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

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.

To apprehend reality, one must strip it of its materiality, a reversal of the process of creation of something from nothing

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.

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.

a well-known Sufi sentiment, the presumption that one can see without a veil is the greatest of veils.

Material space can contain the immaterial beyond spatial delimitation, a possibility actualized in the Temple, which is imagined archetypically as the place above place.

the traditional kabbalistic perception of the physical world as a mirror image of the sefirotic pleroma, which, in turn, is a mirror image of the Infinite that is beyond image,

it does not seem tenable to sever the realistic from the fictional in a clear-cut way, as the latter is what engenders the former, although it may be commonly assumed by scholars that the opposite is true.

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.