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Open Secret Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical
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OPEN
SECRET
M a r c C h a g a l l ,
of
Mena Ḥe m Men d e l
Schneer so n
ELLIOT R. W O L F S O N
New York
C ol u m b i a Uni v ersit y P ress
BM755.S288W64 2009
296.8'3322—dc22
2009009363
Preface
xi
I n t r o d u c t i o n:
1. C o n c e a l in g t h e C o n c e a l m e n t:
2. A / v oid in g P l a c e:
Apophatic Embodiment
66
3. S e m i o t ic Tr a n s u b s t a n tia t io n o f t h e S o m a t ic
130
4. M e s s i a n ic T o r a h:
Hypernomian Transvaluation
161
| C ONTENTS
5. Fe m a l e E n ci r c l e s M a l e:
Gender Transposition
200
6. Ap o c a l y p t ic C r o s s i n g:
P o s t f a c e:
Notes
301
Bibliography
407
Index
431
P r e f ac e
On a cold and rainy Saturday night in November 1972, several weeks before
my sixteenth birthday, I and a few friends made a pilgrimage to 770 Eastern
Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, the world head-
quarters of the Ḥabad-Lubavitch movement. Having grown up in an orthodox
community made up predominantly of East European Jewish refugees, I was
well aware of the phenomenon of Ḥasidism, and especially Ḥabad, which had
already established itself as a major force as purveyors of orthodox Judaism in
America and beyond to other parts of the Diaspora and within the boundaries of
the modern state of Israel. Especially memorable is the fact that my sixth-grade
Talmud teacher was a Lubavitcher, and he was wont to transmit the teachings of
his Rebbe, Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, on special occasions; he would even,
from time to time, begin the daily lesson with a niggun (the ḥasidic term for
a wordless melody) in an effort to inspire the class, an approach that was by
no means typical in the decidedly antiḥasidic (or, in the conventional vernacu-
lar, mitnagdic) yeshiva that I attended. Additionally, it was not uncommon for
Lubavitch emissaries to visit the synagogue where I prayed on Sabbaths and
holidays, translating the message of the Rebbe for a wider audience. In spite of
this more than casual acquaintance with Ḥabad, nothing had prepared me for the
first visit to its spiritual and physical epicenter.
Many memories of childhood and adolescence have already dimmed, but the
memory of that night remains starkly vivid. I felt as if I returned to a place at
once strangely familiar and familiarly strange. I recall that one of the Lubavitch-
ers with whom we met asked each of us about our Hebrew birthdays. When I
told him that I was born on Friday, 19 Kislev, but, since I was born after sunset,
technically my date of birth was 20 Kislev, his eyes opened wide. He inquired
xii | P REFA C E
if I knew the significance of those dates. I told him that I did not, and he then
explained to me that 19 Kislev is the most special day on the Ḥabad calendar,
known as the New Year of Ḥasidism and as the Festival of Redemption, as it
commemorates the release of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the Alter Rebbe, from
Russian prison in 1798. He also explained that because every holiday (at least
in the Diaspora) is celebrated on two days, 20 Kislev was treated as an exten-
sion of the nineteenth, and that this doubling was even more significant when
the nineteenth fell on Friday and the twentieth on Sabbath, the day that prolep-
tically portends the future-to-come. Finally, he said, “Pay attention, this day
bears your destiny.”
