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4 Kabbalah and Political Power In the Sanctuary [of Jerusalem] there were windows broad within and narrow without.1 —Nahmanides One of the problems in the transmission of knowledge is the difficulty of transmitting what one has acquired through experience. How can we pass on to another person a portion of our own life? Western pedagogical tradition has always tried to convert knowledge into digestible fragments through systems of the transmission of data or knowledge. Nevertheless, while all it takes is a trained mind to understand the content of a concept or evaluate a situation based on our desires and satisfactions, illusions, and pleasures, we still run up against the problem that its intensity and quality are unrepeatable. Although the world is inherently stable, eventuality speaks to us of the changeability of our lives. Jewish mysticism presents special characteristics due to the fact that, in the Diaspora, it has always had to live embedded in other political regimes. Kabbalah (a word meaning “tradition”)2 appears as a Jewish school of mysticism that has hardly been studied until our time. In the nineteenth century, when romanticism stirred up historical interest in this spiritual tendency, prominent Jewish scholars “had little sympathy—to put it mildly—for kabbalah.”3 As Gershom Scholem points out—and we shall follow his line of thought from here—it was uncomfortable for Jewish scholars who showed their “lack of adequate knowledge of the sources or the subjects on which in many cases they venture to pass judgment.”4 This led to the peculiar circumstances that Christian scholars were the ones who showed “a real insight into the world of kabbalism.”5 As a consequence of these doubts and ambivalence, the study of the subject was neglected, and “all manner of charlatans and dreamers came and treated it as their own property.”6 The search for the unio mystica with God in order to know Him has been cultivated in Europe for centuries. Its existence is so ancient that St. 107 108 A Vigilant Society Thomas Aquinas called it cognitio Dei experimentalis, alluding to the form of knowledge where neither reason nor intellect directs the search for the proof and existence of God, but one’s own personal living experiences, that is, those extreme feelings, capable of ecstasy, of escaping from one’s being, in order to make the leap and bridge the abyss between man and his Creator. Judaism and Omnipotence Judaism has distinguished itself in the construction of Europe through its capacity to understand the strange omnipotence of the life of man, who, by contrast, is born destitute and with the genuine impotence of the baby. Its contribution to political theory consists of placing this omnipotence in the locus of power that is Yahveh and then projecting it far beyond, where omnipotence remains sealed off and inaccessible. Eric Voegelin7 very intelligently saw that this expulsion of omnipotence evolved through the idea of an alliance or covenant between God and Israel. It is a people that is alluded to as the chosen people, but in reality it is the only one who has recognized its God and to whom will be given the divine law. The Torah was given to Moses, its prophet and leader, in which its most eminent commentators would find at least 613 mitsvot (divine precepts). The Talmud, or scholarly commentary of the Torah and the precepts that Yahveh gave orally to the founders, contains the political and moral wisdom that articulates the life of the Jewish people. The fact is that such omnipotence will not remain forever isolated in a world far off, for Christianity proclaims and acknowledges the coming of Christ as the Messiah who brought with him God’s omnipotence. When seen from the perspective of Jewish life, the return of that longed-for omnipotence that will rescue them from the painful limitation and vital impotence will only happen with the coming of the Messiah, the victorious leader and liberator. Jewish existence always has something of a hope and longing for the true Messiah who will set them free. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the chessboard of Europe was clearly being dominated by Christianity. The Western world began to leave behind the bipolarity of two powerful empires, Islam and Christianity, and open its doors to the increasingly evident hegemony of the latter. The center of the political sphere had gravitated to Charlemagne’s empire, with intervals when the papacy also migrated to Occitania. Throughout the thirteenth century the...

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