Contemplation Through Three Intellectual Faculties

Chabad Hasidism was founded by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, known as the Alter Rebbe, whose 1797 work Tanya set out a path to devotion reached through disciplined intellectual contemplation, hisbonenut, on kabbalistic concepts of the divine, rather than through the spontaneous emotional fervor other early Hasidic schools favored. The movement's own name is formed from the initials of the three faculties that path works through, Chochmah, wisdom, the first unformed flash of an idea; Binah, understanding, the elaboration of that flash into a full, articulated concept; and Daat, knowledge, the faculty by which an understood concept is internalized deeply enough to become felt experience rather than remaining abstract. The Tanya distinguishes these three as the intellectual sefirot, sitting above and grounding the seven emotional sefirot, the middot, that other Hasidic paths engage more directly through song, movement and ecstatic gathering, so that Chabad's claim is not that emotion in worship is wrong but that it should be produced by sustained contemplation working through the mind rather than sought as a spontaneous state on its own. This intellectual first ordering earned Chabad its long standing description as an intellectual Hasidism among historians of the movement, a label the school itself embraces as an accurate description of method rather than as a criticism of insufficient feeling.