Tanya

Foundational work of Chabad Hasidism by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, first published in 1796, noted for its doctrine of the Jewish and non-Jewish soul

Tanya
Original title	תניא / Likkutei Amarim (ליקוטי אמרים)
Author	Shneur Zalman of Liadi
Country	Russian Empire
Language	Hebrew
Subject	Hasidic theology, Jewish mysticism, Lurianic Kabbalah
Genre	Religious text
Publisher	First edition: Slavita; standard edition: Kehot Publication Society
Published	1796 (first edition, as Likkutei Amarim); 1798 (second edition, as Tanya); 1814 (complete five-part edition)

The Tanya (Hebrew: תניא, "it has been taught"), also published as Likkutei Amarim ("Collected Sayings"), is the foundational text of Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, written by Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812), the movement's founder and first Rebbe. It was first printed anonymously at Slavita in 1796, and the YIVO encyclopedia dates it to 1797. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that Chabad Hasidim call it the "written law of Chabad" and "designate it for daily study". It is unusual among Hasidic works in being "a complete systematic exposition" by the founder of the system himself rather than a collection of sermons.

The book sets out a mystical psychology built on Lurianic Kabbalah. At its centre is the beinoni ("intermediate person"), whose two souls are locked in continual struggle. The same teaching that gives every Jew a "divine soul" also holds, in the words of chapter one, that the souls of the nations derive "from the other, unclean kelipot, which contain no good whatsoever". That passage has drawn repeated charges of racism or Jewish supremacism, which Chabad rabbis reject.

Under the seventh Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, printing the Tanya became a worldwide campaign. Chabad's own magazine counted more than 6,700 local editions by 2016, including editions produced by Chabad soldiers inside the Gaza Strip in 2024.

Authorship and composition

Before he committed his teachings to writing, Shneur Zalman of Liadi preached them orally. According to Chabad's introduction to the book, his discourses were "recorded from memory by his disciples" and circulated in manuscript. Many of these copies were "replete with errors as a result of repeated copying and transcription, or by the malicious mischief of opponents", which prompted him to publish an authorised outline of his system. He called the work Likkutei Amarim ("Collected Sayings"), presenting it as a selection of discourses drawn "from books and scribes, heavenly saints". The subtitle Sefer shel Beinonim ("Book of the Intermediates") signalled that it was written for the ordinary believer rather than the saint.

The book appeared during the bitter conflict between Hasidim and their rabbinic opponents, the Mitnagdim. YIVO reports that in October 1798 Shneur Zalman "was arrested and interrogated as a result of being denounced to the Russian authorities as a threat to the state". The informer alleged that Hasidism was "a new religion, forbidden by law" and that its leader was sending money abroad without permission. He was freed in Saint Petersburg on 19 Kislev, a date Chabad still celebrates. A second arrest followed in 1801, after a denunciation by Avigdor ben Ḥayim, the deposed rabbi of Pinsk. The Israeli historian Immanuel Etkes has reconstructed both imprisonments from Russian interrogation records, and his biography gives a chapter to Sefer shel Beinonim.

Publication history

The first edition (Slavita, 1796) carried the title Likkutei Amarim. The second (Zolkiew, 1798) promoted the opening word, Tanya, to the title and kept Likkutei Amarim as a subtitle. The other parts were printed separately at Shklov: the short Iggeret ha-Teshuvah in 1799 and its longer version in 1806. The Shklov edition of 1814, published after the author's death, was the first to contain all five parts, "and this form has since been retained". The standard modern Hebrew–English edition and commentary are published by the movement's publishing house, Kehot Publication Society.

The campaign to print the Tanya everywhere

According to Chabad's own account, Menachem Mendel Schneerson reasoned that a Tanya printed in a Jew's own city would "carry the same influence" that books shipped from elsewhere could not. His followers were therefore asked to print local editions "in every country and in each and every city where Yidden live". By 2016 they had produced "over six-thousand seven hundred editions". Each edition records its place of printing, and the Kehot edition carries a list of all editions.

The campaign has repeatedly followed Israeli military operations. In 1982, during the Lebanon War, the Rebbe "directed a group of Chassidim to print the Tanya in various Lebanese cities, including the capital city of Beirut". His instructions included printing "the name of the city where it was printed in both Hebrew and Arabic". In January 2024 Israel Defense Forces Major Ezzy Morgenstern, a Chabad rabbi and military chaplain, joined an armed convoy into the Gaza Strip and printed 100 copies at an IDF outpost. Chabad.org described it as fulfilling "a mission started by the Rebbe during the 1982 Lebanon war". Israel National News reported that the Khan Yunis printing was managed by Tzeirei Agudas Chabad together with IDF soldiers. It was accompanied by the laying of tefillin and the fixing of a mezuzah, and Tzeirei Chabad chair Yosef Aharonov spoke of the Rebbe's "special attention to soldiers". Further printings followed in Rafah, according to the Chabad news site Anash.org.

