Tanya (Likkutei Amarim)

I am reading the Tanya because it speaks about God and the soul, and about Moses, Abraham, and the first man.

Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi wrote it. He was the first rebbe of Chabad. The book was first printed in Slavita in 1796. He died in 1812.

The Hebrew title is Likkutei Amarim, which means collected sayings. Readers also call the book Tanya, from the opening word of the first chapter. The same book is called Sefer shel Beinonim, the book of the in-between people.

This is a Hasidic religious and mystical work. It belongs to Chabad. It is a teaching book about how a person serves God. I do not treat it as a novel. I do not treat it as a chronicle of dated public events.

The English on the chapter pages is my own new translation from the Hebrew.

Part 1 is the compiler’s foreword and fifty-three chapters. It sets out two souls in a Jew. One soul is from God. The other is the life of the body. The beinoni, the in-between person, is the one the book is written for. He is not described as a finished tzaddik, a righteous person, and he is not described as a rasha, a wicked person.

Part 2 is Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah, the gate of unity and faith. It opens with the section on educating a child, and then it has twelve chapters. It teaches that the world stands because God speaks it into being at every moment. Ein Sof, the Endless, is without a body and without a limit.

God in this book is Ein Sof. The book also uses the Names Havayah and Elohim.

The soul is spoken of as nefesh, ruach, and neshamah. Nefesh is the lowest of those three levels.

Moses is the teacher who received the Torah. In Part 1, Chapter 42, the book says that something of the soul of Moses is in every soul of Israel.

Abraham is one of the fathers. The book calls the fathers a chariot for God. It uses the phrase “the Elohim of Abraham”.

The first man comes in Part 1, Chapter 2, in a note on the garments of the first man in the garden of Eden. Part 2, Chapter 9 names Adam Kadmon, the primordial man of the kabbalah, in a gloss on the contraction of the divine light. Part 1, Chapter 1 says that the life-soul of the body in Israel is from the mystery of the tree of knowledge of good and bad.

Contents

Part 1. Sefer shel Beinonim, Likkutei Amarim

• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Chapter 31
• Chapter 32
• Chapter 33
• Chapter 34
• Chapter 35
• Chapter 36
• Chapter 37
• Chapter 38
• Chapter 39
• Chapter 40
• Chapter 41
• Chapter 42
• Chapter 43
• Chapter 44
• Chapter 45
• Chapter 46
• Chapter 47
• Chapter 48
• Chapter 49
• Chapter 50
• Chapter 51
• Chapter 52
• Chapter 53

Part 2. Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah

• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12

Credits and public domain

The Hebrew I translated is the vocalized text on Hebrew Wikisource, under the title Tanya menukad (תניא מנוקד).

Part 1, Sefer shel Beinonim, was vocalized and given source notes by Nachum Vingrov. The part 1 index on Hebrew Wikisource says that edition is released for free use under the CC BY-SA license.

Part 2, Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah, was vocalized by Meir, from the books of Torat Emet. The index of the vocalized Tanya names him.

Hebrew Wikisource publishes the pages under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. The site license is CC BY-SA 4.0.

The underlying book is in the public domain. The author died in 1812, and the first printing was Slavita, 1796.

Sefaria’s default Hebrew Tanya is the Kehot text, marked CC-BY-NC, with a Kehot copyright note. I did not take the Hebrew from that copy. I did not copy any English translation. The chapter pages are a new translation of the Wikisource Hebrew.

The vocalized Wikisource text of part 1 also prints the approbations. Those pages are not in this set.

The cover photograph is the title page of my own copy. The page names Kehot and Otzar HaChassidim, and it says this is the 78th printing. It was printed in Fayid, Egypt, on the west side of the Suez Canal, in the year 5734 (1974). The same page gives the address 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York.

The Hebrew chapters contain no figures. The only picture is this title page. The picture file is not on the image server yet. The page will show it after wp-content/uploads/2026/10/tanya-cover.webp is uploaded.