Though he died in 1935, [Rav Kook] still towers in ... Israeli politics and Jewish spirituality ; neither can be properly understood without him... Best known in the West... as the founding chief rabbi of modern Israel and the spiritual godfather of Religious Zionism... Rav Kook resists easy categorization. The endless play of light and shadow in his mind, at times fevered, at others serene, recasts the conventional ideas of his time in new and complicated patterns...
Rav Kook lived through religious, political, and social revolutions in a wide variety of settings, all roiled in extraordinary ferment and uncertainty. He witnessed the throes of Rabbinic Judaism in the last decades of the Russian Empire, the new settlements of early twentieth-century Palestine, the Europe of World War I, and interwar Jerusalem. He engaged with the leading political, cultural, and religious figures of the time and became one of them.