Through the years, I have studied the teachings of the Ḥabad-Lubavitch mas-
ters as part of my intellectual diet and, at various times and in various places, I
have also maintained something of a personal connection to the movement, but it
was not until July 2005 that I began to understand the conversation I had on that
November night thirty-seven years ago. After the death of my father on May 19 of
that year (10 Iyyar 5765), I decided to accept the invitation of Avrum Ehrlich to
participate in the First International Summer Program in Jewish Studies at Shan-
dong University in Jinan, China. Of the books that I brought with me to China,
there were several volumes of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s talks and discourses, as
I needed to begin to prepare a lecture I was scheduled to give at the conference
sponsored by the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York
University, “Reaching for the Infinite: The Lubavitcher Rebbe—Life, Teachings
and Impact,” November 6–8, 2005. The topic assigned to me was the Rebbe’s
kabbalah. As it happens, a key text that informed my thinking was a discourse
that I read when I visited the Ḥabad House in Beijing on the Sabbath of July 26. It
seemed to me especially fitting that this would be the case, that the opening of the
path would come into view on the Asian continent. Early on, I made a decision to
pursue the academic study of Jewish mysticism rather than specializing in either
Hinduism or Buddhism, though I have continued through the years to seek points
of affinity between these disparate spiritual orbits. In this book, too, that effort
is clearly on display. At a crucial juncture in the second chapter on the nature of
what I have called apophatic embodiment, I invoke parallels with the Mahāyāna
doctrine of emptiness. Beyond that specific example, the interpretation of Ḥabad
P REFA C E | xiii
night in Brooklyn, “this day bears your destiny!” I have long since departed from
orthodoxy, but, by working intensively on the Ḥabad material, I have reclaimed
something of my own destiny, ostensibly determined by the indeterminate hour
of my birth. In the language of the well-known maxim attributed to R. Aqiva,
“Everything is foreseen but permission is still given”—that I could have chosen
otherwise is beyond doubt, but then, it would not have been my choosing. The
terms of my own liberation, the possibility of becoming less of the more I need to
be less, are to be met by taking hold of that paradox.
Working on the Rebbe has proven a burdensome undertaking. This is so for
a variety of reasons, but mostly due to the sheer wealth of material generated
by the recording of virtually every word he offered publically and the numer-
ous letters he either dictated or wrote in the course of four decades. In such
a huge corpus, repetition is inevitable. The duplication of themes across sev-
eral decades presents a distinctive problem. Prima facie, it would seem that
this would make things easier: once crucial motifs have been identified, many
redundant passages could be ignored. In reality, however, each recurrence is
unique, and, indeed, it is precisely in the iteration that novelty is to be sought.
The homiletical genius of the Rebbe, a quality familiar in diverse masters, con-
sisted of his ability to meet the moment always, to offer a genuine replication,
an utterance both derivative and innovative. The reverberation, therefore, can-
not simply be passed over.
Beyond these considerations, the difficulty is compounded by the intertextual-
ity of his thought, the many layers of biblical, rabbinic, and mystical traditions.
Again, this is not so exceptional, but when one adds to this the fact that Schneer-
son’s teachings echo the vast corpus of the six Ḥabad-Lubavitch masters who
preceded him, one can appreciate that it is not possible to write about him without
taking all of them into account. In spite of the great demand imposed by this inter-
connectivity, I set as a challenge for myself to write a book on the seventh Rebbe
that would demonstrate effectively his indebtedness to the others; in my view,
the only faithful and responsible way to present his thinking is by traversing this
curvature of temporal linearity: to get to the seventh, one must know the first, but
the first cannot be known except through the seventh. It should be clear, however,
that neither I nor the publisher, Columbia University Press, would have found it
P REFA C E | xv
feasible or desirable to cite all the relevant texts to substantiate the main points
of my argument. Accordingly, my methodology has been to make a judicious
selection of citations, offering the reader enough textual evidence to support my
explanations, but not so much that he or she would be overwhelmed. I trust that I
have made my choices sensibly and that I have argued my case convincingly.
27 April 2008
Ei g h t h d a y o f P a ss o v e r
N ote on t h e T r a nsliter a tion
I have followed two systems of transliteration in this book, one for Hebrew and
the other for Yiddish. However, in instances where Hebrew words appeared in
passages that I was translating directly from a Yiddish text, I rendered them in
accord with the standard transliteration of Yiddish.
Other documents randomly have
different content
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