A Critique of "Building the Future Society"
by Rabbi Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag
The essay, translated into English, is here:
http://tinyurl.com/2pva4d
I'm afraid I was influenced by an article I had
read *about* Rabbi Ashlag entitled
"דרך הקבלה אל
הקומוניזם"
("Arriving at
Communism by Way of the Kabbalah"), which
can be found on this URL: http://tinyurl.com/3xeqxe.
It
was impetuous of me to arrive at conclusions about Ashlag's
political views based on what someone had written about him. It was only awhile
later that I was led to the article "Building the Future Society",
which Ashlag had himself written. One can see that
the translation into English is not very good, but Ashlag's
basic ideas are expressed in the translation.
Ashlag's ideas are anything but Anarcho-Communistic
as I had understood from the article "Arriving at Communism by Way of the Kabbalah" (in Hebrew). Either Ashlag
never read the works of the Anarchists, or he did study them, but was not
impressed by their writings. I suspect the former case because he does not cite
the writings of the Anarchists, even to critique them.
At
any rate, he put forth a programme of Altruistic
Communism, as he claims. His Communism, for all its altruism, is Communism in
the form in which Anarchism repudiates it – that is, statist.
His
program of Communism is not only statist, it is
further vitiated by the fact that some of the laws that he would effect are, to
be blunt, off-the-wall. The requirement that one either be religious or,
barring that, agree to having one's children receive religious education from
the state can be chalked up to little more than his generally being freaked out
on Kabbalah. This applies equally to his suggestions
that only a chosen few be allowed to engage in spiritual matters, that those be
the "leaders" of society and that a court determine if someone's
request to serve society by devoting himself or herself wholly to spiritual
matters, should be granted. His statement: "Hence, the nobler nation,
namely the nation of Israel, must take upon itself to set an example to the
world. It is so because we are better qualified than all other nations, not
because we are more idealists than them, but because we have suffered more than
all other nations. For that reason we are more prepared than they to seek
advice to end tyranny from the land."
Witnessing the administration of the Jewish state, we see that
protracted suffering does not make for wise structuring of society or create an
aversion to tyranny. It would be an horrendous
universe that we live in were it so that only after horrific suffering could
one become sensitive to suffering. We learn from Kropotkin,
from Bakunin and from Tolstoy that one can hail from
great privilege and be exquisitely sensitive to suffering. Neither can we use
suffering as an excuse for the Jews, in toto, to be
considered a somehow "nobler" vanguard. There have been many
individual Jews who were made of rarified moral stuff. Among the Anarchists
there are people like Goldman, Berkman, Landauer and Muhsam, to be sure.
Certainly these suffered, but it was not their suffering that set them on the
road to Anarchism. It was the result of their having been Anarchists, not the
cause of their having been Anarchists. They became Anarchists because, though
hailing from comfortable, middle-class backgrounds they were extremely
sensitive individuals. There are also Jews like those who are running the
Jewish State who are abominably immoral. These too cannot be discounted as
being part and parcel of the Jewish People. We Jews have produced the very
great, the disgustingly despicable and, overwhelmingly, the very
average, unremarkable and undistinguished.
It
is no wonder that Ashlag's sons and students taught
and teach Kabbalah and downplay his
socio-political-economic teaching. It is not surprising, having considered his programme, that rather than devoting themselves to the
real task of building an altruistic society they busy themselves with the
esoteric and arcane. Whatever Ashlag's contributions
may have been to the understanding of the Kabbalah,
and I do not doubt that they were noteworthy; however mighty were his
efforts to bridge Heaven and earth, a momentous undertaking; he did not succeed
in proposing even the merest sketch of a workable society.
Though
there were some interesting ideas in the piece, as an Anarcho-Communist
I found "Building the Future
Society" to be an almost thoroughgoing disappointment.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel