Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch passed away in the Jewish year 5626 (1866).
Now, 150 years later, large portions of one of his most widely learned works, Derech Mitzvotecha, have been made available online in English for the very first time.
Known as the Tzemach Tzedek—the title of his monumental collection of response on Jewish law—he served as the third Chabad rebbe. He is credited for presiding over an era in which the Chassidic movement gained countless adherents, as well as acceptance and respect from a wide range of Jewish leaders.
Derech Mitzvotecha (“The Way of Your Commandments”) was one of his earliest works, penned between the years 1814 and 1828, when he was still a young man.
It is a treatment of the Chassidic and Kabbalistic underpinnings of many of the Torah’s mitzvahs, such as belief in G‑d, tzitzit, tefillin, prayer, loving a fellow Jew, starting a family and others.
The work has a long and storied history.
It was first printed in Poltava, now in Ukraine, in the year 1911. Kehot Publication Society, the publishing arm of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, reprinted it again in 1943, in Shanghai, China. It was done by a group of Chabad yeshivah students from Poland who had fled there via Japan to escape the Nazi onslaught.
It has since been reprinted many times in the United States and Israel by Kehot Publication Society.
Five generations after it was first written, the author’s great-great-grandson and successor, the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—often advised those seeking to begin study of Chassidic philosophy to study this fundamental work.
Rabbi Eliyahu Touger rendered selections of the work into English, and they were published by Sichos in English in 2004 with the permission of Kehot Publication Society.
The new offering, titled Selections From Derech Mitzvosecha:A Mystical Perspective on the Commandments, Vol. 1, was quickly snapped up by English-speaking scholars everywhere, leaving the book currently out of print.
Touger’s translation is available online through a unique partnership between Sichos in English and Chabad.org.
View the online Derech Mitzvosecha here.
BEHASHGOCH PROTIS in Rambam these days…