Torah Or and Likkutei Torah

About Torah Or and Likkutei Torah

Torah Or and Likkutei Torah are the two posthumously published collections of Schneur Zalman of Liadi's Hasidic discourses on the weekly Torah portions and the festivals of the Jewish year. Together they form the homiletical companion to Tanya and constitute, with Tanya, the foundational written canon of Chabad Hasidism. Where Tanya systematized Schneur Zalman's spiritual psychology and Lurianic metaphysics for the educated layman, Torah Or and Likkutei Torah preserved his weekly oral teaching to his closest disciples — the discourses (maamarim) he delivered on Shabbat and festivals at his courts in Liozna and later Liadi between his return from his second imprisonment in 1801 and his death in 1812 during the flight from Napoleon's army.

The discourses were not written by Schneur Zalman himself for publication. They were transcribed by his disciples from oral delivery, gathered into manuscripts, and then edited and published over the following four decades by his successors. The work of editing fell primarily to his grandson Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the third Lubavitcher Rebbe known by the title of his halakhic responsa as the Tzemach Tzedek. The Tzemach Tzedek collated multiple manuscript versions of each discourse, arranged them in the order of the weekly Torah portions and the festival cycle, supplied chapter divisions and titles, and added his own brief glosses where the manuscript tradition was unclear or where his grandfather's compressed Hebrew demanded explanation. The first volume to appear was Torah Or, published in Kopust in 1837, covering Genesis, Exodus, and the early festivals through Purim. Likkutei Torah followed in Zhitomir in 1848, covering Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the High Holy Days, Sukkot, and the spring festivals.

The two titles are distinguished mainly by which portions of the Torah they cover and by the manuscript traditions from which they were assembled, not by any deep difference in subject matter or method. Within Chabad they are usually cited together as a single body of teaching, and Chabad scholars often refer to them collectively as the maamarim of the Alter Rebbe. The discourses follow a recognizable format: each begins with a verse from the weekly portion or a phrase from the liturgy of the festival, raises a difficulty or paradox in the verse, and then resolves the difficulty through a sustained Kabbalistic exposition that draws on the Zohar, the writings of Isaac Luria, and earlier Hasidic teaching. The exposition typically moves from the literal sense of the verse to its sefirotic and Lurianic dimensions, then returns to a practical application in the spiritual life of the listener.

The feature making the discourses distinctively Chabad rather than generally Hasidic is their relentless intellectual rigor. Where the discourses of other early Hasidic masters were often brief, aphoristic, and emotionally charged, Schneur Zalman's discourses are extended, analytical, and conceptually demanding. He treats the Lurianic doctrines as a coherent metaphysical system whose internal logic can be displayed and whose implications can be drawn out with the precision of a Talmudic argument. Each discourse builds slowly from premises to conclusions, defining its terms, distinguishing its concepts, and demanding sustained intellectual attention from the reader. This method established the model for the Chabad maamar that all subsequent Lubavitcher Rebbes would follow.

The discourses presuppose Tanya as their systematic background. A reader approaching Torah Or or Likkutei Torah without prior familiarity with Tanya's doctrine of the Two Souls, the structure of the four worlds, and the technical vocabulary of Chabad Lurianism will find them nearly impenetrable. Within Chabad, the standard practice has been to study Tanya as the systematic foundation and then to take up the maamarim as the application of that system to the liturgical year and the inner life. The Tzemach Tzedek arranged the volumes specifically to support this practice, ordering the discourses according to the calendar so that Hasidim could read each week the discourse appropriate to that Shabbat or festival.

