God’s anarchists

I am both a leftist and a religious person – a fairly traditional adherent of the Jewish faith. To me these two facets of my intellectual life have always supported and strengthened one another. Nevertheless, I have grown quite accustomed to rhetoric which casually lumps religious belief alongside vile forms of oppression. This sort of thinking has unfortunately been standard among many on the left for more than a century. The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin laid the groundwork for the standard leftist critique of religion in God and the State, writing that “the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, in theory and practice.”

This assumption is fundamentally mistaken. Religious politics can be perverted and become oppressive, to be sure, just as easily as secular politics can be. But it is important to recognize that there is a strong tradition of religious anti-authoritarianism, and that some of these forces have been among the most successful at creating real change during the 20th century. Because this tradition is so neglected – in our classrooms and at our demonstrations – I’d like to examine the thought of two people who provide outstanding examples of what this sort of politics can look like: the Hasidic rabbi Yehudah Ashlag and the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

Ashlag is well-known in Judaism for his commentary on the mystical text the Zohar, but his social thought remains underappreciated. He envisioned a libertarian socialist society, one that can be described as both communist, in advocating collective ownership, and anarchist, in seeking to abolish state control. In addition, Ashlag was a strident internationalist, who wrote that “the entire world is one family,” and  hence that “there must be no discrimination among…all the nations of the world,” because “as long as there are differences, war will not end.”

Ashlag developed this vision for society based on the esoteric Jewish teachings of Kabbalah, the basic principle of which is that God, who is all-good, is always giving to the creatures, and never takes. Human society, Ashlag concluded, should model itself on this standard of absolute selflessness.

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