[Author’s note: Kook was uniquely extraordinary and extraordinarily unique.]

Rav Kook’s writings eventually gave birth to the Hardal Religious Zionist Movement.

His legacy institution, Mercaz HaRav, would tragically be the scene of a massacre in early March 2008 by an East Jerusalem Palestinian gunman, who infiltrated the premises, and then, the library, and gunned down eight students, with many other students wounded, most all in their teens.

*

The compendium work Lights of Penitence, English translation and Introduction by Ben Zion Bokser, presents selections of Kook’s choicest writings.

In The Moral Principles, p. 135 of Lights of Penitence:

“The heart must be filled with love for all. The love of all creation comes first, then comes the love for all mankind, and then follows the love for the Jewish people.”

on p. 137:

“Though our love for people must be all–inclusive, embracing the wicked as well, this in no way blunts our hatred for evil itself; on the contrary it strengthens it. For it is not because of the dimension of evil clinging to a person that we include him in our love, but because of the good in him, which our love tells us is to be found everywhere. And since we detach the dimension of the good to love him for it, our hatred for evil becomes unblunted [sic] and absolute.”