Much scholarly and popular attention has been centered on whether or not Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh rebbe of the Ḥabad-Lubavitch dynasty, identified himself as the Messiah.Footnote ¹ While this interest is surely understandable, both doctrinally and anthropologically, in my judgment, it obscures the central question concerning the nature of the messianism he propagated. This line of inquiry might seem gratuitous for two reasons. First, his writings, discourses, and actions are replete with references to a personal Messiah, and since there is no evidence that he ever deviated from the strictures of rabbinic orthodoxy, there should be no reason to cast doubt on his explicit assertions. Second, a distinguishing feature of Ḥabad ideology, in consonance with the general drift of Ḥasidism, is the ostensible commitment to divulging mystical secrets, penimiyyut ha-torah, the spreading of the wellsprings outward (hafaṣat ma‘yanot ḥuṣah) to broadcast the mysteries that impart knowledge of divinity mandatory for proper worship.Footnote ² Prima facie, it would appear that Ḥabad breaks the code of esotericism upheld (in theory if not unfailingly in practice) by kabbalists through the centuries. This is surely the self-understanding sanctioned by the seventh rebbe, and it can be justifiably argued that he went to greater lengths than his predecessor and father-in-law, Yosef Yiṣḥaq Schneersohn—availing himself of the socioeconomic opportunities of the postwar American environment and making use of the instruments of technology—to accomplish the diffusion of the inwardness of the Torah.

The historical picture is more convoluted. One should never forget that Schneerson was heir to a long-standing esoteric tradition, according to which things are not always as they seem to be, nor do they always seem to be what they are. The role of secrecy in his teaching endures both in content and in form. Even though he was overtly dedicated to the distribution of esoteric matters in the service of inculcating the concrete life of true piety, Schneerson remains beholden to the hermeneutic of dissimulation attested in much earlier sources: The mystery is a phenomenon that conceals itself in the very act of revealing, for if that were not so, it would not be a mystery that was revealed.Footnote ³ We can speak, therefore, of an inherent duplicity: The secret can be disseminated only if it is withheld. For Schneerson, as for many masters of Jewish esoteric wisdom, the ploy of secrecy is especially operative in the realm of messianic speculation.

This is the spot where my approach diverges most conspicuously from the work of others: Schneerson's employing the standard ways of referring to the personal Messiah—a point that I not only do not repudiate, but which I document painstakingly by referring to many of his overt pronouncements to this effectFootnote ⁴—does not mean that strict allegiance to a literal interpretation without heeding its symbolic correlate is the most felicitous path to understand the intent of his words. Rather than repeating his dicta verbatim, I have sought to gaze beneath the curtain of the explicit to determine the latent meaning underlying the copious references to an actual Messiah by contextualizing them in his speculations on cosmology and temporality.

A crucial element of that contextualization is the attempt to frame the question of messianic belief philosophically by establishing the contours of reality according to the Ḥabad masters. I believe with good reason that for Schneerson the decoding of the meaning of events that transpire in the temporal–spatial arena is to be envisaged through the speculum of theosophic symbolism. Borrowing the language of Joseph Mali, I would argue that the method best suited to study Schneerson is mythistory, that is, a historiography that recognizes the essential role that myth plays in the historical construction of personal and communal identities.Footnote ⁵ To ascertain this phenomenon, one must eschew the standard opposition of myth and history, the imaginal and the tangible. Mali's hybrid term, “ideareal history,”Footnote ⁶ is an entirely apt depiction of Schneerson's orientation, that is, what is real in history is what is perceived ideationally to be real—not in an idealist sense that would reduce the material to the ideal, but in a postidealism wherein the transfigured materiality is construed mythopoetically as the true nature of reality. This is the significance of Schneerson's teaching that in the messianic state we will detect that the soul is sustained by the body,Footnote ⁷ as well as his prediction that “it will be discerned openly that nature is divinity,”Footnote ⁸ a cosmological perspective that I have dubbed acosmic naturalism or apophatic panentheism, that is, the perception of the nothingness incarnate in the multiple forms of existence that constitute the world.Footnote ⁹

