 Okay, hi everybody, let's please sit down for our keynote. I know everyone's really, really tired, but this one day you'll look back on this as a rare opportunity to hear great Elliot Wilson weigh in on Hasidism and the Hasidic sermon in particular. I don't want to belong the introduction because he's just so well known and his books are so well known, but I do want to talk about a particular kind of scholarship which I find so inspiring, which is to sort of remove yourself in a sense and let the text speak through you even when they're not saying necessarily what you want them to say. These can be, for example, problematic from the perspective of gender, from the perspective of being ethnocentric or any other number of things, but I find this kind of scholarship to be truly inspiring where you just allow the text to speak in a way that may make you uncomfortable. I think that kind of scholarship for me has been extremely inspiring, which is why even though I have a very different methodology as you just saw, I take that inspiration from Elliot Wilson in particular. And so I just want to introduce Elliot by saying just how much admiration I have for the work that he does. I think there are moments where people feel uncomfortable with the work and they push back, they try to ignore. Let's just say that this will be here with us a hundred years from now and people will be reading and re-reading Elliot Wilson. So without further ado, our keynote speaker. Well, thank you for those words, Glenn, and for inviting me and Aura and Maria for all your help. If it's okay, I want to dedicate my words this evening to the memory of Philip Wexler who is a friend of many of us and collaborator with Elliot Rubin. So he's missed. We didn't always agree. In fact, mostly we disagreed, but he was a very honorable dialogue partner. Okay. So you know the title of the lecture, Beyond Orality and Writing, the Time Space of Hasidic Commolies. Can everybody hear me okay? So I would like to begin by recalling the argument that I offered in the introduction to Open Secret, published in 2009. Every academic attempt to speak of the seventh Rebbe of the Chabad-Lubabic dynasty is fraught with danger, insofar as the hermeneutical lens crafted by the scholar invariably would be deemed too narrow. By this disclaimer, I did not mean to dissuade scholars from applying the highest standards of historical criticism to study Schnersen's life and thought. Since the time of my book appeared, there have been a considerable number of published monographs, as well as masters and doctoral theses dedicated to this task from a number of methodological perspectives. The issue that I was raising, however, and one that is still worthy of our consideration, is that it is not tenable to uphold the possibility of disentangling the threads of the fictional and the factual in a clear-cut way. Since in the case of the seventh Rebbe, and I would extend the argument to the case of any Hasidic master, the imaginative is what engenders the empirically real, although it is commonly assumed that the opposite is true. I recently happened upon a review through a speculum that shines, which was published in 1996, the review, two years after the book appeared. The reviewer, whose name I will not disclose in order to protect the guilty, writes that my assertion that the book attempts to bridge history and phenomenology is indefensible. Since the method deployed therein is principally phenomenological and that despite the considerable erudition that I display, the claim that I have been attentive to historical settings is merely a fig leaf because at crucial points my conjectures are less proven than postulated. Now, I guess it was a stroke of fortune that I did not see this review until a few weeks ago, even though in the ensuing 20 years I've encountered much worse. I mentioned this review because the simplicity of its critique sheds light on a prevalent bias of Jewish studies and one that, in my opinion, continues to dominate in spite of the many advancements in the last decades and the concerted effort of scholars in the field to catch up to the theoretical sophistication well-attested in other disciplines. Speaking candidly, it is preposterous to harbor a distinction between proof and postulation. Whether we are talking about the humanistic or the social scientific study of Jewish culture, is there any proof that is not in some measure postulation? Even the theoretically astute natural scientists would acquiesce to the truism that there is no proof that is not in some measure postulation. More to the point, however, and in a posture of self-defense, I would counter that in the speculum and continuing in many publications that have appeared in the ensuing years, I have walked a hermeneutical path based on the belief that the pitting of history against phenomenology is a false polarity. Contrary to an oft-repeated misrepresentation, phenomenology is not a historical. Serious