Menahem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), the seventh and seemingly last Rebbe of the Habad-Lubavitch dynasty, was both a paragon of Hasidic ultraorthodoxy and a charismatic proponent of a unique mystical rationalism for post-Holocaust Jews that appealed to the contemporary fascination with science and technology, but which rejected scientific method when its conclusions challenged traditional beliefs. Schneerson was a man marked by conflicting tendencies: a radical messianic visionary, who promoted a conservative political agenda; a relatively reclusive contemplative, who built his hasidic sect into an international movement; a man dedicated to the exposition of mysteries, who nevertheless harbored many secrets. Schneerson displayed the capacity to combine contradictory sensibilities, astutely masking views that might be deemed heterodox by the canons of orthodoxy, engineering a fundamentalist ideology that could potentially subvert the traditional gender hierarchy, the halakhic distinction between permissible and forbidden, and the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile.While most literature on the Rebbe focuses on whether he identified with the role of Messiah, Elliot R. Wolfson, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and the phenomenology of religious experience, concentrates instead on Schneerson's apocalyptic sensibility and his promotion of a mystical consciousness that undermines all discrimination. For Schneerson, the ploy of secrecy is crucial to the dissemination of the messianic secret. Utilizing the rhetoric of a personal redeemer who will come in the future, Schneerson offered a de-temporalized and de-personalized idea of salvation. To be enlightened messianically is to be delivered from all conceptual limitations, even the very notion of becoming emancipated from limitation.

The ultimate liberation, or true and complete redemption, fuses the believer into an infinite essence beyond all duality, even the duality of being emancipated and not emancipated, an emancipation, in other words, that emancipates one from the bind of emancipation. At the deepest level, Schneerson's eschatological orientation entailed the discernment that a spiritual master, if he be true, must dispose of the mask of mastery. Situating Habad's thought within the evolution of Kabbalistic mysticism, the history of Western philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism, Wolfson articulates the rich theology and profound philosophy of Schneerson, focusing on the nature of apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality.