Reshimos — The Rebbe’s Private Notebooks
Hebrew: רְשִׁימוֹת — “notes,” “records,” “jottings” | Published posthumously
What Are the Reshimos?
Reshimos are the Rebbe’s private Torah notebooks — personal journals of Chassidic and Kabbalistic thought that he kept from his early years, through his studies in Berlin and Paris, and continuing throughout his life. They were never intended for publication: they are thinking-on-paper, exploratory, personal, sometimes fragmentary — the record of a profound mind working through the deepest questions of Torah.
After the Rebbe’s histalkus (passing) in 1994, the Kehot Publication Society began publishing the Reshimos in book form. The project is ongoing. Each volume reveals new dimensions of the Rebbe’s inner world — his sources, his method, his spiritual preoccupations across different periods of his life.
The Character of the Reshimos
What distinguishes the Reshimos from the Rebbe’s public sichos and ma’amarim:
- Exploratory: The Reshimos show the Rebbe thinking, not yet teaching. One sees the process: questions raised, answers tried, rejected, revised.
- Personal: References to his own spiritual experiences, to his dreams, to his encounters with Torah texts that transformed his understanding.
- Kabbalistic depth: Even more than the public ma’amarim, the Reshimos engage with the most abstract levels of Kabbalistic thought — ain-sof, tzimtzum, the structure of the divine emanations — with a freedom possible only in private notes.
- Historical insight: The Reshimos from the 1930s and 1940s give insight into the Rebbe’s intellectual development before he became Rebbe — his engagement with secular philosophy (he studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin), with science, with the great challenges of the 20th century.
Reshimos as Torah
Despite their private nature, the Reshimos are substantive Torah. The Rebbe’s notes often develop ideas that later appeared in formal sichos — seeing the notebook version gives the student a deeper understanding of the final teaching. Other Reshimos contain unique teachings found nowhere else in the Rebbe’s published corpus.
One famous Reshimo (published as Reshimos no. 1) describes the Rebbe’s experience at his father-in-law’s farbrengen on Simchas Torah 5689/1928 — shortly after his marriage. It is a remarkably intimate document: the young future Rebbe records his experience of a farbrengen that penetrated to his core, and begins to articulate (tentatively, in private) what it means to receive the tradition of Chabad through lived experience rather than mere text.
The Reshimos and the Rebbe’s Humanity
For Chassidim, the Reshimos are important in another way: they show the Rebbe as a human being engaged in avodah — not merely a leader who transmits perfected Torah from on high, but a tzaddik who worked, who sought, who grew. This is itself a chiyus (life-force) for the ordinary Chassid: if the Rebbe’s private notebooks show process, then my own imperfect, searching avodah is not disqualified — it is the essence of the enterprise.