Quick Answer
The primary text of Breslov Hasidism: 411 lessons from a man who died at thirty-eight, who told his followers that the whole world is a narrow bridge and that despair is forbidden, and whose movement has refused to replace him for two hundred years. The lessons are difficult in a way that no summary conveys, moving by association through Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah. The Breslov Research Institute edition, with its notes, is the only realistic way in for most readers. The reward is a voice unlike any other in the tradition.
Key Takeaways
- Lessons, not chapters. Each one is an associative chain from a verse back to itself.
- Hitbodedut, an hour of spoken solitary prayer, is the practice at the centre.
- Despair is forbidden because there is nowhere God is not.
- Simplicity over cleverness, from one of the cleverest men in the tradition.
- The BRI edition is essential; the text alone is nearly impenetrable.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Likutey Moharan, the Collected Teachings of Our Teacher Rabbi Nachman, is the record of the formal lessons Rebbe Nachman of Breslov gave to his followers between roughly 1800 and his death in 1810.
It appeared in two parts: the first in 1808, during his lifetime and under his supervision, with 286 lessons; the second in 1811, after his death, with 125. The two are usually printed together and referred to as Likutey Moharan and Likutey Moharan Tinyana.
The lessons were given orally, mostly on Sabbaths and festivals, in Yiddish, and written down afterwards in Hebrew by his disciple Reb Noson of Nemirov. Some Rebbe Nachman wrote himself. Most he reviewed.
Breslov Hasidim regard it as their central text. It is read in the way other communities read their rebbe's teachings, except that Breslov has never had another rebbe, and so the book has had to be the teacher for two centuries.
Editions. The Breslov Research Institute's fifteen-volume edition gives the Hebrew, a facing English translation, and notes on every line that trace the sources and explain the associations. It is the only complete English version and it is indispensable. Single-volume anthologies exist for readers who want to test the water, and the BRI's own selections are the safest.
Who Rebbe Nachman Was
Nachman was born in 1772 in Medzhybizh, in the house of his great-grandfather the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, who had died twelve years earlier. He was raised in the movement's birthplace, among its first generation.
He married at thirteen, spent his youth in intense private devotion, and in 1798 made a dangerous journey to the Land of Israel that he later described as the turning point of his life. He returned, settled in Breslov in 1802, and gathered followers.
He was, by every account, extraordinary: brilliant, mercurial, prone to depression and to ecstasy, fiercely self-critical, and convinced of a unique role. He said things about his own soul that scandalised other Hasidic leaders and provoked a feud that lasted the rest of his life.
He contracted tuberculosis in 1807, moved to Uman in 1810 to die there, and did, at thirty-eight. Before his death he told his followers not to appoint a successor. They obeyed and still do.
Reb Noson and the Making of the Text
The book exists because of one man's memory and devotion.
Noson Sternhartz met Rebbe Nachman in 1802, at twenty-two, and became the disciple who wrote everything down. He had a scholar's training and a prodigious memory, and after each lesson he would reconstruct it in Hebrew, bring it to the Rebbe, and have it corrected.
Rebbe Nachman said of him that without Reb Noson not a page of his teaching would have survived. That is almost literally true. Nearly everything we have, the lessons, the tales, the conversations and the biography, passed through Reb Noson's hand.
After the Rebbe's death Reb Noson led the movement without ever claiming to be its rebbe, published the second part of the lessons, wrote his own vast commentary in the form of prayers, and held the community together through decades of persecution by other Hasidim. The book is, in a real sense, theirs jointly.
The Shape of a Lesson
The form is what makes the book difficult, and it has to be understood before anything else.
A lesson typically opens with a verse, from Scripture or from the Talmud, or occasionally with a bare statement. It then moves through a series of numbered sections, each introducing a new idea, a new source, a new image, connected to the previous one by an association that may be verbal, thematic, numerical or Kabbalistic. At the end the chain closes and the opening verse is reread in the light of everything said.
The connections are not arguments. A word in one verse echoes a word in another; a concept from the sefirot is mapped onto a stage of prayer; a Talmudic story is read as a description of the soul. The reader who expects a thesis will find none. What there is instead is a web, and the meaning lies in the whole of it.
