Shneur Zalman of Liadi

The Tanya was published in 1796 and is the first book in which Hasidism sets out a complete account of itself rather than a collection of teachings and stories. Its full title, Likkutei Amarim, means collected sayings, and its subtitle describes it as a book for those who are told to seek counsel for their souls, which is the audience it actually addresses: ordinary people trying to work out what they can realistically become.

Its central move is to abandon the saint as the target. Shneur Zalman distinguishes the tzaddik, the wholly righteous person in whom the appetite for wrong has been transformed and no longer stirs, from the rasha, the wicked, and then from the beinoni, the intermediate. The beinoni is not a compromise between the two. He is a person in whom the animal impulse is fully alive and never acts on it, in thought, speech or deed, and he wins that battle continuously, all his life, without the struggle ever getting easier.

The point of the category is pastoral. The tzaddik is not an achievable goal and nobody should organise a life around failing to reach it. The beinoni is available to anyone, and the book is a manual for occupying that position. Underneath sits a two soul psychology, a divine soul and an animal soul contending for the same person, and a metaphysics in which the created world has no independent existence at all, so that the struggle is real to the one who fights it and, from above, is taking place inside God.

The early Hasidic movement was accused by its opponents, the Mitnagdim of Lithuania, of substituting emotion for learning, and the accusation had enough force to hurt. Shneur Zalman's response was not to defend fervour but to make it the product of study. Chabad is an acronym of chochmah, binah and daat, the three intellectual faculties of the Kabbalistic scheme: the flash of insight, its working out, and the settled knowledge that binds a person to what he has understood. His argument is that feeling generated directly is shallow and does not last, while feeling produced by prolonged contemplation of what God is holds and reshapes conduct.

That produced a distinctive practice: long, slow, meditative prayer preceded by study of a specific idea, and a movement whose literature is dense rather than anecdotal. It also produced a durable institution. Chabad is the only one of the eighteenth century Hasidic courts to have become a worldwide organisation, and its outreach network is descended from the same conviction that the teaching can be explained to anyone.

He was also a jurist. His restatement of the code of Jewish law, undertaken at the Maggid's request, is used well beyond Chabad and is one reason his standing survived the opposition to Hasidism rather than depending on it. The two halves of his output, a mystical psychology and a legal code, were not separate projects to him: the law describes what a person does, and the Tanya describes who is doing it.