engagement with this philosophical practice demonstrates convincingly that a viable phenomenological orientation must always be rooted in historical inframing. Rather than positing the ill-conceived binary, the question that legitimately demands interrogation is how to understand the historical inframing. And that very much depends on the thinker's operative assumption about the nature of time. It is beyond the confines of this lecture and the time allotted to me, but I will know briefly that Husserl's idetic reduction is principally a way to disclose the structure of the internal time consciousness predicated on the correlation between the unity of apprehension and the unitary object that endures, which is constituted by the retention of the past in the present. However, this continuity involves as well the protension of the future in the present. What Husserl calls the double intentionality of the flows of consciousness, the intertwining of retentional and potential intentionality is precisely the temporal dynamic that makes possible our historical sensibility and the narratological propensity to memorialize experiences orally in writing or through other artistic means, such as music, dance, sculpture, or painting. Bracketing this interpretation of Husserl, it should be evident from even a cursory familiarity with my scholarship that I do not be little or dismiss the conceptual and heuristic value of the historiographical writing of history. However, I do subscribe to the wisdom of avoiding the extreme positions of positivism or skepticism. The truth, it seems, lies in the space between uncritically presuming that historical records provide incontestable objective reliability versus uncritically assuming that these records should be regarded as purely imaginary. Let me add that the fissure between fact and fiction is not to be measured simply by the metrics of the passage of time. Common sense might dictate that closer propensity to the event that is described by the human observer secures a more accurate account of what really happened. Upon reflection, however, this assumption proves to be dubious, as we were currently discerned that ambiguity and ambivalence are coterminous with the mentality of what is transpired and not a feature of temporal deferral. From this phenomenological datum, that is what we perceive as characteristic of human experience, we can deduce that historical investigation is inexorably delimited by the paradox of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. And this is so irrespective of the proximity of one doing the analysis and the incident being analyzed. But to return to the main point, every academic endeavor to converse about the Rebbe, whether the approach is textual, philological, or anthropological sociological, is willy-nilly circumscribed within an ideational framework that is as much fact as it is fiction. The concern I am raising becomes more transparent when we consider the question of sources and the respective levels of legitimacy accorded them. Needless to say, the material utilized by a scholar will vary in accord with his or her methodological discipline. The social scientists may rely less on the text ascribed to the Rebbe and will seek to assess his personality by examining ethnographic evidence, including interviews and or surveys with members of the Chabad community. The more conventional text scholar, by contrast, will investigate the Rebbe's letters and discourses to determine the contours of his thinking and behavior. While there is palpably a notable difference between these approaches, a dilemma is shared nonetheless. To state the matter openly, it is not apparent to me that any methodology can divest the Rebbe of his garb as Rebbe so that the person of Anachal Mendel-Schneerson, a visibly tactile body born in 1902 and perished in 1994, can be divulged transparently. Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me state unequivocally that I do not deny that there are more and less reliable sources, nor am I suggesting that it is impossible to ascertain any historical information about the Rebbe outside of his persona as the movement's leader. Of course, this is possible. What I'm arguing, however, is that the very notion of a Hasidic Rebbe must be understood as a composite figure, a corporate entity, if you will, a man whose identity is configured by his followers and perhaps also by his opponents. And that, in this respect, I am aligning myself with a postmodern conception in Dettetu Foucault, which deems identity a matter of genealogical fabrication rather than genetic factuality. The imaginative flourishes are no less vital to understanding identity construction than are the data retrievable through rational and quantitative means of exploration shaped by neurobiological, psychological, and sociological assumptions. Even the more sober attempts to treat the Rebbe or the movement in scientifically verifiable terms cannot free