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

From the report

What if the world we hope for is not somewhere in the distant future? What if, in some strange sense, it already exists? This is one of the possibilities opened by the Zohar, the great masterpiece of Jewish mysticism. Composed in medieval Spain and written largely as a mystical commentary on the Torah, the Zohar would seem an unlikely place to look for radical political ideas. It speaks of God, creation, the soul, good and evil, the mysteries of Scripture, and the hidden structure of reality. It is a profoundly religious work and, in many respects, a profoundly conservative one.

It would therefore be absurd to claim that the Zohar is secretly a work of modern political anarchism. It is nothing of the sort. But that does not mean it has nothing to say to us politically. On the contrary, the Zohar offers a conception of reality that may have surprisingly radical implications: a world that remains unfinished, in which God and humanity are intimately intertwined, in which what happens below affects what happens above, and in which redemption cannot simply be imposed upon the world from somewhere outside it.

What follows is a preliminary exploration of a much larger possibility: that the Zohar can be read as a resource for emancipatory thought, not despite its mystical character but through it. Such a reading would not seek to extract a political doctrine from a medieval religious text, still less to disguise its hierarchical and conservative commitments. It would ask instead whether the Zohar’s understanding of creation, divine life, human becoming, and the relations between worlds might help us imagine forms of freedom that modern political thought has struggled to articulate. The aim is not to discover anarchism already present in the Zohar, but to bring its mystical vision into a critical encounter with the emancipatory possibilities of our own time.