The Path of the Just
Books | Religion / Ethics
Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto
The Path of the Just (Messilas Yesharim), written by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto in the eighteenth century, is one of the most influential and popular works on Jewish ethics. Based on a famous talmudic passage in tractate Avodah Zarah, which delineates the qualities man must possess in order to attain religious and ethical perfection, The Path of the Just is a spiritual guide that focuses on those qualities, guiding the reader toward perfection of the human soul. In this new translation of and commentary on The Path of the Just, Yaakov Feldman brings fresh insight and understanding to what was once an indispensable text in the religious academies of the ethical movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By providing a new comprehensive translation and commentary of Luzzatto's eighteenth-century work, Yaakov Feldman brings the original spirit of The Path of the Just into a modern twentieth-century frame of reference and once again brings this classic text to the foreground of Jewish wisdom literature.