The textual situation of the discourses is complex. Multiple manuscript traditions survived, some recorded directly from Schneur Zalman's mouth and others transmitted through several intermediaries. The Tzemach Tzedek's printed editions represent his judgment about which versions were authoritative, but later Chabad scholars have continued to publish additional discourses and alternate versions from manuscripts that the Tzemach Tzedek did not include or did not have access to. The Kehot Publication Society edition produced by the Lubavitch movement in the twentieth century gathers many of these supplementary materials and provides the most comprehensive Hebrew text now in print, supplemented by the extensive notes and cross-references compiled by the sixth and seventh Lubavitcher Rebbes Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn and Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

Content

Torah Or and Likkutei Torah together cover the entire annual cycle of weekly Torah portions and the major festivals of the Jewish year. The discourses are arranged in the order of the calendar so that a Hasid can read each week the maamar appropriate to that Shabbat or festival.

Torah Or, published in Kopust in 1837, contains the discourses on Bereshit (Genesis) and Shemot (Exodus), as well as the festivals that fall during these months — Hanukkah, Purim, and the early portions of the calendar. The Genesis discourses include extended treatments of the creation account, the patriarchal narratives, and the descent into Egypt. The opening discourse on Bereshit develops the doctrine of tzimtzum (divine contraction) and explains how the act of creation involved the apparent withdrawal of the divine light to make room for finite existence. The discourses on the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob read the patriarchal narratives as encoded teachings about the three pillars of the spiritual life — chesed (loving-kindness), gevurah (strength), and tiferet (beauty) — and trace how each patriarch embodied a distinct mode of divine service.

The Exodus discourses develop the themes of slavery and redemption, the giving of the Torah at Sinai, and the building of the Tabernacle as encoded teachings about the structure of consciousness and the work of liberation from inner constraint. The Hanukkah and Purim discourses develop the inner meaning of the two post-biblical festivals, treating Hanukkah as a celebration of the inner light that cannot be extinguished and Purim as a teaching on hidden providence and the Esther's concealment of the divine name throughout the Megillah.

Likkutei Torah, published in Zhitomir in 1848, covers Vayikra (Leviticus), Bamidbar (Numbers), Devarim (Deuteronomy), and the major festivals of spring and fall — Pesach, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Shemini Atzeret. The Leviticus discourses develop extended treatments of the sacrificial system, reading the technical details of the Temple service as encoded teachings about the elevation of the animal soul through divine service. The Numbers discourses treat the wilderness journey as an allegory of the soul's pilgrimage through the four worlds of Lurianic cosmology. The Deuteronomy discourses develop Moses's farewell addresses as final teachings on the inner work of return.

The festival discourses are among the most studied portions of the work. The High Holy Days discourses develop the theology of judgment, repentance, and renewal that frames the inner work of Tishrei. Schneur Zalman teaches that Rosh Hashanah is the day on which the divine kingship is renewed and that the shofar's blast represents the simple cry of the soul that precedes all articulate prayer. The Yom Kippur discourses develop the inner meaning of the high priest's entry into the Holy of Holies as an allegory of the soul's annual entry into its own innermost chamber. The Sukkot discourses develop the imagery of the four species and the booth as teachings on divine intimacy and the soul's joy in being held by God.

The Pesach discourses treat the exodus from Egypt as the paradigmatic spiritual liberation, in which every constraint of consciousness (mitzrayim, narrow places) is broken open by the in-breaking of divine freedom. The Shavuot discourses develop the giving of the Torah as the moment when divine wisdom became permanently available to human consciousness through the contemplative practices of Torah study. Throughout, the discourses move from the literal sense of the verse or the festival to its mystical meaning and then to its application in the inner life of the listener, following a movement that came to define the Chabad maamar as a literary form.

Key Teachings

The doctrine of bittul, self-nullification, is the central spiritual teaching of the discourses. Schneur Zalman teaches that the highest form of divine service is the cancellation of the ego before the divine reality, in which the soul recognizes that it has no independent existence apart from God. Bittul comes in two forms — bittul hayesh (the nullification of the something, in which the soul recognizes its dependence on the divine source) and bittul bemtziut (nullification in essence, in which the soul recognizes that even its existence is nothing more than a reflection of the divine). The discourses develop these distinctions at length and connect them to the spiritual practices of prayer, Torah study, and observance of the commandments.

