In a Life That Encompasses All Being

     by Rav Avraham Yitchak Kook

 

      Fearing God and keeping God’s commandments in an incomplete life that appears only to the gross, corporeal eye can pave a path for itself with “commandments as though humanly taught,” with limited human reason.

            But in a life that encompasses all being, a life whose boundaries are as broad as the breadth of all existence, whose images are so rich and heaped in their measure that even the heights of heaven cannot contain them, there is nowhere to turn except to the law and divine commandant.

            The source of might cannot be more or less than the fear of God, living and fresh, as it proceeds to sprinkle the dew of revival upon areas of activity in [this very] life—“guard His commandments”—for a person must as an entirety be educated and guided so that he will fit into all of existence and [connect] to its Source.

            It is not possible to found an educational system [solely] on behalf of one spark of a human being, on behalf of one drop [that comes] from his sea of life. Rather, every individual must reach the heights to which he yearns, every person in his entirety with all of his worth, with his life filled with everything in the physical and everything in the spiritual, all of temporal life and all of eternal life—the entire person, he, only he, can absorb into himself a complete and acceptable solution to the riddle of the world and life, which so greatly stings and hurts.

            There is nothing useful in a doubting stubbornness that bitterly says that it will set meaningless conditions upon which to build its pillars so as to [understand] God and His world, [a stance] that stubbornly demands to find comfort, a solution, precisely in this small flash of the life of the senses, of the circumscribed flesh and spirit, in this temporary life that passes like a fleeting shadow.

            That is not the way. [It is true that] the [incomplete] part is important and worthy, the flesh is refined and beloved, and the spirit awakens and arises.

            But all of these attain their greatness, their radiance, [only] when they yearn radiantly [as they face] the center of the course of their being, which is given prominence only because it has been carved out in a divine manner, only [because it derives] from the divine source that the holy people of the world—the champions of supernal ethics, the lions of justice and truth, the kings of faith and simple-heartedness, the rulers of life and conquerors of death, who ride the heights of existence—with their intellect and feeling, with a mighty spirit that is the holy of holies, which peals before them like a bell, in the thunder of their might that transcends all boundaries of time and place free themselves and the entire world together with them from narrow obligations and constrained boundaries.

            And with that, it is precisely they who make a basis for the eden of life and its pleasantness. It is precisely they who know how to place a limit and a tempo upon everything positive and everything negative, upon every delight of the body and soul, upon all that is lovely to the eye and heart.

            It is precisely they who carve out justice—they are the princes of the world who lodge in the shadow of the Almighty.

            It is precisely they who teach man the [true] content of his life, [it is they] who rule over their [evil] inclination, who consider the universal reckoning, and whose counsel is faithful for every individual.

            Orot Hakodesh III, pp. 8-9