Emuna

Very often even the most motivated & religious feel a lack of enthusiasm to learn Torah or wake up for shul. Similarly, Post-Modernism poses a great challenge for religion. A culture which is based on democracy & freedom, is skeptical about truth, is over-run with "Fake-News", and stresses myself and my "self-awareness" seems like an inevitable threat to Judaism. Rav Kook was a century ahead of his time, and directs us practically how Post-Modernism is meant to be used to our advantage, and help us rise to a new level of spirituality where we do mitzvot out of identification rather than peer pressure. This is the solution to strengthen our motivation whenever it weakens! Also, if looking for "My" Torah, when can one disagree with his rabbi? A Super-Important lesson & Game-Changer in education!

The importance of Torah scholarship is clearly central to Jews- the "People of the Book", but Rav Kook feels it necessary to reveal the other side of the coin. God gave us the "Living Torah" relevant even to the masses even living primitively in nature. God explicitly wants a Nation of Israel, not just knowledgeable & religious individuals, not just rabbis & professors who can sometimes "outsmart" themselves, but also the common people. The intelligentsia needs the masses who are more healthy & natural in spirit, action & belief, just as the masses need the intelligentsia to lead & analyze the more complicated issues. In an era without prophets or Sanhedrin, only God's ignorant masses can sometimes solve historic & halachic difficulties.

The main mitzvah upon which all the other mitzvot are structured is emuna, certainty of G-d. The Gemara tells us (Makkot 24) that the Prophet Habakuk "summed up" all the mitzvot into one, saying, "The righteous will live by his faith." Therefore, since we are obligated to teach our children to fulfill the Torah's commandments, it is clear that we must teach them emuna from a very young age – for that is the mitzvah on which everything else stands.

Israel's Exodus from Egypt served as a preparatory course for the nation's great future, foretold at the very beginning of its creation to its Patriarch Avraham: "I will make you into a great nation… and the other nations will be blessed through you" (B'reshit 12,2-3). The meaning of the phrase "great nation" in this context is that we will be "close to G-d." As written in Va'et'chanan, "Who is a great nation like Israel, to which G-d is so close." However, to reach closeness to G-d, several steps are required.

It's known that in Hassidut, they say that Amalek equals Doubt in Gematria (numerical value). Nevertheless, Rav Kook completes the picture by showing the other side of the coin, why Hashem created doubting for good and beneficial purposes.