Rav Kook Monologue

On Yom Ha'Atzma'ut, as many times in the past, I performed a one man show in my school.  The first time I did it was when I did Moshe Rabeinu talking about his life, when we had an Egypt themed day on Rosh Chodesh Nissan. Since then I've done monologues, in costume and character, as Ramban, R Yehoshua Fass, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Johann Kremenetzky, Eliezer ben Yehuda, and more.

The way it works is that there are four presentations taking place in four different rooms and each grade goes around the building over about 45 minutes seeing an 8 minute educational show in each room. So for the presenter it means re-doing the same performance four times in a row in quick succession.

I put a lot of effort into this.

I wrote a poem to open and close Rav Kook's talk and created the fiction of a teacher evoking his name and then having him appear from heaven. In his talk, which was based on his letter to his father in law, the Aderet, he defends his eulogy for Herzl and explains his rational behind that and other actions he took in his life that didn't go over so well with other great rabbinic leaders of the time. I also included some of the ideas he said in the eulogy itself.

Here's the opening poem:

I was a poet, as your teachers know
and taught words of love, because
we reap what we sow

I reached out to people,
considered by some - bad
I was misunderstood, this made me sad...

There's a clip of it included in this video (3:55-4:30):