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Title: On Jewish Anarchism Author: Furio Bagnini Date: 21st September 2009 Language: en Topics: Jewish anarchism, religion, Judaism Source: Retrieved on 25th January 2021 from https://www.jewdas.org/on-jewish-anarchism/ Notes: Edited by Bas Moreel
“God’s people, the people that received the revelation before Christ
came on earth, that is most universally spread on the surface of the
earth, has always seen that the Christian teachings of the Church
fathers were incomplete, has always proclaimed that a great age would
come called “kingdom of the Messiah” with the religious teachings
presented as fully as possible, with the spiritual and worldly powers in
balance and the human race united in one single religion and one single
organisation… The golden age of the human race is not behind us but
before us. It is to be sought in the perfection of the social order. Our
fathers haven’t seen it but our sons will see it one day. For them we
ought to level the road”
(Henri de Saint-Simon, Le nouveau christianisme).
As a socialist free from antisemitic sentiments Saint-Simon was probably
one of the first to formulate the hypothesis that socialism affirms
values claimed as its own by the best Jewish tradition.
The modern revolutionary utopias, especially those of the libertarian
and anti-authoritarian kind, with their belief in a forthcoming
liberating revolution, originate from two different psychological
attitudes. One is the critical examination of the essence of human life
and of the substance of society; the other is the longing for a more
genuine social life, for a human society based on love, mutual
understanding and mutual aid. The former attitude springs from Western
thinking, the latter from Judaism. The prophets were the first to
transform this longing into a “political” message of equality and
justice, the Hassidic Jews were the last collectivity trying to live
this message as something absolute. At certain times expressed openly,
at other times concealed / hidden the longing has never disappeared.
When the Jews left the ghettoes and joined the world society the two
attitudes merged into the teachings and the apostolate of modern
socialism.
Martin Buber, the famous Jewish philosopher who was inspired by a strong
“religious anarchism”, defined Judaism as a synthesis of three basic
concepts: the idea of unity, the idea of action and the idea of a
future. The idea of unity takes shape in the idea of transcendental
unity. God, creator of the world, is one and unique, and he alone must
be loved as essence of all ethical perfection. The knowledge of God
teaches us what man should be, the divine tells us what the human is.
The basic teachings of Judaism as a whole are summarised in the
prohibition of idolatry, which the prophets saw as the origin of all
evil. As God is one, so, the morals as laid down in the Torah, the civil
and social law of the people of Israel, must be one. Equality and
justice are the basis of the law derived from Leviticus [one of the five
books of which consists the Torah]. Equality involves recognition of the
basic rights of man (the right to live, to own, to work, of asylum, of
rest and of freedom), whereas justice ought to translate itself into the
acceptance of the obligations towards the weakest and the poorest.
The second idea is the idea of action. In its essence Judaism doesn’t
demand theological adhesion but practical compliance with the law, from
the oldest times onwards action was the core of Jewish religiosity. In
all the books of the Torah there is very little talk of belief and much
more of action. Every action, even the most insignificant one, is
somehow linked to the divine and gets universal significance and
importance. Every joint action becomes exemplary, as says a Chassidic
saying: “When I went to see the rabbi that was not to hear his teachings
but to see how he unlaces and laces his felt shoes”. The right praxis is
important, important is to live in accordance with the Torah, to behave
in accordance with the Torah in daily life. Action in the shape of work
and study ought to aim at a transformation of reality towards a more
just future. Max Weber showed already that this aspect of Judaism has a
revolutionary potential when he tried to find an answer to the question
why so many Jews adhered to revolutionary movements. According to the
Torah the world is neither eternal nor unchangeable but created, and its
orders are the product of actions of humans; it is a historical
realisation aimed at making room again for a situation really wanted by
God. As Weber observed, the whole attitude of Judaism in respect of life
is marked by the idea “of a future political and social revolution
guided by God”.
The third basic idea of Judaism is the idea of future. Jews should keep
the future in mind. In this respect a traditional Jewish comment on the
passage in Genesis (21.9 seq.) in which Sarah, Abrahams wife, chases
Ishmael from the house of his father together with his mother Haggar [a
maid of Abraham with whom he had got Ishmael]. The teachers have
wondered how Sarah could behave so cruelly towards Hagar and her son.
One of the answers has been that Ishmael “was playing”, as the word
metzacheq is generally translated, with an explicit sexual connotation.
