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
DoreenDotan@gmail.com