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

But this raises a difficult question: How can people whose desires and habits have been shaped by domination create a society that is not itself dominating? No institutional blueprint can by itself answer that question. People must become capable of different relations. Yet this cannot mean that humanity must first be perfected and only afterward become free. That would merely invite another form of domination, in which some enlightened authority undertakes to manufacture the new human being. The transformation must occur reciprocally. New human beings become possible through new relations, even as new relations require human beings capable of sustaining them. The transformation of the self and the transformation of society therefore cannot finally be separated.

Still, relationality is not in itself emancipatory. Domination, too, is a relation: master and slave, ruler and subject, exploiter and exploited are bound together through relations that reproduce their inequality. What matters is the character of the relations we establish and sustain-whether they diminish our capacity to act or enlarge it, whether they subordinate us to one another or make possible a freedom that we can realize only together. The political significance of a relational conception of reality lies not in any guarantee of emancipation, but in recognizing that the relations through which domination persists are also those through which another world can begin to emerge.

And here we return to the Zohar. Above and below, human and divine, present and future, self and community: again and again, what appears separate turns out to exist through relation. Perhaps this is where the deepest affinity between Jewish mysticism and anarcho-communism lies-not in some hidden medieval anticipation of modern revolutionary movements, but in the possibility of transforming the relations that constitute our world, without imagining a sovereign power standing outside it and imposing a finished order upon it.

This is only a beginning. A more sustained political reading of the Zohar would have to explore its understanding of exile and redemption, the fragmentation and restoration of divine life, the relation between masculine and feminine powers, and the extraordinary significance it assigns to human action within the cosmic order. It would also have to confront those elements of the text that resist emancipatory interpretation: its hierarchies, exclusions, and often severe moral prohibitions. The question is not whether the Zohar can be made to speak with one voice, but whether its tensions and contradictions might themselves become productive for a radical political imagination. Such a project would seek neither to redeem the Zohar from its history nor to subordinate it to a ready-made political theory, but to discover what new possibilities of collective life might emerge from a critical encounter with its mystical vision.

The world is unfinished. The human being is unfinished. Even divine life, in the astonishing vision of the Zohar, is not indifferent to what happens below. Redemption therefore cannot simply be something done to the world. It must happen within the relations that constitute the world. Landauer gives this mystical intuition a political form. If the state is reproduced in relations among people, another society becomes possible only as other relations become actual. Revolution then ceases to mean merely capturing the center of power. It means creating forms of life in which that center is no longer necessary.

And perhaps this is what the strange expression olam ha-ba can still teach us. The world to come is not merely another world waiting for us somewhere beyond this one. It is this world becoming otherwise.