Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag (Rabash)

About Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag (Rabash)

Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag was born in 1907 in Warsaw, the son of Yehuda Leib Ashlag who would later become known as the Baal HaSulam. He grew up in a household where kabbalistic study was the central activity of daily life and where his father's developing project of systematizing Lurianic Kabbalah for a broader audience shaped the intellectual atmosphere from his earliest years. The young Baruch received a thorough traditional education in Talmud and rabbinic literature alongside intensive exposure to the kabbalistic texts that his father was studying and writing about. He emigrated with his family to Jerusalem in 1922 when he was fifteen, and the Jerusalem years became his formative period as both a son and a disciple.

The relationship between Baruch and his father was unusual even by the standards of Jewish father-son rabbinic dynasties. Yehuda Ashlag explicitly designated Baruch as his successor and devoted significant attention to training him in the practical and theoretical dimensions of the Lurianic system. The training was not only textual but also experiential — the elder Ashlag taught his son the specific spiritual practices and inner work that he believed were necessary to actually live within the kabbalistic framework rather than only to study it from outside. Baruch's mature teaching reflects this combined transmission of textual mastery and experiential practice in ways that few other twentieth-century kabbalists could match.

During his father's lifetime Baruch served primarily as a student and assistant rather than as an independent teacher. He participated in the writing and editing of his father's major works, helped to maintain the small circle of students who studied with the Baal HaSulam in Jerusalem, and absorbed the entire body of his father's teaching across the years when the Sulam commentary on the Zohar and the Talmud Eser HaSefirot were taking final form. When Yehuda Ashlag died in 1954, Baruch was forty-seven years old and had spent more than three decades as his father's primary student. He took over the leadership of the small Ashlagian community in Jerusalem and began to develop his own distinctive teaching while remaining faithful to the framework his father had established.

The distinctive contribution of Baruch's mature teaching was the practical articulation of the love-your-neighbor principle within the Lurianic ethical framework his father had developed. The elder Ashlag had identified the transformation of the will from receiving for oneself to receiving for the sake of giving as the operative goal of spiritual practice, but he had presented this primarily as a theoretical framework grounded in classical kabbalistic categories. Baruch developed the practical implications of this framework, articulating how the principle was supposed to be lived in actual relationships between members of a kabbalistic community. His teachings emphasize the central role of mutual love and bestowal among students of Kabbalah as the operative practice through which the theoretical principles his father had identified could become actually transformative in daily life.

Baruch's written corpus is smaller than his father's but more focused on practical and pastoral concerns. His articles and discourses, collected after his death in volumes including the Sefer HaShlavim (Book of Steps) and the Igrot Rabash (Letters of Rabash), present the love-your-neighbor framework in language designed for direct application by students working through the kabbalistic curriculum his father had established. The articles often take the form of meditations on specific verses from the Torah or the Zohar that bear on the relationship between self and other, and they walk the reader through the inner work necessary to actually move from theoretical understanding to practical embodiment.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Baruch began to attract a new generation of students including Michael Laitman, who became his primary disciple during the last two decades of Baruch's life. Laitman, originally from the Soviet Union, brought a scientific and analytical sensibility to the Ashlagian tradition that complemented the more traditional rabbinic background of earlier students. The relationship between Baruch and Laitman during the 1980s established the framework that would become the basis for the Bnei Baruch organization that Laitman founded after Baruch's death in 1991. The name Bnei Baruch (Sons of Baruch) honors the relationship and signals the organization's claim to be the authentic continuation of Baruch's teaching.

Baruch died in 1991 in Bnei Brak at age eighty-four, having spent nearly his entire life within the Ashlagian framework first as student of his father and then as teacher of the next generation. His own published writings during his lifetime were modest in quantity, but the discourses and articles that students preserved and edited after his death have grown into a substantial corpus that the Bnei Baruch organization treats as the central source for contemporary Ashlagian practice. The relationship between Baruch's actual teaching and the form in which Bnei Baruch has presented it has become a contested question among scholars and students, with some arguing that Bnei Baruch faithfully continues Baruch's project and others suggesting that significant elements of the original have been simplified or transformed.

