די כללות'דיגע נשמה

There are two ways to make a group one. You can compress it — reduce difference until nothing is left to disagree about. Or you can reveal that it was one already at a level beneath the difference, in which case the differences survive intact and simply stop being ultimate.

Every political unity in history has been the first kind. The Chassidic account of Moshiach is emphatically the second.

Klalis

If yechidah is the point at which an individual soul is one rather than an assembly of faculties, yechidah klalis is the same structure at the scale of a people. Knesses Yisrael is not a federation of souls that have agreed to cooperate. It is described in the sources as one thing with many expressions — which is why the tradition can speak of Israel in the singular without it being a figure of speech.

Moshiach’s relation to this is not managerial. He is not the point at which the parts are administered into agreement. He is the collective yechidah made visible — the place where what was always true about the whole becomes something the whole can see.

The spark in each

This is the basis for a teaching that is easy to sentimentalise and worth stating precisely: every Jew has a spark of Moshiach. It does not mean that everyone is a little bit messianic, or that the office is distributed. It means that the yechidah in each person and the yechidah klalis are not two different things, so the capacity that is fully unobstructed in him is present, obstructed, in everyone.

The practical consequence is the opposite of passivity. If the point is present and obstructed, then removing obstruction is work anyone can do, and it is the same work he completes.

Difference is not the problem

It follows that the ingathering of exiles is not a homogenisation. The tribes are not dissolved. Communities do not converge into a single custom. The sources describing the future are conspicuously full of distinctions — tribal portions, priestly roles, different cities, different functions.

Children returning to their border — plural children, one border. Fragmentation was never the existence of many. It was the loss of the sense in which the many were one. That sense is what returns.