Is Lurianic Kabbalah Post-Liberal?

In the Flickering of the Divine Void

According to Lurianic Kabbalah, the Creation of the world follows a dialectic. (Hegel, who popularized dialectical thinking, was influenced by Kabbalah.) In this post, I’ll read the theological drama as a parable about liberalism. But first, a refresher of the myth.

1) God (ayn sof) is infinite and everywhere.

2. God contracts Godself to make a void (chalal hapanui) where God is not. The act of contraction is called tzimtzum.

3) God re-enters the void, filling it with the divine presence, once again.

1b) When God re-enters the void, however, God’s presence overwhelms it and the void shatters. This is called shevirat hakelim (“the breaking of the [divine] vessels.”)

2b) This leads to a fragmentation of divine unity into splinters of light that are trapped in the void’s pockets of divine absence (klipot).

3b) The messianic redemption will spell the total liberation of the divine unity from the shells of divine absence, or else, more radically, a nondual realization that the divine absence and the divine presence are one, that the shell isn’t other from what it ensnares. The act of repairing the divine fracture—or realizing that the fracture is itself a form of wholeness in disguise—is called tikkun. Without knowing it, many of today’s social justice activists are drawing on this ideal of tikkun when they espouse tikkun olam (“repairing the world.”) They’ve simply secularized and mass disseminated a once esoteric, mystical ideal.

Kabbalah and Liberalism

All ancient societies were hierarchical, authoritarian, collectivist, and fundamentally illiberal. Just as God was originally ubiquitous, so, in the ancient world, there was no “private space,” no personal conception of rights, no sense of the individual separate from society. People were not free—and did not think of themselves as free—to make up their own values. Differentiation was a blemish, not an ideal. Call this the era of eyn sof.

But the fatal flaw of illiberal societies is their inability to deal with conflict by any other means than coercion and violence. When illiberal value systems collide, it’s a zero-sum war. Liberalism begins with the discovery that we’d rather co-exist and disagree than kill each other over what we think is good (and which we have no way of definitively proving). Liberalism is the era of tzimzum. Just as God retreated from the world to make room for the Other, for that which is not-God, liberalism requires people to keep their deepest ideals private. It is a kind of challal hapanui, a vacuum wherein the individual can flourish and pursue its own sense of right and wrong. Locke makes the right to property the bedrock of liberalism. But a sense of property can only exist where there is a sense of separation.

Today, many who enjoy the benefits of liberalism question its Lockeian foundation, from Patrick Deneen on the right to Michael Sandel on the left. Many of the critics follow Leo Strauss’s critique of Isaiah Berlin, namely, that liberalism is ensnared in contradictions, as it gives with one hand (an official stance of valueless neutrality) what it takes away with the other (the insistence on neutrality as a fundamental value). This view has influenced Peter Thiel’s critical essay “The Straussian Moment” and more recently, Bruno Macaes’s critique of John Rawls, on which I’ve written here. Do the critics of liberalism want to return to anti-liberalism? I don’t think so. Rather, they want something that can be called “post-liberal.” Is it coherent? Sustainable? Achievable? I’m not sure. Perhaps it is a messianic vision of tikkun. In this post-liberal future, individualism is harmonized with collectivism; personal liberty (divine void) and the public good (divine presence) prove to be two sides of the same reality.

If I am right, one of the major theological debates in the reception of Kabbalah is also one of the major political debates of our time. To what extent should we pursue the messianic ideal or sublimate it through ritual and prayer? Or perhaps we should pursue a portfolio approach, which makes up in risk-diversification what it loses in coherence and conviction. Hasidism, as Gershom Scholem argues, took the Lurianic myth and made it an internal, emotional story. This was in response to the disappointments of the failed Sabbatean movement of the early modern period. Perhaps Zionism picks up the mantle where Sabbateanism left off…

But the question of whether the lesson of Lurianic Kabbalah is anti-political or hyper-political is itself a question that its drama addresses. We live in the flickering of the divine void.

---

What is Called Thinking? is a practice of asking a daily question on the belief that self-reflection brings awe, joy, and enrichment to one’s life. Consider becoming a subscriber to support this project and access subscriber-only content.

You can read my weekly Torah commentary here.