Before You Shall I Pour Forth My Speech

by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

Before You shall I pour forth my speech, Master of all worlds.

Your greatness will not prevent me from coming close to You, for indeed [Your] greatness is [Your] humility, and they have no end—as is the case with all of Your traits.

Neither will my awareness of my smallness and my nothingness prevent me from having the vigor to come close to You, the light of life and the source of good, for there is no end to the greatness that my heart will cause me to feel in that I am one of Your creations.

And even if I look down on some of Your creatures and they are inconsequential in my eyes, only foolishness causes that.

You are the source of wisdom. Only You know Your greatness. And in the power of that greatness, truly all of Your creatures are of equal worth, insofar as they are Your creations, great and awesome God.

And for me as well, it is enough for me to be considered one of the works of Your hands—that covers all of my imperfections.

And behold, with a trembling of the holy I come to You, my King. Save me. From all of my sins help me escape, and from all of my enemies deliver me. Save [me] please, save [me] please, Father Who is compassionate and gracious regarding all deeds.

“To Hashem belongs salvation; upon Your nation is Your blessing selah.”

Chadarav, pp. 153-154

Deliver Me From Oppression

by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

Save me, Hashem, deliver me from human oppression.

Grant me the merit to truly brighten my entire being.

Strengthen and gird my will and my abilities to walk upon the straight path of the light of the holiness of Your straightness, for “You desire straight things”—You, Hashem my God.

Chadarav, p. 153

The Purifications That I Perform on Myself

by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

The purifications that I perform on myself, my thoughts, my ideas, my traits and my feelings—they will be general purifications for the entire world.

Chadarav, p. 153

I Need to Strengthen My Will

by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

I need to strengthen my will, to free it from any subservience [caused by] phantasm.

Then it will be connected to Torah and prayer, to a mindful clinging to the divine and to an inner awakening in a depth of holiness.

And the merit of the land of Israel will stand by me even in my exile, to bring me back to the holy land with great mercy.

Chadarav, p. 152

I Cannot Move from Clinging to the Divine

by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

I cannot move from clinging to the divine, and so I have to obligation to strive to see the divine light and its pleasantness in all mundane matters, in all speech and in every deed and movement, whether my own or of others, and certainly to feel the revelation of the supernal light as it comes through the conduits of truth and righteousness within the entire Torah, including its simple meaning, halachic discourse and Talmudic disputation.

And that is why I always tend to align such Talmudic disputation with the character of conceptual logic, which includes as well the feeling of the heart.

And it is all out of an inner tendency—the fact that I desire with all my heart that the divine light, with its delight and light, should be revealed to everyone, and that everyone should be refined by it and take delight in it.

And I need constant encouragement not to move from that level, and to increase its light and to stride forth well upon its path, and to incorporate all the paths of learning and [Torah] leadership on this general path, which is the path of the righteous that grows ever more illuminated until the fullness of the day [arrives].

And the effort of proper direction in the essence of the portion of the Torah that belongs to oneself, [an effort] supported by the [natural] tendency of the soul, is the most assured path of going in the direction of the root of the soul, and of guiding it in the manner fit for it.

And even though everyone in whole world may think that he has no connection to this at all, nevertheless there exists within the core of the heart a tendency to shine the light of Hashem in that point where feeling and intellect and every power of life join.

In order to cause this light to shine well, in order for it to truly perform its task, a person must repent fully out of love. And [then,] due to the great value of repentance, the power of [its] influence onto the entire world will increase.

And the path of that repentance must go through everything: [it must be] in deeds and in traits, in speech and in thought. And at any rate one must not push away any good point. And whatever part of repentance comes to mind, one must be lively and bring it into actuality, with mindfulness and joy and trust [in God] and a depth of faith.

Chadarav, pp. 134-136

There is a Messiah Without God

by Yaacov Dovid Shulman

There is a messiah without a God.
We have seen him visiting our beaches,
He commanded the waves and tar infested the sand.
He commanded the heavens
And missiles rained like stars.
He thundered at the mountain
But his voice rattled like the crinkling of a newspaper.
We turned the page, we snoozed,
Our chin bobbed upon our chest
And the air turned red and sullen.

The Ideal Totality of Being

by Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook

The ideal totality [of being] reveals its power only through the multitude of [individual] particulars, as they are well-organized in a proper arrangement in both the spiritual life and the life of action.

But these particulars they have no value without the universal soul.

And [so] when I feel very weary because of the weight of the burden of details, which are boring and heavy, I must revive my spirit by watering it with the universalist phenomenon.

And when that universal brilliance flows upon the multitude of our particular, hewn structures, we return to work on the particulars with precision and verve.

Chadarav, p. 132