Mysticism and world domination – HyperZionism is a social practical Kabbalah
November 23, 2009
Yuri Khalturin, assistant of the Department of Ontology and Theory of Knowledge of the Yekaterinburg State The University talks to Rabi Abraham Shmulevich. Part three (1, 2)
Yuri Khalturin: Another question in connection with the topic of “mysticism and politics” that interests me is the connection between mysticism and counterculture, in particular, the concept of “psychedelic revolution”, in which mysticism, counterculture and drugs (psychodelics) are combined as factors of confrontation with the existing system.
Avraham Shmulevich: In no way, mysticism has nothing to do with drugs.
Yuri Khalturin: Are there any youth movements in Israel that are trying to connect Kabbalah and psychedelics?
Avravam Shmulevich: They exist, as in the rest of the world, but real mysticism has nothing to do with drugs. A person who took drugs – I don’t take such a person as my students, I can’t communicate with him. This is a false way to get a mystical experience, we have to get everything ourselves. Drugs don’t give anything, it’s the same as mechanical memorization of Arizal’s texts, it’s not mysticism, it’s an illusion. You can use LSD, hear voices, but it will not be the voice of the Almighty, these are not the voices that Yeshayah (Isaiah) or the forefather Abraham heard. Real mysticism is rationalism. Mysticism is absolute sobriety. The fact that we do not see the Almighty in this world is the result of intoxication. But there is nothing but the Almighty in this world, and the fact that we do not see him is the result of some intoxication, there is a veil before our eyes, and strengthening it, it is impossible to open it. Mysticism is the highest form of rationalism. Razio – Mind is one of the names of the Almighty. The attitude to search for the Deity with the help of psychedelics – it stems from a false attitude to “God-seeking”, which has spread in European culture since the outlet of the Renaissance, apparently (although the term “God-seeking” itself in the Russian philosophical tradition is usually used more narrowly, as a designation of a certain direction of Russian philosophical and religious thought).
Yuri Khalturin: Is the search for God a false concept? False way? How so?
Abraham Shmulevich: It’s over. The task should be not to “find God”, but to “see Him”. God – He’s not hiding anywhere. He doesn’t hide from Man, from the creature. He is present everywhere and everywhere – and is present as clearly as possible. Imagine a person on a bright sunny day in an open field. Does he have to “seek the Sun”? Sunlight is everywhere and everywhere, and around it and on it and in it. But if a person’s eyesight is damaged, it may be a problem to see this light. If our person has a cataract, the lens is clouded – then everything, and the light itself and the objects in it, will be seen dull, blurred and distorted, if, not to mention us, belmas have grown before our eyes – then it will seem to a person that he is in the dark at all. And then a person should assume that it is his task not to look for light in this darkness, if he starts looking for light – he will find himself on a false, not going anywhere path. But he must try to remove the obstacle, remove vision distortions, find vision.
So the task of the mystic is to find the clarity of a spiritual vision – and stay in this state always. It’s clear that psychedelics are not an assistant here. On the contrary.
Yuri Khalturin: Again, it is not entirely clear to me how you combine hyper-Sionism and political activity with Bratslav Hasidism? If we go outside, we’ll see these guys singing songs, dancing, dancing, having fun, smoking weed. What can this kind of hip-like mysticism have to do with politics?
Abraham Shmulevich: This is already a kind of trash that has nothing to do with Rabbi Nachman. This is already a kind of product of degeneration. The most essential is always hidden and does not lie on the surface. Most of the things that are called Kabbalah in Israel are not Kabbalah. The fact that these guys are having fun, reading Bratslav books there, even though they smoke weed, it’s good, but it’s not real. Rabbi Nachman also wanted to bring Mashiach into the world. The task he set for himself is the same thing that we are trying to build. But Bratslav Hasidism is to some extent a philosophy of despair. Rabbi Nachman’s view of this world is extremely pessimistic. Our world is hell, Geigin But, understanding the depth of despair, understanding where you really are, you need to live on in this world and get out of it.
Yuri Khalturin: Kabbalah and politics. How can Kabbalah become a political resource? As a magical practice for the manipulation of mass consciousness? Like a myth that can captivate the masses for a leader who declares himself a messiah? Or in some other way?
Abraham Shmulevich: Kabbalah, like any doctrine, can work on a profane level, when it takes over the masses and forces them to act one way or another.
