| Sumario: | This study attempts to assess the nature of the role of the homily in Ḥasidism by tackling the complex interplay of orality and writing; that is, the credibility that is ascribed to the sermon must be gauged from within the breach between oral performance and written preservation. The gap between oral and written 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 scrutinize these convictions critically? I surmise that the response to these questions turns on being attuned to the nature of the timespace in which the sermon was initially delivered and that is preserved for posterity in the written account. In its most elemental cadence, time can be defined as the metrics of the indeterminacy of the indivisible unity of the general that is perpetually determined by the incessant division of the particular. Temporal computation, accordingly, is not predicated on the motion of physical entities as the philosophers have long maintained, but it is rather the calculation of the incalculable that is beyond time, the ebb and flow of the infinitivity that generates the polarities of light and dark, which translate into the bicameral sentient experience of the nocturnal-diurnal rhythm, engendered respectively as feminine judgment and masculine mercy. Specularized from this vantage point, the eventality of time is hypostatized in the moment that is the compresence of past, present, and future. Time in its constituent fluidity -- or in quantum terms, its computational incommensurability -- relates to the paradox of the ephemerality that endures as the endurance that is ephemeral, that every moment is unique because duplicated and duplicated because unique.
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