What is a Chabad House?
Chabad is influenced by the teaching of the Baal Shem Tov, a great Jew of 18th-century Eastern Europe who loved his people with an immeasurable passion. The calamities of his time had created a situation in which there were many simple Jews who had no learning and little knowledge, alongside great scholars who looked askance at the ignorance of these commoners. The Baal Shem Tov taught us to look deeper, beyond the knowledge of a person, beyond his outward behavior, into the depths of his heart, to find there the divine spark and reveal it with unconditional love. Today things are different and the same. There are not as many simple Jews, but there are plenty of very complicated ones. Our Torah scholars cannot be compared to the scholars of those times, but the chasm remains, this fissure that sometimes lies between the Jews that rest on Shabbat and those who do not yet know its beauty, between those that cherish the wisdom of Torah and those who are looking elsewhere instead. The appr
