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What should you do when unwanted thoughts invade your mind—not during prayer, but during ordinary life? The Tanya's twenty-seventh chapter offers counterintuitive advice: be happy ...
Intrusive thoughts during prayer are not a sign that your prayer is worthless. They are a sign that your prayer is working. Chapter twenty-eight of the Tanya addresses one of the m...
Sometimes the heart turns to stone. You try to pray and feel nothing. You try to study and the words slide off your mind like water off rock. You know intellectually that God is gr...
Chapter thirty of the Tanya instructs: "Be humble of spirit before every person" (Avot 4:10)—and it means every person, including the worst person you can imagine. How is this poss...
Chapter thirty-one of the Tanya addresses a danger built into its own system. The previous chapters instructed the reader to crush the ego, to contemplate one's spiritual wretchedn...
"You shall love your fellow as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). Hillel the Elder called this the entire Torah, with everything else being commentary. Chapter thirty-two of the Tanya ex...
Chapter thirty-three of the Tanya prescribes an exercise for generating joy—and it is available to every person, regardless of spiritual level. Concentrate your mind and consider: ...
The Tanya's thirty-fourth chapter brings everything together with a single image: the Patriarchs were God's chariot, and you can be too. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never, for a sing...
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Chassidism, poses a devastating question in his masterwork the Tanya: if most people will never fully defeat their evil inclina...
God wanted a home. Not in the highest heavens where angels sing without ceasing. Not in the dazzling worlds of pure spirit. God wanted a home in the lowest, darkest, most difficult...
Every commandment you perform sends a flood of infinite light into the physical world. That is not a metaphor. According to the Tanya of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, that is the ...
A strange ruling sits at the heart of Jewish law. If you recite the Shema prayer entirely in your mind, with complete concentration and devotion, you have not fulfilled your obliga...
Angels are, in a certain sense, spiritual animals. The prophet Ezekiel saw them with the face of a lion, the face of an ox (Ezekiel 1:10). The Tanya takes this literally: angels ha...
Rabbi Chaim Vital, the great student of the Arizal, revealed something extraordinary about what happens in the upper worlds when we study Torah. Study Torah with genuine intention,...
Before you put on your tallit in the morning, before you open a book of Torah, before you do anything holy at all, you need one thing first. Fear. Not terror. Not dread. Rabbi Schn...
There are two kinds of awe, and they lead to entirely different places. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi maps them with surgical precision in the Tanya, drawing on the Mishnah (the ea...
There is a love of God so universal that every single Jewish soul possesses it, regardless of spiritual level. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi locates it in a verse from Isaiah that ...
There is a direct road to God that does not require you to be a mystic or a saint. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi calls it the attribute of our patriarch Jacob: the path of compassi...
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi offers a method for awakening love of God that he says is accessible to everyone. It is, he insists, "very near indeed." The key is a single verse fro...
"In every generation and every day," the Tanya teaches, "a person must regard himself as if he had that day come out of Egypt." Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi reads the Exodus not a...
If God's light were to flow into the world without restriction, this world could never exist. Everything finite would dissolve back into the Infinite like a candle flame in the sun...
The entire architecture of creation, every world, every angel, every concealment of divine light, exists for one purpose: so that a human being in a physical body can choose to tur...
There is a love of God that surpasses all the forms of love the Tanya has described so far. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi compares it to gold surpassing silver. It burns like fiery...
The Shechinah (שכינה), God's indwelling Presence, rests in the Holy of Holies. But if God fills the entire world with His glory, what does it mean for the Shechinah to "rest" in on...
The Shechinah (שכינה) is not a separate entity from God. It is the point where God's hidden infinity first becomes visible, the way sunlight becomes visible only after it leaves th...
The First Temple and the Second Temple were not the same. Not in their physical structure, and not in the quality of divine light that dwelled within them. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of ...
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that the Torah is not just a text to study. It is a key that unlocks every prayer and opens every closed door. When a person engages deeply with Tor...
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that prayer is the essential weapon of the Messiah. Not a sword. Not an army. Prayer. The teaching begins with a striking image from the Zohar: the ...
Listening to a wicked singer is spiritually dangerous. Listening to a righteous singer can transform your soul. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov explains why, and the answer involves the s...
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that in the future, all suffering will be revealed as good. Not philosophically. Experientially. You will bless God for your pain the same way you b...
"The entire world was created only for my sake" (Sanhedrin 37a). Rabbi Nachman of Breslov takes this teaching at face value: if the world exists for you, then you are responsible f...
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, in his Kedushat Levi commentary on the opening verse of the Torah, makes a claim that sounds simple but overturns how most people think about cre...
In his commentary on Parashat Bereshit, Rebbe Elimelech of Lizhensk (the Noam Elimelech) asks a deceptively simple question: why does the Torah begin with the word "beginning"? Ras...
