THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS about women in Habad hasidism brought together concepts such as the Lower Unity, in which the Divine is recognized in the here and now, and the empowerment of women to ‘spread the wellsprings’. For observers of contemporary Habad it is clear that a central goal of this empowerment is the quest to bring about the messianic redemption. In this chapter I explore some of the inherent combinations of opposites in that ideal.

A CHARACTERISTIC of Habad hasidic thought is the combination of opposites. Indeed, it is expressed in the Hebrew title of Rachel Elior's work about the early generations of the Habad movement: Unity of Opposites: The Mystical Theosophy of Chabad. The essence of this is the combination of rational and mystical elements, as seen, for example, in the various Habad systems of contemplation before prayer. The contemplative employs a rational, intellectualist system of thought, yet his goal is a mystical experience of self-transformation. In this chapter I claim that the same combination of opposites applies to, and is an integral part of, the messianism of contemporary Habad.

Medieval rabbinic expressions of the messianic idea can be considered in terms of either an apocalyptic series of miraculous events or a rational progression which leads to the political restoration of Jewish independence. Either of these might focus on a specific end (kets), a time foretold by prophecy or eschatological calculation. The apocalyptic mode culminates in the revival of the dead, a complete transformation of the world order. While examples of the apocalyptic mode abound, Maimonides in the twelfth century is generally seen as presenting the paradigm of the rational mode.

The Habad movement was an inheritor of the belief that the spread of mystical teachings would hasten the coming of the messiah. This view was expressed by R. Hayim Vital in his introduction to Ets ḥayim, and by other sixteenth-century kabbalists, as well as in the famous ‘Sacred Epistle’ of the Ba’al Shem Tov, which was discussed in Chapter 2 above. How this belief, which in the case of Habad became a central ethos, related to Scholem's thesis of the neutralization of messianism in hasidism, claiming that public political messianism was replaced by an emphasis on inward spirituality, will be considered briefly below.