The doctrine of yesh and ayin, existence and nothingness, structures the metaphysics of the discourses. Schneur Zalman teaches that what appears to created consciousness as solid existence (yesh) is in reality a configuration of divine light (ayin), and that the practice of contemplation reverses this perception so that the practitioner comes to see existence as the divine nothing that animates it. This is the inner meaning of the Lurianic doctrine of tzimtzum: the divine contraction is not a real withdrawal but a perceptual modification that allows finite consciousness to arise within the infinite divine reality.

The distinction between sovev kol almin and memale kol almin — the divine light that surrounds all worlds and the divine light that fills all worlds — is one of Schneur Zalman's most influential conceptual tools. The light that fills all worlds is the immanent divine presence that gives finite reality its existence and that can be known by finite consciousness through contemplation. The light that surrounds all worlds is the transcendent divine reality that exceeds finite consciousness and can only be approached through self-nullification. The discourses use this distinction to explain how God can be both immanent and transcendent without contradiction.

The doctrine of seder hishtalshelut, the chain of emanation, organizes the cosmology of the discourses. Schneur Zalman traces the descent of divine light from its infinite source through the four Lurianic worlds of Atzilut (emanation), Beriah (creation), Yetzirah (formation), and Asiyah (action), and shows how each lower world is a contracted reflection of the worlds above it. The spiritual work of the Hasid involves the reverse movement — the ascent of the soul through the worlds back toward its source — and the discourses provide detailed contemplative maps for this ascent.

The contemplative practice of hitbonenut is the working method that the discourses recommend. The practitioner takes a teaching from the maamar, holds it in his mind during prayer, examines its implications, and allows the understanding to penetrate from his intellect into his emotions and from his emotions into his actions. This contemplative descent of the teaching from intellect through emotion to action is the practical heart of Chabad spirituality, and the discourses are designed to provide the materials for this practice. Each maamar gives the practitioner a structured contemplation suitable for a week or a festival of meditative work.

The teaching on avodah shebalev, the service of the heart, distinguishes Chabad from other Hasidic schools. Where many Hasidic teachers emphasized spontaneous emotional fervor in prayer, Schneur Zalman taught that the emotions of the spiritual life must be cultivated through prior intellectual contemplation. The proper Chabad practice is to study a Kabbalistic teaching, contemplate its meaning until the contemplation gives rise to the appropriate emotion, and then enter prayer in that prepared emotional state. The discourses provide the intellectual material that this method requires.

Translations

Torah Or and Likkutei Torah have remained primarily Hebrew works throughout their history, and full English translation has been a relatively recent and incomplete project compared to the long translation history of Tanya. The original printings — Torah Or in Kopust in 1837 and Likkutei Torah in Zhitomir in 1848 — were Hebrew editions prepared and edited by Menachem Mendel Schneersohn the Tzemach Tzedek from manuscripts of his grandfather's discourses. These early printings were followed by many additional Hebrew editions in Vilna, Warsaw, Lvov, and other centers of Jewish printing during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The standard contemporary Hebrew edition is the Kehot Publication Society edition produced by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement under the direction of the sixth and seventh Lubavitcher Rebbes. This edition includes the full text of both volumes with the chapter divisions and arrangement established by the Tzemach Tzedek, supplemented by the extensive cross-references and notes compiled by Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn and Menachem Mendel Schneerson during the twentieth century. The Kehot edition has become the standard reference for serious students of the discourses inside and outside Chabad.

Full English translation of Torah Or and Likkutei Torah has not been completed. The Lessons in Tanya project that produced the standard English-language commentary on Tanya during the 1980s and 1990s under the supervision of Yosef Wineberg established a model for translation and explanation of difficult Chabad texts, and similar projects have been launched for portions of Torah Or and Likkutei Torah. The Sichos in English organization based in Brooklyn has published English translations and elucidations of selected discourses, particularly those associated with major festivals and with the Hasidic holidays of the Chabad calendar.