This is the classical form of the Hasidic homily raised to a very high degree of density. Reb Noson's notes and the BRI commentary exist to make the associations visible. Without them, a reader with no background will be lost within a paragraph and a reader with some background will be lost within a page.
The First Lesson
Worth describing, because it sets the pattern and states the theme.
The first lesson opens with a Mishnaic saying about Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel and moves, within a few lines, to the claim that a Jew must always look at the wisdom, the inner intelligence, in every thing, and draw close to God through that intelligence, which is the light shining in each created thing.
From there it turns to the moon and the sun, to Jacob and Esau, to the letter that stands for wisdom and the letter that stands for kingship, and to the way a person of understanding is protected from the forces that would drag him down. The whole is folded back on the opening saying.
The theme is the one the book returns to constantly: that God is findable in everything, that finding him requires attention and a kind of inward hearing, and that the obstacles to that hearing are what the spiritual life is a struggle against.
Hitbodedut
The practice that distinguishes Breslov from every other Hasidic path, and the one thing in the book every reader can take away.
Hitbodedut means seclusion. Rebbe Nachman's version is specific: set aside an hour every day, go somewhere alone, a field at night if possible, and speak to God in your own language, spontaneously, about everything, your failures, your longings, your confusion, your resentment, without formula and without stopping. If you cannot think of anything to say, say that. If you can only say one word, say it again and again until it opens.
He held this above all other devotions, above study and above formal prayer, and said that all the great tzaddikim reached their level only through it.
The teaching appears in many lessons and most fully in the second part, lesson 25. What is striking is its psychological realism: he knows that the mind resists, that the hour will feel empty, that the words will not come, and he treats all of that as part of the practice rather than as failure.
Hitbodedut is the part of Likutey Moharan that has crossed every boundary. People with no connection to Breslov or to Judaism practise it, because the instruction is so plain: go somewhere alone, speak, do not stop. What is easy to miss is how demanding it is. An hour of unscripted speech to an interlocutor who does not answer exposes everything a person has been avoiding saying to themselves. Rebbe Nachman knew this. He said the hour would be the hardest of the day and that this was its whole value.
It Is Forbidden to Despair
The teaching most associated with him, and its source.
In the second part, lesson 78, in the course of a discussion of how a person is to conduct himself when he has fallen very far, Rebbe Nachman cries out, in a phrase Reb Noson preserved, that there is no despair in the world at all. The saying is usually condensed to it is forbidden to despair, and it has become a slogan, printed on stickers and walls across Israel.
The teaching behind it is precise. Rebbe Nachman argues that God's presence fills all worlds, including the lowest, and that therefore there is no place, however degraded, from which a person cannot call out and be heard. Despair is the belief that one has fallen beyond reach. Since there is no such place, the belief is false, and holding it is a kind of denial of God.
It is a doctrine, not a mood. He was not saying cheer up. He was saying that a certain conclusion is logically unavailable to a person who believes God is everywhere, and that the darkest moment is therefore always a possible beginning.
The Narrow Bridge
The other saying everyone knows, and what it means in context.
The second part, lesson 48, contains the line that the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not to be afraid at all. It has been set to music and sung at every Jewish gathering for fifty years.
The context is a lesson on the obstacles a person meets on the way to holiness, and on the fact that the obstacles are put there so that the desire may grow. The bridge is the passage through the world, narrow because the world is full of things that would throw a person off. The instruction is not that the bridge is safe. It is that fear is the one thing that will make you fall.
Read in the lesson rather than as a song, it is bracing and slightly terrifying, which is the correct response.
Simplicity Against Cleverness
The teaching that sits most oddly with the form of the book.
Rebbe Nachman repeatedly insists on simplicity. He praises the person who serves God without sophistication, warns against philosophy and against the excessive cleverness that leads people to doubt, and says that the highest thing is to be a simple Jew doing simple acts with a whole heart.
This from a man whose lessons are among the most intricate texts in Hasidism, who was steeped in Kabbalah, and who was by every report dazzlingly clever.
The resolution he offers is that cleverness must be used to reach simplicity and then set down. The lessons are the ladder; the life at the top is plain. Whether he managed this himself his biography leaves uncertain, and the tension between the teaching and the teacher is one of the things that makes him human.
Joy as Obligation
The counterweight to the darkness.