In reality, the word metzacheq has the root tzadi chet kof, which means
‚to laugh’ and is also in the name Yitzchaq. One of the possible
interpretations then is that Ishmael wasn’t playing but “laughed very
loudly”; morphologically the word metzacheq is an intensive form of the
verb, whereas Yitzchaq, on the other hand, is rather the one who “will
laugh”. Sarah shows her prophetic power here, as she understands before
Abraham that somebody who is able to laugh loudly in a world so full of
injustice and grief doesn’t deserve to be his heir. But somebody who
acts on something and in such a way that he can laugh one day in a more
just world deserves to be his heir.
This orientation towards the future is connected with the hope of
redemption in the messianic times. From the times of the Torah till the
times of the chassidic fervours the messiah and the future in which the
perfect life in truth and the unity of the world would have become
reality, with the separation between good and evil abolished by the
definitive annihilation of sin, were the final existential aspiration of
the Jewish people. In Jewish as opposed to Christian thinking, the
messiah will not bring an apocalypse or a horrible end of the world but
the full realisation of man, also as a social being. The coming of the
messiah will not take place in the other world but is being prepared in
history. In the Jewish, as opposed to the Christian, thinking about the
messiah, the redemption, writes Gershom Scholem, will be kind of “a
public historical event in the Jewish community, a visible event
unthinkable without this exterior manifestation. Christianity sees the
redemption as a spiritual, invisible event that takes place in the soul,
in the personal world of the individual human being requiring an
interior transformation not necessarily accompanied by changes in the
course of history… What Judaism has irrevocably placed at the end of
history, as the event in which culminate the exterior events has become
the centre of history in Christianity”.
Man is the main agent of redemption, his actions alone which will speed
up the coming of the messiah: “If all Israel respected the sabbath if
only one single day, the Messiah would come immediately, for it is
written: “To-day if you were to listen to his voice””. The mentioning of
the sabbath, the day devoted to rest, is not accidental. As say the
teachers, the sabbath is “an example of the future world”, an
anticipation of the messianic times when man will no longer be another
man’s slave and be freed from daily alienation. The sabbatical year when
all activities stop is also an announcement of liberation and of the
exemption from daily work. The jubilee is also a revolutionary
institution, as can be read in Leviticus. It restores social equality
every fifty years by the redistributioin of property. On this subject
Gustav Landauer wrote: “Uprising as basic law, change and overthrow as a
rule for all times… that was the greatness and the holiness of the
mosaic social order. We need that again: new rules and a spirit of
change that does not fix things and laws definitively but declares
itself permanent. The revolution should become part of our social order,
the basic rule of our basic law”.
The election of the Jewish people involves in the first place the
obligation for every Jew to take part in the anticipation of the day of
redemption. The coming of the messiah on earth depends on the free
efforts of individual human beings during their life. Not by chance did
rabbi Nachman from Breslau , one of the most fascinating and original
Chassidic teachers, conclude: “To become more perfect man should renew
himself day after day”. What is needed is a permanent mental revolution.
Those who live to-day must work for social justice, as in the past those
living then had to work for it in their time and as those living in the
future will have to work for in the future: the coming of social justice
depends on them.. As is said explicitely in the texts of the prophets,
this “revolution” will take an international character and will be a
universal movement involving all the States of the world. This shows
another difference between Jewish and Christian messianism. Christianity
has eliminated the political element of the redemption maintaining only
the spiritual element. Christianity, writes rabbi Elia Benamozegh,
“speaks of ascetic morals, of an ascetic kingdom and of an entirely
spiritual messianism; instead of political liberty it has spiritual
freedom for its followers”.
In Jewish messianism, religious as well as political, two currents can
be distinguished: a restaurative current and a utopical one. The
restaurative current expects the return and the resurrection of a
situation of the past but that has always been seen as an ideal in the
collective imagination of the Jewish people. The redemption was seen as
the return to an ideal state of the past, a lost golden age. The
utopical current looked forward to a situation that has never existed
and was nurtured by the dream of a radical overthrow of all that
existed, of the coming of an absolutely new world, of the “the unheard
of”, of “something that has never been, the peak of bliss”, as writes
Walter Benjamin. Although each other’s opposites these two currents have
always gone together, both can be tracked in the historical
manifestations and ideologies of messianism and in almost all modern
revolutionary currents. This combination of restauration and utopia, as
stresses Michael Löwy, can also be found in libertarian thinking, where
“revolutionary utopia goes always hand in hand with a profound nostalgia
of forms of the precapitalist past, of the traditional peasant community
or of the guilds..”.
