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 world. He also promoted a Kabbalistic take on the political movements in pre-mandate Palestine and a universal love ethic intended for both the Jewish and non-Jewish world. These three concerns were seamlessly united in Ashlag’s mind; he articulated his complex, integrated vision in his books, letters, and essays.

During his life Ashlag was little known. An excerpt from Ha’aretz describes him: “One day in Jerusalem of the early 1950s, Shlomo Shoham, later an Israel prize-winning author and criminologist, set out to look for Kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag…Ashlag at that time was trying to print Hasulam (literally, The Ladder), his Hebrew translation and commentary on The Book of Zohar… Whenever he would raise a little money, from small donations, he would print parts of his Hasulam.

‘I found him standing in a dilapidated building, almost a shack, which housed an old printing press. He couldn’t afford to pay a typesetter and was doing the…