Is Socialism Kabbalistic?

On Parshas Korach and the Jewish connection to the desire for equality

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Korach has always been a misunderstood character in my opinion. His name, which means bald or chilly, implies a negative connotation, like Disney villains whose names signal their role as the bad guy. It is clear he is going to be the villain in the story.

Yet from the actual story, it isn’t quite clear why he was considered such a villain.

The ambiguities begin with the very introduction of Korach. “And Korach took,” the parsha begins—but never really explains what he took. Nearly all the commentators weigh in on this. Rashi explains, based on Onkeles’s translation, that the language “took” refers to his adversarialness—Korach removed himself from the mainstream by arguing with Moshe.

But why begin by introducing Korach in such a vague way altogether? Whatever the term ויקח, “and he took,” refers to, would it not have been easier to write it out more clearly?

Korach’s actual rebellion is also quite unclear. The Torah describes it as follows:

וַיִּקָּהֲלוּ עַל־מֹשֶׁה וְעַל־אַהֲרֹן וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֲלֵהֶם רַב־לָכֶם כִּי כׇל־הָעֵדָה כֻּלָּם קְדֹשִׁים וּבְתוֹכָם ה’ וּמַדּוּעַ תִּתְנַשְּׂאוּ עַל־קְהַל ה’׃

They combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and God is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above God’s congregation?”

Doesn’t Korach have a point here? The Jewish community is entirely holy—is it so awful that he pointed this out?

Rashi cites the Medrash that adds more detail to the complaint of Korach:

"אֵלֶּה קְרוּאֵי הָעֵדָה" — וְהִלְבִּישָׁן טַלִּיתוֹת שֶׁכֻּלָּן תְּכֵלֶת, בָּאוּ וְעָמְדוּ לִפְנֵי מֹשֶׁה, אָמְרוּ לוֹ טַלִּית שֶׁכֻּלָּהּ שֶׁל תְּכֵלֶת חַיֶּבֶת בְּצִיצִית אוֹ פְטוּרָה? אָמַר לָהֶם חַיֶּבֶת, הִתְחִילוּ לִשְׂחֹק עָלָיו, אֶפְשָׁר טַלִּית שֶׁל מִן אַחֵר חוּט אֶחָד שֶׁל תְּכֵלֶת פּוֹטְרָהּ, זוֹ שֶׁכֻּלָּהּ תְּכֵלֶת לֹא תִפְטֹר אֶת עַצְמָהּ?

Korach came before Moshe dressed in garments entirely made of the blue dye, known as techeles, and asked Moshe if such a garment still required tzitzis. Normally tzitzis have one string made of blue, here Korach asked if the entire garment was made from that dye, would a blue string still be necessary?

Where on earth did the Medrash find that a central part of Korach’s complaint against Moshe had to do with tzitzis? Of course, the last parsha ended with the commandment to wear tzitzis, but why did the Medrash make this imagery so central in the story of Korach?

To understand all of this, let’s explore the fascinating history of the Jewish confrontation with socialism.

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Karl Marx was no friend of religion. Born in 1818 to parents who both descended from rabbinic families, he was baptized as a young child. After a fairly unremarkable career as a journalist, Marx was drawn to the ideas of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, particularly his approach to history, known as Hegelian dialect, which understands historical progress as the resolution of contradicting ideals that yield a third-best option. Simply put, history is a repeated three-stop process with a thesis (the current state of affairs), an antithesis (the reaction, issue, or challenges to the current state), and synthesis (the resolution of the conflict which creates a better approach through combining both ideals).

Most famously, Marx criticized religion as an impediment to Hegelian progress. Marx believed that religion perpetuates the status quo by offering an illusory sense of happiness and hope, which distracts people from the need to challenge and change the oppressive conditions they live under. Instead of addressing the root causes of their suffering—such as capitalist exploitation and class inequality—religion encourages passive acceptance and resignation. As Marx famously wrote:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

As an aside, I still think about this comment from Bridget Phetasy, herself a recovered heroin addict, “If Karl Marx was right and religion is the “opium for the masses,” I find it telling that with the rise of secularism—the masses are increasingly turning to opioids.”

Marx, however, proposed that religion was halting societal progress. Instead of seeing religion as a comfort for human sorrows, Marx proposed Historical Materialism, suggesting that history should be judged based on the material conditions it provides to society rather than its ideals. Economic factors, especially the modes of production (how goods and services are produced), shape society's structure and development, rather than religious practice or ideals. According to Marx, all of history is marked by the conflict between different social classes. In a capitalist society, this struggle is primarily between the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class who own the means of production) and the proletariat (the working class who sell their labor). This struggle led to capitalist exploitation, the difference between what workers are paid and the value of what they produce. He argued that capitalists exploit workers by paying them less than the value of their labor, thereby generating profit for themselves. Overall Marx argued that capitalism alienates workers from their labor, the products they produce, their fellow workers, and their humanity. Workers are treated as mere cogs in a machine, losing their sense of creativity and purpose. The ultimate goal of Marxist socialism is to achieve a classless, stateless society known as communism. In this society, the means of production would be collectively owned, and goods and services would be distributed based on need rather than profit. Marx envisioned this as a society where people would be free from exploitation and alienation, allowing for the full development of human potential.

