Time & Perspective Quote by Menachem Mendel Schneerson

Time, in Schneerson's hands, isn’t the neutral grid we drag our days across; it’s a creature with agency. Calling time “another of God’s creations” does more than nod to theology. It yanks time out of the modern, managerial frame - calendars, productivity, “time management” - and plants it in a moral universe where the hours aren’t owned, banked, or optimized. They’re bestowed. That shift matters because it quietly rebukes a culture that treats time as private property.

The second clause lands the sharper claim: time “has a life of its own.” Subtext: you cannot fully domesticate it, and you shouldn’t try. There are seasons when history moves slowly and moments when it accelerates, and the proper stance isn’t panic or control but attentiveness. In Chabad thought, Schneerson often fused cosmic purpose with urgent action; this line threads that needle. If time is alive, it can be “met” rather than merely spent, and it can also demand things of you. The command isn’t to surrender to fate, but to stop confusing impatience with progress.

Contextually, a 20th-century Jewish leader speaking after war, displacement, and ideological upheaval is making a pointed intervention: meaning doesn’t arrive only when you force it. Time itself participates in redemption, in ripening, in readiness. The rhetorical power is its calm authority: it reframes delay not as failure, but as part of a created order that is neither random nor fully at our disposal.