Viewing terrestrial events as symbolic of the dynamic potencies in the divine pleroma is a basic tenet of the kabbalistic mindset from the Middle Ages. Indeed, as Henry Corbin suggested, the “conviction that to everything that is apparent, literal, external, exoteric (ẓāhir) there corresponds something hidden, spiritual, internal, esoteric (bāṭin) is . . . the central postulate of esoterism and of esoteric hermeneutics (ta'wīl).”Footnote ¹⁰ It is preposterous to think that the seventh rebbe did not subscribe to this way of construing the concrete facts of history. Why should we entertain the possibility that he would have affirmed a notion of facticity stripped of the sheath of metaphoricization?Footnote ¹¹ The coincidence of the symbolic and the factual is the conceptual basis for my argument that the rhetoric of the personal Messiah serves as a signpost to lead one to a state of unification in which all individuation—including the individuated sense of the redeemer—is overcome.

The coincidence of which I speak is indicated idiomatically by the term mammash in the Ḥabad lexicon. Following an exegetical strategy attested in older kabbalistic sources, including zoharic homilies, this term signifies the hyperliteral confluence of the literal (peshaṭ) and the symbolic (sod).Footnote ¹² This is not to discount that there are passages in Ḥabad literature where the terms mashal and mammash are ostensibly distinguished, the former connoting the figurative and the latter the actual, but a more profound reading of the sources intimates that it is precisely this locution that signifies the convergence of the two, an exegetical point that mirrors the ontological homology between the upper and lower worlds. One very important example from the first part of Tanya is worth citing: “Thus verily by way of parable [mammash derekh mashal] is the obliteration of the existence of the world and its fullness [biṭṭul ha-olam u-melo’o bi-meṣi'ut] vis-à-vis its source, which is the light of the infinite, blessed be he.”Footnote ¹³

This text in which the phrase is embedded exhibits the larger point that is vital to comprehending the Ḥabad perspective and my interpretation thereof: There is no mammash that is not a mashal, and hence something is thought to be actually real when it is understood that the factual is figurative and the figurative factual. Commenting on Yosef Yiṣḥaq's explication of the statement in Tanya that the soul “is verily a portion of the divine from above” (ḥeleq eloha mi-ma‘al mammash),Footnote ¹⁴ Menaḥem Mendel noted that the word mammash has two connotations, that which is literally so without exaggeration and that which is concretely real.Footnote ¹⁵ On closer examination, it becomes clear that these are two sides of one coin: The semantic literalness conveyed by the word mammash is connected to the sense of ontic tangibility, but the latter is determined by the symbolic domain to which actual events are correlated. The soul, therefore, is literally divine, since it is of the same substance as God; this suggests, however, that the symbolic is, in fact, more concrete than the literal, or that the literal is actual to the extent that it instantiates the symbolic. Even the language ḥeleq eloha mi-ma‘al, which is drawn from Job 31:2, needs to be deconstructed according to the Ḥabad interpretation: If the soul is consubstantial with the infinite, it cannot be designated literally a “part of God,” because the infinite is incomposite. The force of mammash, which is added to the verse, rhetorically performs the reversal that allows one to see that the literal is the figurative and the figurative literal, that substantiality is composed of what is deemed insubstantial from the empirical standpoint. I would apply this same criterion to the use of the term mammash in conjunction with the Messiah. Thus, explicating in a talk from the second day of Shavu‘ot, 7 Sivan 5751 (20 May 1991), the desire that the Messiah should come “without delay in actuality [tekhef u-mi-yad mammash],” Schneerson noted that the word mammash implies that it should occur “in the manner of actuality [be-ofen shel mammashut], in the corporeality and materiality of the world,” and as a result the corporeal will become a “vessel” for the “most supreme spirituality,” the divine essence.Footnote ¹⁶ So even here we see that the sense conveyed by actuality is a transfiguration of the physical.