Baruch's personal style as a teacher reflected the contemplative warmth he had absorbed from his Polish Hasidic upbringing combined with the analytical rigor his father had developed in the Ashlagian framework. Students who studied with him during the last decades of his life describe long evening sessions in which he would walk through specific passages from his father's writings, opening up the practical implications and applying them to questions students brought from their own spiritual work. He was patient with beginners but demanding of advanced students, expecting them to actually undertake the inner work the texts described rather than treating the material as theoretical content to be intellectually mastered. The pedagogical model he developed combined careful textual study with sustained attention to the practical and pastoral dimensions of student development, and it has shaped how subsequent Ashlagian teachers including Michael Laitman have understood their role.

Contributions

Baruch's principal contribution is the practical articulation of the love-your-neighbor principle within the Lurianic ethical framework that his father had established. The elder Ashlag had identified the transformation of the will from receiving for oneself to receiving for the sake of giving as the operative goal of spiritual practice. The framework was theoretically powerful but it required practical articulation to become actually usable as a guide for contemporary contemplative community. Baruch provided this practical articulation through his articles and discourses, walking students through the specific inner work necessary to move from theoretical understanding to actual embodiment of the principle in their relationships with each other.

The practical work as Baruch articulated it begins with the recognition that the natural human will is structured to receive for the sake of self alone, and that this structure manifests in every aspect of ordinary relationships including those between students of Kabbalah who genuinely want to develop spiritually. The first stage of the practice is the development of awareness of this structure in oneself, the second is the recognition that the same structure operates in others, and the third is the creation of a community of mutual support in which members work together to develop the alternative orientation of receiving for the sake of giving. Baruch's articles return to these themes from many angles, providing practical guidance for the difficulties that students encounter at each stage and showing how the kabbalistic framework his father developed actually applies to the situations students face in daily community life.

The second major contribution was the preservation and transmission of his father's teaching during the four decades after Yehuda Ashlag's death in 1954. This was not a simple matter of repeating what his father had taught. The conditions of Israeli religious life changed substantially during these decades, the kabbalistic landscape was transformed by the emergence of various competing schools and teachers, and the audience for serious kabbalistic study shifted as immigration and demographic change reshaped the Jerusalem and Bnei Brak religious communities. Baruch maintained the core textual and theoretical framework his father had established while adapting the pedagogical approach to the changing conditions, and the Ashlagian tradition emerged from his stewardship in a stronger institutional position than it had occupied during his father's lifetime.

The third contribution was the training of the next generation of teachers including Michael Laitman, who would carry the Ashlagian tradition into the global networks of the post-1991 period. The training Baruch gave Laitman during the 1980s established the framework that became the basis for the Bnei Baruch organization, and the relationship between teacher and student during this period has become a documented case study in how mystical teaching can be transmitted across generational and cultural lines. The relationship was not without complications and the question of how faithfully Laitman has continued Baruch's actual teaching has become contested in academic and student circles, but the fact of the transmission is undisputed.

A fourth contribution, less widely recognized, was the maintenance of the Ashlagian textual tradition through the publication of new editions of his father's writings, the preparation of his father's notebooks for publication, and the editing of his father's letters and shorter writings into accessible collections. This editorial work was essential to keeping the Ashlagian textual tradition available to new generations of students and represents a substantial body of practical scholarship that has not always received the recognition it deserves.

Works

Baruch's written corpus is smaller than his father's and consists primarily of articles, discourses, and letters that were collected and edited after his death rather than texts he prepared for publication during his lifetime.

The major collections include the following.

Sefer HaShlavim (Book of Steps) is a collection of articles on the practical and ethical dimensions of Lurianic practice, organized around the stages through which a student moves in developing the alternative orientation of receiving for the sake of giving. The articles take the form of meditations on specific verses or themes and walk the reader through the inner work necessary to actually embody the kabbalistic principles his father had identified theoretically.

Dargot HaSulam (Rungs of the Ladder) is a similar collection focused on the practical implications of his father's Sulam commentary on the Zohar, treating specific Zoharic passages in light of the practical questions that students working through the curriculum encounter.

Igrot Rabash (Letters of Rabash) is a collection of letters Baruch wrote to disciples and other correspondents, addressing specific personal and spiritual questions and providing pastoral guidance for students at various stages of the kabbalistic curriculum. The letters are valuable as documentary evidence of how Baruch actually applied the Ashlagian framework to the situations his students faced and represent an important supplement to the more formal articles and discourses.

Igrot Rabash al HaTorah and similar collections include Baruch's writings on specific Torah portions and Jewish festivals, applying kabbalistic categories to the seasonal and weekly rhythm of traditional Jewish practice. These writings show how Baruch saw the Ashlagian framework as integrated with rather than separate from traditional Jewish observance.

