What Would a Jewish State Look Like? Part 2: The Halacha State - Introducing the Kabbalah State

Halacha, as a diasporic way of life, is gradually becoming obsolete in our times, and its relevance to a halachic state is laughable. In contrast, Kabbalah was a pioneering movement in human history, predating the computing revolution by being the first to formulate ideas of spiritual technology, transforming laws into corrections and tools. Therefore, in a Kabbalah state, legality would be entirely different from a Halachic state (which would merely replace the source of legal authority). In Kabbalah, unlike legal law, the law is organic to reality, like scientific law. Thus, a Kabbalah state would allow for quasi-scientific conduct and spiritual engineering, this time using information age technologies as the state's foundation

Under the Vine - The utopia of the nomadic people was anti-state, and saw spiritual rather than political orders as the social basis. A state-hater shall live  (Source)

What is the source of alienation that the law creates between the individual and the state? The idea of an external law, which must be enforced upon the person, and which can be violated without being caught and without punishment, is foreign to both religious and scientific conceptions of law. Like scientific law, religious law is not external to reality, but describes the way reality itself operates - if you sin, you will be punished, and if you do good, you will be rewarded. It doesn't need to convince the person to obey the law and respect its authority through ideology; rather, obeying the law is in the person's best interest. The idea of a human law that has a metaphysical break between it and reality itself, and therefore needs justification, like the idea of a person who has a metaphysical break between their perception and reality, and therefore needs justification - is a modern secular idea.

And while Halacha still needs an external mechanism to the natural world, of reward and punishment in the afterlife and a God who judges and sees everything from above, on which the law is founded, Kabbalah sees the law as an immanent part of reality, simply existing within it. You didn't sin against the law - you damaged reality itself, and you didn't obey the law - you fixed a hidden flaw in reality. In this, Kabbalah is much closer to the scientific perspective than Halacha, and it is indeed a phenomenon that grew alongside the scientific revolution, even preceding it in certain ideas (for example, the existence of hidden properties within material reality that are not directly measurable, like energy). The connection between scientists like Newton and Copernicus to Kabbalah and esoteric doctrine is a chapter that secular scientific history has obscured for understandable reasons.

The Kabbalistic world of legality has another similarity to the scientific world, which is the connection between law and technology. Once the law is the foundation of reality, it can be used to creatively manipulate reality. For example, one can use the laws of the upper worlds to achieve goals in this world, in the field called practical Kabbalah, or through various corrections to change the upper worlds. This idea allows us to look at the state as a kind of developing spiritual entity that can and should be changed, something that the Halachic conception of law sees as invalid, hence the inflexibility of Halacha in adapting to the modern world. According to Halacha, the law is fixed and produces nothing but obedience to God, while according to Kabbalah, the correction progresses and improves, and each time different actions must be performed to advance the construction of the spiritual entity and bring about a messianic-futuristic era.

A law programmed into the system has a tremendous advantage over an external law: it cannot be transgressed, and therefore there is no need to obey it. For example, if in the past I had to take my salary from the employer and then pay tax to the state, I could have stolen the money, or someone could have stolen the money from me, and there were many potential breaking points of the law along the way. On the other hand, if the salary is transferred automatically by bank transfer, and so is the taxation, I have become a law-abiding citizen against my will, and the law has become immanent. Information technology allows the state's law to become a law of nature. And it's not just about transferring money. Blockchain technology can also turn contracts into self-fulfilling systems, as well as other social mechanisms, such as secret voting. In blockchain elections, it will no longer be possible to cheat - with mathematical certainty. And with zero-knowledge interactive proof technologies, like those developed by Shafi Goldwasser, it will no longer be possible to commit crimes and cheat even in the computation itself. Such control technologies will make increasingly large parts of the law immanent to reality, and the state will become a kind of spiritual software - and the idea of ideological justification for the law will gradually die.

In such a state, many disputes about the proper law will turn from ideological disputes (and therefore sterile and harmful) into scientific disputes, decided through experiments. Today, for example, it is difficult to divide the state into a random experiment with two tax rates, and check which of them leads to faster growth, or how two growth rates affect other parameters. Therefore, in the absence of science - the dispute becomes ideological. In contrast, in a programmed state, driven by scientific experimentation, such an experiment is easy to perform, and its results are quickly measurable. Thus, increasingly large parts of state management will become optimization problems, solved by data experts, and eventually by algorithms, rather than by the gut feelings of countless ignoramuses. An automatic learning system can change tax rates according to various parameters, with efficiency that a human cannot compete with. Thus, a political problem can become a scientific or algorithmic problem, and technology will be able to gradually reduce human control over another human, until the gradual reduction of politics, which is the sick evil of humanity.

Technological development allows for a functioning law without a persona behind it, and this is actually just a continuation of a very deep and long-term trend in state development, from the personal to the impersonal: from the rule of the father and the charismatic tribal leader, to the rule of the dynastic king, to the rule of the oligarchy, to the rule of the people, to the rule of bureaucracy, and to the rule of the completely impersonal learning algorithm. This trend will gradually reduce the political domain and leave more and more unsolved political disputes in the individual's domain, thereby increasing their freedom - and more importantly, their intellectual freedom. Slowly, the perception will prevail that problems that cannot be solved by algorithms - such as matters of faith and culture - are not within the state's domain. The state will be perceived as the domain of automatic social regulation, too complex for human control, as the stock market is perceived today, or as traffic will look in the era of autonomous vehicles (which will eliminate traffic laws along with crime and enforcement in the field). Such a state will gradually become an organic body, which although has extensive and efficient control and monitoring mechanisms, they are not personal, just as no cell in the body controls all others, or no neuron in the brain controls others. There is no prime minister in the brain, so there can't be a Bibi [Translator's note: referring to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's long-serving Prime Minister] in it either, and this not only doesn't impair its effectiveness and adaptability - but enhances them.

How is this related to a Jewish state? Well, the greatest flaw of the state today is its takeover of private consciousness through the political domain and its blatant personalization. The illusion of influence in a democratic state causes individuals to waste endless unnecessary energies on harmful or inefficient political engagements (for example: discussion on Facebook). The importance of the Jewish anarchic vision is not only rooted in the disappearance of human control over humans, which is a problematic issue on any scale, from patriarchy to the state, and from Ben-Gurion to Bibi. The Jewish vision is critical mainly to the spiritual world of the person, which is severely polluted today by the state. The vision of a man under his vine and under his fig tree is not only a negative vision, of getting rid of foreign rule and "foreign worship", but it is a positive idea that allows engagement with the spiritual world under that vine and reading a book in peace under that fig tree. And you shall meditate on it day and night.

In the past, religious law was harshly criticized precisely because of the internalization of its mechanisms and commandments by the person, which became mechanisms of oppression and self-supervision, and severely affected the individual's consciousness. The external secular law was supposed to free us from all this. But the actual result is the opposite: the state has penetrated the consciousness of individuals through current affairs to a monstrous degree, even perverse (there are people who listen to the news every hour on the hour, and few abstain from news for a whole day). Many people around us live in a false consciousness determined by the orchestrated scandal of the day, which has no connection to their real lives, and this is seven times worse for Jews, due to their argumentative, factional, and dispute-loving nature (which enjoyed better days in the past, for example in the world of the Talmud). Therefore, the emancipation of Jews from the state is of critical importance for the continuation of their cultural heritage. They find it difficult to separate the private and cultural sphere from the public, so instead of the public sphere taking over the rest, as in totalitarian regimes, it should be gradually reduced in favor of an invisible state - a Kabbalah state. In such a state, without oppression from above - whether coercive or cognitive - the world of the spirit will rise and flourish on its own.