Yehuda Ashlag, the Socialist Kabbalist

Among the few who know of Rav Yehuda Ashlag (1885–1954), his name is associated with esoteric Jewish thought or with the pop Kabbalah movements led by his second generation students. Some may know that he translated the central work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, into modern Hebrew in the early 50s, or have studied his brilliant commentary on it, Perush al HaSulaam (The Ladder).

Few think of him as a political pamphleteer or a utopian who proposed models for a socialist society. Yet he was those things too, and a look at what he wrote reveals him to be a fascinating contemporary Orthodox Jewish thinker. Rabbi Ashlag divided his time between utopian political dreams and explaining how the human being calls down higher levels of soul existing in the infinite thought of God, or how the upper worlds nest within each other like russian dolls.

Ashlag was born into a Polish Hasidic family and moved to Israel in 1921, spending most of his life there until his death in 1954. He was friendly with Rav Kook, and likewise unhappy with the approach of the traditional old settlement Kabbalists he met. In the 20’s he began publishing commentaries on the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. A group of disciples gathered around him and in the 30s he began writing essays and political pamphlets which promoted the popular study of Kabbalah, which he thought would cause revolutionary changes throughout the…