Additional materials including transcribed lessons, recorded discourses, and supplementary writings continue to be edited and published by the Bnei Baruch organization and other parties working with the manuscript and recording materials that have survived. The complete corpus of Baruch's teaching is still being assembled and will likely continue to grow as previously unknown materials are identified and prepared for publication.

• Sefer HaShlavim. Baruch Shalom Ashlag. Multiple editions, posthumous publication.
• Dargot HaSulam. Baruch Shalom Ashlag. Multiple editions, posthumous publication.
• Igrot Rabash. Baruch Shalom Ashlag. Multiple editions, posthumous publication.
• The Question of the Existence of Jewish Mysticism. Boaz Huss. Magnes Press, 2016.
• A New Age of Kabbalah. Boaz Huss. Hebrew University, 2007.
• Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah. Jonathan Garb. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Controversies

The controversies surrounding Baruch Ashlag center on questions about the relationship between his original teaching and the form in which the contemporary Bnei Baruch organization has presented it after his death in 1991. Boaz Huss and other scholars who have studied the post-Ashlagian transmission have raised questions about whether the practices, organizational structures, and pedagogical approaches that characterize contemporary Bnei Baruch faithfully continue Baruch's actual project or have transformed it in ways that he might not have endorsed.

The first contested area concerns the institutional structure. Baruch's own teaching during his lifetime took place within a relatively small and traditional yeshiva context, with students who came to him through personal connections and rabbinic recommendation and who participated in a community life shaped by Israeli religious culture. Bnei Baruch under Laitman has developed into an international organization with branches in dozens of countries, mass distribution of materials in multiple languages, online courses available to any interested participant, and a public profile substantially different from the relatively private context in which Baruch himself worked. Some critics have argued that this institutional transformation has changed the meaning of the practice in ways that Baruch would not have intended; defenders have responded that the expansion was the natural extension of the principle Baruch and his father were teaching, that Kabbalah should become available to everyone willing to do the work.

The second contested area concerns the relationship between the Ashlagian tradition and Jewish observance more broadly. Yehuda and Baruch Ashlag were both fully observant Orthodox rabbis who saw kabbalistic practice as taking place within the framework of traditional halachic observance. Bnei Baruch under Laitman has explicitly opened its teaching to non-Jewish students and to Jews who do not maintain traditional observance, arguing that the Ashlagian framework is universal in principle and that the halachic dimensions are separable from the core kabbalistic practice. Critics including Boaz Huss have argued that this represents a substantial departure from the Ashlagian original, in which the kabbalistic and halachic dimensions were inseparable. Defenders have argued that the universalist potential of the framework was always present in Yehuda Ashlag's writings on bestowal as the operative principle of spiritual practice and that Bnei Baruch is making this potential explicit rather than betraying the original.

A third controversy concerns the publication and editorial history of Baruch's own writings. Most of the material currently in circulation as Baruch's teaching consists of articles and discourses that students preserved and edited after his death rather than texts he himself prepared for publication. The editorial choices made in these collections shape how readers encounter his thought, and the question of how accurately the published texts reflect his actual teaching has become contested. Bnei Baruch has produced its own editions of these materials that some scholars regard as interpretively shaped to support the organization's contemporary positions, while others have argued that the editions are reasonable reconstructions of an oral teaching that was not originally designed for publication.

A fourth controversy, of a different character, concerns the relationship between the academic study of Baruch and the teaching networks that present themselves as continuations of his work. Some teachers within Bnei Baruch have been wary of academic engagement with their tradition, treating scholarly analysis as a misunderstanding of practices that can only be evaluated from inside the framework. Some scholars have responded that this insularity makes serious historical and conceptual engagement difficult and that the legitimacy of the contemporary teaching networks would be strengthened by greater openness to outside examination. The negotiation between scholarly and practitioner perspectives on Baruch's legacy continues to develop.

