Nefesh HaChaim נפש החיים

Nefesh HaChaim by Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin was printed by his son Yitzchak at Vilna in 1824, three years after his father's death.

The first gate is on man as the image of God: a man's act echoes through the worlds, and so its weight is out of all proportion to his standing. The second is on prayer. The third is on tzimtzum, and on where the practical usefulness of the words ein od milvado — "there is nothing but Him" — comes to an end: a thought true in its measure, but taken as a rule of conduct, destructive. The fourth is on Torah: study for the Torah's own sake, for the understanding of the text, is the act by which the worlds are held up.

Between the third and fourth gates stand eight unnumbered chapters — the most direct objections to the Chasidic way in the whole book.

It is usually called the Mitnagdic answer to the Tanya. It is more exact to say otherwise: the book never once names the Tanya, its author signed no bans, and its argument is not with one work but with the very thought that nearness to God is reached through rapture or through a tzaddik. Here it is reached by the work of the mind upon the words of the Torah. Scholars — Lamm, Nadler, Magid — read the book so; and there is also the view that between it and the Tanya there is no real disagreement about tzimtzum at all.