themselves entirely from the grip of her geography. Simply put, without the narrative, there would be no framework within which to study Schnersen and this is as true for the scholar as it is for the partisan. Attempts to penetrate through the hagiographical cloud are futile. The presumption that one can remove the shroud entirely to observe some naked historical truth is misguided. The only truth that may be uncovered is truth covered in the appearance of truth, which is to say the dissimilitude of untruth. In the Chaba lexicon, the point is made by the arresting juxtaposition of the words ma shal and mamash, or mamash. As we find, for example, in the following passage from the first part of Tanya by Oshnir Zaman of Liadi, and I quote, thus verily by way of parable, mamash derach ma shal is the obliteration of the existence of the world and its fullness, bitu ha'olemu mulou'u bimitsu'uot, vis-a-vis its source, which is the light of the infinite, blessed be he. This is not the context to enter into a detailed examination of this passage. Suffice it to say, however, that expressed here is the key, what I would call may ontological doctrine of Chabad. The material cosmos is nullified in relation to the light of infinity. Mystical gnosis consists therefore of discerning that the annihilation of the world is literally true only to the extent that it is figuratively so. Since somatically, the world continues to exist and is not literally abolished by the contemplative gesture of nullification. Most significantly, the insight concerning what I have called apophatic embodiment as opposed to the term acosmism used by many other scholars is marked by the paradoxical expression mamash derach ma shal, verily by way of parable. In the writings of Schneer Zalman and other masters in the Chabad-Lugavich dynasty, we encounter related expressions such as mamash derach ma shal to articulate the idea that there is no mamash that is not ma shal. Now this is not to refute that we find in the relevant literature the more standard distinction between ma shal and im shal, leaving the impression that there is an irreconcilable incongruity between the symbol and what is symbolized. For my purposes, it is noteworthy that the idioms like mamash derach ma shal and mamash derach ma shal intimate that something is thought to be actually real when it is understood that the factual is figurative and the figurative factual. I will illustrate the point with another example from the Raiats, Yosef Yitzchak Schnerson, the sixth Rebbe. And he's commenting on the off-sided statement in the first part of Tanya that the Jewish soul, very pertinent to our previous conversation, quote, is verily a portion of the divine from above. Ch'elak aloha mimal mamash. The seventh Rebbe, oh, sorry, oh yeah, so this commenting on the Raiats, the seventh Rebbe noted that the word mamash has two connotations. That which is literally so without exaggeration and that which is concretely real. The two connotations are two sides of one coin and hence the semantic literalness conveyed by the word mamash is connected inextricably to the sense of ontic tangibility. But what is conveyed by the latter? Concrete reality is perforce determined by the symbolic domain to which the tangible events are correlated. The soul therefore is literally divine since ontologically it is of the same substance as God, but this suggests that the symbolic is in fact more concrete than the literal. Even the language ch'elak aloha mimal, which is derived from Job 31-2, needs to be deconstructed according to the Chabad interpretation. If the soul is consubstantial with the infinite, it cannot be designated literally a part of God because the infinite is in composite. The force of the mamash added to the verse oratorically performs the reversal that allows us to see that the literal is the figurative and the figurative is literal. That substantiality consists of what is insubstantial from the empirical standpoint. Appeal to textual sources published under the name of the Seventh Rebbe do not help us out of this labyrinth of figurative dissembling. To be sure, the letters dictated, written, or paraphrased on the basis of the word spoken by Schnersen, the few texts we know he compiled himself, such as the commentary in the Passover Haggadah, marginal glosses on the transcriptions of his own discourses, the Sichot, and the divinely inspired Hamiley, the Mamarim, or those of previous masters and the notebooks and diary fragments written in his own hand, published respectively as Rishimot and Rishimat Hayoman, are the kinds of literature that should be accorded high priority as documents to be utilized in the search to ascertain his opinions. However, the issue of transcription is more convoluted and uncertain. Assuredly, the individuals in charge of publishing this material, the Maarechet Otsarah Hasidim as they are called, have religiously upheld the need to impart to the reader the rebri's various