Notable Quotes

"The whole work of the kabbalist is to acquire the second nature, the nature of bestowal, in place of the first nature with which we were born, the nature of receiving for ourselves alone." (Sefer HaShlavim, on the meaning of the spiritual work)

"Love your neighbor as yourself is the great principle of the Torah not because it is a demanding ethical commandment but because it is the only practical method by which the will to receive can be transformed into the will to bestow." (Igrot Rabash, letter to a student)

"The community of those who study together is not external to the work of Kabbalah but is the actual place where the work takes place; without the brothers there is no Kabbalah, only books about Kabbalah." (Dargot HaSulam, on the role of community)

"My father the Baal HaSulam used to say that the entire wisdom of the Kabbalah comes to teach us how to love, and that anyone who studies Kabbalah without practicing love has missed the entire purpose of the study." (Attributed teaching preserved by students)

Legacy

Baruch's legacy operates primarily through the contemporary Bnei Baruch organization founded by Michael Laitman after Baruch's death in 1991. The name Bnei Baruch (Sons of Baruch) signals the organization's claim to be the authentic continuation of Baruch's teaching, and the organization's curriculum draws extensively on Baruch's articles and discourses as the operative texts for contemporary practice. Bnei Baruch has grown from its origins as a small circle of Laitman's students in the 1990s into an international organization with branches and student populations in dozens of countries, materials translated into multiple languages, and an active program of publishing, teaching, and outreach that has brought Ashlagian categories to a global audience.

The relationship between Baruch's actual teaching during his lifetime and the form in which Bnei Baruch has organized it for mass distribution is one of the contested questions in academic studies of contemporary popular Kabbalah. Boaz Huss has documented specific transformations in the transmission, including changes in the institutional structure, the opening of teaching to non-Jewish students, and the editorial framing of Baruch's writings for contemporary audiences. The question of whether these transformations represent faithful continuation or significant departure from the Ashlagian original has not received a settled scholarly answer.

Beyond the Bnei Baruch organization, Baruch's legacy operates through the broader Ashlagian textual tradition that includes his father's Yehuda Ashlag's Sulam commentary on the Zohar, the Talmud Eser HaSefirot, and the philosophical introductions, all of which Baruch preserved and continued to teach throughout his life. The contemporary availability of the Ashlagian textual tradition in print and electronic form, in Hebrew and in translation, owes much to the editorial and pedagogical work that Baruch maintained during the four decades between his father's death and his own. Without his stewardship, the Ashlagian project might have fragmented or faded after the elder Ashlag's death rather than developing into the global teaching tradition it has become.

For the academic study of modern and contemporary Kabbalah, Baruch is recognized as a major figure in the second-generation transmission of Lurianic thought into the conditions of the late twentieth century. Gershom Scholem did not engage extensively with Baruch's work, in part because Scholem's primary attention was directed at earlier historical material, but contemporary scholars including Huss and Garb have placed Baruch within the broader history of modern Kabbalah and have engaged seriously with his theoretical and pastoral contributions. Moshe Idel has acknowledged the importance of the Ashlagian school more broadly within modern kabbalistic developments.

The specific contribution of practical articulation of love-your-neighbor ethics within the Lurianic framework has been recovered by readers from outside the strictly kabbalistic context who have found in Baruch's teaching a contribution to the practical theology of religious community more broadly. His articulation of how a contemplative community can function as the operative laboratory for transformation of motivation has been compared to similar developments in other contemporary religious traditions and has contributed to broader conversations about the role of community in contemplative practice.

The connection between Baruch and the other major branch of post-Ashlagian transmission through Philip Berg and the Kabbalah Centre is documented in Boaz Huss's studies of the contested receptions of Ashlagian thought. Berg studied with both Yehuda and Baruch Ashlag in Jerusalem in the 1960s before founding the Kabbalah Centre in the United States, and the Centre's framework drew on Ashlagian categories that Berg had absorbed from Baruch even where the Centre's institutional and pedagogical approach diverged significantly from Baruch's more traditional style.

Significance

Baruch Ashlag's significance lies in his role as the bridge between his father's foundational synthesis of Lurianic Kabbalah and the contemporary popular Kabbalah movements that have drawn on the Ashlagian framework to reach mass audiences. The elder Ashlag had produced the textual and theoretical foundation — the Sulam commentary, the Talmud Eser HaSefirot, the philosophical introductions — but he had not lived to see how this foundation would be transmitted to broader audiences in the changing conditions of the second half of the twentieth century. Baruch occupied the bridge position between the two eras, carrying his father's teaching faithfully through the four decades after the elder Ashlag's death and training the disciples who would take it to wider audiences in the post-1991 period.

The practical articulation of the love-your-neighbor principle within the Lurianic ethical framework is Baruch's most distinctive theoretical contribution. The elder Ashlag had identified the transformation of will from self-interested receiving to other-directed giving as the operative goal of kabbalistic practice, but he had presented this primarily through theoretical exposition grounded in classical categories. Baruch developed the practical and relational dimensions of this framework, articulating how the principle was supposed to be embodied in actual relationships between students of Kabbalah and how mutual love within a kabbalistic community could function as the operative laboratory in which the theoretical principles were tested and developed. This practical articulation was essential to making the Ashlagian framework available as a basis for contemporary contemplative community rather than only as a body of theoretical doctrine.

