Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson

exponents of Lubavitch lore—in line with other Ḥasidic masters who trace their way of thinking to the Beshṭ—have repeatedly stressed that all of reality is infused with divine light, and that the telos of human existence, which is fulfilled most perfectly in the rituals of the Jewish people, is to liberate these holy sparks from their encasement in

my hermeneutic belief that by digging into the soil of a specific cultural matrix one may uncover roots that lead to others.

From this ideational stance, cause and effect are completely reversible, and hence one can legitimately move through the present from past to future or from future to past.

The sixth Rebbe deduced from this principle that Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), the Ba‘al Shem Ṭov, “master of a good name,” generally abbreviated as the Beshṭ, should be considered the “Moses of Ḥasidism” and Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the “Moses of Ḥabad.”

Both the “secret” and the “secret that is in the secret” relate to the ontological status of the soul, but the latter, in particular, underscores that the soul is embedded in the essence of divinity, which is to say, the soul is consubstantial with God.

Just as the darkness is greatest right before the dawn, the need to propagate secrets is proportionate to the intensification of their concealment. Paradoxically, then, the dark itself is proof of the imminence of redemption,24 and the more one thinks about the darkness, the more one will think about the light.25

the very notion of a Ḥasidic rebbe must be understood as a composite figure, a corporate entity, if you will, a man whose identity is configured by his followers and perhaps also by his opponents. In

The mythopoeic axiom that God and Torah are identical—so central to the kabbalistic imaginary—presupposes that disparate matters are juxtaposed in the (dis)semblance of the name incarnate. In that respect, the Torah as primordial parable points to the inherent metaphoricity of language, the convergence of the literal and the figurative.

the quest to disseminate mystical knowledge within an intellectualist framework, thereby forging a synthesis of the ecstatic and the scientific, the mystical and the philosophical.