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

What if the world we hope for is not somewhere in the distant future? What if, in some strange sense, it already exists? This is one of the possibilities opened by the Zohar, the great masterpiece of Jewish mysticism. Composed in medieval Spain and written largely as a mystical commentary on the Torah, the Zohar would seem an unlikely place to look for radical political ideas. It speaks of God, creation, the soul, good and evil, the mysteries of Scripture, and the hidden structure of reality. It is a profoundly religious work and, in many respects, a profoundly conservative one.

It would therefore be absurd to claim that the Zohar is secretly a work of modern political anarchism. It is nothing of the sort. But that does not mean it has nothing to say to us politically. On the contrary, the Zohar offers a conception of reality that may have surprisingly radical implications: a world that remains unfinished, in which God and humanity are intimately intertwined, in which what happens below affects what happens above, and in which redemption cannot simply be imposed upon the world from somewhere outside it.

What follows is a preliminary exploration of a much larger possibility: that the Zohar can be read as a resource for emancipatory thought, not despite its mystical character but through it. Such a reading would not seek to extract a political doctrine from a medieval religious text, still less to disguise its hierarchical and conservative commitments. It would ask instead whether the Zohar's understanding of creation, divine life, human becoming, and the relations between worlds might help us imagine forms of freedom that modern political thought has struggled to articulate. The aim is not to discover anarchism already present in the Zohar, but to bring its mystical vision into a critical encounter with the emancipatory possibilities of our own time.

The political possibilities of the Zohar begin, perhaps, with its strange conception of the "world to come." In a passage near the beginning of the Zohar, beautifully rendered by Daniel Matt in the first volume of the Pritzker edition, the text comments on the words from the Song of Songs, "The blossoms have appeared on the earth." The Zohar identifies the blossoms with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who existed within the divine mind before entering the created world. They are associated with three of the sefirot, the divine powers or emanations through which the infinite becomes manifest.

The Zohar connects this discussion with olam ha-ba, literally "the world that is coming." We commonly think of the world to come as the hereafter: another world that begins when this one ends. But the mystical conception is stranger. The world to come is not simply a future reality waiting somewhere at the end of chronological time. In some sense it already is. For us it remains "to come," but its reality does not depend upon its arriving at some future date.

Suppose we take that idea seriously as a political idea. Every radical politics confronts the accusation that it is utopian. The world it seeks-a world without exploitation, domination and degrading inequality-is dismissed precisely because it does not yet exist. We are told to be realistic: human beings are selfish; hierarchy is inevitable; capitalism may have its problems, but there is no viable alternative. The world we have becomes the measure of every world that could possibly be.

The Zohar suggests another way of thinking about possibility. The world to come need not be a fantasy simply because it is not yet actual. The possibilities of another world may already inhabit this one, concealed beneath forms of life that prevent them from becoming visible. Emancipation, in that sense, does not create its possibility out of nothing. It actualizes possibilities already immanent within a world whose existing form has concealed them. The analogy is not between divine reality and some ideal political order, but between two ways of understanding the relation of possibility to actuality. What is already real within the Zohar's mystical vision becomes, in the political register, a way of thinking about possibilities that remain unrealized without being merely imaginary. This is where Jewish mysticism begins to approach politics.

Jerusalem above and Jerusalem below

One of the fundamental ideas of Kabbalah is that what human beings do here below affects what occurs in the divine world above. Human beings are not merely spectators before a completed God and a completed creation. Their actions participate in the drama of creation itself.

The Zohar expresses this idea with extraordinary force in its discussion of Jerusalem. God addresses the earthly Jerusalem in its desolation and declares, in effect, that just as the people do not enter Jerusalem below, God will not enter Jerusalem above. Elsewhere the Zohar speaks of a heavenly Jerusalem corresponding to the earthly one. The divine presence will not enter the former until the latter has been rebuilt.

The theological implications are startling. We ordinarily imagine God as complete and self-sufficient, standing above history: the world may need God, but God certainly does not need the world. The Zohar complicates that picture. Something remains incomplete above because something remains incomplete below. Human action makes a difference to divine life. In some sense, God has turned responsibility over to us.

This does not mean that the authors of the Zohar intended "earthly Jerusalem" to signify a modern egalitarian society. To read them that way would be an obvious anachronism. But we can ask what happens if we take earthly Jerusalem as the figure of a reconciled human community. The result is a remarkable political theology. Redemption cannot simply descend from above. The world cannot be repaired by the unilateral exercise of sovereign power-even divine sovereign power. Something must happen here, among us, within the relations through which human beings constitute their common world. God cannot simply be conceived as complete and external to the becoming of the world. Reality is unfinished. So, perhaps, is God.

A distinction is necessary here between Ein Sof, the infinite and ultimately unknowable divine reality, and the sefirot, the dynamic powers through which divinity becomes manifest. It is not Ein Sof that is incomplete or dependent upon human action, but the unfolding life of the sefirot, whose harmony can be disrupted or restored through what happens in the human world. Divine incompleteness, in this sense, does not signify a deficiency in the infinite itself, but an unfinished process of manifestation and reconciliation.