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

The one who acquires this gnosis perceives that the world is suffused with divine reality, that there is, paraphrasing the zoharic locution favored by many Ḥasidic masters, no place devoid of the divine.

a hyperliteral reading of the rabbinic dictum that the wicked are called “dead” even in their lives, whereas the righteous are called “living” even in their deaths.

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.

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.

As Naftali Loewenthal surmised, the selective employment of Lurianic concepts by Shneur Zalman was an attempt “to make the teachings of the Maggid and the Baal Shem Tov rationally meaningful to a Hasidic following which was composed of scholarly men who, in the main, made no claim to pneumatic attainment.”

water corresponds to the exoteric meaning and wine to the esoteric.

one might even say the midrashic temperament is captured in the saying “There is no before or after in Scripture” (ein muqdam u-me’uḥar ba-torah), a dictum that philosophically implies that what comes after may be before what comes before it was after.

what is new is new precisely because it is old, that what is disclosed in the guise of the unprecedented is a concealment of the erstwhile.

“the more that one comprehends, the comprehension itself necessitates additionally that there are matters above the intellect, to the point of the saying that the end of knowledge is not to know.”