The rab­binic clas­sic Mes­sil­lat Yesharim is one of the most impor­tant Jew­ish books of Musar or ​“eth­i­cal behav­ior.” It was writ­ten in 1738 by Moshe Hayy­im Luz­zat­to, a mys­tic and a philoso­pher from Italy known best by his acronym the RaMHaL. This new edi­tion uses the also-clas­sic 1936 JPS trans­la­tion of Mes­sil­lat Yesharim by Rab­bi Morde­cai Kaplan, whose goal was to give Eng­lish read­ers access to this impor­tant guide to moral and prop­er behav­ior as a way to fend off the assim­i­la­tion and accul­tur­a­tion that was tak­ing hold of Amer­i­can Jew­ry at the time.

Rab­bi Ira Stone’s com­men­tary on the Kaplan trans­la­tion sheds new light on the orig­i­nal RaMHaL text and on Kaplan’s trans­la­tion. The trans­la­tion is in bold type and black let­ter­ing, Stone’s com­ments are in a lighter font.

The one small flaw with this work is that in order to com­pare the Kaplan trans­la­tion and Stone’s com­men­tary with Luzzatto’s orig­i­nal work, the read­er must flip to the back of the book, where the Hebrew text is found.

Read­ers with an inter­est in rab­binic thought, Jew­ish phi­los­o­phy and Jew­ish ethics will find much Stone pro­vides the tools for the read­er to eas­i­ly and inde­pen­dent­ly access Luzzatto’s great classic.