חב״ד · Chabad — the mind first

Chokhmah, Binah, Da'at — the three intellectual sephirot, and the name is the programme. Founded by Shneur Zalman in Belarus, and alone among the courts in insisting that emotion which has not been generated by understanding is worthless: you are to contemplate until the feeling follows, not to work the feeling up directly.

⭐⭐ The one branch that made a doctrine out of distrusting enthusiasm — in a movement whose public reputation is enthusiasm. ⚠ And its later history is the movement's sharpest open question: under the seventh Rebbe it became a global outreach organisation of extraordinary reach, and after his death in 1994 with no successor, a section of it declared him the Messiah. The dynasty that placed intellect above ecstasy ended with the most contested messianic claim in modern Judaism.