A Portrait of Two Artists at the Crossroads: Between Rav Kook and S.Y. Agnon

Appears in: Tradition 49:2 (Summer 2016). Rav Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook (1865-1935) and Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1887-1970) were figures of enormous and entwined significance, encountering one another in the heady years of the Second Aliyah (the decade of immigration to Ottoman Palestine prior to World War I). This personal relationship was to span decades and permeate to an underappreciated extent the literary production of Agnon. In this essay, I aim to show that Rav Kook had a profound impact on the young Shmuel Yosef, and that the latter, for his part, embodied Rav Kook’s ambitions for the type of authentically Jewish creative endeavor he hoped would be generated as part of the national return to Eretz Yisrael.