But the task of Kabbalah is to organize society. Any idea to be popular, to exist, to influence, to be alive, must spread. But not everyone is capable of intellectual efforts, there is only a small circle of people who perceive ideas on an intellectual level. But they can also be perceived on a primitive level, just as most people learn the mythologems of modern science. Everyone knows the word “gene”, but very few people understand what it really is, but if there were no mass knowledge, there would be no genetics, the same with Kabbalah. Remember the parable of Rabbi Nachman about the poisoned grain.
Crazy people need to be manipulated to get them out of their madness. That’s if it’s about manipulation. In addition, Kabbalah is a sober view of the situation. And those people who want to change society should have a sober look. You can’t act in the world if you don’t know how the world works. Managing society, changing society, revolution is a professional thing. There are always few professionals and revolutionaries.
We have already talked about humanists, or encyclopedists in France, for example, a couple of hundred people who created the era of the New Age, gave impetus, justification and direction to economic and social changes. A hundred or two people for more than a century, maybe even less, several dozen people. But, nevertheless, their ideas created the modern world. Simply put, hyper-zionist Kabbalah also, first of all, creates an ideology. Modern society does not know where it is going, a modern politician has no purpose, he supports homeostasis, and homeostasis at the level of his personal career. And to lead society forward, you must have an idea of what to do in general, from the system by which the world lives, again it is Kabbalah.
Kabbalah is a political doctrine, a political weapon. In addition, Kabbalah organizes the person who studies it, gives him the strength to act, lead the right lifestyle, have the right view of the world. However, of course, manipulation cannot be the main means, it is always a side thing. To manipulate, you must always have a resource to be manipulated. There must be something behind it, an empty person cannot manipulate, he has no strength to do so. It is impossible to make the masses of people engage in unfounded nonsense and believe in stupidity.
Yuri Khalturin: And yet, is it possible to use Kabbalistic symbolism, Kabbalistic myth to control the masses?
Avraham Shmulevich: Of course, you can. They are used very widely, and not always used by Jews. For example, the communists used Kabbalistic symbolism. Let’s say, the slogan “Lenin lived, Lenin is alive, Lenin will live” is the formula of the Tetragrammaton, since the four-letter name in Hebrew is a verb to be in the forms of the past, present and future tense. And the hammer and sickle reproduces the letters of the word “Shaddai” with their shape. But the communists used it for destruction, used them for the wrong purpose, and it turned out what it turned out. When these things are used unconsciously, incompetently, all kinds of nasty things are obtained. Therefore, we must consciously take the process into our own hands
Yuri Khalturin: What intersections between Kabbalistic theosophy and hyper-Sionist ideology can be established?
Avraham Shmulevich: Hypersionism is a social practical cabalah. If we use the words of Marx, who also took a lot from Kabbalah, the mystics of the past thought about how to know the world, we think about how to change it. Hypersionism is the doctrine of how to change the world in accordance with the laws of Kabbalah, that is, with the laws of the Almighty. In our ideology, we use both the idea of the Land and the People of Israel as Shchina, and the idea of correcting the world (tikkun), and the idea of collecting sparks. We say that we are the Kabbalah of Eretz Israel or Adam Rishon (Adam the First Man) as opposed to the Kabbalah of Galut.
Kabbalah Galuta talks about collecting or extracting sparks of holiness, we are talking about expansion. If you choose a spark of holiness from something, it will die. We need to expand holiness. The whole world should become an object of holiness. Sparks of holiness should not be pulled out, but their energy should be connected in the center. We do not carry the spark to Eretz Israel, it remains in its place, but the Land of Israel is the center of the power of all sparks, like a mirror that connects all the rays of the sun, and then one ray turns out, as well as here.
Thanks to this, each of the sparks of holiness in the whole world perceives energy from Eretz Israel, spreads light to the surrounding matter and turns it into sparks of holiness, so holiness spreads throughout the world. This is the fundamental difference between the Kabbalah of Galutah, the old Kabbalah and the new Hyper-Sionist Kabbalah.
Yuri Khalturin: For example, how the Arab-Israeli conflict looks from these positions. For example, Lightman interprets this issue through the prism of the concept of “tikkun”, but speaks of the correction of the Jewish people themselves, of an internal, spiritual correction, which will automatically entail external reconciliation. What do you think about it?
