Note: This book was adapted and edited by Rabbi Sacks, based on excerpts from talks by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson.
To hear or read a talk of the Lubavitcher Rebbe is to undertake a journey. We are challenged and forced to move: where we stand at the end is not where we were at the beginning. Time and again a sicha will be set in motion by a seemingly microscopic tension – a question on a comment by Rashi, perhaps, or a problem in understanding halachah, a practical provision of Jewish law.
Once in motion, however, the argument leads us into fresh perspectives, provisional answers, and new questions, until we climb rung by rung to the most elevated of vantage points. From here, as we survey the ground beneath us in its widest of contexts, the initial question is not only resolved but also revealed as the starting point of a major spiritual search. The question only existed because we were looking at the surface, not fathoming the depths of Torah.
These talks are addressed with relentless clarity to the contemporary Jewish condition. Their implicit starting point is the darkness of a post-Holocaust world in which spirituality, moral conviction, and the Divine purpose of Creation, seem almost beyond reach. Their tacit faith is that step by step we can be led from the present moment of confusion to the timeless lucidity of Torah, beyond the low clouds to the Infinite Light.