If you hear some Messianic undertones in Marx’s vision, you are not completely wrong.

Marx is rarely treated kindly in the Jewish context because of his alienation from Jewish life as well as his antagonistic words towards religion and Judaism in particular. In 1844—a lot of 1840s action!—Karl Marx published his essay "On the Jewish Question," as a critique of Bruno Bauer, another German philosopher. Bauer had argued that Jews could only achieve political emancipation by renouncing their religious identity. Marx's essay responds to Bauer's arguments and goes beyond the specific issue of Jewish emancipation to discuss broader themes of political and human emancipation. The essay has been interpreted by many as having latent anti-semitic themes including the image of the Jew as being inexorably connected to capitalist pursuits. Some scholars are more charitable noting that Marx’s essay only used the Jewish People as an analogy, but the essay certainly has been championed by anti-semites and did not ingratiate Marx’s legacy for the Jewish community.

And it is Marx’s unhealthy relationship with religion that makes it all the more surprising to many of the religious roots and connections within the socialist movement.

Aaron Shmuel Lieberman is one such figure. Lieberman was born in 1843 and died in relative obscurity after taking his own life when a married woman he was in love with refused to leave her husband for him. For those who do remember him, however, he is known as the father of Jewish socialism. What makes his brand of socialist philosophy so unique is that he explicitly couches his argument for a socialist society in kabbalistic terminology and values. As Eliyahu Stern demonstrates in his fascinating article, “Marx and the Kabbalah: Aaron Shemuel Lieberman’s Materialist Interpretation of Jewish History,” Lieberman’s work is littered with references to the mysticism of Rav Isaac Luria, known as the Arizal, as well as the works of Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzato, known as Ramchal. As Stern explains, Lieberman “adopted Luria’s basic temporal scheme that identified the imbalances and injustices of history as a function of Creation.” The religious imbalances and injustices of the world as described by the Arizal became analogies for economic and societal issues in the works of Lieberman. The translation from mystical imbalances to economic injustices was paved, in the works of Lieberman, through his interpretations of the Ramchal, specifically in his work Klach Pischei Chochma (trans. 138 Gates of Wisdom). In the Ramchal, Liberman saw, as understood by Stern, “buried in Luzzatto’s writings, one can see a rigorous messianic theory that emphasized the unique role of the Jewish people in bringing about a universal social and political revolution.” This may not be such a radical rereading of Ramchal as it would at first seem. Jonathan Garb already noted in his article, “The Circle of Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto in Its Eighteenth-Century Context,” that much of the work of the Ramchal was dedicated to “the general translation of the Kabbalistic myth into this-worldly terms, which are primarily political.”

Lieberman was not alone in trying to couch a socialist revolution in mystical terminology. Most notably, Rav Yehuda Ashlag, known as the Baal HaSulam, after his commentary on the Zohar, was quite outspoken about his Socialist leanings. Aside from his command of kabbalah, Rav Ashlag was familiar with many philosophical writings including Spinoza, Hegel, Rawls, and Schopenhauer. As Hayyim Rothman details in his fascinating work, No Masters But God: Portraits of Anarcho-Judaism, which includes an entire section on Rav Ashlag’s political philosophy, Rav Ashlag advocated for the adoption of altruistic communism in the State of Israel. Altruistic communism, Rav Ashlag argued, was the most Jewish approach to governance. Why else, Rav Ashlag explains, was the Torah given to the entirety of the Jewish People rather than just our forefathers, if not to reinforce the notion of mutual responsibility? As the biography on Rav Ashlag recounts, Rav Ashlag met with Ben-Gurion on several occasions to advocate for the socialist basis of Zionism, as well as observing the Shabbos in Israel as a national day of rest from work, a position that was eventually adopted. As Adam Zagoria-Moffet summarizes in his MA thesis on Ashlag entitled, “The Communist Kabbalist: The Political Theology of Rav Yehudah Ashlag”:

Straddling the traditional world of the bét midrash and the modern ground of Marxist politics, Rav Ashlag carved for himself and for his descendants a new approach to mystical praxis which took human action out of the exclusively-cosmological realm of Luria’s original formulation and plunged it into the psychological and the political dimension simultaneously.