Structure

The Encyclopaedia Judaica lists the five parts of the book as follows:

• Sefer shel Beinonim / Likkutei Amarim ("The Book of the Intermediates"), 53 chapters. The psychological and devotional core of the work.
• Sha'ar ha-Yiḥud ve-ha-Emunah ("The Gate of Unity and Faith"), called Ḥinukh Katan in the first edition. On divine unity and the continuous creation of the world.
• Iggeret ha-Teshuvah ("Epistle on Repentance"), also called Tanya Katan.
• Iggeret ha-Kodesh ("Holy Epistle"), pastoral letters published in 1814.
• Kuntres Aḥaron ("Final Tract"), Shklov 1814.

Core teachings

Two souls

Likkutei Amarim teaches that every Jew has two souls. One "originates in the kelipah and sitra achara". It is "clothed in the blood of a human being, giving life to the body", and is the source of both natural virtues and vices. The second is a "divine soul". In the Jew the first, "animal", soul is said to derive from kelipat nogah, a husk "which also contains good". According to Balk, Shneur Zalman holds that the Jewish soul is "literally a part of God and the Divine essence" (ḥelek Elokah mima'al mamesh).

The beinoni

YIVO identifies the book's "main innovation" as the distinction between the tzaddik, who "has completely purified his soul from evil", and the beinoni, or "middling" person. The beinoni still feels evil impulses but never acts on them in thought, speech or deed. The subtitle Sefer shel Beinonim reflects the book's address to "the average Jew".

Mind over heart

The name Chabad (ChaBaD) is an acronym of three intellectual faculties: ḥokhmah (wisdom), binah (understanding) and da'at (knowledge). In the Tanya these faculties come first and are meant to govern the emotions. Rachel Elior describes the system's "essential innovation" as a religious outlook that "concentrated upon perceiving the divinity: its essence, its nature, the stages of its manifestation", a conception that "generated a profound transformation of religious worship and was the cause of great controversy throughout the Jewish world".

Bittul (self-nullification)

Naftali Loewenthal identifies bitul (self-abnegation) as the central esoteric concept of the second Rebbe, Dovber Schneuri, who developed his father's system. He also argues that the early Chabad school was distinguished by a "communication ethos encouraging the transmission of esoteric [teachings] to the broad reaches of the Jewish world".

Intellectual context

Lurianic Kabbalah

YIVO describes the Tanya as "anchored in the doctrines of divinity and the soul taught by Lurianic Kabbalah", the system of Isaac Luria (1534–1572) of Safed. The key passage on the nations explicitly cites Ḥayyim Vital's Etz Ḥayyim (Portal 49, chapter 3) as its authority. The book's language of kelipot (husks) and divine sparks is taken from the Lurianic tradition.

Talmudic sources

The book takes its name from its opening word, which introduces a teaching from the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Niddah) on the oath administered to the soul before birth, "be righteous and be not wicked". The passage on the nations relies on the Babylonian Talmud's reading (Bava Batra 10b) of Proverbs 14:34, "the kindness of the nations is sin", which the Tanya explains as charity done "only for their self-glorification".

Chabad compared with other Hasidic, Haredi and Litvish currents

The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that the book was "criticized adversely by both maskilim and Mitnaggedim", and even by the Hasidic leader Abraham of Kalisk. Loewenthal argues that, faced with modernity, most traditional Jewish communities either secularised or retreated "into enclave religiosity". Chabad, by "stressing communication", took a third path, and he presents this as the root of its later outreach. Etkes devotes chapters to Chabad's "front line against the Mitnagdim" and to the founder's conflict with Abraham of Kalisk. Within the Hasidic world, Chabad's stress on intellect and on systematic study of a single text set it apart from courts centred on the charisma of the tzaddik.

Teachings on non-Jews

The text

After describing the Jewish animal soul, chapter one of the Kehot translation continues: "The souls of the nations of the world, however, emanating from the other, unclean kelipot, which contain no good whatsoever…", and adds that "all the good that the nations do is done out of selfish motives". The Kehot commentary then notes that some among the nations, "the pious ones of the nations of the world", have souls from kelipat nogah. Balk summarises the doctrine thus: "the soul of a non-Jew is purely animal in nature", and "Even righteous gentiles, while possessing an element of good within their souls, do not possess a Divine soul".