For the contemporary Bnei Baruch organization founded by Michael Laitman after Baruch's death, Baruch is treated as the immediate source of the practical teaching that the organization continues to develop. The name Bnei Baruch signals this claim, and the organization's curriculum draws extensively on Baruch's articles and discourses as the operative texts for contemporary practice. The relationship between Baruch's actual teaching during his lifetime and the form in which Bnei Baruch has organized it for mass distribution is one of the active questions in academic studies of contemporary popular Kabbalah, with Boaz Huss and others tracing the specific transformations that have occurred in the transmission.

For the broader history of modern Kabbalah, Baruch represents the second-generation problem that every founding mystical teacher's successor faces: how to remain faithful to a powerful original synthesis while also developing it in response to changing conditions and new audiences. Baruch handled this challenge through a strategy of conservative continuation combined with practical extension, preserving his father's textual and theoretical framework essentially intact while developing the practical and pastoral dimensions that the elder Ashlag had not had time to articulate fully. The strategy has proved durable, and the Ashlagian tradition through Baruch and his successors has continued to grow in size and influence rather than fragmenting or fading after the founder's death as many comparable traditions have done.

For the relationship between Jewish mysticism and contemporary spiritual practice more broadly, Baruch's emphasis on mutual love within a contemplative community connects the Ashlagian tradition to similar practices in other religious traditions and to the broader contemporary interest in community-based contemplative work. His specific articulation of how Lurianic categories of giving and receiving translate into the actual texture of relationships within a community of practitioners has been studied by readers from outside the strictly kabbalistic framework as a contribution to the practical theology of religious community.

Connections

Baruch's intellectual lineage is the most direct possible: he was the son and primary disciple of Yehuda Ashlag, and his entire teaching career consisted of receiving, preserving, and developing his father's synthesis of Lurianic Kabbalah. Through his father he absorbed the full Lurianic legacy traceable back to Rabbi Isaac Luria via the Vital recension and the systematic expositions developed by Moshe Chaim Luzzatto and others. The Hasidic background of his early Polish education connected him to the broader transmission of Baal Shem Tov and the Hasidic recensions of Lurianic thought that had shaped his father's approach.

Baruch's central textual sources were the same as his father's: the Zohar (which he studied through his father's Sulam commentary), the Etz Chaim of Chaim Vital, and his father's own systematic Talmud Eser HaSefirot and Sulam writings. He studied these texts not as objects of academic interest but as the operative curriculum for the spiritual practice he was developing and teaching to his own students. The earlier Sefer Yetzirah appears in his teaching where the discussion of language and the divine names becomes relevant.

Within the broader history of Lurianic Kabbalah, Baruch occupies the second-generation position in his father's school and serves as the link between the original Ashlagian synthesis and the contemporary teaching networks that have grown out of it. He had contact with other Jerusalem and Bnei Brak kabbalists during his lifetime, including figures connected to the Beit El tradition founded by Shalom Sharabi and to the various Hasidic courts active in the Israeli religious landscape, but his teaching remained focused on the Ashlagian framework his father had established rather than incorporating substantial elements from these other traditions.

The transmission line that runs from Baruch to the contemporary Bnei Baruch organization passes through Michael Laitman, who became Baruch's primary disciple in the last two decades of his life and who founded Bnei Baruch after Baruch's death in 1991. Through Laitman and the Bnei Baruch organization, Baruch's teaching has reached audiences in dozens of countries and has been translated into multiple languages. The other major branch of the post-Ashlagian transmission runs through Philip Berg, who studied with both Yehuda and Baruch Ashlag in Jerusalem in the 1960s before founding the Kabbalah Centre in the United States, though Berg's institutional approach diverged significantly from the more traditional pedagogical style that Baruch maintained.

For the academic recovery of his thought, Boaz Huss has produced the most sustained engagement with Baruch's teaching as part of his broader studies of modern and contemporary popular Kabbalah. Jonathan Garb has placed Baruch within the broader history of psychological thought in modern Kabbalah. The relationship between Baruch's original teaching and its contemporary reception in Bnei Baruch and other post-Ashlagian movements is one of the active questions in contemporary scholarship on popular Kabbalah.

Further Reading