In Ḥabad philosophy, there is no objectivity that is not subject to symbolic confabulation. One can, and indeed must, distinguish between the mashal and the nimshal, the sign and the signified, but just as in a dream truth is inescapably entwined with deception—the dream is the deceit that dissimulates as truth, as opposed to the deceit that covers truthFootnote ¹⁷—so it is not possible for there to be a signified that is not enmeshed in a web of signification.Footnote ¹⁸ The innate metaphoricity of existence is anchored in the depiction of the Torah as the primordial parable (meshal ha-qadmoni), a mythopoeic trope that conveys the belief that the infinite light is materialized in the cloak of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are contained in the name YHWH, the mystical essence of the Torah.Footnote ¹⁹ All that exists in the concatenation of the worlds is a manifestation of the light that is above all the worlds, a manifestation that is simultaneously a masking—a point emphasized by the wordplay between ha-olam and he‘lem, that is, the world is the concealment of the infinite because the infinite is revealed therein by being concealed.Footnote ²⁰ Insofar as the Torah, the primordial parable or the parable of the primordial, is the image of that which has no image, the scriptural text exemplifies the convergence of the literal and the figurative: What is literally true is the figuration of that which has no figure, and thus human beings do not have the ability to grasp the actual divested of the metaphorical veneer. Even the messianic promise—linked exegetically to Isaiah 30:20 and 40:5—of the “disclosure of the essence of the infinite light without garment” (gilluy aṣmut or ein sof beli levush)Footnote ²¹ amounts to seeing that there is no seeing but through a garment, perceiving the metaphysical as it is manifest in the pretense of the physical, the paradox of the boundless and the bounded being identified as one and the same (zaynen beli gevul un gevul eyn zakh),Footnote ²² the mystery referred to by the rabbinic depiction of the world as the place for the divine habitation, dirah ba-taḥtonim,Footnote ²³ the spectral immanence of the invisible transcendence.Footnote ²⁴ Instead of viewing the world as illusionary, it should be seen as allusive: The corporeal points to the spiritual in a way analogous to the hermeneutical claim that the esoteric meaning of the Torah is accessible only through the guise of the exoteric meaning, the light of infinity deflected through the façade of the letters, which constitute the true nature of materiality.Footnote ²⁵ To be illumined messianically, therefore, entails seeing the veil unveiled as the veil, apprehending that the veil and the face behind the veil are the same in virtue of their difference.Footnote ²⁶

Predictably, this interpretation of the rebbe’s thought has met with resistance and the charge that it is not the sense that the texts literally transmit.Footnote ²⁷ I do not, however, subscribe to the view that one can access the “plain meaning” without any interpretative layer, as if there were a naked truth that can be uncovered through textual exegesis. This is not to say that I think an interpreter can say whatever he or she wishes to say, or that I consider all readings equally valid. Philological proficiency is, I insist, a legitimate tool to decipher the literal sense of a text. The latter, however, is not ascertained by recovering an originary meaning, a fixed reference point, but rather through the continuous discovery engendered by the ongoing dispersal of meaning; the text, on this accord, varies with each new reading. The position I have taken is the middle ground between pure philology and constructive philosophical hermeneutics: The text is not simply what the reader says, nor is the reader merely reflecting what the text says. Interpretation arises from the confrontation of text and reader, which results in the concomitant bestowal and elicitation of meaning.Footnote ²⁸

Here the notion of the “unthought” (Ungedachte) expounded by Heidegger is useful. In Was heisst Denken? (1954), he contends that we are prevented from “hearing” the language of thinkers as long as the “self-deception about history” prevails, and we construe tradition as something that “lies behind us” rather than as something that “comes toward us because we are its captives and destined to it.” The reversal of time—the fate of the future unfurled as the cause of the destiny of the past—is related to the hermeneutic of attunement to a thinker's language, which, in turn, requires that we acknowledge and respect that language, but this can come about only if one is attentive to what is unique and inexhaustible in each thinker through “being shaken to the depths by what is unthought in his thought. . . . The unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow.”Footnote ²⁹ The unthought is not something that can be thought once and for all, but the potential of the text to yield new meaning unremittingly in the curvature of time.Footnote ³⁰ The more original the thinking—the deeper it wells forth from the origin that stays hidden with every disclosure—the more fecund will be the attempts to articulate what remains unthought.

Schneerson's own approach can be adduced from his elucidation of the novel interpretations of the Torah originating in the supernal Torah, the infinite thought or wisdom, which emanates from the “essential hiddenness” that transcends the triadic division of time. I will cite one passage where the matter is couched messianically. The text is based on the transcription of the discourse Schneerson offered on the second day of Shavu‘ot, 7 Sivan 5728 (June 3, 1968):

The innovations of the Oral Torah that evolve unexpectedly from the exerted effort to explicate the text result in the uncovering of meanings that are both archaic (already given to Moses at Sinai) and novel (they could not be imagined beforehand). Repetition is not the mechanical return of the same, but the creative reclamation of difference, the constant verbalization of a truth spoken as what is yet to be spoken. For Schneerson, Torah study is a form of disciplined spontaneity that ideally instigates an innovative replication, the saying again of what has never been said, a reiteration that always occurs “in the moment” (be-sha‘ata ḥada).Footnote ³⁵ This is the vehicle through which one merits to seeFootnote ³⁶ the new Torah that is to emerge,Footnote ³⁷ for, according to a talmudic tradition, the Messiah is one of three things (together with a scorpion and a lost object) that comes serendipitously, when a person is unaware, literally, when one’s mind is distracted (be-hessaḥ ha-da‘at).Footnote ³⁸

What, then, is the understanding of redemption that I proffered in Open Secret? The core of my reconstruction is based on Schneerson’s persistent emphasis on the spiritual task of the Messiah to reveal the “depth of the inwardness of the Torah,” the disclosure of the “essential will” (raṣon aṣmi)Footnote ³⁹ that occasions an act of self-sacrifice, the nullification of the inner self (biṭṭul penimi).Footnote ⁴⁰ From early on, Schneerson adopted the view, which can be traced back to an oft-cited and highly influential passage from the fourth section in the Iggeret ha-Qodesh of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, that messianism involves a spiritual transformation that results from the contemplation of the divine through an opening of the “interiority of the heart” (penimit ha-lev), which is described further as the “inner point of the heart” (nequddat penimiyyut ha-lev) or as the “depth of the heart” (umqa de-libba), the “illumination of the supernal wisdom [he'arat ḥokhmah elyonah] that is above understanding [binah] and knowledge [da‘at],” the “aspect of the spark of divinity [niṣoṣ elohut] in each Jewish soul.” The coming of the Messiah is linked, therefore, to the verse “Then the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your offspring to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live” (Deuteronomy 30:6), for true prayer, the “worship of the heart from the depth of the heart in its interiority,” demands removing the foreskin from the heart, so that one knows that God alone is the vitality of one’s life. This is the import of the aforementioned rabbinic idea that the Messiah comes when one is unaware, that is, the Messiah corresponds to “this love that is from the depth of the heart, verily from the inner point,” the facet of the soul that is above knowledge. The coming of the Messiah thus signifies the “disclosure of the aspect of the universal inner point [gilluy beḥinat nequddah penimit ha-kelalit] and the exit of the collective Shekhinah from exile and captivity.”Footnote ⁴¹

