The Way to Walk: Spiritual Instructions of Eighteenth-Century Hasidism

The Way to Walk is a collection of early Hasidic instructions for living a proper moral and spiritual life. These were written for an emerging new spiritual elite among the followers of R. Yisra'el Ba'al Shem Tov, composed in the two decades following his death in 1760. Hasidism was not yet a popular movement: it began rather as a small community of those seeking a more intense spiritual path than could be expected of the general public. These are the key documents that defined that path, one that was to lead toward devekut, or intimate attachment to God.