Isaac Luria’s concept of the Tiqqun, reparation or reintegration, is the
most important example of this duality in Jewish messianism. Isaac Luria
and his disciples of the Safed school in Galilea had formulated (end
16^(th) century) a cosmologic doctrine directly linked to the belief in
the messiah. According to this theory God had voluntarily limited or
contracted his powers (tzimtzum) when creating the world. The
imperfectness of the world was a symptom of the disintegration of the
universe resulting from the Shevirat ha-kelim, the “breaking of the
pots”, which had been too weak to contain the divine light. The
scattered fragments of the pots had kept small sparks of the divine
light, however, and are a harmful residue for the world. From them come
the Qelippot, the dark forces of evil. Man and Israel as a whole have
the mission to lift the scattered holy sparks and to free the divine
light from the domination of the Qelippot, which, historically,
represent tyranny and oppression. This process is called Tiqqun and all
should contribute to it. The Tiqqun will restore the ideal order
disturbed by the “breaking of the pots” and Adam’s subsequent fall.
Humankind has the task to repair the pots, to eliminate evil, to bring
the absolutely perfect back, to restore the proper nature of things and
to put them back in their [right] place.
In this context reparation and redemption become identical notions. When
the world will have been repaired it is impossible that there will be no
redemption [i.e. that it will not be free], as redemption represents the
perfect state of the world, a harmonised world in which everything will
be in its right place. The Tiqqun leaves the purely mystical domain and
drops its cosmic and ontological dimension becoming messianic and
political. The Tiqqun world, as rightly observes Michael Löwy, is thus
the utopian world of the messianic reform, of the elimination of
impurity, of the disappearance of evil.
Isaac Luria’s kabbalah, which blended old mysticism and traditional
political messianism led to an explosive manifestation of the forces
that created it and made it successful. The hope of an imminent
redemption putting an end to sufferings and injustices found a dramatic
historic and spiritual expression in the adventure of Sabbatai Zwi
(1626–1676). Sabbatai Zwi was born in Smyrna [now Turkey] on the 9^(th)
of [the Jewish month] Av, the day on which the destruction of the First
and the Second Temple is commemorated. Already as a young man he had
started studying the kabbalah. In Jerusalem, where he had moved in 1662,
his disciple Nathan from Gaza persuaded him that he was the messiah. The
news that the messiah had come spread like wildfire and caused great
excitement among Jews all over Europe. A true mass movement inspired by
him developed upsettinbg life in the whole Jewish world. Sabbatianism,
“the most polyedric heretical movement of Jewish mysticism”, according
to Scholem, became a definitive theoretical system thanks to Nathan from
Gaza, who, on the basis of Isaac Luria’s kabbalah and the cosmogonic
conepts of those days, imagined that the messiah suffered unspeakable
pains when he set out to restore the initial harmony on earth. In order
to overcome evil from the inside the redeemer had also to become impure
so as to be able to purify the impure and to defeat the cosmic root of
evil. Sabbatai Zwi’s anti-law behaviour – including his apostasy: in
1666 he converted to Islam – were seen by his followers as a descent
into the abyss of negativity which would enable him to free the
particles of divine light imprisoned in the dark. Animated by a strong
religious nihilism the Sabbatianists interpreted the talmudic saying “an
intentional transgression weighs more than the unintended fulfilment of
a precept” (Nazir, 23b) in line with their conceptions and held that a
sinner is good in God’s eyes because impurity brings the spirit to
holiness. The doctrine of the holiness of sin was not limited to the
violation of certain precepts but extended to all the prohibitions of
the Torah, and the followers of the movement formulated the following
law violating blessing: “Blessed be You, Lord our God, who allow what is
prohibited”. Some went so far as to affirm that henceforth everything
was pure because Sabbatai Zwi had definitively defeated evil.
In the course of the 18^(th) century frankism, the movement developed
around the person of Jacob Frank (1726–1791) took over the teachings of
Sabbatai Zwi and developed them further. Jacob ben Judah Leib, as his
real name was, was born near the border separating Podolia and Bucovina
[now parts of Rumania]. He was a nihilist of a rare authenticity.
Initiated into the secrets of Sabbatianism he became a guide for
numerous followers and finally claimed an almost divine status as
possessor of Sabbatai Zwi’s soul. He proclaimed that man should free
himself from all laws, all conventions and all religions. Authentic life
meant rejecting all religious acts and every positive belief. Franks
belief in the redeeming force of destruction knew no borders: “Wherever
Adam came a city was built, but where I go everything will be destroyed,
because I have come only to destroy everything – but whatever I will
build, will last forever”, one can read in the collection of aforisms
which he published under the title Sliwa Panskie (Words of the Lord).
