⚠ מי השילוח · Mei haShiloach — the most dangerous book in the wing

Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica's collected teachings, printed after his death. Its governing claim: everything is from God, including what a person does wrong, and beneath the level at which sin is real there is a level at which the divine will was being done all along.

⭐⭐⭐ It reads Zimri, the man Pinchas kills in Numbers 25, as having acted at the deepest level of the divine will — and Pinchas as having acted correctly on the level of the law. Both. ⚠⚠ This is not a licence and the book says so repeatedly; the level it describes is not one a person may claim for themselves in advance, only recognise in retrospect. But it is genuinely the sharpest antinomian edge in normative Hasidism, and its own tradition has spent a century and a half deciding how much of it to say out loud.

⭐ Izbica is the parent of Radzin and, through Gershon Henoch and then Zadok haKohen of Lublin, of some of the most searching psychological writing in the tradition.