It is a great mitzvah to be always in joy, he says in the second part, lesson 24, and the saying is as famous as the others. The lesson explains that sadness is the root of most spiritual illness, that the forces of the other side feed on it, and that a person must therefore fight for joy as a religious duty, by any means: music, dancing, even foolishness and pretence if nothing else works.
This from a man who suffered from severe depression and said so. The teaching is not that joy is easy. It is that joy is required, that it must be fought for from the bottom, and that even the pretence of it has power.
The three teachings together, despair forbidden, fear forbidden, joy obligatory, form a single stance toward inner life that is severe and consoling at once. That stance is the book's gift.
The Tzaddik
The doctrine most readers outside Hasidism will find hardest.
Hasidism holds that the tzaddik, the righteous master, is a channel between his followers and God, and that attachment to him is a spiritual necessity. Rebbe Nachman took this further than most. He spoke of the true tzaddik of the generation as a unique figure, and he left his followers in no doubt that he meant himself.
The lessons return to this often. Attachment to the tzaddik, travelling to him, receiving his teaching, being included in his prayers: these are presented as essential to the soul's repair.
Breslov's refusal to appoint a successor follows from it. If the tzaddik of the generation was Rebbe Nachman, no one can replace him, and his followers go to his grave in Uman every Rosh Hashanah, tens of thousands of them, rather than to a living rebbe. A reader must decide how much of this to take on. The rest of the book does not depend on it.
The Lurianic Background
The system the lessons assume.
Rebbe Nachman's vocabulary is that of Lurianic Kabbalah: the ten sefirot, the withdrawal by which God made room for the world, the shattering of the vessels, the sparks scattered in creation and the task of raising them. He uses it fluently and without explanation.
What he does with it is characteristic of Hasidism generally and of him in particular: the cosmic drama is read as a description of the inner life. The shattered vessels are the person's own broken state; the sparks are the holiness trapped in one's own failures; the raising of the sparks is repentance and prayer. The Tree of Life becomes a map of psychological ascent.
Readers who know Scholem's account of how Hasidism psychologised Kabbalah will find the process on every page.
Likutey Moharan and the Tales
The relationship between the two halves of his output.
In 1806 Rebbe Nachman announced that he would begin telling stories, and over the next four years told the thirteen Tales that are his other great legacy: the Lost Princess, the Seven Beggars and the rest. He said the stories contained his teaching in a form that could reach people the lessons could not.
The two texts illuminate each other. Themes stated abstractly in a lesson appear as characters in a tale; images from the tales unlock passages in the lessons. Breslov tradition reads them together and the BRI notes cross-reference constantly.
A reader who finds the lessons impenetrable might start with the Tales, which are strange but readable, and return to the lessons with images in hand.
The Controversy
Why Breslov was persecuted, and why it matters for reading the book.
Rebbe Nachman's claims about his own soul, his sharp criticism of other Hasidic leaders, and his refusal to conform to the pattern of dynastic Hasidism made him enemies, above all the Shpola Zeide, an older rebbe who denounced him. After his death the opposition turned on his followers, who were ostracised, mocked as dead Hasidim for having a dead rebbe, and in some places physically attacked.
The persecution shaped the movement's character: small, intense, defensive, and bound to the text as the only authority. It also meant that the lessons were read, for generations, by people for whom they were the whole of their religious world.
The hostility has faded. Breslov is now one of the largest Hasidic groupings and its teachings have spread far beyond it. But the book still carries the marks of a community under siege.
The Edition
The Breslov Research Institute edition, begun in the 1980s and completed over two decades, is a work of scholarship as well as devotion. Each lesson is given in Hebrew with a facing translation, the sources are identified, the Kabbalistic terms are explained, and the associative links are drawn out in notes that often exceed the text.
The translation is faithful and readable. The notes are the reason to buy it. Fifteen volumes is a serious commitment and a reader may sensibly begin with one, or with a BRI anthology, before taking on the whole.
The Objections
Three, and they are the ones readers within the tradition raise too.
The difficulty. The associative form is not merely hard; it is, for readers without extensive background, close to inaccessible. The commentary makes it possible and does not make it easy.
The tzaddik doctrine. The claims about his own role sit uneasily with the teaching on simplicity and with the humility the book elsewhere demands, and readers outside Breslov will not accept them.
