How Great is My Inner Struggle

by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

How great is my inner struggle. My heart is filled with an exalted and broad spiritual yearning.

I want the divine felicity to constantly spread within my entire being—not because of the pleasure of that delight, but because this is how it should be, because this is the state of reality, because this is the substance of life.

And I am always sighing, roaring from my inner essence with a great voice: give me the light of God, the delight of the living God and His play, the great appearance of the visitation of the palace of the King of the world, God, the God of my father, to Whose love I am dedicated with all my heart, the fear of Whom elevates me.

My soul rises ever higher, it transcends all lowliness—the smallness and limitations that a life of nature, of the body, limited by environment and social mores, oppressed within manacles, completely put in chains.

But a flow of obligations [then] ensues: endless [exoteric Torah] studies [with all its details], confusions of ideas and the emergence of intricate arguments born of an exacting examination of letters and words. [This] comes and surrounds my soul, which is pure, free, light as a cherub, pure as the essence of heaven, flowing like a sea of light.

I am not yet able to gaze from beginning to end and thus understand the felicitous message [of such study], to feel the sweetness of each detailed insight, to look with light within the areas of darkness of the world.

And so I am filled with pains, and I hope for salvation and light, for supernal exaltation, for the appearance of knowledge and light, and for the flow of the dew of life even within those narrow conduits, from which I may draw sustenance and be sated, so as to delight in the felicity of Hashem, so as to recognize the pure, ideal Will, that which is elevated and hidden, the supernal might, which fills every letter and point of a letter, every halachic contention and complex argument.

“And I shall play in Your commandments that I have loved.” “And I shall speak of Your laws.”

Chadarav, p. 129