Avraham Shmulevich: Nothing happens automatically, you need to work on everything. You can correct yourself only through practical action, working on the implementation of Galakha, on its implementation. At the same time, the liberation and settlement of the Land of Israel, and the construction of the Temple, and the creation of a just social order are also all the commandments of the Galakha. And then we spread this holiness to the whole world. One of my teachers said that Eretz Israel has all the best, including the goi Eretz Israel who are also the best. Arabs are a scourge in the hands of the Almighty. In addition, Arab society has preserved many things that are absent in Jewish and Western society, such as family values. Some Arabs are simply Jews by blood, once forcibly converted to Islam, they just have to return to Judaism. Some Arabs can accept the seven commandments of Noah’s sons. The Arabs, unlike many modern secular Israelis, have preserved the idea of the sanctity of the Temple, they really think that we want to build the Temple, build Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates, although no one except Bead Artzeinu wants it. Israel has no project now, so the whole world around it is disoriented. If we put forward this project, some Arabs will simply join it. Some, those who refuse, then, as they say, if the enemy does not surrender, they destroy him. We must act according to the method of Alexander the Great: he included everyone who agreed with his principles in his empire, and the greatest civilization emerged – Hellenism.
The same will happen with Judaism, Jewish civilization will become a world civilization. We consider Judaism not as a tribal religion, but as a civilization, a world civilization that should become the main active ideological force of mankind. When they say that Jews seek to rule the world, it’s nonsense. Galakha generally forbids a Jew to live anywhere except in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel), even just to leave the Land of Israel for a while – it is forbidden, those Jews who continue to live in the diaspora today – commit sin. Not to mention the fact that the most complete knowledge of the V-sevyshne is possible only in Eretz Israel.
Jews should not sit in every corner of the world, even in every world center, somewhere in Antwerp, and rule the world from there, just as Americans are not sitting there now, but it is American civilization standards, American scientific, technical, information and political technologies, American culture that is decisive. And its place should be taken by Jewish civilization, the culture of Abraham, Yitzhak, Jacob, Adam the First Man, and the Temple should become the spiritual center of mankind. This is one of the commandments of the Torah and at the same time the main promise of the Almighty, given by Him to the forefathers of the Jewish people, given by Him to the People of Israel at the dawn of our history. “And your name will no longer be called Abram (translated as “father of the Aramaeans” – A.S.), but your name will be Abraham (translated as “father of many nations” – A.S.), for I will let you become the father of many nations.” (Book. Bereshit (The Book of Genesis), Chapter 17, Art. 5). “You will become the father of the whole world” – explains this promise-order of the Talmud (Treatise Brahot, 13a). This is both God’s promise to the Jews and the command to work on the implementation of this promise. Now, however, the Jews have forgotten about this promise and commandment, about this mission, and non-Jews have also forgotten about it.
Unless anti-Semites still remember and don’t let the light go out. But nothing – there will be someone to remind about it – both the Jews and the whole world.
“God is not a man to lie to Him, and he is not a son of man to change him. Will he say and not do it? will speak and not do it?” (c. Bemidbar (Numbers) 23:19).
Mysticism and politics. Part 1
November 10, 2009
Yuri Khalturin: At first glance, mysticism and politics are opposite to each other. Mysticism is deeply individual, introverted, turned to the transcendent. Politics deals with the masses, is turned outway, political practice unfolds horizontally, not vertically. Nevertheless, these two spheres of human activity somehow interact, and I would like to understand how such interaction is possible, especially in the current situation.
Avraham Shmulevich: First of all, these are not opposites, it’s actually the same thing. Any real politics comes out of mysticism, it is connected with mysticism, it feeds on mysticism, it is, in fact, the embodiment of mysticism. We are now at the stage before the change of world formations, including political and spiritual, so things are ossified a little and it is not visible. But the entire modern so-called Western European civilization grew exclusively out of mysticism: mystical movements, whether English Protestant sects or before that Catholicism. Even the Russian autocracy seemed to be such an oblique system, nevertheless, it considered itself as a manifestation of divine will on earth. Another thing is that the mechanisms that provided this have already died out. For example, the prototype of political parties is Masonic lodges. Actually, that’s where they came from.
It’s just that in history it happens that those ideas that at first seem revolutionary, new, esoteric, they gradually take over the masses, become commonplace, ossification, and new generations of revolutionaries are already fighting against what was once revolutionary ideas.
Yuri Khalturin: How are Masonic lodges and parties connected? After all, by definition, a party is a part of society, party politics is a policy of conflict, while the Masonic box is a place where conflicts (political, ethnic, religious) should not exist in the idea.
