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| חצות |
If, as Moses explains,
then we've passed from nightime, the first 500 years of that millennium, which began in year 5000, and have already entered daylight hours. If 500 years equals 12 hours, and we are 280 years since morning, and morning was at 6:00 am - let's say - then the time right now is 12:43 pm, 43 minutes after חצות!
The year the Ba'al Shem Tov went public was at 6:00 am, at dawn of the 6th day. The Alter Rebbe of Chabad became the 3rd generation thereafter to expose Chassidut, in the year 5550.
The light of Chassidus was lost from most Jews for 1,950 years; Since the 2nd Temple's destruction in the 4th millennium. Jews stuck with Torah, to be sure, but only to the well known 4 layers of Torah. The 5th layer of depth was an entirely new perspective of Torah that only Chassidus now brought to the public's cognitive grasp.
כי אלף שנים בעיניך כיום אתמול כי יעבר
"For a thousand years are in Your eyes like yesterday, which passed ...." (Tehillim (90:4)then we've passed from nightime, the first 500 years of that millennium, which began in year 5000, and have already entered daylight hours. If 500 years equals 12 hours, and we are 280 years since morning, and morning was at 6:00 am - let's say - then the time right now is 12:43 pm, 43 minutes after חצות!
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| עלות השחר |
The light of Chassidus was lost from most Jews for 1,950 years; Since the 2nd Temple's destruction in the 4th millennium. Jews stuck with Torah, to be sure, but only to the well known 4 layers of Torah. The 5th layer of depth was an entirely new perspective of Torah that only Chassidus now brought to the public's cognitive grasp.
This was a taste of the new light of Moshaich. This made for Jews for Moshiach to again become a valid topic of discussion. This new insight would have been shunned by Jews before that had they learned about it then because this topic brought about sorrowful memories. It had been a taboo subject earlier. The Jewish mind back then was unprepared to entertain the concept of Moshiach having been deeply frustrated over the years with fake candidates and, instead, met only with severe oppression by host countries.
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| The Wellsprings of Chassidus Opening Up |
Dawn arrived with the Ba'al ShemTov in 5500, and especially after sunrise the Alter Rebbe, in the year 5550, began to spread the word widely. By then all Jews were cognitively equipped by God to better digest this new light, this new spiritualism, of Chassidus.
These dates are significant from a Jewish Halachic perspective! How so?
We know that Chassidus will be learned during the Sabbatical Era in the 6th millennium. We will then be immersed in it, learning the most inner secrets of the infinite Torah. That will be the entire purpose of Jewish existence. This is what is meant by the metaphor, that in Moshiach's time we will partake in the festive "feast of the Leviathan and the Wild Bull" (סעודת שור הבר והלווייתן). That food is Chassidus.
Halachically, on Friday, once daytime arrives, it is a Mitzvah - a commandment for every Jew - to taste of the food being prepared for the Sabbath (טועמיה חיים זכו). That Mitzvah is time-dependent, sanctioned only starting at daybreak. Thus since the year 5500, we are obliged to taste some of that food in anticipation of what it'll be like.
Had you learned some Chassidus before 1740, it would have meant little to you because the command to learn Chassidus, that is -- to taste the future food of Shabbat -- only took effect in the year 1740, with the exposition of the Ba'al Shem Tov.
Other halachic aspects concern the times when formal prayer services begin or end. So, for example, the time of Tefillah, the Shmoneh Esrei morning prayer, is a time that Chassidus regards as a fight -- as a struggle to keep well concentrated in prayer, doing our best to keep from being distracted. These times may well translate into what happened to the Jewish people during the progroms and then the holocaust.
Anyhow, those time of day aspects, as to how and when they occurred, are now well behind us. For us Jews today, we only await the Ultimate Redemption that's about to happen any day now. Surely God won't wait until the last minute to debut Shabbat aspects, as if Friday hours were as secular as before. Rather, along the lines of the אחישנה possibility, which is one way Moshiach can come, aside from the other inevitable way (בעתו), the blessings will shower down a lot sooner than expected.
[Gleaned form a Maamar (להבין הקושיא הידוע) of the 5th Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Rebbe Rashab, who founded the first officially Chassidic Yeshivah, said in 1903.]
