Time in the Teachings of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi

 
Habad mainstream. See Dein, 
What Really 
Happens
, 113-21; Foxbrunner, 
Habad
, 52; Friedman and Heilman, 
The Rebbe; 
24-7; Wolfson, 
Open 
Secret
, 356 n. 67; Shandler, 
Jews
, 230-74. This illustrates how difficult it is to draw a clear-cut 
distinction between different factions within contemporary Habad. 
5
On the neutralization of messianism in Hasidism in the aftermath of Sabbatianism, see Scholem, 
Major Trends
,
 
328-30;
idem,
The Messianic Idea
, 176-202. 
6
See for example Mindel, 
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady
, ii, ‘The Philosophy of Chabad’.
 
Dr Nissan 
Mindel (1912-99) was a follower of Habad, and for many years served as the secretary, first of the 
sixth and then of the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe. He was also engaged in the communication of Habad 
teachings to a broad audience, which included translations of 
Tanya
and of 
Lubavitcher Rabbi’s 
Memoirs
, and a book in two volumes on Shneur Zalman, which contains the biography of Shneur 
Zalman and an exposition of his teachings based on 
Tanya
; the third volume, based on Mindel’s 
manuscripts on 
Torah or 
and 
Likutei Torah,
is scheduled for publication by Nissan Mindel 
Publications. On the alleged rationalism and philosophical inclination of Rashaz, see Stamler, 
“Sekhel,” 1-3, 195-7. 

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13 
have tended to focus on early Habad’s preoccupation with the transcendent God, 
while neglecting altogether its view of history, be it Godly or profane.
7
The present study attempts to fill this gap by investigating temporality and 
history within worldly existence in the teachings of Habad’s founder, Rabbi Shneur 
Zalman of Liadi (henceforth Rashaz, 1745-1812). It springs from the question, which 
first drew me to the topic, of the extent to which the temporal discourse – so central 
to contemporary Habad – might be found already in the teachings of the founder of 
the movement. To establish this, it was necessary to address critically the 
harmonistic Habad perspective on all the Habad-Lubavitch rebbes as transmitters of 
the same, unified and self-contained tradition referred to in Habad parlance as the 
“words of the living God” [
divrei Elokim hayim
]. This internal perspective is at odds 
with the prevailing academic approach, which discerns an ideological discontinuity 
between early Habad and its 20
th
-century incarnations.
8
While the development of 
Habad’s doctrine over time, all the way from Rashaz to Menahem Mendel 
Schneerson, lies beyond the scope of the present thesis, the ideas of the latter were 
the ones that first struck me as arising from the teachings of the former. 
Another factor that influenced my approach to the subject was the paradigm 
shift that occurred within Hasidic scholarship when Scholem's notion of the 
neutralisation of the messianic idea in Hasidism was contested if not quite rejected.
9
7
See for example Elior, “Mekomo shel adam,” 47-9, in which hasidic thought is explicitly defined as 
theocentric. Foxbrunner can be seen as an exception, as he devoted a short sub-chapter to the issue of 
the cosmic history, see Foxbrunner, 
Habad
, 78–93. 
8
See Elior, “The Lubavitch Resurgence,” 387. For a long time, there existed no scholarly work that 
provided an overall account of the Habad teaching from its inception to the present. This changed 
recently, with Eliot Wolfson’s 
Open Secret
and Dov Schwartz’s
Mahashevet
Habad
as the most 
notable examples. 
9
Scholem first formulated his thesis on the ‘neutralised’ nature of Hasidic messianism in his 1941 
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 
(329-331), and he subsequently referred to it briefly in some of his 
other writings during the 1950s and 60s. For the early critique of this thesis, see Tishby’s 1967 “Ha-
ra’ayon ha-meshihi,” which was the trigger for Scholem’s fully developed thesis, published in his 
1971 “The Neutralisation of the Messianic Element”. For later revisions of Scholem’s thesis, see Idel, 
Hasidism
, 16-7; idem, 
Messianic Mystics
, 212-13, 223, 237-8; idem, “Mystical Redemption,” 12-19 
idem, “Multiple Forms,” 58-69. 

