Rav Kook on Teshuva

This is a huge and incredible topic. I will scratch the surface now in my amateurish fashion and hopefully come back to it another time.

Anyone not familiar with Rav Kook's views should try and read up on them. They are fantastic, incredible, sometimes outlandish but always stimulating and challenging.

Sin and repentance take on a new light in Rav Kook's thought. Sin is natural and inevitable, an outcrop of nature being material and static. Teshuva is a cosmic process of returning to G-d, man's individual Teshuva enables the universal Teshuva as well. Teshuva links everything with the Divine.

Rav Kook believed that the human desire for progress, excellence, freedom and an ordered life emanates from a basic human need to get close to G-d, which is the fundamental of human life. Every culture and religion is an illumination of the divine light amongst humans.

The most startling idea for me is the idea of human progress, improving the world, making it a more civilized place, this is Teshuva. He explicitly mentions ecomonically and socially improving society which goes together with personal atonement and repentance - it is all one deed, one act.
There is so much more to say, and even the small amount I have said I haven't expressed particularly well (a major problem with Rav Kook's thought) but I hope I gave you an inkling into his ideas.

Tzom Kal and have a meaningful day.

TRK