PAA: Do you take and dissect every letter I type as a gemorah? If it turns out there was a natural fish shortage circa 1914 and it couldn’t be fish does that disprove the maaisa or does it mean it might have been some other food? The story is over 100 years old so even under the best of circumstances you’d expect being off on a small detail doesn’t invalidate the essence. And this is the primary point. Two major world class talmidei chachomim told over this story. And they didn’t say it once in a shiur with a couple of students 50 years ago. They said it over and over many times over many years to many of their talmidim. You can’t make this up. It is relatively easily verifiable. Ask around. Speak to three or four of their long time talmidim. If all four look at you blankly like they have no idea what you’re talking about and never heard the story you can come back to me with a taaina. But that isn’t going to happen. (Btw, Avi K said he asked a YU grad, not a talmid of Rav Gorelick zt’l.)
Maybe it was later than 1914 and it ran an article on R. Kook’s not so brand new writing or saying. Maybe the CC did oversee what the paper wrote. He didn’t buy the paper; it came with his fish. Maybe R. Gorelick (senior) or his wife unpacking his fish read it and told it to him.
Regarding the non-religious soccer players:
“This sport that young Jews play in Eretz Yisroel in order to strengthen their bodies to be strong young men for the Nation, completes the spiritual strength of the Tzadikim above … playing sports to strengthen the body and the spirit for the strength of the entire Nation is a holy service to Hashem, and raises the Shechinah higher and higher, like the 80 songs and praises sung by Dovid HaMelech in Tehillim.” (Oros M’Ofel 34).
Can one imagine anything more contradictory to the basic values of our Torah? And I this one is quoted from him by Rav Yosef Yedid, word for word from the same Chibur:
http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=22671&st=&pgnum=449
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????? ?????? ??????? ????? ?????? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ??????? ?????
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Until he came, we all knew Torah and Mitzvos were the only thing that gave us merits; Aveiros did the opposite. R. Kook mixed non-Torah values into Judaism that turn upside down what our religion tells us about good and bad. Don’t bother looking for sources for these and other such things. You won’t find any. Rav Yosef Yedid in that Teshuva I linked to above constantly refers to him mockingly as “This Navi” because he must have received his Hashkafos by prophecy, since there is nothing close in Torah literature that says such things. But I know where he got these Hashkafos from. It is secular Nationalist philosophy. That’s why you won’t find anything like this in Torah sources.
“One can view nineteenth-century European nationalism as an appropriate matrix for Rav Kook’s thought, and there is no dearth of analogues to Hegel, Bergson, and others in his writing.” (Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, Leaves of Faith II, p. 202).
What he did was, he took non-Jewish ideas about Nations, people, and politics, and attributed to them spiritual value, and considered their fulfillment the achievement of Torah objectives. By way of analogy, imagine if someone would say we will attain the lofty “chaya-yechida” level of Neshama, be “meyached yichudim” and cause the coming of Moshiach if we become communists. The Gerrer Rebbe, Imrei Emes, politely described it as being influenced by the fads of the times so much that it causes him to say good is bad and bad is good (????-???). (The letter of the Imrei Emes was edited by Simcha Raz to leave out the part where he writes how R. Kook “says tahor is tamei and tamei is tahor”.) Another example of this is the recently published “The Rav Thinking Aloud” by Rabbi David Holtzer. There, Rabbi JB Soloveichik tells – and this is on tape – about his meeting Rav Kook: Someone asked Rabbi Soloveichik: “You felt the presence of greatness?” R. Soloveichik’s answer: “I wouldn’t say greatness. Uniqueness. Greatness – if you understand by “greatness” intellectual greatness – no, I was not impressed by his scholastics.” (That entire paragraph (above is just the beginning) was met with such outrage by the religious Zionist community that in the next printing of the book, it was edited out.)
BTW, I’d like to see the original source of the purported letter of the CC’s son-in-law and the source of the alleged walking out of the Agudah convention by the CC. Considering the number of forgeries that have been introduced by RZs on this, it surely needs documentation. The letter I find especially suspicious. Both the letterhead and the signature identify his as “the son-in-law of the CC”. Whoever puts such credentials on their letters, let alone twice, once in the beginning and once in the end? Rav Chaim Kanievsky’s son-in-laws don’t stick in “son-in-law of Rav Chaim” on top and on bottom of their letters. And the photocopy going around online of the letter is a modern typeface with no signature. Where is the oldest source of this letter’s publication. So far I don’t see anything earlier than the internet age. (Not that there weren’t forgeries pre-internet.)
There was no widespread belief from the fake KK. It was almost unheard of prior to R. Kasher publishing it.