Avraham Shmulevich: A party, in theorion, is a group of people (one of the meanings of the word “party” is just a “group”, as well as a “part”) that sets itself the task of implementing certain political goals, the task of forcing society to follow a certain ideology. People unite in a Masonic lodge according to the principle of commitment to a certain system of values, ideology. Those who do not share that ideology will not be accepted into the lodge. And within this ideological group, conflicts, in the east, should not exist. In the conditions of an absolutist feudal society, there were no parties in their modern form yet, and Masonic lodges were just such ideologically motivated groups, and aimed to impose a certain system of values on society, in fact, this is just a system of values of modern “liberal” society. And the Masons aimed to spread this ideology to the whole society – they acted for this purpose with the methods that were available in this era.
Yuri Khalturin: Do your words mean that all mysticism is revolutionary?
Avraham Shmulevich: Yes. Mysticism is a connection with the Creator. God is the father of the Revolution. The first and most important Revolution in the history of the universe was the Act of Creation,
Yuri Khalturin: What do you mean by revolution?
Avraham Shmulevich: Revolution is a movement. Revolution is change. Revolution is life.
Mysticism is the doctrine of the mystery, that is, the true essence of things. And that’s why mysticism not only does not contradict politics, but simply without it there is no politics. And we, the hyper-zionists, the Bead Artzeynu Movement, are really the only political, at least on the scene of modern Israel, movement that thinks about such things. All the rest, both political forces and religious forces, including official Judaism, support homeostasis. There is a big problem with any official religion, institutional religion, that the clergy is always a protective institution, i.e. it must protect tradition. In those few, in fact, few periods of history, when there are no sudden changes and everything goes as it goes, it works. But as soon as the situation actually changes, the spiritual tradition must change with it. And the clergy by nature opposes any changes, and this is the cause of the crisis of religious systems, including the crisis we are experiencing now. Modern religions, including modern Judaism, they don’t think about politics.
What is politics? Politics is life. Aristotle considered politics the highest of arts. That is, it is not just art, but the quintessence of the arts, it is the doctrine of the organization of the human community, and there is nothing outside the human community. But traditional religions, including Judaism, they stopped thinking about the embodiment of the ever-changing divine truth,
Yuri Khalturin: How can the divine truth change, because God is eternal?
Abraham Shmulevich: God, of course, is eternal and unchanging in His essence. But He reveals Himself to His creation – outside of Himself, in interaction with the world. And this His function, the function of revealing His Eternal Essence, it will change all the time along with the world. And man can know God (as well as creature in general) only in the process of change, in the process of movement, in the process of constantly renewing interaction of God with the world created by Him. (Remember the image of the Divine Chariot from the Vision of the Prophet Yehezkiel). Such a constant change, constant renewal – that’s the revolution. This is the pulse of the Almighty, which is afraid in our world
There are always people in the world who keep their hand on this Pulse.
And they come all the time for organizations like ours, which at first are in the minority, and almost underground, at least in the intellectual underground. And after some time, they begin to be the force that determines the spiritual and political nature of society. Take even the same Jesuits who saved the Catholic world. Or the Renaissance – there were about several hundred humanists who made the Renaissance, these are people who really made all modern culture. Therefore, it’s not about the number, and not even about the quality of people, but about the ideology that these people put forward.
In the entire history of Jewish civilization, after the destruction of the Second Temple, only four ideologies were put forward.
The first ideologem is the ideologem of Khazal (khazal – i.e. “hahameinu, zichronam levraha” – “our sages, blessed memory” – an abbreviation adopted in Hebrew for rabbis and sages of the Talmud era), i.e. the sages of the Talmud: we close ourselves, as they say, in the four cubits of Galachi, we must preserve what was. This is a fence around the law, we cut off our ties with reality.
The second ideology is assimilation. That is, Jews must dissolve among other nations for the benefit of each individual Jew. And there were people who made quite purposeful efforts to do so.
The third ideology is reformism, to one degree or another, starting from Karaimism, ending with modern reformism, which says that we must correct the Torah, “adapt the Divine Tradition to modernity”, remove from the Jewish tradition all things that contradict the traditions of the surrounding peoples: to be, for example, simply “Germans of the Moses Law”, “Arabs of the Moses Law”, or some “Peruvans of the Moses Law”. This, of course, doesn’t work very well either.
