The Light of the Life of Elijah Rising

by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

Behold, I see with my own eyes the light of the life of Elijah rising. His power on behalf of his God grows ever more revealed.

The holiness within nature breaks through its boundaries. It proceeds powerfully to unite with the holiness that transcends nature, with the holiness that wars against nature.

We fought against nature and we emerged victorious. Nature had damaged us, dislodged our thighbone, but the sun has shone to heal us of our lameness.

Judaism of the past, from Egypt until now, is one long war against nature, against the nature of the world, against the nature of humanity as a whole—even against the nature of the [Jewish] nation, and against the nature of every individual.

We fought against nature in order to conquer it, in order to crush it within its house.

It is subjugated before us. The worlds grow ever more perfected. In the essence of the depth of nature, a great demand arises for holiness and purity, for a refinement of the soul and purification of life.

Elijah comes to proclaim peace, and within the inner soul of the nation a current of life of nature breaks forth, and comes ever closer to holiness.

The remembrance of the exodus from Egypt grows transformed into a memory of the exodus from the subjugation of nations, which grows ever closer to completion.

And all of us are in the process of coming closer to nature. And it approaches us, increasingly subdued before us, as its demands grow ever more attuned to our exalted demands, [which come] from the source of holiness.

The young generation, which demands its land, its language, its freedom and its honor, its literature and its might, its possession and its feelings—[all these things] flow via the stream of nature, whose inner being is filled with holy fire.

Chadarav, p. 201