In a nutshell, this is the seventh rebbe's messianic message, to liberate the point of the interiority of the heart from the lowest depth (omeq taḥat) to the supreme height (omeq rom),Footnote ⁴² from the state of constriction (meṣar) to the state of expansiveness (merḥav),Footnote ⁴³ or, as it is often referred to, the “essential expansiveness” (merḥav aṣmi),Footnote ⁴⁴ a transition that occurs, like the act of repentance, “in one moment and in one second” (be-sha‘ta ḥada u-ve-rig‘a ḥada),Footnote ⁴⁵ a temporal delineation that is “not dependent on time” (eino taluy bi-zeman), a movement as swift “as a blink of the eye” (ke-heref ayin)Footnote ⁴⁶ and therefore “above time and place” (lema‘lah mi-zeman u-maqom).Footnote ⁴⁷ The future redemption is thus demarcated as the “rupture of the railing of time” (periṣat geder ha-zeman) and as the “inheritance without bounds” (naḥalah beli meṣarim).Footnote ⁴⁸ Exhorting the imminent coming of a personal Messiah figures prominently in the seventh rebbe's teaching as the channel to assist in the psychic conversion from the extreme of abjection to the extreme of elation. The mode of worship appropriate to this conversion is referred to as “skipping” (dillug),Footnote ⁴⁹ the leap of consciousness that terminates in the “disclosure of the essence” (gilluy ha-aṣmut)—perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of nonessence, insofar as essence, the light of infinity (or ein sof), denotes the event of presence that is always in excess of being present—and the consequent emancipation of self through the expiration of self.Footnote ⁵⁰ The heart is opened through the leap to the limitlessness of the (non)essence by delimiting itself and contracting to a point, or in the liturgical language that Schneerson was fond of quoting,Footnote ⁵¹ by becoming like dust.Footnote ⁵² Through self-extinction the individual Messiah (mashiaḥ ha-peraṭi) in each Jew, the “individual spark of the Shekhinah that is in the interiority of the heart,” is revealed, and this begets the coming of the collective Messiah (mashiaḥ ha-kelali), who will disclose the essential expansiveness of the Torah that is presently manifest through the study of ḥasidic doctrines (especially as expressed by Ḥabad).Footnote ⁵³

The critical dimension that links the individual and the collective Messiah stems from a state of consciousness that is above knowledge,Footnote ⁵⁴ even above the interiority of the heart,Footnote ⁵⁵ and hence the worship, which brings about both types of redemption, is illustrative of a postrational or metacognitive gnosis.Footnote ⁵⁶ A clear enunciation of the point is found in the talk given by Schneerson on Simḥat Torah, 23 Tishrei 5737 (October 17, 1976): “And the worship, which is from the aspect of yeḥidah, is above division, and this is the preparation that is proximate to the true and complete redemption by means of our righteous Messiah, for the matter of the Messiah is yeḥidah, and thus there is in each Jew a spark of Messiah, for the individual yeḥidah that is in each Jew is a spark from the collective yeḥidah of the Messiah . . . he should come to redeem us and to lead us erectly to our land in the true and complete redemption, verily soon.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This worship is identified as repentance, insofar as the latter actualizes the “bursting of all limitations and boundaries,” a quality attributed exclusively to the redeemer, whose ancestry can be traced to Pareṣ, a name derived etymologically from the breaching of boundary (Genesis 38:29),Footnote ⁵⁸ a gesture that does not entail the antinomian breaking of the law but its hypernomian fulfillment.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Messiah represents the contemplative attainment of a mental state that exceeds all limits and supersedes all differentiation.

