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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 ...
The Talmud tells a vivid sea-story: Rabbi Yochanan and his companions saw a massive fish raise its head from the water, its eyes shining like two moons, spouting water from its nos...
The true tzaddik (a righteous person), Rabbi Nachman of Breslov teaches, is the one who looks at every detail of creation and asks: why did God make it this way? Why does a lion ha...
Everything has a purpose. And that purpose has a purpose of its own, each one higher than the last. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov uses this insight to explain why you must judge every p...
Why travel to see a tzaddik (a righteous person) in person when you can read their teachings in a book? Rabbi Nachman of Breslov answered this question directly: there is an immeas...
There exists a soul in every generation through whom Torah insights are revealed to the world. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov describes this soul as one burdened with suffering: "Bread w...
Sarah is the only woman in the entire Torah whose age at death is recorded. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev asks why, and his answer reveals something stunning about what it mean...
God's command to Abraham—"Go forth from your land, your birthplace, and your father's house" (Genesis 12:1)—reads like travel instructions. Rebbe Elimelech of Lizhensk, in his comm...
"And Sarah's lifetime was one hundred years and twenty years and seven years" (Genesis 23:1). Rashi offers his famous comment: at one hundred she was like twenty (free from sin), a...
"And you shall plate it with pure gold" (Exodus 25:11). The Talmud (Sukkah 45b) reads the verse about the Tabernacle's acacia wood—"standing up" (Exodus 26:15)—to mean that the woo...
The Torah uses an unusual word — "michsah" — when describing how the Passover lamb should be allocated. (Exodus 12:4) says the lamb must be divided "according to the michsah of sou...
What is the intent of "according to the count of souls"? From (Ibid.) "A man (according to his eating"), I might think only a man. Whence do I derive (the same for) a woman, a tumt...
The Torah permits certain food preparation on festival days with the phrase "only what is to be eaten by all souls." The Mekhilta records a debate about exactly how far this permis...
Rabbi Yossi HaGlili reads the same verse about "what is to be eaten by all souls" and arrives at a different conclusion than Rabbi Yishmael. Where Yishmael excludes both animals an...
Rabbi Akiva agrees with Rabbi Yossi HaGlili that animals are included in the festival food-preparation permission — but he reaches this conclusion through a different textual mecha...
The Torah states: "And if a man strikes any soul of a man." The Mekhilta examines this verse with extraordinary precision, asking exactly which victims are covered by the prohibiti...
It’s a question that’s haunted humanity for millennia, and Jewish tradition offers some pretty fascinating answers. Rabbi Azariah, whose wisdom is preserved in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliez...
A certain Cuthite said: ‘I will go and see a certain Jewish elder40Rabbi Yishmael ben Rabbi Yosei. who mocks people.’ He came and sat near him. He said to him: ‘I saw in my dream f...
