Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson
updated 7h ago
updated 7h ago
the particular, in all of its unpredictability, sheds light on a universal that must repeatedly articulate its universality from the vantage point of the particular.
Justin Reidy added 4mo ago
my hermeneutic belief that by digging into the soil of a specific cultural matrix one may uncover roots that lead to others.
Justin Reidy added 4mo ago
From this assumption there follows the further one that both genders are circumscribed in a closed circle of nondifferentiation—to be contrasted with an open circle of indifference—much like the serpent eating its tail, according to the archaic mythological image. A critical and influential formulation of this ideal is the zoharic description of th
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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
Justin Reidy added 4mo ago
The only truth that may be observed is truth garbed in the appearance of truth.
Justin Reidy added 4mo ago
Just as Jung equates the “inner experience of individuation” with what the mystics name “the experience of God”—the “smallest power” confronting the “greatest power,” the “smallest space” containing the “infinite”—so we can think of Schneerson becoming an “in-dividual,” that is, a “separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole,’”89 the individuated point t
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The lack of any chronological order in the sefirotic pleroma—in the language of Sefer Yeṣirah, which is frequently cited by kabbalists, “their end is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end like a flame bound to the coal”115—is the ontological underpinning of the inability to impose a linear template onto the scriptural narrative.
Justin Reidy added 4mo ago
From this vantage point, it is possible to view the life of Schneerson as a form of self-effacement, which rendered him feminine in relation to his predecessor, a point immortalized in the fact that he is buried to the left of his father-in-law.
Justin Reidy added 4mo ago
the religious philosophy that may be elicited from the body of his thought is not only conceptually sophisticated but daringly innovative.
Justin Reidy added 4mo ago