The changes in the historical plane are not supernatural events; they are external enactments of an internal transformation. Unlike Scholem, I do not think the spiritual or interior redemption is a form of neutralization; pneumatic enlightenment is itself an acute form of messianic activism and not a deferment. This applies to Schneerson, as can be seen from the following comment in the discourse from 19 Kislev 5719 (December 1, 1958), an extensive and intensive meditation on the verse “He redeems my soul in peace,” padah ve-shalom nafshi (Psalms 55:19):

We see that from a relatively early date Schneerson understands the actual coming of the personal Messiah in history symbolically as the showing of the inwardness of the heart, the aspect of the soul of each Jew—dos pintele yid Footnote ⁶²—to which the redeemer corresponds, and the act of nullification of the self that proceeds therefrom. I do not allege that the symbolic cancels the factual, but I do maintain that the import of the latter is determined by the former. By means of each Jew realizing the potential to be an individual Messiah, the collective redemption (ge'ullah ha-kelalit) through the arrival of the Messiah in actuality (be-vi'at mashiaḥ be-fo‘al mammash) will be implemented.Footnote ⁶³

The messianic urgency in Schneerson’s voice became exaggerated in the course of time, reaching a crescendo in the last decade of his life, but the fundamental aspect of his teaching did not change. The salient feature of the redemption, whether the individual or the collective, is a spiritual alteration in consciousness that is related to the revelation of the inwardness of the point of the heart. He repeatedly taught (following the view found in sources purportedly transmitting the view of Isaac Luria and affirmed by his six predecessors in the Ḥabad-Lubavitch lineage)Footnote ⁶⁴ that the Messiah corresponds to yeḥidah,Footnote ⁶⁵ the aspect of the soul that is the pneumatic corollary to the incomposite will (raṣon pashuṭ), the highest gradation of the supernal realm, the “concealed Eden” that is the “aspect of the essential concealment of the infinite” (beḥinat he‘lem ha-aṣmi de-ein sof),Footnote ⁶⁶ also branded by the technical Lurianic term penimiyyut attiq,Footnote ⁶⁷ the “essence of the point of the heart” (aṣmut nequddat ha-lev) in virtue of which the Jew can be unified with the yaḥid, the nondifferentiated one, through the effacement of the self (biṭṭul aṣmi)—that is, the eradication of the illusion that the self is ontically separate from the divine.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this state of incorporation (hitkallelut) in the (non)essence, there is a “nullification of opposition” (biṭṭul di-le‘ummat zeh),Footnote ⁶⁹ for opposites coincide in the indifferent oneness (hashwwa’ah or hishtawwut) of infinity. Redemption of the soul (linked exegetically to Psalms 55:19) is thus explained as implying that “the adversary is abolished entirely [ha-menagged mitbaṭṭel legamrei] . . . and this by way of the disclosure of yeḥidah. . . . Since the aspect of yeḥidah has no opposite [ein kenegdah le‘ummat zeh] . . . through the disclosure of yeḥidah the opposition is of itself nullified.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In the absence of any opposition, evil is transformed into good according to the principle of ithapkha, which is distinguished from itkafya, the subjugation of evil to goodFootnote ⁷¹—and all differences are transcended, including, at least theoretically, what is perhaps the most troubling difference in Judaism as a religious-ethnic culture, the disparity between Jew and non-Jew, represented prototypically by the boundary separating Israel and Amaleq. While not all the Ḥabad masters are consistent on this point, there are many passages that stipulate that even this boundary will be effaced, and hence the ultimate soteriological significance attributed to the holiday of Purim according to which, by the talmudic injunction,Footnote ⁷² one must become so inebriated that one can no longer distinguish between “blessed is Mordecai” and “cursed is Haman” (both expressions numerically equal 502).Footnote ⁷³ The messianic Torah, the Torah of the Tree of Life as opposed to the Torah of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, is expressive of this transvaluation, the law above the law of the commandments, the new Torah that exceeds the distinction between innocence and guilt.Footnote ⁷⁴

The mystical significance of the symbol of the Messiah that I have proposed can be traced seamlessly from Shneur Zalman of Liadi to Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson. The fact that one can find detailed descriptions of the personal Messiah in Schneerson’s teaching is not something that I have denied or ignored. The premise of Open Secret is that there are these references, but the question that I pondered is what they signify in the overall scheme that informed Schneerson's worldview. The very point of the Messiah in Ḥabad Ḥasidism is to cultivate the nonegocentric consciousness, wherein all things personal are annihilated through the assimilation of the self in the “void that is a greater abnegation than the nothing” (efes hu biṭṭul yoter me-ayin).Footnote ⁷⁵ Messianic consciousness, in short, is about overcoming the individuated sense of self (kelot ha-nefesh) as an entity separate from the divine.