The darkness. The book is preoccupied with sin, obstacles, the other side and the fall, and the teachings on joy can read as a struggle against an undertow rather than a settled peace. That is honest and it is also exhausting.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you know Rebbe Nachman from the sayings and want to see them in the lessons they came from, where they are stranger and stronger.
Read it if you have some grounding in Kabbalah and Jewish sources and want the most original Hasidic voice at first hand.
Read it if you practise hitbodedut or want to, and want the teaching behind the practice.
Read the Tales first if the lessons defeat you, and come back.
The three famous sayings are usually met as comfort. In the lessons they are something harder. Despair is forbidden on grounds that have nothing to do with things improving: the belief that one is beyond reach is a theological error. Fear is the one thing that will throw you from the bridge, so the bridge stays narrow and the fear has to go. Joy is a commandment, to be fought for by any means including pretence, precisely because it does not come naturally to a person who sees clearly. Rebbe Nachman saw very clearly and suffered for it, and the stance he built was not optimism. It was a refusal to grant the darkness the one thing it wants, which is the last word.
Four hundred and eleven lessons from the rebbe who has never been replaced.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the difficulty and the tzaddik doctrine are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Likutey Moharan?
The collected teachings of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, 1772 to 1810, transcribed by his disciple Reb Noson and published in two parts in 1808 and 1811. It is the central text of Breslov Hasidism.
Who was Rebbe Nachman?
The great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, and the founder of the Breslov movement, which has never appointed a successor and still regards him as its living rebbe.
What does the title mean?
Collected Teachings of Our Teacher Rabbi Nachman. Moharan is an acronym of the Hebrew for Our Teacher, Rabbi Nachman.
How is it structured?
As numbered lessons, 286 in the first part and 125 in the second, each usually opening with a scriptural or Talmudic verse and unfolding through associative chains of ideas back to that verse.
What is hitbodedut?
Rebbe Nachman's central practice: an hour a day of solitary, spontaneous, spoken prayer in one's own language, pouring out everything before God. He considered it higher than any other devotion.
What does it say about despair?
Lesson 78 of the second part contains the phrase later condensed to it is forbidden to despair. The teaching is that no matter how far a person has fallen, there is no place where God is not, and therefore no place from which return is impossible.
Which edition should I read?
The Breslov Research Institute edition, in fifteen volumes with Hebrew text, English translation and extensive notes, is the standard. Single-volume selections exist for readers who want a way in.
Is it difficult?
Very. The lessons assume fluency in Torah, Talmud, Midrash and Kabbalah, and move by association rather than argument. Without commentary most readers will be lost within a paragraph.
How does it relate to the Tales?
The Tales are the thirteen stories he told in his last years, which he said contained his deepest teachings in hidden form. Likutey Moharan is the teaching in open form; the two illuminate each other.
What is the Kabbalistic background?
Lurianic. The lessons use the vocabulary of the sefirot, the shattering of the vessels and the raising of sparks throughout, though always turned toward the inner life of the individual.
Why is Rebbe Nachman controversial?
He made claims about his own soul that other Hasidic leaders found intolerable, feuded with the Shpola Zeide, and the Breslov refusal to appoint a successor was seen as an affront. The controversy has softened but not vanished.
Who should read it?
Readers with some grounding in Jewish sources who want the primary text of one of the most original spiritual voices of the modern period, and anyone who knows Rebbe Nachman only from aphorisms.
Take the hour
Of everything in four hundred lessons, one instruction needs no background and no commentary. Go somewhere alone. Speak, out loud, in your own words, about everything, for an hour, to whatever you are able to address. Do not stop when the words run out; say that they have run out. Rebbe Nachman said this hour was worth more than any study and that it would be the hardest hour of the day. Both claims can be tested by anyone. The second will be confirmed within ten minutes. The first takes longer.
Sources & References
- Nachman of Breslov. Likutey Moharan, Breslov Research Institute, 15 vols., trans. Moshe Mykoff, ed. Chaim Kramer.
- Sternhartz, Noson. Chayey Moharan (Tzaddik), the biography of Rebbe Nachman.
- Green, Arthur. Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav.
- Kaplan, Aryeh. Rabbi Nachman's Stories.
- Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, on Hasidism.
- Mark, Zvi. Mysticism and Madness: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav.