Kabbalah and Economics

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post</a>, I compared Kabbalah to Haskell. It's only fitting that my next post compares Kabbalah to another topic I blog about frequently: economics. Heads up in advance that this post will be very revealing about my political/economic compass.

It's all about want</h2>
One of the first things you learn in economics is about wants. Human beings want things. Those things are scarce. Economics analyzes how these scarce things—food, water, cell phones, land, and more—are allocated, based on people's wants and preferences.
You would think that Jewish mysticism would have nothing to do with that. But instead, a core concept in Kabbalah is the ratzon lekabel, or desire to receive. God created the world out of a desire to give. In order to give, He needed something to receive. The essence of the created beings is this desire to receive. Or, putting other words to it, the core of creation is want.
The Kabbalistic story doesn't stop at desire to receive. We want to achieve affinity of form with God. Which means acquiring a nature of giving. This is incredibly difficult, because the core of our creation is the desire to receive. Kabbalah describes how to achieve this giving nature. We'll get to that a bit later.
But things aren't quite as simple as desire to receive vs desire to give. Within the Kabbalistic framing, we distinguish between the action and the intent. And we end up with four levels:

Receiving (action) to receive (intent) This is a fully selfish form of receiving, and is our natural state. That doesn't mean "you're a bad person for being like this." It means it's the starting point. Think of a baby: all it does is eat because it wants to eat. That's quintessential receiving to receive.</li>
Giving (action) to receive (intent) You still desire to receive, your actions are geared towards receiving. However, your acts are now acts of giving. A lot of our actions in this world fall into this category. When I go to work, I'm rarely doing it out of purely altruistic motivation. I'm doing it to receive a paycheck.</li>
Giving (action) to give (intent) This is already beyond the level most of us achieve in this world. It's true altruism, true selflessness. One of the ways we get close to this is giving to our loved ones. But even there, there's generally at least some level of intent to receive: the happiness of seeing a loved one's appreciation, for example.</li>
Receiving (action) to give (intent) This is, perhaps surprisingly, the highest level we can achieve. Why it's greater than giving to give is because, unlike giving to give, this actually fulfills the purpose of creation (receiving). But this is a subtle point, and not really necessary for the economics comparison. So we'll focus on the first three levels instead.</li> </ul>
At this point, we're going to veer away from strict Kabbalistic definitions, and instead use these receiving and giving terms in more economics-friendly ways.
Violence: receiving to receive</h2>
An extreme form of receiving to receive is violence. Theft, pillage, conquering, enslaving... all of these are an act of receiving, fully with the intent of receiving. There's no giving at all.
That's not to say that every form of receiving to receive necessitates violence. Receiving a gift from another person can be receiving to receive. But violence definitely falls into this category too.
Much of human history has lived under receiving to receive economic systems. These kinds of systems are destructive. They lead to lack of societal progress. People rarely advocate for such systems today.
Free markets: giving to receive</h2>
By free markets, I'm going to focus on idealized versions. By that, I mean a system where:

No one is forced to participate in a trade</li>
All trade is fully voluntary</li>
Participants have full access to information to avoid being deceived</li>
Courts enforce laws and contracts fairly and equally</li>
Money is hard: it cannot be created by privileged parties cheaply</li> </ul>
Under these assumptions, there's only one way to get money: offer someone with money something they value more than the money for trade. I'd describe that as a perfect example of giving to receive. If I sell you an apple for $2, I haven't coerced you into buying it, and you're well aware of your other options for buying food, then the trade means you value the apple more than the $2.
In this case, I'm giving you the apple. The act is one of giving. (Yes, it's also an act of receiving the money.) But the intent isn't altruistic. I'm not giving you the apple because I want to give you the apple. I'm doing it because I want the money. I want to receive. It just so happens that the economic system forces me to give in order to receive.
Becoming selfless under free markets</h2>
In practice, many people in free market systems do end up engaging in nominally selfless acts. They give charity, spend time volunteering, and so on. And far be it from me to criticize such actions! Those are wonderful things for people to do, and it's wonderful that free markets tend to encourage people in such directions.
But rarely, if ever, would these be truly "selfless" in the Kabbalistic sense. I already hinted at this above. There's usually a selfish ulterior motive associated with these things. That motive could be feeling good about yourself, wanting to avoid the negative feeling of the suffering of others, social pressure, social status, or tax write-offs.
Again, it's great that people give, even if the motivations aren't pure. But ultimately, free markets cannot, on their own, help us escape from selfishness. Free markets don't try to combat selfishness. Instead, they channel that selfishness, through incentives, towards productivity and wealth creation.
It's a great way to create a productive, modern world. It's not a great way to fulfill the purpose of Creation.
Socialism: the shortcut to giving?</h2>
If we truly want to evolve to selflessness and a world of giving, capitalism and free markets appear to be a dead end. And to be fair, many free market advocates would argue that selflessness isn't a good goal to strive for anyway. Selfishness makes the world go round.
But let's say you want to live in a world of selfless giving. Free markets are greedy by nature. Instead of "free exchange of goods between willing partners," you base your economic philosophy around:

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need </blockquote>
The system gives. It gives people what they need. Selfish wants disappear. All needs are met. People selflessly give.
Except, of course, for the fact that this has never happened. Not in one example of socialism did the system work out as I just described.

There's never enough wealth to fulfill the wants of every person. Scarcity hasn't been defeated.</li>
Defining "need" is complex. Do you need to take a shower every day? Or are you just wasting water?</li>
People don't selflessly give. They give at gunpoint.</li>
When the connection between production and reward is weakened, the incentive to produce weakens too.</li>
People find other, non-monetary ways to compete for reward, status, and power.</li> </ul>
I'm sure many readers are strongly disagreeing with this point. (Or rather, if anyone with socialist leanings got through the previous section without rage quitting, they're disagreeing.) Maybe you truly believe there's a way to fix all these problems somehow.
My Kabbalistic response is: you can't. You can't uproot the desire to receive like this. It's the core of who and what we are. Trying to take the shortcut to a world of giving, at the end of the barrel of a gun, will never work.
In my opinion, socialism has the right goal, but achieves the exact opposite of its intent. Using the Kabbalistic framing:

Capitalism/free markets sit squarely in the giving to receive world, and can never naturally improve beyond that.</li>
Advocates of socialism want to push us into a world of giving to give (the right goal).</li>
But in practice, by doing so through force, they aren't encouraging people to selflessly give. They're using force to take from some people and redistribute to others, while calling the resulting transfer an act of giving. In other words, socialism is a reversion back to the realm of receiving to receive.</li> </ul>
The Kabbalistic answer</h2>
So how do you become selfless? It's not at gunpoint. It's not through coercion. The Kabbalistic answer is to do acts of giving, with the intention of becoming a giving person.
There's far more to that story than I've just said. In Rav Ashlag's framework, this is deeply connected with learning Torah and performing mitzvot (commandments) for the sake of heaven. The relationship between that and "giving with the intent of becoming a giving person" is a somewhat shocking revelation. It's not something I'll dive into further here, but if you're interested in the topic, Kuntres Matan Torah</a> is a good starting point.
But there's a form of that answer I can give here that's far more readily adaptable by most. The way to start giving with pure intent is to give, at the small scale, with as much love as you can. The simplest is to start with your spouse, your children, and your close friends. The goal isn't perfection in intent. The goal is to begin the process of refining your will from one of pure egoistic desire to love of your fellow.
I don't think we're ready for socialism. We're not ready for large-scale selflessness-based systems. We need to let the engine of selfishness run the macro, while the core of selflessness can develop in the micro.
Low time preference</h2>
And this is my final parting thought. One of the central ideas in Kabbalah is the masach, or screen. It's a complex topic that I won't fully explain here. But I will give a simple if incomplete analogy. The screen says: I won't immediately and automatically receive the thing I want right now. I will push it away, and receive it in a more refined form.
That description, while not the literal one of a masach, sounds remarkably like the economic concept of low time preference. Low time preference means: instead of wanting to consume everything immediately, I'm willing to defer my consumption, invest in the future, save my money, and consume in the future.
Putting money in an interest-bearing account would be an example of low time preference behavior.
Saving money so I can use it in the future is not a selfless act. It's remarkably selfish, in fact! But it still has the same shape as developing towards selflessness: being willing to forgo my immediate wants. One way of looking at it, if a bit stretched, is that I am selflessly giving to my future self.
One of the complaints I (and many others) have about the modern financial world is that its inflationary nature necessarily reduces the incentive to behave in a low time preference way. Said another way: the fact that $10 in five years will buy less than $10 buys today pushes the incentive somewhat toward consuming that $10 sooner, acting more selfishly, focusing on my immediate needs, and bypassing the masach or screen concept. Inflation can also encourage investment instead of consumption, but it clearly discourages simply holding cash.
Maybe, just maybe, moving towards a hard money system is one way the world can evolve to one of selflessness. But don't worry, this post is long enough already, I won't turn it into a Bitcoin advocacy bit. And I'm definitely not claiming that Bitcoin is a sign of the redemption... that would be crazy!