levels of involvement with textual production, by making the distinction between a text that has been edited, Muga, and one that has not, Bilti Muga. Without repudiating the meticulousness of these scribal classifications, I'm not confident that they are sufficient for one who undertakes a historical reconstruction that would stand the test of the most circumspect scrutiny. Firstly, we are still beholden to a translation from the linguistic matrix of Yiddish to Hebrew. And secondly, to the transition from the medium of oral communication to written. Appeal to other media, such as audio or videotapes, alleviates the problem to some degree, but not completely. Since many of the discourses were given on Sabbaths or holidays where there could be no electronic recording, and I just want to add here, parenthetically, that I have checked some of the audio and video against the written versions of these discourses. And there are discrepancies. It isn't a one-to-one correspondence. Now, as it happens, Schnersen addressed the quandary facing the scholar in the introduction to the collection of discourses by the fifth rebbi, the Rashab, that was published under his auspices, and I quote, in several of these transcriptions, Hebrew terminators, Rishimot, we could not clarify who wrote the transcription, or as it is referred to by the Hasidim, putting down the pre-sees of the discourse. Meniah HaNachah Shallah Sikha, and hence it is impossible to know how exact it is, but pay attention to this. That the ones who wrote all these transcriptions were amongst the faithful who were extraordinary, Hasidim vatikim, for whom every word and remark of their rebbi was holy to them. There is no question that they tried with all their capability to guard the language of the master, not to add to it or detract from it. Though it is possible that due to the length of the discourse and the like, the transcriber may have aired with respect to some words, and particularly in the place that he wrote in Hebrew and the discourses were spoken in Yiddish. But in general, the matters are certainly exact. These words can be applied to the seventh rebbi himself. Our knowledge of his teaching is greatly due to the disciples who transcribed his words, but they shall always remain a rift between the written texts and oral recitation in the event that access to the latter is only through the former. And beyond the example of Chabad, we can extract from Schnersen a general principle about the Hasidic sermon. The credibility that scholars ascribe to the sermon must be gauged from within the breach between the oral performance and the written preservation. I will supply a recent example from the Satmer Hasidim as it corroborates that the methodological problem has persisted even to the present. I am referring to the Haggadah Shal Pesach, Kedushah Yol, that is the Pesah of the Haggadah with the explications based on the insights of Yol tidal bound. And it's just recently published. The anonymous redactors writing under the name Ma'arachet Likute Orah note that when they took upon themselves the task of producing this text, they were confronted with Avodakasha, arduous work for several reasons. First, the teachings of tidal bound were not committed to writing by the individuals, well the teachings on the Haggadah Shal Pesach, were not committed to writing by the individuals who were regularly assigned with this responsibility. Since the Rebbe did not give them permission to attend his Seder, the ones who were allowed to attend were guests and younger students. And thus the responsibility to remember and later transcribe tidal bound expositions fell upon them. To complicate the matter, the guests invited to the first Seder were not typically the guests invited to the second Seder. So in order to create the text, therefore the editors as they tell us had to gather together all of these scattered accounts written by those who attended the Rebbe Sederim over the course of many years. Insofar as there were many individuals involved in this process, predictably the reshimot, the transcriptions, displayed multiple and dissimilar versions of the same teaching, as it is human nature that each person documents the matter in accord with his, and I won't say her here because it's clearly men involved, recollection. Understanding and distinctive rhetorical style. The diversity is only enhanced in this case because the teachings were not transcribed until after the holiday, and thus forgetfulness of details and nuance is inescapable. The redaction work of the editors, or as they refer to it, the holy labor of Adat Hakodesh was to review, to compare, to assemble these multiple transcriptions into one edifice, referred to literally as an inn or a boarding house, fun dak, so that the words contained therein would be well-turned, davar davar al ofnav, according to expression from Proverbs. The redactors also note that they conversed with several of the transcribers, quote, so