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

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

The ritual directives can serve this role as they are, kabbalistically imagined, limbs of the body of the Torah, a notion of corporeality that is not inconsequential to understanding the apophatic embodiment we are seeking to articulate in these reflections.

The matter is captured in the proverbial statement, “When wine goes in, the secret comes out,” nikhnas yayin yaṣa sod, the rabbinic analogue to the Latin epigram in vino veritas.

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.”

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.

logically it may have) an indifference that transcends difference indifferently, but rather a coincidence whereby one of the opposing terms is entwined in the other.206 When kabbalists speak of a reality where there is no left, they mean that everything is right, and not that there is neither left nor right.207

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.

The essence, accordingly, is neither light nor dark because it is both light and dark, albeit not identically or differently, indeed beyond the identity of identity and difference.

the religious philosophy that may be elicited from the body of his thought is not only conceptually sophisticated but daringly innovative.