Naftali Loewenthal's Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1990, provides extended scholarly translations and analysis of key passages from the maamarim within the broader argument of the book. Loewenthal's translations are accurate and accompanied by careful explanation of the technical vocabulary, and they offer the best academic introduction in English to the literary character of the discourses. Roman Foxbrunner's Habad: The Hasidism of R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady, published by the University of Alabama Press in 1992 and reprinted by Jason Aronson, provides additional translations of key discourses within a comprehensive scholarly study of Schneur Zalman's thought. Rachel Elior's The Paradoxical Ascent to God, published by SUNY Press in 1993, offers detailed analysis of the metaphysical structure of the discourses and provides extensive translations of representative passages.

For readers without Hebrew, the most accessible entry point to the maamarim is through these scholarly translations and through the partial English editions produced by Chabad publishers, supplemented by the audio and video shiurim on the discourses that have been recorded and distributed by the contemporary Chabad educational network.

Controversy

The controversies surrounding Torah Or and Likkutei Torah are mostly inherited from the controversies surrounding Tanya and the broader Chabad project, but the discourses raised some particular questions of their own that have continued to occupy scholars and traditional readers.

The first controversy concerned the editorial work of the Tzemach Tzedek. When Torah Or appeared in 1837 and Likkutei Torah in 1848, some readers within and outside Chabad questioned whether the printed text accurately represented the original oral discourses. Multiple manuscript versions of many discourses had circulated among the disciples of Schneur Zalman, and the Tzemach Tzedek's editorial decisions about which versions to print and which to omit were based on his own judgment about which manuscripts were authoritative. Critics suggested that the Tzemach Tzedek had occasionally smoothed difficult passages, harmonized contradictions between manuscripts, or imposed his own interpretive choices on the inherited material. Modern textual scholarship by Chabad and academic researchers has confirmed that the Tzemach Tzedek's editing was generally faithful but has also identified specific cases where the printed text differs from surviving manuscripts in ways that affect the interpretation of particular passages.

The second controversy concerned the relationship between the discourses and Tanya. Some Mitnagdic critics argued that the discourses departed from the more guarded formulations of Tanya and presented more radical claims about divine immanence and the metaphysical status of the Jewish soul than Schneur Zalman had allowed in his published work. The discourses do contain stronger formulations of certain doctrines — particularly the doctrine that the divine soul is a literal portion of God above — and these stronger formulations gave Mitnagdic critics additional ammunition for the charge that Hasidism collapsed the distinction between creator and creature. Defenders of Chabad have responded that the stronger formulations in the discourses are clarifications rather than departures and that they make explicit what Tanya had only intimated.

A third controversy concerned the role of the discourses in shaping later Chabad messianism. The seven Lubavitcher Rebbes drew constantly on Torah Or and Likkutei Torah for the imagery and concepts they used to describe the messianic process and the role of the tzaddik in bringing redemption. Critics of the messianic developments in twentieth-century Chabad, particularly the messianic claims that arose around Menachem Mendel Schneerson in the 1990s, have argued that some of the discourses contain language that lent itself to messianic interpretation in ways that the Alter Rebbe himself would not have endorsed. Elliot Wolfson's Open Secret traces this hermeneutic history in detail and shows how the discourses became the textual foundation for the most controversial theological developments in late twentieth-century Chabad. Defenders within Chabad have maintained that the discourses contain the messianic teaching authentically and that later Rebbes simply drew out what was implicit from the beginning.