that the words of our Rebbe can be brought to light as they were explicitly uttered from his mouth in his holiness and purity. Having studied this Haggadah, I can attest that the teachings contained therein, accord with the teachings we can elicit from other writings that have, that conserve tidal-bound oral discourses, not because I'm a master of tidal-bound works, but I can use the annotations in the Haggadah and I checked some of those sources. But the fact that there is this element of affinity does not preclude the scholar from asking the obvious question. Is the goal of the redactors to present a written document that captures the words as they were originally spoken, achievable? I do not think this is possible, as the disparity between the oral and the written can never be fully attenuated in the admittedly composite literary artifact that they have produced. Now the divide of which I speak is impossible to close, but not impossible to bridge. But let us recall the phenomenologically, the bridge serves as a signpost to demarcate that which connects by keeping apart. For the distance between two termini, if the distance between the two termini was entirely collapsed, there would be no need for a bridge. Utilizing the metaphor of the bridge to speak metaphorically of the metaphor, or we could say the metaphor par excellence, with respect to the inherently parabolic nature of the Hasidic sermon, we must note the expanse between the oral and the written. And this is precisely what is continuously crossed, but never collapsed. But what facilitates this crossing? What inspires on the one hand, confidence in the believer to trust the narrative uncritically? And on the other hand, bestows on the scholar the incentive to examine these convictions critically. I would surmise that the response to these questions turns on being attuned to the nature of the time space in which the sermon was initially delivered. And that is presumably preserved for posterity in the written account. To understand my argument, it is necessary to preface it with a brief account of the Kabbalistic principle that is the underpinning of the Hasidic perspective on time. This also has come up on a number of occasions in the course of the day. The object of time's calculation is not a quantifiable magnitude that is of necessity finite. That would be the classical philosophical account of time. In Kabbalistic Theosophy, the movement of which time is the measure is the pulsation of the immeasurable plural locality of the infinite. What I've called polyontology, and we'll hear more about this tomorrow in Ellie's presentation, to denote that Ainzolf is constituted by the infinity of the appearances of the many rather than by the absorption of the many in the totalizing unity of the one. The temporal computation therefore is not predicated on physical entities as the philosophers have long insisted. In its most elemental cadence, time is the calculation of the incalculable that is beyond time. The ebb and flow of infinity that generates the polarities of light and dark which translate into the bicameral sentient experience of the nocturnal diurnal rhythm, engendered respectively in Kabbalistic symbolism as feminine judgment and masculine mercy. Specularized from this vantage point, the eventuality of time is hypothesized in the moment that is because it already was what it is always to be. The compressants of past, present, and future signify by the tetragrammaton. As the propulsion of the internal impulse, time is the essence of the infinite light that is beyond the category and demarcation of the aspect of time, the nameless that is beyond, but only accessible through the name. The rabbinic understanding of the tetragrammaton and the inherent link between the temporality, zaman yut, of the eternal and the eternality, nitsch yut of the temporal, prompted Kabbalists to identify the deportment of time, zaman, as the quality of summoning, zamin, such that what is yet to come withholds its presencing, not as a presence that refuses to come to presence and is thus presently absent, but as the presence that can only be present as non-present. Insofar as God and the Torah are identical, I'm continuing now with the Kabbalistic perspective on time. Insofar as God and Torah are identical and God and the tetragrammaton are one, it follows that the mystical essence of the Torah is the name, an apodictic truth of Kabbalah from its inception. From this identification, we can deduce moreover that the Torah in its textual embodiment is the veil that unveils the infinite by concealing the light it reveals, the voice that declaims the ineffable by muting the name it declaims. On this score, we must mark the inherent metaphoricity of what exists. This is the meaning of the Chabad tradition and we heard of this in Green's presentation, that the Torah is the Meshal Kadmoni. He didn't mention Chabad, but he mentioned this idea of the Meshal Kadmoni, the