The fourth ideology is Zionism, political Zionism, which said that Jews should become a political force, set themselves political tasks, but attach themselves to some great power, that is, fit into the political process that is going on, as a secondary force, and thus find their place on the world map. And, in fact, Israel is the implementation of this project, and now it is obvious that it has already exhausted itself.
And the fifth project is my project, hyperzionism: the Jews must return to the role they have already spontaneously begun to play in the world European civilization, and which, in fact, is the commandment of Judaism – to be a force that guides human civilization, which sets the standards of human civilization.
This is actually the story that happened before the destruction of the Second Temple, starting with the Maccabean Wars. It was a struggle between Jewish civilization and Roman civilization for who would set the spiritual standards of humanity. This struggle ended in a draw, i.e. modern civilization is a kind of amalgam of these two.
Remember, in the Gospel there is a phrase: “scribes and Pharisees, who bypass the sea and the land, in order to convert at least one.” That is, Judaism is not some tribal religion, and Judaism should return to this role, that is, to the role that was bequeathed to the Forefather Abraham – to be the people of priests. Actually, all the prophets talked about it. And, I repeat, this is the task, the political task that our movement sets for itself.
Yuri Khalturin: Is this a political task, and not, rather, spiritual or cultural?
Avraham Shmulevich: Spirituality, especially culture, exists only in society.
Accordingly, our methods of achievement cannot be massive at the initial stage, I think that the time will come for this by 2011-2012, and, I think, according to a number of signs, by 2018 we will be the leading movement.
Yuri Khalturin: How do Rabbi Cook’s hyper-Zionism and religious Zionism relate? – what you are saying is very similar to the ideology of this trend.
Avravah Shmulevich: It’s still two different things. Rav Cook and religious Zionism are among our forerunners. Rabbi Cook’s religious Zionism was one of the first attempts to get Judaism out of this cocoon, but Rabbi Cook never thought in political terms.
The fact that it has now been turned into a kind of symbol is, in fact, a defensive reaction of the system. Rabbi Cook was the chief rabbi of Palestine, but he did not make any significant changes, political changes. Moreover, he preserved the system that developed in Galut.
One of the most blatant examples here is two rabbinates, Sephardic and Ashkenazi. Another example is when in the late 1920s and early 1930s there was a dispute among the kibbutz movement to abandon non-Jewish labor. There was a problem with milking cows on Shabbat – this is a forbidden work on Shabbat, you can’t violate Shabbat, and without it it is impossible – the cows will just die, and that’s it. And when the kibbutzniks asked him a question, he said: “Hire Arabs.” He was so unaware of what was happening. That is, Rabbi Cook did not think in political categories.
At the same time, it is also necessary to take into account that most of his heritage of Rabbi Cook is still in manuscripts, and has not yet been published, and these are his most explosive ideas and it is not by chance that with all the alleged feast before Rabbi Cook, which is shown by both the state and the structures of religious Zionism related to the state – his archive has not yet been published in full and even most of it has not been published.
In fact, Rabbi Cook became a symbol, and his teaching became the leading ideology of political Zionism only somewhere in the 70s. Until that time, other portraits hung on the walls of most schools and yeshivas of religious Zionists – Rabbi Kalisher, Rabb Alkalai, Rabb Gutmacher, Rabbi Herzog, but not Rabbi Cook. Yeshiva “Merkaz a-Rav”, a yeshiva founded by Rabbi Cook and led by his son Rabbi Zvi-Yehuda Cook, has not yet occupied the unalternative position it occupies now.
Perhaps the main “supplier of personnel” for the synthesis of the state and religion in the forties andties was the yeshiva Hebron (before the Hebron massacre of 29 – the year of TARPAT – it was called “Slobodka”), and the “modern ideological baggage” of religious Zionism did not consist almost exclusively of the legacy of Rabbi Cook as it is today – religious Zionists taught both the books listed above and other authorities.
And I think that when the old system realized that religion could actually become a political factor, they actually raised Rabbi Cook on the shield to protect themselves.
With all that, of course, he is one of our ancestors. But he doesn’t have a political action program.
In general, this is an amazing thing, but Judaism was not engaged in almost in the 20th century the halakha of the state – what the state should be from the point of view of the law. There were only a few people, the largest of them is Rabbi Hirshenzon, and Rabbi Cook is not one of them. He doesn’t have a program of practical actions.