This catastrophic-revolutionary view of emancipation is also clear in
Mikhail Bakunin’s saying “a passion for destruction is a creative
passion”. A merciless war was to be waged against the inadequate laws
that govern the world: “And I say to you that all the fighters should be
without religion. That is to say, they will have to conquer freedom by
their own forces..”. This fight will affect all the layers of the soul
that descends into the abysses in order to ascend: “In order to go up
one must first go down. Nobody can climb over a mountain without having
been at its foot. We have to go down to the lowest point if we want to
attain the infinite. That is the mystical principle of Jacob’s Ladder
which I have seen and which has the shape of a V. I have not come into
this world to lift you up but to throw you into the abyss. You can’t go
lower. We can’t get out of there by our own forces alone because the
Lord alone can pull us from those depths by the power of his arm”. Man
can only become truly free when he has been able to live a truly
anarchic life: “The place where we go doesn’t allow any law because all
laws come from death whereas we go to life”. How can one again think of
Bakunin and his famous formula: “I don’t believe in constitutions or
laws… We need something different. Passion, vitality, a new world
without laws and, so, truly free”? The expectations and teachings of
these last sabbatianists played a decisive role in the opening up of
their souls to the apocaliptic wind of the time. They then came close to
the spirit of the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, and when the fire
of faith weakened they became maskilim, enlightened people, religious
reformers, indifferent prophets and true sceptics.
In the beginning of the 18^(th) century, while the wind of sabbatian and
frankian messianic madness was still blowing, chassidismo started
developing among the Jewish masses of Poland and Russia. This popular
religious movement was started by Israel ben Eliezer (around 1700–1760),
better known as Baal Shem Tov (master of the good name) or Besht (by the
initials of this name). While not significantly innovating doctrine and
writings, chassidism was, nevertheless, an explosion of creative
religious energy against the old values that had become meaningless. The
following story characterises chassidism: “Baal Shem Tov had changed the
traditional order of prayers. Some protested: “This order has been
established by the great men of our generation”. To which Baal Shem
answered: “And who has said that those great men have gone to
paradise?”. With study and erudition not considered central chasidism
took an anti-elitist character and made the simplest acts of daily life
holy, faith became democratic and popular, libertarian, a gigantic
social revolution. The great importance attributed to intention, even if
remained ineffective, and the fact that evil and sins were attributed
some holiness, freed the humble and the weak from all guilt and allowed
them to have their imperfections. There is chassidism, writes Marc-Alain
Ouaknin, “when a society remembers that it is not enough to be but that
we have to exist, that, if we want to live really, we must continually
find new ways of life, invent ourselves continually..”.
In chassidism each person becomes the redeemer of the world which he is
himself, that is one of the aspects of the great chassidic revolution.
Man leaves the collective anonymity and becomes a subject in the
strongest sense of this word. We may quote here a famous saying of rabbi
Menachem Mendel from Kotzk: “If I am I because you are you, then I am
not I and you are not you. But if I am I because I am I and you are you
because you are you, then am I I and you are you”.
In chassidism, Martin Buber wrote, every human being represents
something new that has never existed before. Everybody has to recognise
that this particular person is unique in this world because of his
particular character and that there has never been somebody like him,
for, if there had already been somebody like him there would have been
no need for him to come in the world. Every person is a new creature in
this world called to fill it with his particularity. Every person has
the task to realise his unique, unprecented, never replicated
possibilities, not to repeat things done already by others be they the
greatest of all. Rabbi Sussja from Hanipol illustrated this idea shortly
before his death saying “In the other world I won’t be asked: “Why
haven’t you become Moses?” but I will be asked: “Why haven’t you become
Sussja?”” . The difference between the kabbalah of Isaac Luria and the
chassidic doctrine is the difference between the
ontological-metaphysical and the psychological and personal. In this way
the kabbalistic concepts became meaningful for individual life and
accessible for everybody without distinction, whereas in rabbinic
Judaism the kabbalah was reserved for the few elected, in Hebrew
yechidei seguld, who had fulfilled the strict requirements for access to
the esoteric aspect of the Torah considered extremely dangerous.
Chassidic mysticism seeks to make man take part in the divine life
become history and to shorten the distances between heaven and earth.
For God who has put limits upon himself in order to make room for the
created man has the task to free the sparks hidden in all aspects of
life. In this way simple and insignificant acts also become fundamental
and universally relevant. Chassidism puts an ethics of the deed into
practice that has to do with the human faculty to start things, to
undertake things, to take initiatives. Chassidic action is the opposite
of repetition, of lack of innovation. Chassidic ethics of the deed is
interruption of the flow of life that leads to death, it’s continuous
being born anew. It is freedom. Because we were born we are doomed to be
free. Life ought, moreover, to be lived in the sign of concrete love for
all human beings including those at the bottom, the am ha-aretz, the
simple minds and the sinners. Rabbi Jakob Jizchak from Lublin [Poland]
used to say: “I prefer a sinner admitting he is one to a saint conscious
of his saintness. The sinner admitting the truth passes his days in
Truth. And Truth is God. So, the sinner lives in God too. But he who
thinks he is a perfect saint lives in untruth, and God hates untruth.