primordial parable, a mythopoeic trope that communicates the belief that the infinite light materializes in the cloak of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet which are contained in the tetragrammaton. All that exists in the concatenation of the worlds is a manifestation of the light that is above the worlds, a manifestation that is concomitantly a masking, a point emphasized by the word play between Ha'olam and Ha'alem. That is, the world is the concealment of the infinite because the infinite is revealed therein by being concealed. Precisely from this opposition of disclosure and concealment, expanding and withholding, the texture and shape of time in its ontological comportment can be discerned. The linkage of innovative explications of the Torah and the evolving nature of time that we can elicit, for instance, from Moses Corvero, whose writings were surely an important influence on early Hasidim, throws a spotlight on the intricate, or Hasidic masters I should have said, throws a spotlight on the intricate connection between phenomenological harmonics and ontology of time. What is especially evocative is the following paradox in the Ramak that ensures, that ensues from this connection. On the one hand, the idea of an infinitora entails that the text is inherently timeless. For that which is infinite cannot be contained in any temporal frame that is finite. But on the other hand, the meaning of a text that is inherently timeless can be manifest only in and through an endless chain of interpretation that unfolds persistently in time. Indeed, in its most basic hermeneutical sense, time is the modulation of the unremitting recitation and elucidation of the text that is timeless. Building on this Kabbalistic idea, and particularly as it was transmitted in the writings of the Maral of Prague, Hasidic master, early Hasidic masters routinely emphasized that the tetragrammaton heralds the temporal eternality of God's eternal temporality. A perspective poetically captured by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and I quote, time however is beyond our reach, beyond our power. It is both near and far, intrinsic to all experience, and transcendent transcending all experience. It belongs exclusively to God. Time then is the otherness, a mystery that hovers above all categories. The tripartite compressions signified by the tetragrammaton Hayyahu veviya communicates that God transcends time, but that the transcendence can only be achieved through being more deeply embedded in time, or to be more precise to be implanted in the moment, which is the aspect of time in which the timeline is cut, and so far as the three temporal modalities converge and are thereby surmounted. Cast in the traditional theological categories, the time of the present undergirds the spontaneity of revelation, as well as the sabbatical rest that seals the act of creation and the salvific repose of messianic redemption. All three occurrences transpire in the moment in which rest is motion and motion rest, where there is no discrepancy between the streaming of time and the steadfastness of eternity. It is through and in the moment therefore that we have the capability of discerning the mystery of otherness incarnated in the compressions of past, present, and future, a quality of being in time that is not time and in the moment that is no moment, or in the language of the Ramak, is man she ain't no man, over eight she ain't no eight. Or as Dov Bear Schnereson, the Mithli Rebbe, the son of the Alta Rebbe, put it the essence of the infinite light that is entirely above time, at smut or ensov shall amala min azman lagamre. The eight temporal temporality not only describes ensov, but can be achieved by the Jew in the ecstasy of mystical union, a state of transformed mindfulness in which one's matter has been transposed into form, which is to say transfigured into the body that is constituted by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The awesome Hasidic texts, we frequently find the transcription of Betul, nullification, which brings up about this super consciousness, or Mohin the Galut in the Lurianic terminology, by means of which one can attain the state in which in the language of the Rashab, time itself will not only be above time, shazman atzmo ye limala min azman, but even more paradoxically, one reaches the illumination of infinity, where time itself is without time, shazman atzmo hubulizman. The eternality of time, the limit to assuming the character of the limitless is instantiated in the moment, but to be in the moment, the most concrete abstraction of the abstract concretization of human temporality is to be deeply enrooted in a historical context. So let me mention here a passage from the Maureen Ayum of Benachem of Chernobyl. It is known that God, blessed be he, is above time, with respect to God, blessed be he, that he was, he is, and he will be, are equal, for he was, he is, and he will be