The Hidden Tzaddik's Playbook

On voice. I will use Hebrew and Yiddish terms throughout because I am a Jew writing for Jews. If you are not a Jew, you will pick it up. The terms are not gatekeeping. They are the language the source material lives in, and translating them out would flatten the music.

A leader is not someone who is followed. A leader is someone whose movement creates the conditions in which others can move.

At the end of each day, I write down three things I noticed during the day that I would not have noticed a year ago. Sometimes the three things are about a client. Sometimes about my children. Sometimes about a stranger on the street. The discipline is not the content. The discipline is the act of noticing what I noticed, which trains the perceptual apparatus to keep noticing.

Song is one of the paths of avodah, the service of HaShem. It is not decoration. It is not entertainment. It is one of the technologies through which a soul moves from one state to another. ... a soul travels through song. A body travels through space using its legs or a vehicle. A soul travels through song. The song is the vehicle.

The Baal Shem Tov used literal song. He sang while davening. His Chassidim sang while davening. They sang together at farbrengens. They sang specific niggunim with specific intentions for specific emotional states. The technology of song was, for the early Chassidic movement, a deliberate organizational practice. ... song carries information that cannot be carried in any other form. A teaching transmitted only in words is incomplete. A teaching transmitted in song carries the same words plus a frequency that the words alone cannot encode. The niggun is not nostalgia. It is data infrastructure

There is a category of injustice that you cannot fight your way out of. The only path through it is to remain where you are and let the truth do its own work. ... The chassidic teaching is not that you should accept all bad treatment. The teaching is that there is a specific kind of bad treatment, where the truth is on your side and the falsehood is operating publicly, where the right move is to outlast rather than to fight.

The discrimination between cases requires judgment, and the judgment is hard. The Besht's standard is useful. The standard is whether the truth, given time, will surface on its own. If the answer is yes, you wait. If the answer is no, you fight.