By Elliot R. Wolfson
Menahem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994) was once the 7th and probably final Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty. Marked by way of conflicting traits, Schneerson was once an intensive messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political time table, a reclusive contemplative who equipped a hasidic sect into a world circulate, and a guy devoted to the exposition of mysteries who however harbored many secrets and techniques. Schneerson astutely masked perspectives that would be deemed heterodox by way of the canons of orthodoxy whereas engineering a fundamentalist ideology that may subvert conventional gender hierarchy, the halakhic contrast among permissible and forbidden, and the social-anthropological department among Jew and Gentile.
While so much literature at the Rebbe makes a speciality of even if he pointed out with the function of Messiah, Elliot R. Wolfson, a number one student of Jewish mysticism and the phenomenology of spiritual adventure, concentrates as a substitute on Schneerson's apocalyptic sensibility and his advertising of a paranormal recognition that undermines all discrimination. For Schneerson, the ploy of secrecy is essential to the dissemination of the messianic mystery. To be enlightened messianically is to be introduced from all conceptual obstacles, even the very proposal of changing into emancipated from dilemma. the final word liberation, or real and entire redemption, fuses the believer into an enormous essence past all duality, even the duality of being emancipated and never emancipated—an emancipation, in different phrases, that emancipates one from the bind of emancipation.
At its inner most point, Schneerson's eschatological orientation discerned non secular grasp, if he be real, needs to eliminate the masks of mastery. Situating Habad's concept in the evolution of kabbalistic mysticism, the background of Western philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism, Wolfson articulates Schneerson's wealthy theology and profound philosophy, targeting the character of apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality.
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Additional resources for Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson
Example text
M a im o n i d e s , P e r u sh h a -M is h n ayot, Sanhedr in 10 :1 As with any truth-statement, truth is undeclarable; so it is called a truth-statement. — T h e D i a m o n d S ū tra Pointing the Way Metatextually To s tat e t h e o b v i o u s at t h e o u t s e t : i n s o f a r a s Ḥabad is an actual movement, a social scientific methodology would seem to be especially suitable to studying the seventh Rebbe. Not only is there no need in this case to rely exclusively on a philological-textual analysis, but one could raise serious questions about the legitimacy of adopting such an approach.
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 individuat- ed point that comprises the totality of what is, the jot that bears the essence of the Infinite (aṣmut ein sof), according to Ḥabad nomenclature, the yod that is the first letter of the name YHWH, the alphabetic cipher that semiotically represents the ten sefirot, the manifest hiddenness of the hidden manifestation.
125 In my estimation, the study of Ḥabad requires a hermeneutic based on a notion of time at odds with the linear conception under- girding this comment. The critical scholar, no less than the pious adept, must be attuned to the sense of time at play in Ḥabad speculation, and only then can one appreciate that the meaning of the first master’s teaching is to be sought in the seventh, even as the meaning of the seventh master’s teaching is to be sought in the first. From this ideational stance, cause and effect are completely reversible, and hence one can legitimately move through the present from past to future or from future to past.