in one instant, ha'yahu veve ye berega achad, because the creator, blessed be he, is infinite, and he has no beginning and no end, hence the one who merits the resplendent light, which is the aspect of the one by becoming unified with the blessed one, shana'ase achdut imo yitbarach, he is above temporality, lamala mizman yut, and he can see from one end of the world to the other, the past, present, past, future, and present, as has been said, and not like the nations of the world. So even there, you have to stick in this ethno-sense, is who cares at this point about the other? Okay, that's how deep it goes. From a second passage, We get a better sense of the minakhum of Chernobyl consider the quality of eternity, which transcends time, a component of the temporal. Quote, it is known that the Torah consists of the names of the Holy One, blessed be He in God, blessed be He was, is, and will be, living and persisting eternally. And similarly is the Torah. And certainly in each moment of time, vachol etu zaman, the Torah is guard, mit labeshet, in accord with the needs of the moment, and the time. God's eternity is a apostasized in the fact that the Torah recurrently begets a different garb in accord with the exegesis of the moment. Based on the Zoharic identity of God in the Torah, it follows, moreover, that if the former is infinite, the latter will be as well. Again, we see that eternality is not antithetical to temporality, but it is rather its fullest implementation. And just as the infinite is accessible only through the pretense of the finite, so the eternal is apparent only through the facade of the temporal. So OK, so I'm going to skip, because I know it's late, and I'm going to skip a couple of sources here that pursue this matter further. And I want to pick it up, though, with this idea, that insofar as God is infinite, and God is identical with the Torah, the Torah is infinite, which means that it will be garbed differently in each interim of time. So to buttress this idea, the Hasidic masters refer often to the teaching of Luria, transmitted by Haim Vitaal, to the fact that each time of the annual festivals pass over Pentecost and Tabernacles, there is a glowing of the subvernal lights commensurate to the particular time of the given festival. So one is obligated to experience the appointed time of each holiday in the manner that it was initially experienced. Pesach, the departure from Egypt, Anshfu was the receiving of the Torah on Sukkot, the soldier, and threw the desert on the way to the Promised Land. Notably, in his Shukhan, Arukh, Zaman of Liyadi appropriated this principle in his contention that even though the determination of clock time varies from place to place, it has no effect on the sanctity of Sabbath festivals or other rituals. Since their holiness is dependent not on terrestrial time zones, but on the propitious moment, the Eirat zone above, and the subvernal unifications, the Yehudim Eleonim that surpassed the category of place and time. Now again, I'm gonna skip here, but it should be obvious that this Hasidic perspective is based on Kabbalistic precedent, but in turn, that is an elaboration of the conception of time articulated by some of the rabbinic sages regarding the fact that each time one studies Torah, it's as if the Torah was given, again, at that moment, a Ki'ilu, right? Just quickly one passage from Pasikdurah of Kahana, commenting on the verse in Exodus 19, did they arrive on this very day, Hayyom az-Zeh, rather when you study my words, they should not be old, you say nim in your eyes, but it should be as if the Torah were given on that very day, Ki'ilu Hayyom litna Torah. The implicit hermeneutical assumption, and I'm coming to my conclusion, that again is altogether otherwise based on this idea, is what I would identify as the conduit that conjoins and separates the oral and the written. That is just as each moment of time is the reiteration of the novel, the recurrence of what has never been, so each transcription of the Rebbe's words is concurrently a repetition and an innovation. The written transcription can never be identical to the oral delivery, but the divergence embodies the time space that undergirds the revelatory nature of the master's teaching. And I conclude with a comment of the Rai'ats from a talk he delivered on the 11th of Nisan, 5709, which would have been the 4th of April, 1949, in which the seventh Rebbe, or as he was known at the time, the Ramash, included in his edition of his Passover Haggadah. The Rai'ats was explicating the inner meaning or the capitalistic intent of the requirement to eat matzah shmurah at the Seder. I have it in Yiddish. Do you want me just to read the translation of the Yiddish? Do I have time to read the Yiddish? Yeah. All right, so remember I grew up in Brooklyn, but it's the wrong, sorry, you'll forgive me. Das is their penimi nukudi atzmi. Here you get the nukudi, a penime version. Vart, das is their penimi nukudi