Kabbalah, Haskell, and the ST Monad

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the past year, I’ve been learning Kabbalah for the first time in my life. It has been a fascinating journey. I haven’t really shared much about it publicly, and I’m not sure whether I’m going to continue discussing it on this blog or anywhere else.

However, I recently ran into an overlap between Kabbalistic teachings and purely functional programming which is, frankly, kind of hilarious. So I figured I would write something down for the three other people in the world who may be interested in this intersection.

To the other Kabbalistic religious Jews who know a little bit of Haskell: hey there.

This is a weird post to write, because I’m basically aiming at an audience that may know the functional programming side, may know the Kabbalistic side, may know both, or may know neither. So I’m going to introduce both. Let’s start with the part I’m much more comfortable with: functional programming.

Immutability</h2>

Let’s say you have a list of numbers:

[</span>1</span>,</span> 2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>]</span></span></code></pre>
And you want to add one to each number, ending up with:</p>
[</span>2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>,</span> 6</span>]</span></span></code></pre>
In many programming languages, the natural way to think about this is mutation. Somewhere in the computer’s memory, there are five numbers. We go to that memory and modify the values in place.</p>
Purely functional programming languages like Haskell don’t really like this approach. One reason is that mutation makes code harder to reason about. Another is aliasing: if two different parts of your program are both referring to the same list, and one part changes the list, the other part is now holding on to something different from what it thought it had.</p>
So one of the core ideas in Haskell, and in purely functional programming more generally, is immutability.</p>
Once a value exists, you don’t change it.</p>
But of course, we still need to “change” things. Programs that can’t produce new values aren’t very useful. So instead of modifying an existing value, we create a new value based on the old one.</p>
In our example, we don’t mutate:</p>
[</span>1</span>,</span> 2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>]</span></span></code></pre>
into:</p>
[</span>2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>,</span> 6</span>]</span></span></code></pre>
Rather, we create a new list. The old list still exists. The new list exists too.</p>
Now let’s make this a little more concrete. Imagine we had an operation that modifies one position in a list. You tell it which position you want to modify, how you want to modify it, and it gives you back a new list.</p>
We could use that operation like this:</p>
[</span>1</span>,</span> 2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>]</span></span>
[</span>2</span>,</span> 2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>]</span></span>
[</span>2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>]</span></span>
[</span>2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>]</span></span>
[</span>2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>,</span> 5</span>]</span></span>
[</span>2</span>,</span> 3</span>,</span> 4</span>,</span> 5</span>,</span> 6</span>]</span></span></code></pre>
Conceptually, this works. We never mutated any list. Every step produced a new list.</p>
The problem is that this is terribly inefficient. We didn’t really want five intermediate lists. We wanted one final list.</p>
Now, of course, we can define better operations for this specific case. We can use map (+1)</code>, and everything is wonderful. That’s not the point I’m getting at here.</p>
The question is: what happens when we want the efficiency of mutation, but we still want the safety and reasoning benefits of immutability?</p>
The ST monad</h2>
This is where the ST</code> monad comes in.</p>
I am not going to try to give a full explanation of monads here. That way lies madness, blog comments, and probably someone correcting me on category theory. For our purposes, a monad gives us a way to sequence operations. Do this, then do that, then do the next thing.</p>
The ST</code> monad is particularly interesting because it lets us perform local mutation inside an otherwise pure program.</p>
A typical pattern looks something like this:</p>

