@Always_Ask_Questions You make a good point, however this is one thing you are neglecting from it. Having an oral tradition (Torah sh’Ba’al Peh) means having a Rebbi. We cannot just read books (no matter how holy) and have that be our Rebbi, we need a person who is dynamic and understands his talmid and the world.
@sechel83 That is how Chabad chooses to interpret that particular aspect of Chassidus. You should be aware that the rest of the frum world does not. We view Acharonim as Torah that is highly susceptible and open to machlokes from any other Acharon. Divrei halacha and hashkafa especially, since they are are often extremely subjective. I have two very misnagdish examples I can give you from personal experience with the Yekkish community (but this exist in every frum community except Chabad).
- The translators of Rav Hirsch ZT”L’s works had to make a lot of decisions as to what would be published and what wouldn’t. The decided to all but ignore anything that wasn’t openly published by him (i.e. they left out letters and speech transcripts). Furthermore, they acknowledged that his views changed over his lifetime, and even his core philosophy of “Talmud Torah im Derech Eretz” differed from how he wrote about it in his 20s to how he wrote about it in his 50s. This affected which works they chose to translate.
- A while back, a woman found a stash of letters by her great-grandfather, Rav Eliezer Lipman Philip Prinz ZT”L, a Rav from Antwerp. They were all in Dutch, so she brought them to a relative to translate. The relative said that most of the letters, unfortunately, would have to be omitted since they were paskening halacha and there’s no way to know what the case was and whether it would still apply. One example was that he allowed people to open sidewalk umbrellas on Shabbos (I think the heter had to do with the construction of the umbrella and way in which it was opened, along with the fact that most of the community would still be mechalel Shabbos if he never gave a heter) which would either cause people to falsely think that umbrellas are muttar, or brand him a heretic.