tzvi Yehudah was convinced that his father’s mystical Zionist dreams were coming true.

Messianic fulfillment was determined and at hand. God was beckoning us to “hasten the end”, and full redemption required only that the Jewish people settle all the land.

Tzvi Yehudah’s ethics were not the universal interpersonal morality of his father. They were metaphysical: the unfolding of divine will in history, specifically Israel’s return to its God-given homeland. Settling all the land became a categorical, non‑negotiable demand.

In other words, an ultimate value. Injustice was not favoritism and partiality as proscribed in the Torah, but surrendering any part of the land.

Rather than an ethical value to be pursued between people, Tzvi Yehudah’s justice was the cosmic process of moving toward redemption. Another “redemption is none other than sovereignty, the government of the people in the full extent of its land,” he proclaimed.

Kook, the father, wrote frequently about loving all creatures and envisioned a universal ethical future for all humanity, but Kook the son concentrated on God’s particularist love of Israel and the Jewish love for God, Torah, and the land.

Today, settling the land has assumed ultimate value for Religious Zionism, and moral ideals are troublesome afterthoughts – with tragic results. Freed from interpersonal ethical constraints, Religious Zionism today too often is characterized by violence and injustice.

They have even clashed with Israeli soldiers and destroyed army property. All of these zealots wear kippot and act out of Zionist motives to settle the land. While this violent phenomenon increases, Religious Zionist politicians, leaders, and rabbis often wink in approval.

Surely, the perpetrators are radicals who do not represent the majority of Religious Zionism. Every group has extremists, but a group’s moral health should be measured by how its majority and leaders respond to extremism.

It is telling that in the last national election, 49% of the residents in the moderate settlement of Efrat voted for the parties led by the extremists Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Religious Zionist rabbis have responded to this violence mostly with silence. Rav Yaakov Medan of Yeshivat Har Ezion is the exception proving this. In a July, 6, 2025 article in Arutz Sheva, he unequivocally condemned the settler violence against innocent Palestinians, but admitted that condemnation by the settler leadership was merely “a faint voice.”

Compared to the condemnation of attacking the IDF and desecrating Shabbat, “the voice of condemnation over what was done to ordinary Arabs is much weaker ... virtually absent, faded and forgotten.”

This demonstrates today’s Religious Zionism’s priorities. Should a rumor arise of withdrawal from one kilometer from Judea or Samaria, hundreds of Religious Zionist leaders would protest publicly and aggressively – yet when murder is committed, they are silent.

So seduced by the value of settling the land, they overlook murder. These leaders appear to be little more than real estate promoters and servile water carriers for extremist right-wing political leaders.

We need not enter into the debate about the ethics of capital punishment to see that the law contradicts justice in a fundamental way: It calls for the death penalty for Palestinians who murder Israelis, but rules out executing rampaging Jews who murder innocent Palestinians and Bedouins.

This law explicitly contradicts the philosophical, legal, and Torah requirements of justice: “You shall decide justly between one person and his fellow …You shall not be partial in judgment” (Deuteronomy 16:19). True justice is “blind,” not favoring some persons over others. This law is blatantly discriminatory.

There are other profound religious problems with this legislation. Rabbinic tradition established the policy of non-execution, remarkably similar to the previous Israeli policy shunning executions. The Talmud decried putting anyone to death, calling a Sanhedrin that carried out an execution only one time in seven (or perhaps 70) years “a bloody court” (Mishna Makkot 1:10). And Rabbi Akiva ruled out implementing the death penalty in principle.

Since the Israel Medical Association prohibits doctors from administering lethal injections as a form of punishment, the law calls for execution by hanging. Jewish tradition regards hanging as repugnant on legal and moral grounds. According to Jewish law, death by hanging was never the method of punishing criminals.

Yet another example: The government recently passed a law banning the arrest of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft dodgers. This law dictates that non-haredi draft dodgers are subject to arrest, but haredim will go unpunished. This also explicitly contradicts justice’s requirement of impartiality.

While unhappy with this law, all Religious Zionist parties and factions voted for it to preserve their standing in the coalition. Again, there was little protest against this injustice from Religious Zionist leaders. (Of course, we know that Jewish corruption is at least as old as our prophet Isaiah: “Your rulers are rogues, and cronies of thieves, every one loving bribes and greedy for gifts” (Isaiah 1:23).

There is a tragic, frightening paradox about Religious Zionists abandoning justice and morality. The Torah and the elder Kook are clear that unethical Religious Zionism undermines the purpose of the Jewish return and endangers our existence on the Land of Israel.

Kook insisted that returning to the Land of Israel would bring ethical and spiritual blessing to the Jewish people and to humanity. Yet Religious Zionism’s abandonment of ethics has brought the world’s curse and condemnation on our entire Zionist project.

Religious Zionists claim to sanctify the land, but by spilling innocent blood they pollute it: “You shall not pollute the land in which you live; for blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it.” (Numbers 35:33-34) and “You shall not pollute the land in which you live; for blood pollutes the land” (Numbers 35:33).

The execution law claims to increase Jewish security, yet hanging defiles it: “An impaled body is a curse to God: You shall not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess” (Deuteronomy 21:23).

These recent unjust laws should strike terror in the hearts of religious Jews. The Torah insists that violating justice forfeits the Jewish right to stay on the land. Our covenant is eternal, but our rights of residence are not: “Justice, justice you shall pursue so that you may thrive and live on the land that the lord your God is giving you” (Deuteronomy 16:20).

A Zionism that makes territory its apotheosis instead of a means, that violates the sanctity of human life, and that promotes injustice is a Zionism that has sold the land’s holiness for 3 hectares of real estate and ruthlessly bartered the sanctity of Zionism for political power. This was neither the vision of the God of Israel, the Torah, nor Avraham Kook.

Before Tisha B’Av, commemorating the destruction of both Jewish commonwealths, we read Isaiah’s vision. The prophet laments the sins and crooked ideas of his religious peers. Yet amidst this catastrophic vision, Isaiah knows that his God of Israel always offers the Jewish people the possibility of redemption.

And Isaiah tells us how we achieve redemption: Not by acquiring land, nor by unrestrained violence, but by recovering the authentic moral Zionism of the Torah: “Zion will be redeemed with justice and its penitents through righteousness” (Isaiah 1:27).

Isaiah’s was also the vision of Kook, and countless other Religious Zionist leaders including Rabbis Yitzhak Yaakov Reines, Avigdor Amiel, Isaac Herzog, J.B. Soloveitchik, Shlomo Goren, Yehudah Amital, Aharon Lichtenstein, Yaakov Medan, and Yuval Cherlow.

All of them taught that God’s covenant and gift of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people is based on what God demanded of Avraham, the first “Religious Zionist”: Jews must “do tzedakah u’mishpat, righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19).