Influence

The influence of Torah Or and Likkutei Torah on Jewish life over the past two centuries has been pervasive but largely concentrated within the Chabad community and the wider world of Hasidic and academic study of Hasidism. Within Chabad the discourses are second only to Tanya in their daily impact on the spiritual practice of Hasidim. Every Lubavitcher Rebbe from the Tzemach Tzedek through Menachem Mendel Schneerson built his own teaching on these discourses as foundation, and the seven generations of Chabad maamarim that fill the Kehot library represent successive elaborations of the conceptual vocabulary and the homiletical method that Torah Or and Likkutei Torah established.

The practice of studying the weekly discourse before Shabbat is an old Chabad custom that links the maamarim to the rhythm of Jewish time. A Hasid prepares for Shabbat by studying the discourse from Torah Or or Likkutei Torah that corresponds to the upcoming Torah portion, allows the contemplation to shape his mood and intention, and brings the resulting state into the Shabbat prayers and meals. This practice has been observed continuously for nearly two centuries and has produced generations of Chabad Hasidim whose inner lives have been formed by sustained immersion in these texts.

The influence on the broader Hasidic world has been significant though often unacknowledged. Other Hasidic dynasties developed their own collections of weekly discourses on Torah portions, and many of these collections show the influence of the Chabad model in their structure, their length, and their conceptual methods. The collected works of the masters of Hasidism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries — the works of the Sefat Emet of Ger, the Aish Kodesh of Piaseczno, the Mei HaShiloach of Izbica, and many others — all bear the marks of the literary form that the Tzemach Tzedek established for his grandfather's discourses.

The influence on academic scholarship has been substantial. The maamarim provide the most extensive Hasidic application of Lurianic metaphysics to specific scriptural texts and are therefore essential evidence for any historical or philosophical study of Chabad. Gershom Scholem drew on the discourses in his foundational studies of Hasidism, and the subsequent generation of scholars including Naftali Loewenthal, Roman Foxbrunner, Rachel Elior, Elliot Wolfson, Shaul Magid, and Nehemia Polen have all built parts of their accounts of Chabad on close readings of these texts. The academic study of Hasidism in English would be considerably impoverished without the discourses.

The influence on contemporary Jewish meditation and contemplative practice has grown in recent decades as English-language teachers have drawn on the maamarim for guidance on hitbonenut and other forms of structured contemplation. The contemplative practices that the discourses recommend have been adapted by Jewish meditation teachers across denominational lines and have contributed to the broader recovery of Jewish contemplative traditions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Significance

Torah Or and Likkutei Torah supplied Chabad Hasidism with the second pillar of its written canon and established the literary form through which all subsequent Chabad Rebbes would teach. Tanya gave the movement a systematic theology in propositional form. The maamarim gave it a homiletical practice in which that theology could be applied week by week to the texts of Torah and the seasons of the liturgical year. Together the two works defined what it meant to be a Chabad Hasid intellectually: a person who studied Tanya as systematic foundation and the maamarim as the working out of that foundation in the unfolding cycle of Jewish time.

The discourses gave Chabad its distinctive method of reading Torah. Schneur Zalman approached each verse as a window into the Lurianic structure of reality and read its details as encoded references to the divine names, the sefirotic configurations, and the dynamics of tzimtzum and emanation. This method was not arbitrary allegory. Schneur Zalman insisted that the Lurianic reading was the inner meaning that the literal text was designed to convey, and that the literal sense and the mystical sense were two strata of a single divine intention. The discourses display this method at sustained length and trained generations of Chabad Hasidim to approach Torah study as an exercise in Kabbalistic decoding rather than as legal or narrative analysis alone.

The discourses also established the conceptual vocabulary that later Chabad thought would refine. Technical terms such as bittul (self-nullification), yesh and ayin (existence and nothingness), or oh yashar and oh chozer (direct and reflected light), seder hishtalshelut (the chain of emanation), and the distinction between the divine light that fills all worlds and the light that surrounds all worlds were given their working definitions in these discourses. Naftali Loewenthal's Communicating the Infinite has shown how the conceptual vocabulary of the maamarim became the working tongue of the Chabad school across the seven Rebbes, with each successor developing and refining the inherited terms while preserving their fundamental structure.

