Sublime

Jews who are deeply engaged in traditional language and practice, knowledgeable in their textual heritage, and open to the wider world have the power to alter the course of contemporary Jewish life. They may never be the majority in the Jewish community, but they have the potential to engage the majority of Jews in a deep way.

the study of Ḥabad requires a hermeneutic based on a notion of time at odds with the linear conception under-girding this comment.

despite the Torah’s insistence on justice as the foundation of society, there is something prior to justice and to society itself, namely the gossamer strands of kindness that link self to self in bonds of love.

we actively decided not to make Yeshivat Hadar a pluralistic environment. For instance, all the full-time students are expected to daven together in a single service that is egalitarian and traditional. Students must also commit to living a life engaged with Torah and mitzvot. All of the faculty we hired also support this form of prayer and commitm

the innermost element of secrecy entails the expansion of consciousness, designated by the technical term da‘at, which I rendered as “mindfulness,” to the point that the soul is bound to the Infinite, a prolepsis of the messianic future.

Ḥabad messianism, which reached a climactic pitch in Schneerson, is a form of enlightened consciousness—a soterial recasting of the biblical mandate to know the name—that entails an illumination in space and time from the infinity that is beyond space and time and in virtue of which the spatial and temporal coordinates of the world are nullified in

the shift in the authority of Torah from corrosive coercion imposed to an offer of a wisdom that bubbles up, the Torah attracts attention and elicits observance because it is wise and beautiful and because it augments life.

the conjunction of the Jew to the light of Ein Sof, a monopsychic state that summons the eradication of ontic difference, biṭṭul ha-yesh, a blurring of the boundary between finite and infinite.91

What Process Theology offers is the opportunity to sandblast the philosophical overlay of Hellenistic Greece and medieval Europe off the rich, burnished grain of Bible, Rabbinics, and Kabbalah so that we can savor the actual patterns in the living wood of religion, the etz hayyim,