HEGEMONY

The Zohar has much to say in various subtle ways about hegemony, leadership, predominance. It tells us that God appointed supernal ministers over all nations with the single exception of Israel, which He retained for Himself. It is extremely important in thinking about the Zohar not to take any references to particular peoples literally. Israel represents all righteous people everywhere, all those who seek to live a good life under the guidance of God Himself, believing in His justice and wisdom and having faith in His divine plan for the world. All the other nations are those people who do not live in this way, or who choose to make worldly things their gods. Egypt in particular is not the country of the Nile; it is the symbol for the material world, for the worship of goods and wealth that overcome so many people during their lifetimes. The Zohar is not so much denigrating true worship of God under other names as it is pointing out by use of metaphor that those who are not under the direct rule of God are under the direct rule of other ministers who are lower than He and who do not love and care for their charges in the same way that He does.

Rabbi Shimon says (Pequdei Section 14) that in the world above, the holy side knows and protects all of its own, and the Other Side knows and controls all of its own. The Zohar does not pick up on this particular subtle point, but it is crucial to the understanding of the difference between being under God’s hegemony and someone else’s. The pivotal word is of course ‘control’. Since God has given us free will, He leaves us free to act as we will, while at the same time He loves and protects us from even our worst evils as long as we return to Him with sincere repentance. The Other Side — Satan, Samael, the Adversary, whatever he is called — MUST control its slaves because its agenda is actually subjugation. Its agenda as seen in the Zohar is to draw people into the darkness, to encourage in them the incorrect use of power. This is evidenced in the many sections that talk about Balak and Bilaam the sorcerers, and about the many descriptions that are made of their methods and their partnership with the Other Side. And the subjugation of the world itself is no small part of that agenda — the overthrow of other people and of nature itself to serve its own ends.

The issue of hegemony in the Zohar is many-layered. We can explore it from the point of view of God’s authority, of where the authority is vested in any household and family, of the authority under which a township or province or nation dwells, and of the authority that is rightfully placed to be the caretaker of the whole earth. At each of these levels it is easy to see how the Zohar is saying that right authority is critical for proper balance, and that subjugation to wrong authority will always lead the person or the family or the nation or the whole world away from the light and to the darkest levels of Gehenom. There is nothing very subtle about this, and it seems obvious when the eye is cast over the entire landscape of the Zohar.

It begins not so much when God creates the heavens and the earth and all therein, but when he says to Adam: “To you I give the rule of all that you see, the rule over these creatures I have made”. This is the first instance where God gives away some of His own power, and it is at the same time that He also gives the living beings on earth His own power to reproduce, to bring the seed to the womb and make new life. In terms of hegemony in the Zohar, Yesod is the central focus primarily because the power to make life is the greatest power available to mankind, and this power is embodied in the Sfirah Yesod.

It is for this reason that women are so disempowered in the Zohar. The text seems to be unthinkingly and relentlessly misogynistic, and this must and does somewhat devalue the Zohar as a document for our times. However, it helps if we understand the overall concepts of rulership and right authority as laid out throughout the many sections. The male or active principle is the last of the Sfirot above Malchut, which is the receptive feminine principle of the earth itself, and which is often identified with the Shechinah, the feminine aspect of the Godhood. Since God is in each of the qualities that the Sfirot allude to, He is in the quality of Yesod that powerful and impregnating principle that is necessary to create life in the first place — any life. It is my view that the thinking of the rabbis goes like this: I have some wine and I have a jar. I must have something to hold the wine, for otherwise it spills onto the ground and I have nothing, so the jar is important. But the important thing is the wine; that is the treasure for which I must find a safe place. The jar is important only insofar as it enables the wine to be saved. And in this analogy the jar is of course the womb, the receptacle. To use another totally different analogy, the earth is important as the receptacle and support for the seed, but it is the seed that is of most importance.

What does this have to do with hegemony? From identifying Yesod, the source of seed, the male principle, as the treasure, the extension was made to thinking that men themselves were the treasure. From identifying Malchut, the womb, the female principle, as the necessary but not so important receptacle, the extension was made to thinking that women themselves were not so important.

It’s interesting that the Zohar does not necessarily equate power with the right to rule, so I don’t think that women were considered to be less important because they had less physical strength. It is nowhere implied that they had less value because they couldn’t hunt or work as hard or because they spent a lot of time incapacitated by pregnancies. The error of mistaking the role of the feminine and masculine principles for the feminine and masculine roles in society was made thousands of years ago in many religions and societies and has never been corrected.

The reason I pursue this point is because it is paradoxical that the role of the Shechinah is considered to be so absolutely critical to the restoration of the World to Come, the release from exile of all righteous people, and the reunion of the lower world with the upper world. God gives the Shechinah the tremendous power and responsibility of looking after the righteous while they are in exile, i.e. while they are on this earth under the rule of duality. He releases to Her all of His hegemony for these times, and He languishes through missing her so much. In this tale as told by the Zohar God cannot complete the world without His Shechinah. And what we find now seems to contradict the first sentence of this chapter. Far from retaining for Himself absolute governance over all the righteous, He has given this power over to her during the time of the exile.

This seems to require a definition of the exile. On the surface it refers to the four times that Israel has been exiled from the Holy Land. One layer deeper it means the exile that all experience when they are incarnated and are far from their spiritual home and from the ability to communicate with spirit. On another layer below that it means the separation of the spirit from the light that created it. To understand this on an even deeper level yet we must remember that the Zohar says when the light filled the spirits before their birth they were brought before God where He showed them the Garden of Eden and Gehenom, and made it clear which place would be their future if they did or did not follow His precepts. Therefore all spirits know on some deep level that they can reunite with God through correct behavior, and thus they are not really exiled because they have that promise. The deepest layer of exile comes instead from the deepest problem that people have: the inability to believe that God’s light will ever be restored to them. And it is at this level of exile that the Shechinah has the most hegemony and the most effect.

At the highest level she traveled before Israel as a light as they struggled through the wilderness. On the next level she stays with each person as they go through their lives, as the small point of God’s light inside every heart. On the next level she speaks to people in dreams to remind them of the greater Light. And on the deepest level she keeps faith alive in those who plead for her help in the face of their own suffering.

These sorts of interpretations arise because the Shechinah is spoken of as separate from God in many sections. But if we reunite her with God, and consider her to be the feminine aspect of God that is present in everything, the feminine principle of His spirit, we see how He does indeed retain hegemony over Israel in exile, at every level of their exile from heaven and from Him. And we can use the same argument to see how the hegemony that He gave to Adam was never given away either because Adam was also part of God, was the incarnational aspect of God that is present in everything on earth. And however heretical it sounds, Adam is every person living on the planet today. The authority that we hold over the planet — over its bones and flesh, its minerals and soil, its water and air — still belongs to God because we are that aspect of God that arises through the materialization of spirit. If we act in accordance with His desire, then we exercise our hegemony in exactly the same way that He would exercise it. And thus He has still retained the governance of Israel for Himself. If we give our hegemony to the Other Side then we are acting under the governance of the ministers of the Other Side, who will control us and the world instead of protecting us and the world. And the consequences of that are plain to see by looking at cracked storage bins for nuclear waste, at blobs of oil falling from the skies during the war in the Middle East, and at people lying in the gutters in more countries than one.

Rabbi Shimon says that The Other Side cannot rule over the Righteous. This now becomes self-evident, for as soon as people are righteous they automagically come back under God’s rule.