The significance of the work extends beyond Chabad to the wider history of Hasidic literature. Before Torah Or, Hasidic homiletical literature consisted mostly of short aphoristic sayings and brief discourses gathered after the death of a master by his disciples. The Tzemach Tzedek's editorial project established a different model: a master's discourses gathered into a structured collection arranged by the liturgical calendar and edited with the care that earlier generations had given only to legal codes and Bible commentaries. This model influenced the literary practices of other Hasidic dynasties. The collected works of the masters of Ger, Belz, Sanz, and other major courts that appeared in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries follow the same general pattern that the Tzemach Tzedek established for his grandfather's discourses.

For scholars of Jewish mysticism, Torah Or and Likkutei Torah are essential because they are the most extensive Hasidic application of Lurianic metaphysics to specific scriptural texts. Anyone who wants to understand how the Lurianic system was actually used in the religious life of an early nineteenth-century Hasidic community, rather than simply how it was systematized in theoretical works such as Etz Chaim, must read the maamarim. Rachel Elior, Roman Foxbrunner, and Naftali Loewenthal have all built parts of their accounts of Chabad on close readings of these discourses, and the academic study of Chabad in English would be impossible without them.

Connections

Torah Or and Likkutei Torah connect the Lurianic and Cordoverian streams of Kabbalah to the liturgical year of Judaism, and they connect Tanya to the festival calendar that frames the spiritual life of every Jew. Their internal references reach in many directions across the mystical canon.

The discourses presuppose Tanya as their systematic foundation. The doctrine of the Two Souls, the structure of the beinoni's spiritual life, the contemplative practice of hitbonenut, and the technical vocabulary of Chabad Lurianism are all developed in Tanya and then applied in the maamarim to specific verses of Torah and specific moments of the festival cycle. Reading the maamarim without Tanya is like trying to read advanced commentary without the underlying text, and within Hasidism the two are always studied together.

The metaphysical framework of the discourses is fundamentally Lurianic. Schneur Zalman draws constantly on the doctrines of Isaac Luria as transmitted through the writings of Chaim Vital. The Lurianic texts Etz Chaim, Shaar HaGilgulim, and the related Lurianic treatises are quoted and presupposed throughout. The maamarim are best understood as a Hasidic re-presentation of Lurianic Kabbalah in which the Lurianic doctrines are reframed as guides to inner experience rather than as cosmological speculation.

The discourses also draw on the earlier Cordoverian tradition. The doctrine of divine immanence developed in Pardes Rimonim by Moses Cordovero and the ethical teachings of Tomer Devorah are integrated with Lurianic metaphysics throughout the maamarim. The Cordoverian doctrine that God fills all things became central to Chabad teaching that the divine soul of every Jew is a literal portion of God above and that the apparent independence of the created world is an illusion to be overcome through contemplation.

The Zoharic tradition is the immediate scriptural source of the discourses after Torah itself. Schneur Zalman quotes the Zohar on nearly every page and assumes his reader's familiarity with its narrative voice and technical vocabulary. The discourses can be read as a Hasidic commentary on the Zohar's reading of Torah, in which the symbolic associations of the Zohar are tied to the inner experience of the listener rather than left as cosmic speculation.

The conceptual framework of the discourses is built on the Kabbalistic doctrine of the sefirot. The three intellectual sefirot from which Chabad takes its name — Chokhmah, Binah, and Daat — provide the structural axis of the contemplative practice that the discourses recommend, while the lower seven emotional sefirot describe the inner life that the contemplation is meant to transform.

The text was edited and published by Menachem Mendel Schneersohn the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Lubavitcher Rebbe, whose own voluminous writings form the next layer of Chabad-Lubavitch literature. The maamarim of the Tzemach Tzedek and his successors all build on the foundation that Torah Or and Likkutei Torah established.

Further Reading