Panel: POLITICAL MYSTICISM: DIALOGUE AND THE DIVINE IN DARK TIMES



927.2 - "THE BREAKING OF THE VESSELS"

AUTHORS:
Davis E. (Northwestern University ~ Chicago ~ United States of America)
Text:
This paper explores Gershom Scholem's interpretation of Lurianic Kabbalah as a political theology of exile and fragmentation, arguing that it offers a distinctive lens on the moral and metaphysical foundations of international order. In Scholem's reading, the myth of shevirat ha-kelim—the "breaking of the vessels"—describes a primordial catastrophe that scattered divine sparks throughout creation. Redemption, for Scholem, thus requires not a return to wholeness but an ongoing labor of repair (tikkun) amid dispersion. Against both theological and secular fantasies of unity, Scholem's Kabbalistic historiography renders fragmentation constitutive of the world rather than a deviation from it. I read this cosmology of brokenness as a model for rethinking political order beyond sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Kabbalistic vision of a world held together by dispersed responsibility parallels modern attempts to imagine plural, non-sovereign forms of association—federal, diasporic, and transnational. Yet whereas liberal and cosmopolitan theories often seek coherence through universal norms, Scholem's exile-centered ontology resists closure: it grounds obligation in the awareness of dislocation itself. Bringing Scholem into dialogue with twentieth-century Jewish political thought and contemporary critical theories of world order, I argue that Kabbalah's metaphysics of exile articulates a moral and political realism for a shattered world. Rather than lamenting fragmentation, it transforms it into the condition of ethical relation and collective responsibility. The paper thus reimagines exile not as a failure of political unity but as the very grammar of coexistence in an unredeemed international.