Nobody is perfect”.
The chassidic word is also an ethics of the word, the rejection of the
instituted word, of what has been said already. The chassidic word
laughs, dances, it’s joy, the opposite of the prefabricated language of
the cliché, of publicity, of politics. The reasonings of the
institutions and of public opinion correspond to prearranged models.
They are incomprehensible because the institutions are committed to
creating opinions, i.e. non-words and non-thoughts. As Marc-Alain
Ouaknin says: chassidism is against the “we-all-say-the-same-and
together”. Chassidic people are people of the Chidush, of the new, they
have the task to seek freedom, to invent other forms of life. Chassidism
is doing things every day but not just repeating the things done the
previous day, in the language of rabbi Nachman: “it’s forbidden to be
old”.
Historically, chassidism was a critique of the official rabbinic
institutions of the time but this criticism can very well be extended to
institutions in general. But the greatest contribution of chassidism is
the democratisation of study, the possibility for everybody to start
interpreting. As says rabbi Nachman: “a simple person who takes the time
to read, to look at the words of the Torah can also see new things, new
meanings; if one looks at the sayings intensely they begin to “make
light”, to blend, to combine (Yoma, 73b) and one can see new
combinations of sayings, new words, things of which one hasn’t thought
at all. All this is also possible for simple people, without effort…”.
This subjective relationship with the text existed already in the
talmudic tradition but later on study became reserved for an elite and
the thinking became dogmatic and ideological. The changes introduced by
chassidism can be seen in the following story, that can be considered a
paradigm of the cultural and existential revolution brought by
chassidism: “A disciple sees his teacher, who asks him: “What have you
studied?” The disciple answers: “I’ve gone three times through the
Talmud”, whereupon the Teacher says: “But has the Talmud gone through
you?””. Study is a political act because the freedom to interpret is
also a freedom that affects life. In this sense study is revolution, an
attitude of contestating tradition and the main obstacle to accepting
the stereotypes of ideological thinking. But – a point on which rabbi
Nachman insists repeatedly – one should not innovate with new laws that
reinforce institutional thinking. Integrative laws are rejected because
they strengthen the institutions and the custodians of ideologies
instead of weakening and destroying them. As the individual affirms
himself continuously by interpretation his task is not to repeat or to
paraphrase verses [e.g. of the Torah] but, as Emmanuel LĂ©vinas would
say, to go beyond them, to go from the text to one’s own text. This is,
so to say, the whole political dimension and function of chassidism, its
anti-ideological and revolutionary aspect “in respect of an order in
which nothing, neither words, nor people, nor people’s bodies or looks
are allowed to communicate directly, but as values they have to go
through models that generate and reproduce them in total “estrangement”
of each other… Revolution is wherever there is a beginning of a change
that makes models meaningless – whether that change is a minute change
in appearances, a change of syllables in a poem, or the fact that
thousands of people talk to each other in an insurgent city”.
Chassidism showed again what Jewishness is basically about: lived
religiosity, a religion of doing free from precepts. Life, man,
community became supreme again in Jewish life. Unfortunately, this
libertarian movement has turned into a despotic power. Singing, dancing,
sacred gestures have become ceremonial acts and a reactionary spirit has
taken the place of democracy. But in spite of the abuses and the
degeneration of the movement, writes Gershom Scholem, the chassidim “as
mystic moralists have found the way to social organising”, which is
their main contribution.
I would like to end my essay with a chassidic parable of rabbi Uri from
Strelice that seems most appropriate: “When I was still a boy and my
teacher started teaching me how to read, he once showed me two minute
letters in the book of prayers, which looked like square dots, saying:
“Uri, do you see those two letters one beside the other? They are the
monogramme of the name of God, and each time they appear together in a
prayer you should pronounce the name of God, although the name is not
written in full”. I read on together with the teacher till we found the
two letters at the end of a sentence. They were also two square dots,
yet not beside each other but over each other. I thought they were the
monogramme of God and pronounced his name. But the teacher said: “No,
no, Uri, this sign doesn’t indicate the name of God. Only where the dots
are beside each other, where each sees the other as a friend equal to
himself is the name of God; where one dot is under the other and the
other dot is over the former, there the name of God is not”…”.