The following is an extract of a letter written by Rav Kook To Rabbi Yizhak Isaac Halevi (To the best of my knowledge this is the author of the Dorot Harishonim). It outlines what for Rav Kook is the the essence and ultimate goal of all Jewish education, to know and to love G-d. If one does not achieve that, then the end result is apathy and estrangement from Torah and the Jewish people.
By the grace of God, Rehovot, 4 MenahemAv, 5668 [1908]
From narrow places, He who illumines the world and all its inhabitants will raise a light of deliverence. To the renowned rabbi, our pride and source of strength, whose name is adorned with holiness, our master Rabbi Yizhak Isaac Halevi, may he be blessed with a long and good life, peace, peace with much love…
We cannot ignore all the bitter complaint voiced by the great spirits of the world, the Cabbalists, the philosophers, moralists and the pietists, over our neglect of the spiritual dimension of our faith. The essence of this complaining is already found in the torah, in the prophetic and the later writings, and among all the sages of the Talmud. The knowledge of God, his love, and the higher level of his fear, which are merged with responsiveness to life in its fullness that is renewed each day – this is the foundation of all life. It is the basic objective of the Torah and the commandments, of the entire Talmud, and the halakha [the corpus of law]. When this is the present everything is present. What inspired the heretics to reject the principles of faith and to subvert its teachings by repudiating the Cabbalah, is in its essence the fact the world has grown even darker, from generation to generation, through the withdrawal of the inner light that is transmitted through the spiritual channels. The decline in knowledge [of God] has led to a decline in love for hi,; because feeling has run dry, love has ceased; and because there has been a decline of love, heresy has emerged to undermine the expressions of piety that have become a burden. It could only accomplish this by sinister rejections and ignorance. If the love had continued through the holy sensibilities of the person, and his attachment to the light of the Torah, through the power of spiritual reflection, which is joined with the broad and profound domain of the practical halackha, this state of affairs would never have come to pass….
I am not saying that all the students of the Yeshiva are to be great scholars in all fields. This is impossible. Some special individuals may be born with such talents, that they can absorb everything, but the majority divide into specialists and a person can only master that to which his heart is drawn. In its general orientation, however, the Yeshivah must give our people all that it lacks. And since in our time, among the subjects to which people are drawn and which have a great impact on life is literature and poetry, we must also see that in this field, too, we shave have our own, and it shall no longer be a fact that every talented person in the field of literature and every prominent poet must automatically be a heretic and a sinner. We must destroy this false assumption and show the world that the beauty of poetry and the delights of literature will flower when they are rooted in the life of our people, in its natural state, when it is faithful to a past whose source is the living water of faith in God.
Igrot I, Letter 149