Start with an immutable vector.</li>
Create a mutable copy of it inside ST</code>.</li>
Mutate that copy in place.</li>
Freeze it back into an immutable vector.</li>
Return the immutable result.</li>
</ol>
From the outside, nobody can observe the mutation. The mutable vector never escapes. The rest of the program just sees a pure function from one immutable value to another immutable value.</p>
That means we can do something mutation-like internally while preserving the external semantics of pure functional programming.</p>
Or, since I’m already writing a Jewish blog post: the mutation is kosher.</p>
The key idea is containment. Haskell as a language does not generally embrace arbitrary mutation. But it gives us a controlled environment where local mutation is allowed, as long as the mutation cannot leak out and break the guarantees of the rest of the program.</p>
Put differently: inside this little sealed-off world, mutation exists. From the outside, the whole thing is just one pure action.</p>
Let’s put that to the side for a moment and switch to Kabbalah.</p>
אין העדר ברוחני</h2>
One of the core ideas I’ve encountered in Kabbalistic learning is:</p>
אין העדר ברוחני</p>
There is no absence in the spiritual.</p>
Or said another way: in spirituality, nothing is ever erased, destroyed, or removed.</p>
That is a very strange idea from the perspective of our physical world. In our world, things change all the time. A building stands, and then it is knocked down. A cup is whole, and then it breaks. A document exists, and then someone deletes it. A person is in one emotional state, and later they are in a different emotional state.</p>
We naturally think in terms of mutation. Something was one way, and now it is another way.</p>
But in the spiritual system, as I understand it, that is not what happens. When something “changes,” the original state is not destroyed. Instead, a new state comes into being.</p>
Let’s take one example.</p>
In Kabbalistic terminology, there is a concept called a מסך, a screen. The screen has some level of עביות, usually translated as thickness or coarseness. That thickness can be at different levels: Shoresh, Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet.</p>
Let’s say there is a Masach at level Dalet. It is exposed to light, and the light refines it, bringing it down to level Gimel.</p>
In our normal physical intuition, we would say: the Masach used to be level Dalet, and now it has changed into level Gimel.</p>
But spiritually, that’s not quite right. The level Dalet state is not erased. It remains. The refinement gives rise to a new state, a new Masach, now at level Gimel.</p>
The old thing was not modified.</p>
A new thing was created.</p>
This sounds suspiciously familiar</h2>
At this point, the overlap should be pretty obvious.</p>
The Kabbalistic idea that nothing is ever removed or changed in spirituality sounds a lot like immutability in Haskell.</p>
In Haskell, if I have a value, I don’t mutate that value. I create a new value based on the old one.</p>
In the spiritual system, as I’m currently understanding it, a spiritual state is not mutated into a different spiritual state. The original state remains, and the new state emerges from it.</p>
That’s already a neat overlap. But for me, the more interesting part is the connection to ST</code>.</p>
Because we clearly do not experience our world this way.</p>
In this physical world, mutation seems very real. Things change. Things decay. Things are built, broken, refined, damaged, repaired, and transformed. We live in time and space. We experience before and after. We experience cause and effect. We experience becoming.</p>
And that makes me wonder whether our physical world is, in some sense, like one giant ST</code> action.</p>
Inside the ST</code> monad, mutation is real. You really can modify a mutable vector. You really can write to a mutable reference. Step one happens, then step two happens, then step three happens.</p>
But from the outside, the entire ST</code> computation is pure. No mutation leaked out. The outside world doesn’t see the intermediate states. It sees one pure transformation from input to output.</p>
