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by Yaacov David Shulman (Translator), Avraham Yitzchak Kook (Author)
Teshuvah means "return." It is the return to God, the return to health, the return to our soul, the return to happiness, the return to home. Lights of Teshuvah is the quintessential work of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), first Chief Rabbi of the Holy Land, who was a Talmudic genius, a communal leader, a saintly personality, an impassioned visionary, a fighter for social justice, a poet and most of all a mystic. He was also a deeply original thinker, the breadth, inclusive spirit and transcendent ecstasy of whose teachings embrace the entirety of creation. Rabbi Kook was a poet of the soul and a spokesperson for a complete human spirit that embraces contradiction, that reconciles the poles of this-worldly and other-worldly experience. His writings celebrate the union of legalism and poetry, particularism and universalism, faith hidden in atheism and atheism hidden in faith, the spirit revealed from the flesh, and beauty revealed through ugliness.
Rabbi Kook sang of universal creativity, of an unceasing fecundity that is the natural song of all being. He championed the poetic and creative spirit within each individual. "Every time our heart beats with a true expression of spirituality," he wrote, "every time a new and exalted thought is born, we hear the likeness of a Godly angel's voice at the doors of our soul asking that we allow him entry so that he may appear to us in the totality of his beauty." Ultimately, Rabbi Kook's robust message is one of life and growth, hope and optimism. "Death is a false phenomenon," he taught, and "to the degree that the quantity of movement toward wholeness grows, evil decreases and goodness is revealed."
Orot Hateshuvah was published in 1925, gleaned from Rav Kook's voluminous eight volumes of journals (Shemonah Kevatzim, 1904-1919) by his son, Rav Tzvi Yehudah Kook.
