The world to come: Jewish mysticism and the politics of emancipation

Revolution and tradition

None of this makes the Zohar a politically progressive book in the contemporary sense. Quite the contrary. It can be extraordinarily severe. Its sexual morality in particular can strike the modern reader as deeply conservative. Masturbation is compared with murder and associated with demonic forces; sexual relations are governed by strict religious prohibitions. We should not hide such passages in order to manufacture a politically convenient Zohar. But neither should we assume that revolutionary thought must simply discard everything inherited from tradition.

Here the German-Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer becomes an indispensable interlocutor. Landauer, murdered in 1919 during the suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, developed an anarchism quite different from the caricature of anarchism as the destruction of every institution and inherited form. He insisted that human beings need forms of association and traditions capable of binding them together. "We need form, not formlessness," he wrote. "We need tradition."

In his Paths in Utopia (1949), Martin Buber observed that Landauer had described Walt Whitman as combining seemingly contrary impulses: the conservative and the revolutionary, individualism and socialism. The same, Buber suggested, could be said of Landauer himself. There is a useful idea here: revolutionary conservation. Revolution need not mean erasing the past and beginning again from zero. It can mean distinguishing between those inherited forms that sustain domination and those capable of nourishing freer forms of life. The latter are not merely preserved. They are recovered, transformed and made to live differently.

Such a conception also describes how we might read the Zohar today. We need neither submit to everything it teaches nor dismiss it as an artifact of medieval religion. We can ask instead what possibilities remain buried within it-what still lives, though it may appear dead.

The unfinished human being

The Zohar's conception of the human soul provides one answer. It distinguishes three principal dimensions of the soul: nefesh, ruaḥ, and neshamah. Nefesh, the life-force, is the lowest. Ruaḥ, spirit, represents a higher level. Neshamah, associated with divine breath, is higher still. What matters is that these are not simply three faculties that every person possesses in precisely the same way from birth. In the Zohar, the higher dimensions of the soul represent possibilities of spiritual development. The ordinary human being is not the finished human being.

The historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem emphasized this distinctive feature of Kabbalistic psychology. Medieval thinkers could draw upon older tripartite theories of the soul, including Platonic ones, but the Kabbalists transformed them. The higher levels of the soul become states attained through spiritual and moral development.

There is, of course, a tension here. The Zohar conceives spiritual development hierarchically, whereas an emancipatory politics seeks to overcome relations of domination. But the political significance of this conception need not lie in its hierarchy. It lies rather in the understanding that human beings are not fixed or completed beings, but capable of becoming something other than what they presently are. What the mystical tradition understands as spiritual ascent can thus be reinterpreted politically as the transformation of human capacities through new forms of collective life.

This conception of human becoming has consequences that extend beyond the spiritual domain. Emancipation cannot consist merely in rearranging institutions while leaving unchanged the people who continually reproduce those institutions. If human beings are unfinished, then the transformation of society must also involve the transformation of the capacities, habits, and relationships through which human beings constitute their common world.

Here the connection with Landauer becomes especially illuminating. Landauer's most famous political insight was that the state is not simply a thing-a gigantic machine standing outside us and imposing itself upon us. The state is also a relationship, a particular way in which human beings behave toward one another. This changes the meaning of revolution.

If the state were simply a building, an army, a parliament or a collection of bureaucratic offices, revolution might consist in capturing or destroying those things. But if the state also exists in our relations with one another, then abolishing institutions while preserving the forms of human behavior that sustained them will merely reproduce domination under another name.

For Landauer, however, revolution is not merely a matter of dismantling existing relations. It is also a matter of creating new ones. The task is not to wait until the state has been overthrown before beginning to build a different society, but to establish forms of communal life, cooperation, and mutual responsibility within the world as it exists. The new society must begin to take shape in the midst of the old, not as an ideal imposed upon reality from without, but as a possibility brought into existence through the transformation of everyday relations. In this sense, revolution is not simply an event that will occur at some future moment. It is a process already underway wherever human beings begin to live together differently.

This is also where Landauer's thought approaches the anarcho-communist tradition, which envisions not merely the abolition of the state but the overcoming of capitalist property relations through common ownership, voluntary association, and mutual aid. Political freedom cannot be secured while the material conditions of life remain organized through exploitation and economic dependence. The transformation of society must therefore extend to production, distribution, and everyday life. Freedom is not simply something individuals possess independently of one another; it is something they make possible together.