That feels like a surprisingly good analogy for our world.</p>
Inside this world, mutation is real. Time is real. Our choices are real. Actions matter. Things can be damaged, repaired, elevated, or corrupted.</p>
But from a higher spiritual perspective, perhaps the entirety of this world is one contained process. We begin from one state. We go through the entire history of this world, with all of its apparent mutations, choices, actions, and consequences. And at the end, there is a final corrected state.</p>
Inside the process, mutation.</p>
Outside the process, immutability.</p>
To be clear: I am not claiming this is a rigorous Kabbalistic model. Please do not build theology on top of my Haskell analogy. That way lies even more madness than monad tutorials.</p>
But as an analogy, it feels useful.</p>
Programming as spiritual training wheels</h2>
There is a broader point here that I keep noticing.</p>
A lot of Kabbalistic ideas are incredibly abstract. That’s not a complaint. They are supposed to be abstract. We are dealing with realities that are not physical, not spatial, and not bound by the categories we normally use to understand the world.</p>
But modern life gives us access to abstractions that earlier generations simply did not encounter in the same way.</p>
Programming is one of the clearest examples.</p>
In Kabbalah, distance is not necessarily physical distance. Spiritual distance is measured by similarity and difference of form. Two things are “close” if they are similar in form, and “far” if they are different in form.</p>
That sounds strange if your only model of location is physical space.</p>
But if you write software, this isn’t that strange.</p>
In a computer game, an object may have an on-screen location: it is standing next to a tree, or inside a room, or ten meters away from another character. But where is that object “really”? It may be stored in memory somewhere completely unrelated to any of those visual relationships. Two objects that are “next to each other” in the game world may be nowhere near each other in memory. Two objects next to each other in memory may have nothing to do with each other in the game.</p>
The represented space and the storage space are not the same thing.</p>
As programmers, we deal with these kinds of distinctions all the time. We constantly move between levels of abstraction. We understand that something can be “located” in one structure conceptually while being represented somewhere entirely different physically. We understand that identity, equality, reference, state, and transformation are not simple ideas.</p>
That doesn’t make Kabbalah easy. I’m not sure anything makes Kabbalah easy.</p>
But I do think that spending a lifetime programming has given me some mental handles that make certain Kabbalistic ideas easier to approach. Or at least easier to misunderstand in interesting ways.</p>
And this itself lines up with an idea I’ve heard in Kabbalistic learning: as we approach redemption, these teachings become more accessible and more widespread. I don’t know exactly what to do with that idea yet. But it is interesting to me that the modern world is filled with abstractions that make some of these concepts less foreign than they may have been centuries ago.</p>
No grand conclusion</h2>
I don’t have a big takeaway here.</p>
I’m not announcing a new series. I’m not claiming to have discovered the secret Haskell encoding of the עולמות. I’m definitely not suggesting that the Ari was secretly using runST</code>.</p>
Mostly, I’m sharing a surprising overlap between two parts of my life that I never expected to meet.</p>
On one side: Haskell, immutability, and the ST</code> monad.</p>
On the other side: אין העדר ברוחני, spiritual states that are not erased, and a physical world where change and mutation appear to be very real.</p>
And sitting somewhere in the middle: one religious Jewish programmer, slightly amused that the mental model he used to explain mutable vectors may also help him think about Kabbalah.</p>

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