Time in the Teachings of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi

Alef, Mem, Tau
, 113-4. This will be 
discussed further below, in section 2.3 of the present chapter. 

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141 
the creation of the world.
95
As such, it is located above the order of concatenation 
and is therefore free from all temporal restrictions, as the dimension of time develops 
only once the order of concatenation has begun to unfold. In other words, repentance 
grants the individual direct access to a transcendent reality; it makes it possible for 
him to transcend his temporal limitations and to enter a reality that comprises both 
the world’s beginning and its end. Accordingly, in the present generation the 
redemption is in fact always about to take place, as by repenting the community can 
leap directly into a reality that is redeemed. The redemption is available on both the 
collective and the personal level, as Rashaz demonstrates with the example of 
Eleazar ben Durdaya, who repented and acquired his share of the world-to-come in 
an instant.
96
To recap, Rashaz’s messianism is not acute in the sense of heralding an 
imminent end of days, calculating its precise date, an attaching it to a particular 
historical event or messianic figure. Nevertheless, he holds a deep conviction that the 
redemption can instantly be brought about by Israel as a whole, or at least by each 
and every individual Jew who can reach a personally redeemed state of existence.
97
1.5. Personal redemption. 
The second messianic aspect of Rashaz’s Hasidic teaching, quite apart from the 
collective effort to bring about the ultimate redemption, is the personal striving of the 
individual to achieve the state of redemption irrespective of time and place, which is 
95
Following the midrashic idea that repentance preceded the creation of the world, on which see 
Midrash Tanhuma
, Naso, 11. 
96
See 
b
‘Avodah zarah 17a. 
97
See Wolfson, 
Open Secret
, 278-84, where he discusses the immediacy of the messianic advent in 
the teachings of the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menahem Mendel Schneerson, as expressed in the often 
repeated slogan, the Messiah shall arrive “immediately and truly without delay” [
tekhef u-miyad 
mamash
]. Wolfson points out that Rashaz takes ‘immediacy’ to mean in this context that the time of 
the redemption is not bound to any sequence of historical events, as the redemption transcends 
worldly time and is a “timeless moment, which cannot transpire temporally and therefore must always 
be capable of occurring (in)temporally” (281). Admittedly, the acute messianism of 20
th
century 
Habad was a response to certain historical events, yet the concept of the immediacy of a redemption 
that may come at anytime because by its very nature, it transcends all temporal limitations, can be 
found already in Rashaz’s teachings. 

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142 
achievable through everyday worship.
98
The interpretation of the Exodus as an 
everyday event is the underpinning of this concept: 
“In every generation and every day a person is obliged to regard himself as if 
he had that day come out of Egypt.”
99
This refers to the release of the divine 
soul from the confinement of the body, the “serpent’s skin”,
100
in order to be 
absorbed into the Unity of the light of the blessed 
Ein Sof
, through 
occupation in the Torah and commandments in general, and in particular 
through accepting the Kingdom of Heaven during the recital of the 
Shema’
, 
wherein the person explicitly accepts and draws over himself His blessed 
Unity, when he says: “The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”
101
In the previous chapter I presented an excerpt from Rashaz’s epistle that refers to the 
“serpent’s skin” in which the divine soul incarnates as an opportunity for the 
individual to subjugate the domain of husks and transform it into divinity, thus 
bringing the collective redemption closer.
102
Here Rashaz evokes the same idea to 
show that there is a way out of the confinement of corporeality even before the final 
redemption.
103
The personal experience of the Exodus, defined here as an act of 
incorporation in the perfect unity of God’s infinite light, takes places on a daily basis 
within and in spite of the unredeemed world’s corporeality and materiality, which 
create the impression that the individual exists in separation from the divine unity.
98
On the relation between personal and collective redemption in Habad, see Lowenthal, “Habad 
Messianism”. On a variety of modes of redemption in Hasidism in general, see Idel, “Multiple Forms 
of Redemption,” 61, where he presents the collective redemption that results from many individual 
redemptions as one of the ways in which messianism manifests itself in the teachings of the Besht. 
One of the sources to which Idel refers is Gedalyah of Lynitz’s