Critiques

In Ḥakirah (2013), the Orthodox writer Hanan Balk called the idea that "the Soul of a Jew is Superior to that of a Non-Jew" an "inconvenient truth", "uncomfortable and racially charged". He traced the "familiarity of the concept… among many contemporary Jews" chiefly to "the Ḥabad movement, due to its outreach efforts", and then searched for an alternative within Jewish tradition.

In 2008 a dispute in north London reached the Jewish Chronicle. Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue dropped a Tanya course after congregants protested. The objector Dan Rickman argued that "within the Tanya there is no direct counter-text" and that "the view presented is that non-Jews are a different and lesser type of human being than Jews". He asked: "is 'our' racism better than 'their' racism?"

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, place the Lurianic doctrine of Jewish and non-Jewish souls at the root of the religious-settler ideology they analyse. They argue that "one of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body".

Elliot R. Wolfson's study of Schneerson argues that the Rebbe engineered "a fundamentalist ideology" that could nonetheless subvert "the social-anthropological division between Jew and Gentile". Its sixth chapter is titled "Apocalyptic crossing: beyond the (non)Jewish other".

Chabad responses

Rabbi Yitzchok Schochet, replying in the same Jewish Chronicle exchange, called the racism charge "astounding". He argued that the passage "speaks of idol-worshippers devoid of revealed religion", that the "pious of the nations" are excluded, and that "the realm of 'impurity', too, is infused and sustained by the Divine emanations". He went on to say that Jews are "infused with an additional soul" in order to carry out "their mission to be a Divine beacon to the nations". In a published letter, Schneerson held that the kelipot do not lack "a spark [of G‑dliness] at all, for without a spark of good, it is impossible for any entity to exist". He relied on his predecessor the Tzemach Tzedek's gloss that the nations lack good only "in their essence".

Successive Rebbes and the presentation of the passage

The verified record shows a gradual reworking of the passage rather than a single change of position:

• The third Rebbe, the Tzemach Tzedek, qualified chapter six of his abridgement (Kitzur Tanya): the nations lack good "in their essence", yet "Divine life-energy, a spark" is clothed within them.
• According to Balk, when the seventh Rebbe was asked whether an English translation should omit the teaching "for fear that it might lead to resentment and anti-Semitism", he refused. Citing the world's indifference to the Holocaust, he wrote that "the words of the Alter Rebbe may even be an understatement". Balk also records that the Rebbe told Hillel students in 1960 that a non-Jew has "a Divine spark, but it is not the same kind of Divine spark that a Jew has".
• The current Kehot English commentary qualifies the passage itself by adding the "pious ones of the nations" note. Apologists such as Schochet read the passage as referring to "idol-worshippers".

The evidence that wartime or state censorship changed how the text was printed is thin. This page does not assert it.

Study and outreach

Chabad Hasidim study the Tanya daily. Chabad.org publishes Lessons in Tanya, a five-volume commentary by Rabbi Yosef Wineberg, "translated from Yiddish by Rabbi Levy Wineberg and Rabbi Sholom B. Wineberg", alongside videos and alternative translations. The full text is also freely available on Sefaria. Loewenthal and Balk both connect the book's reach to Chabad's outreach strategy: the doctrine's familiarity today owes most to "the Ḥabad movement, due to its outreach efforts".

Messianism

Wolfson describes Schneerson as "a radical messianic visionary who promoted a conservative political agenda". He argues that the Rebbe's teaching, rooted in the Tanya and later Chabad thought, culminated in a vision of redemption beyond "all duality". Galina Zelenina links the "ardent messianism" of the "Lubavitch mentality" to the movement's political strategy in post-Soviet Russia. The printing campaign, with editions carried into Lebanon in 1982 and into Gaza in 2024, is presented by Chabad as one of the Rebbe's "most 'wondrous'" campaigns.

Reception and scholarship

• Immanuel Etkes, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Origins of Chabad Hasidism (2014/15): the leading critical biography, drawing on Russian interrogation records.
• Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God (1993): Chabad's kabbalistic theosophy.
• Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite (1990): the first two generations of the Chabad school.
• Roman A. Foxbrunner, Habad: The Hasidism of R. Shneur Zalman of Lyady (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).
• Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret (2009): the seventh Rebbe's mystical and messianic revision of Chabad thought.

See also

• Shneur Zalman of Liadi
• Chabad-Lubavitch movement
• Menachem Mendel Schneerson
• Kehot Publication Society
• Torat Hamelekh
• Yitzhak Ginsburgh
• Chabad in occupied Palestine
• Israel Shahak

External links

• Tanya, full text at Sefaria
• Lessons in Tanya at Chabad.org
• Mivtza Tanya, the Chabad printing-campaign website