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14 
This has opened up new perspectives on Hasidic messianism in general, and on 
Habad messianism in particular. In my graduate paper “The Messianic Concept in 
Tanya
,” written in 2009 for the Hebrew Studies Department of the University of 
Warsaw, I attempted to look at 
Tanya
from a “post-neutralisation” perspective, and 
discovered that messianism was conspicuously present in Rashaz’s teachings. This 
was still apparent to the Habad author Haim Yitshak Bunin, who in his 1936 
elucidation of Tanya, devoted a special section to messianism and eschatology.
10
But 
his book was generally ignored by scholars, and it is hardly ever mentioned in 
subsequent studies of Rashaz.
11
Only the attention paid in recent years to the 
messianic doctrine of the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menahem Mendel Schneerson, has 
led a number of scholars to the realisation that the acute messianism of post-
Holocaust Habad was deeply rooted in teachings that can be traced back to Rashaz.
12
The present thesis aims to consider Rashaz’s messianic doctrine without resort to the 
axiom of the neutralisation of hasidic messianism, highlighting Rashaz’s keen 
interest in time, history and the end of days, which has not so far been addressed 
systematically in hasidic scholarship. 
The paradigm shift mentioned above has also shifted the academic focus 
from the theoretical to the experiential dimension of Jewish mysticism. Following 
the publication of Idel’s 
Hasidism – Between Ecstasy and Magic
, several scholars 
have begun to examine expressions of religious experience in the speculative 
teachings of the early hasidic masters.
13
Yet the Habad experience, perhaps because 
of its “rational” or “philosophical” reputation, has remained by and large ignored. As 
Loewenthal points out, the scholarship on Habad has tended to focus on the 
acosmistic aspects of Rashaz’s teachings and sees the spiritual project of early 
Habad, above all else, as the quest to transcend worldliness and dissolve in 
10
Bunin, 
Mishneh Habad
, v, “Mishnat mashi’ah, ‘olam ha-ba u-tehiyat ha-metim.” On this book, see 
Scholem, 
Ha-shalav ha-aharon
, 380-2; Niger and Shatzky, 
Leksikon
, v. i, 266; Reisen, 
Leksikon
, v.i, 
243-4. 
11
Foxbrunner (
Habad
, 85-8 and 91-2) is an exception, having devoted to this issue several pages of 
his book. 
12
See Wolfson, 
Open Secret
, and Schwartz, 
Mahashevet Habad
. 
13
See for example Kaufmann, 
Be-khol derakhekha da’ehu
; Margolin, 
Mikdash adam
; Mark, 
Mysticism and Madness
. 

---

15 
divinity.
14
This approach has yielded important studies of Habad’s mystical path to 
self-nullification and integration in the divine nothingness by means of 
contemplative prayer and study, yet it has overlooked the equally important, worldly 
dimension of the early Habad doctrine, which the present thesis addresses as its 
central concern. 
Following Loewenthal,
15
I see Rashaz’s teachings as the means by which he 
communicated a particular religious experience to every one of his followers, and I 
believe that the richness of the ideas he adapted to his community’s needs was what 
made Rashaz such a successful hasidic leader. His teachings convey a multi-
dimensional worldview that cannot be reduced either to a complex of theological 
ideas or to a set of practical instructions on how to lead the ideal religious or spiritual 
life. In fact, his vast corpus of teachings imparts a sense of religious experience, 
which is governed by the daily, weekly and yearly cycles of the individual’s 
mundane life, while at the same time connecting him to the multigenerational 
congregation of Israel which, although it is subject to history, aims at transcending it 
by integration in the supra-temporal divine. In focusing on the concept of time, I aim 
to explore this particular notion of religious life, and to demonstrate the mystical and 
the mundane, the intellectual and the experiential, the individual and the communal 
dimensions of Rashaz’s teaching.