atzmi vart. Vos marainu harav ha'magin mimezrish, hot makabel, given mimurah, kodash marainu ha'ba'femtov, beshey marok ha'ba'chai, umasarol ha'od kvod kdushas tamidol, ha'makabel penimi rabainu ha'zakain, wa bayhul vairur mirebi lirebi. K'ol ha'ba'achad me'hod kvod kdushas avosainu rabotainu, ha'kdoshim zukhusatam yagain aleinu, bedoro ha'zar masar vair es hadukudah vart ha'amur. So by translation. This is the inner punctilious essential word that our teacher, the master, the mageet of mezrish received from his holy teacher, our teacher, the master of the good name, in the name of his teacher, the master of the living. And he transmitted it to his honorable and holy disciple who received the inner matter, our elderly master, and it came in unity and was explicated from master to master, each and every one of the honorable saintliness of our holy forefathers, may their mayor protect us in his generation, transmitted again and explain the punctilious word that was spoken. So the statement of the raiats encapsulates the myth of origins that has informed khabad-e-bavish worldview. The best received the essential word from his teacher, achiyah the shilo knight, and he transmitted it to Dov bair, the mageet of mezrish, who then transmitted it to Shnear Zaman of the Adi, the Al-Tarebi. Once it circulated to each of the masters of the dynasty. What is crucial for this presentation is the emphasis placed on the fact that this inner point of the essential word, their penimene kudiyatmivart, is rendered anew when explained uniquely in each generation. Geometrically speaking, punctiliousness propagates linearity, the mystery of time as Hemshech. Whence it follows that continuity does not preclude diversity? On the contrary, it is precisely continuity that procures the hermeneutical condition for diversity just as replication is a provision that occasions deviation. This, I believe, is the import of the celebrated comment of Shnear Zaman reported by the raiats in the name of the Rashab from a talk he delivered in 1891. Quote, in the first years of his leadership, the Al-Tarebi said publicly, one needs to live with the time. Man bedar f'lebin mit der Zeit. Or in the Hebrew rendering, yeche yeish lachayot im hazman. What was the intention of this remark? What is the underlying conception of time implied thereby? We are told in the continuation of this passage in Hayyom yom, the anthology of aphorisms and customs that were compiled and arranged in 1943 by the Ramash from the talks and the letters of the raiats. That the Al-Tarebi's brother, Yehuda Leib, explained that his words meant to instill that one must live in accord with the section of the Torah assigned to each week such that one not only intellectually or cognitively studies that section every day of the appropriate week, but that one existentially or viscerally lives with it in our lebin mit der. To translate this explanation into a more contemporary philosophical and scientific register, I would say that Shnev Zalman's ammunition to live with the time implies attumen to the fact that time and its constituent fluidity relates to the paradox of the ephemerality that endures as the endurance that is ephemeral. That every moment is the same because it is different and different because it is the same. This paradox I propose has served simultaneously as the basis for both the resolute faith of the believer to trust the veracity of the Hasidic sermon as a means to access the teachings of the Rebbe and the critical judgment of the scholar to analyze those teachings historically and philologically. Given the framework within the phenomenon of Hasidism as unfolded, this is the best option available to us. The task of the scholar, therefore, consists not in disrobing the naked truth, but rather in disposing the garment in which the truth is attired for the sake of donning another garment in its place. There is, as I've argued, often no face that is not itself a mask. In my mind, this is one of the deepest mysteries that can be elicited from Kabbalistic esotericism. To express the matter in the symbolic language of Israel, Sarug, as a consequence of the act of Shashua, the auto-erotic jouissance related to the Tsimtsum, the primordial contraction, the aura itself is garbed in the malbush, the garment that is woven from the letters of the tetragrammaton, which contains all the letters of the Torah. Through this garment, the light of infinite concealment is revealed, but this light can be revealed in as much as it is concealed. Behind the malbush, therefore, is no body, but the luminosity of the infinite nothing that can be seen only as the nothing that cannot be seen. From this myth, we can extract the ultimate secret of enlightenment. The removal of the veil inevitably results in the unfurling of another veil to be unfurled and hence the ideal of lifting the final veil amounts to discerning that the final veil to lift is the illusion that there is a final veil to lift.