The mystical meaning of the Ḥabad messianic doctrine is contained in the words from the Sabbath morning liturgy, efes biltekha go'alenu limot ha-mashiaḥ, “There is naught but you, our redeemer in the days of the Messiah.” Exoterically, the expression efes biltekha affirms the monotheistic belief that there is no divinity other than God, but, esoterically, it alludes to the meontological truth that even God is annihilated in the absolute naught (efes muḥlaṭ),Footnote ⁷⁶ the essence (aṣmut) that is more than nothing (ayin), as nothing is still too much of a something to be the complete and utter extinction of all particularity vis-à-vis the light of infinity. The unconcealment of this truth—the disclosure of the infinite light in the finite world of discrete multiplicity—is what signals the days of the Messiah.Footnote ⁷⁷ As Shneur Zalman of Liadi reportedly taught, the liturgical refrain efes biltekha go'alenu limot ha-mashiaḥ points to the fact that “in the days of the Messiah there will be an illumination from the aspect of the naught [beḥinat efes] that is above the aspect of nothing [beḥinat ayin].”Footnote ⁷⁸ Until the end of his life Menaḥem Mendel thought of his father-in-law in messianic terms because he believed that the sixth rebbe publicized this teaching in a quintessential way. He was, therefore, the redeemer to the extent that he proliferated the idea of the obliteration of existence (biṭṭul bi-meṣi'ut), which does not entail the nihilistic destruction of being but rather the awareness that there is nothing that is real but the infinite emptiness that is the womb of all potential becoming.Footnote ⁷⁹ The seventh rebbe viewed himself as the medium to fulfill the messianic mission of his predecessor by augmenting the circulation of this very message, to assist others in perceiving the oneness embodied in the plurality of beings, a one that is constantly being configured by the manifold of creation.

From Schneerson's perspective, for the Messiah to be on the way meant that the Messiah was already present, albeit as what is still absent. He often mentioned the sixth rebbe's insistence on the impending proximity of the Messiah—expressed in the image of “standing behind the wall” (er iz ahintern vant), based on the midrashic interpretationFootnote ⁸⁰ of the description of the beloved in Song of Songs 2:9 (hinneh zeh omed aḥar kotlenu)Footnote ⁸¹—to express that what is necessary to bring the Messiah is to dismantle the wall, to remove the mental obstacles that hinder one from discerning that “the reality of the world is divinity” (meṣi’ut ha-olam hu elohut),Footnote ⁸² that “the world and divinity are entirely one” (she-olam we-elohut hu kolla ḥad).Footnote ⁸³ As Schneerson put it in the talk from Shushan Purim 5714 (March 20, 1954):

Despite the passage of time and the failure of its realization, Schneerson did not forsake this belief; on the contrary, it only deepened. On 6 Ḥeshvan 5752 (October 14, 1991), he expressed the matter as follows in a dialogue with Mordecai Eliyahu, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1983 to 1993:

Messianic hope hinges on the paradox of preparing for the onset of what has transpired, the purely present future, the future that is already present as the present that is always future, the tomorrow that is now precisely because it is now tomorrow. The futurity of waiting for the Messiah to appear is not a matter of chronoscopic time at all, but a mental state whereby and wherein one realizes that what is to come intermittently is already present perpetually.Footnote ⁸⁷ All one needs to do is to open the door, provided that one has heard the knock, or perhaps even more profoundly, one will hear the knock only when one realizes that there is no door but the one we have built in our minds.