How selection works

How to ask for advice and a blessing

1. Wash your hands without a blessing — three times on each hand, alternating right and left. This is done to purify body and soul before writing the request.
2. Write everything that is on your heart, in any language. Include the full Jewish name of the person asking and the name of their mother. In Jewish practice these are the names that represent a person, rather than the family name. If the person asking is not Jewish, write the father's name instead.
3. Take on a good resolution — for example putting on tefillin, keeping kosher, keeping Shabbat, or doing a kindness for another person — and then send the request. The software opens a page from one of the scanned volumes of the Igros Kodesh at random and immediately.
4. Read the answer you receive carefully. If it is not clear, any of the volunteers listed on the Contact page, or your nearest Chabad centre, will help you understand it.

A good resolution, undertaken without a vow, is not a condition for receiving an answer. It simply makes a person a vessel for the blessing. It might be giving charity, adding in Torah and mitzvot, or resolving to publicise the good news when it comes.

The method

When you submit a request, the server draws a cryptographically secure random number and maps it uniformly across every eligible letter in the active corpus version. No weighting, no personalisation, no analysis of your text.

What is never used

• The words you write.
• Your profile, history or previous letters.
• Any behavioural, location or device signal.

What is recorded

Each selection stores the corpus version, the size of the eligible pool, the method name and a verification hash, so you can confirm afterwards that nothing was tailored to you.

Which pages to read

If a letter that begins on the page you received continues onto the next page, it is customary to look there too; and if the letter begins on the page before, it is customary to look back to complete the matter. Generally, though, the focus stays on the page that opened.

Why it matters

Randomness keeps the experience honest. Anything that appears meaningful to you belongs to your own reflection, not to an algorithm.