ב"ה
The Rebbe's Notebooks
The "Reshimot"
Editor's note: Three notebooks of notes by the Rebbe, of righteous memory, came to light about a month after his passing, when they were discovered in a drawer in his room. The entries in these journals date between the years 1928, the year of the Rebbe's marriage, and 1950. Throughout these the Rebbe kept these notebooks with him at all times, jotting down the scholarly and sublime products of his phenomenal mind also in the most precarious of circumstances. Read more »
Paris 1938
The deeper meaning behind the different opinions in the Talmud and commentaries regarding the menorah’s spatial alignment inside the Temple, and regarding the identity of its miraculous “western lamp.”
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Matzah represents the bare necessities of life. The Passover offering represents luxuries whose function is solely to give pleasure. Maror represents a middle ground between these two extremes...
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The spiritual significance of shechitah; the laws of kashrut applied to the beast, bird and fish within the soul of man
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In the Talmud, the laws of Mishpatim are expounded upon in three "gates" -- Bava Kama, Bava Metzia, and Bava Batra. The Rebbe sees these as three stages in the social and spiritual journey of man
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1940 in Vichy, France
Why the dramatic shift in Moses' view on the Jewish settlement of the eastern territories? If the Reubenites' and Gadites' petition initially struck him as reminiscent of the sin of the Spies, what convinced him to endorse their plan and even expand on it?
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Who has not fallen prey to the oh-so-human tendency to compare his life to the lives of others? “If only I had So-and-So’s mind (or talent, or money), then I’d be able to make a difference and have some impact on the world!″
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Nice, 1941
Why content ourselves with the perfection of the individual self, when we have been empowered to transform the world?
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When the Torah instructs us to "follow the majority,"1 it seems to simply reiterate a most basic fact of life. Yet every so often we are confronted with a defiant exception to this rule. How does a single split atom radically transform an innumerable quantity of its sisters?
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"One cannot banish a life for the sake of a life'' is a major principle of Torah law. A human life is of immeasurable, unqualifiable, infinite value.
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How can a unit of time be defined as a day of rest, the very antithesis of time?
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Sukkot 1931
Judah the son of Teima would say: "... run like a gazelle ... to do the will of your Father in Heaven." And the Zohar comments, "The gazelle is unique in that when he runs, he turns his head back to the place from which he is running." Where is he running from?
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Chanukkah 1939
Light travels through time and space to ever duskier vistas, to increasingly alien environments. A journey from midday in Jerusalem to the darkest reaches of a world awaiting redemption.
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Chanukkah 1935
[Upon reclaiming the Holy Temple from the Greeks], the Hashmonians first made the menorah out of iron poles plated with tin. When they grew wealthier, they made a menorah of silver. When they grew wealthier still, they made a menorah of gold.
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The sukkah is a makeshift hut in which the Jew dwells during the seven-day festival of Sukkot that remind us of how G‑d sheltered us with the miraculous “clouds of glory” in our forty-year journey through the desert from Egypt to the Holy Land. Yet the sukkah also has a more ancient origin, dating back four hundred years before the Exodus, to Abraham, the first Jew.
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1940, Vichy
A maid's child once dirtied the royal palace. Said the king: "Let his mother come and clean up her child's filth." By the same token, G‑d says: "Let the [red] heifer atone for the deed of the [golden] calf."
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Confinement always precedes a new beginning. Consider the circumstances of every birth. Thus the prophet Ezekiel compares the experience of galut (our current state of exile and spiritual displacement) to a pregnancy, and the redemption to the birth that follows.
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The needle is a fellow with a mission: to wed disjointed fragments into a whole cloth.
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Many claim to intuitively know what is right in life. They reject the notion that one must transcend a subjective self to achieve harmony between body and soul. They argue that the body and the soul are complementary parts of an integral self, requiring no external laws and rituals to govern their relationship and define a particular path through life.
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Penned December 1935
What happens when you mix the soil of materialism with the water of spurious reason?
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Reshimos No. 5. Monday 26 Sivan, 5691
Details of the Previous Rebbe’s Bar Mitzvah; The Gartel; Four Pairs of Tefillin; Details of the Rebbe Rashab’s younger years; The davening of the Rebbe Rashab
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One would have thought that on the day of a Bar Mitzvah — when a boy becomes obligated to keep the mitzvos like a grown-up — the day he is considered a man and he becomes a fully-fledged member of klal Yisrael — that tachanun should not be recited…
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The calendar is more than a measure of time; it is a cycle that charts our inner life and our relationship with our Creator.
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It is specifically in the lowest end of Creation that the potential for holiness is the greatest.
G-d commanded the Jewish people to take vengeance against Midian because they enticed them into the idolatry of Pe'or ;
this idolatry of is hedonism, the indulgence in sensual pleasure as an end in itself, implying that physical pleasures are either too "low" and vulgar to serve divine purposes or are somehow off-limits for the holy life.
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The relationship between G-d and the Jews is like that between husband and wife.
According to the Midrash, G-d allegorically fulfills all the precepts that He commanded the Jewish people. Since G-d is considered the husband of the Jewish people, thus He is "obligated" to provide His people with food, clothing, and conjugal rights as His basic obligations to His wife.
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If we begin the day with a moment of holiness, if we offer even a small portion of our time to G‑d in the morning, then that experience will affect the rest of the day, infusing it with significance and holiness.
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Intermediate
The word for “give thanks” in Hebrew also means “to acknowledge.”
If we recover from all four of those dangers requiring a thanksgiving offering brought to the holy Temple— by not drowning in the sea of chochma, by progressing to the 50th gate of understanding, by manifesting the emotions born of our intellect, and by
communicating our inspiration to others—we thereby rectify our entire complement of soul-powers.
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The four-step program presented here in preparation for Shavuot teaches us to channel four human traits—brazenness, ambition, decisiveness and endurance—to good purpose.
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On the Significance of Circumcision
He doesn't understand; there's pain and hurt. And appreciation for all the symbolism, tradition and meaning are still many years away...
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From the Rebbe's Reshimos, No. 169
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If you or I would design a world, I guarantee we wouldn’t do it this way. We would have one center and spread things out from there. Not so when you're dealing with an infinite consciousness.
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Sanhedrin 98a states: “The descendant of David (Mashiach) will not come until they will search for a fish for a sick person and it will be impossible to find one.”
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