The association of secularism and socialism has a particularly rich history in the world of Chabad given their herculean efforts to preserve religious observance for Jews living under Soviet rule. Still, as extensively documented by Rabbi Eli Rubin, there were voices within the Chabad movement that did not see socialism and religious devotion as necessarily mutually exclusive. One notable figure is Rav Avraham Eliyahu Plotkin whose short story, Kaddish Denied or The Living Orphan, considers how Chassidic fraternity and thought can address the socialist experience. In the short story, Moshe the Carpenter vehemently objects to the characterization of Jewish commitment as bourgeois trickery. Instead, as Eli Rubin explains in his wonderful article, “The Soul of the Worker,” Plotkin argues that religion can and should endure even in a socialist society. As Rubin writes:

Riffing on a Talmudic aphorism that proclaims all Jews “believers sons of believers,” Moshe declares himself “a worker the son of a worker.” His faith and his proletarianism are intrinsically fused, and he cannot abide the forced bifurcation of one aspect of his identity from the other.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe himself even acknowledged the possibility of fusing socialism and religion. “I was never of the opinion that there must be a conflict between a Jewish-socialist worldview and a traditional religious ideology and lifestyle,” the Rebbe said. Still, the Rebbe saw specific merit in the capitalist system of the United States. A long-standing critique of capitalism was the need for people to rely on charity. Marx’s closest friend and partner, Friedrich Engels, who eulogized Marx as “the greatest thinker” at Marx’s funeral (with only 11 people in attendance!) described charity as follows:

charity which tread the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, demand that the degraded, the pariah cast out of society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow

The Rebbe, however, saw this as the very greatness of capitalism in that it allows everyone to contribute in their own unique way. In a 1956 letter to Dr. Elkanah, the Rebbe defends the opportunities that emerge in a society with different levels of socio-economic well-being:

ואשר לסיום מכתבו, בו כותב אשר אין הגאולה יכולה להיות שלמה עד שיחדל אביון מקרב הארץ וכל בני אדם יעבדו בעבודה משותפת ואחריות הדדית ללא עניים ועשירים, אין אני מסכים לדעתו, כי בטבע האדם הוא אשר רגש אושר אמתי בא לו כשיכול להטיב לזולתו, שזה אפשר רק כשאחד עשיר והשני עני.

With regard to the conclusion of your letter—in which you write that the redemption cannot be complete until “the needy disappear from the earth” (Deut. 15:11) and all people work collectively, with mutual responsibility and without poor and wealthy—I do not concur with your opinion because the nature of a person is that a feeling of true happiness comes to a person when he is able to do something for the good of another, and this is only possible when one is rich and the second is poor.

As Eli Rubin explains in his book Social Vision, “To utterly eradicate any and all imbalances would be to eradicate the possibility of true happiness.”

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And this brings us back to our parsha.

I heard once that the Klausenberger Rebbe would refer to Korach as “heiligah Zaide,” his holy grandfather. His ideas conceptually were holy—he wanted a community of equals.

But, as Rav Tzadok explains, sometimes ideas are wrong not because they are unjust but because their time has not yet come. And this was the mistake of Korach. He wanted to usher in the end of times when God’s presence will be explicitly revealed and all hierarchies will collapse.

וזה היה טעות קרח שכיון שבאמת בשעת מתן תורה היה ראוי להיות התיקון האמיתי כמו שיהיה לעתיד. וזה שטען כי כל העדה כולם קדושים וכולם שמעו בסיני אנכי ה' אלהיך (כמ"ש במ"ר) ובתוכם ה' והיינו כמו שיהיה לעתיד שהקב"ה יושב ביניהם והם סביב במחול

The problem, however, was that such a time had not yet arrived. So long as human interpretation mediates our lives, hierarchy and leadership are necessary.

And this is perhaps why our parsha begins with such a vague description of what Korach took. Each commentary interprets it differently. In a way, this highlights the very mistake of Korach—in a world of ambiguity you need different interpretations, some better than others. So long as existence is interpreted through human reason rather than the Divine word, hierarchies and injustice will continue. It is humanity’s responsibility to address and fix them in this ambiguous world.

ולכן קרח לפי טעותו שטען שכבר זכו ישראל לאור מקיף כמו שיהיה לעתיד וכמו שטען ובתוכם ה' לטעותו היה סובר שטלית שכולו תכלת פטורה מן הציצית שכבר יש לו אור מקיף בשלימות מהיראה וכמו שיהיה לעתיד.

And this is why Korach asked specifically about a garment that was made entirely out of techeles. A tallis envelopes a person completely, like a home, like revelation itself. Korach wanted the present to reflect the reality of a garment made completely from wool—a world suffused with the Divine, without hierarchy, without injustice.

We are not yet in such a world, but through our redemptive acts of Jewish commitment, collectively we can inch the world closer and closer.

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Shabbos Reads — Books/Articles Mentioned

• Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution, Shlomo Avineri

• Marx and the Kabbalah: Aaron Shemuel Lieberman’s Materialist Interpretation of Jewish History, Eliyahu Stern

• The Circle of Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto in Its Eighteenth-Century Context, Jonathan Garb

• No Masters But God: Portraits of Anarcho-Judaism, Hayyim Rothman

• The Master of the Ladder: The Life and Teachings of Rabbi Yehudah Leib Ashlag, Avraham Gottlieb (translated by Yedidah Cohen)

• The Communist Kabbalist: The Political Theology of Rav Yehudah Ashlag, Adam Zagoria-Moffet

• The Soul of the Worker, Eli Rubin

• Kaddish Denied or The Living Orphan, Avraham Eliyahu Plotkin (translated by Eli Rubin)

• Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe's Transformative Paradigm for the World, Philip Wexler and Eli Rubin

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