Learn a sicha superficially and you will still walk away with a profound appreciation for the Rebbe’s incisive contributions.
Learn a sicha patiently, carefully, taking the time to absorb every rung of the argument, and that appreciation will be even deeper.
But learn a sicha with the Rebbe’s famed footnotes, and the sicha will transform into something else entirely.
The footnotes are where some of the grandest, most sweeping innovations take place. It is where the Rebbe pulls from texts spanning the entirety of Jewish scholarly history, from Tanach to even his own contemporaries (acharei achronim) and reveals connections unseen, and answers to questions both famous and unknown.
Nestled within these dense notes in a single sicha can be over fifty different volumes, from a Rashi or a Midrash, to a super-commentary on Rashi that has not been in print for decades.
But for the average student, this is a difficult task, for two reasons. For one, it is simply time-consuming to locate the volume in question and find the relevant passage that the Rebbe is referencing. And secondly, many of the books are rare, out of print, or just not accessible to most people outside of a Beis Midrash.
Enter a mashpia in Mesivta Lubavitch of Monsey, Rabbi Moshe Browd, and his labor of love: deciphering the footnotes.
As a yeshiva student, Browd developed a fascination with the interweaving of the whole corpus of Likkutei Sichos. Each sicha, he noticed, built on the previous ones, adding, clarifying, and broadening the subject.
“In the footnotes of later volumes,” he explains, “the Rebbe would reference an earlier sicha or sichos. That would send me back to those to piece together the panoramic perspective the Rebbe was creating over decades.”
This youthful discovery led to a fixation on the footnotes in general. When Project Likkutei Sichos took off a year and a half ago, Browd knew he had something to contribute.
Each week, Browd devotes ten to twenty hours to opening up the footnotes of just one Sicha being studied around the world as part of Project Likkutei Sichos. Patiently, he takes down all the citations of each footnote and then heads to the bookshelf or the various internet databases to find each and every citation. Then, he copies the text of every verse, Rashi, Midrash, Gemara, and Rishon, every Rambam or law in Shulchan Aruch, every passage from a maamer or from the works of the Jewish linguists or philosophers that the Rebbe cites, to a document.
Just this week, Browd released over one-hundred pages of citations on four sichos.
With this in hand, the world of the Rebbe’s footnotes is opened for any hardworking student.
