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1,753 Hebrew letters and 422 English on the inner work. The counsel is dominated by teshuvah (758 letters) and the fixed instruction to learn Chassidus (475 — with a striking arc: 89 in the 1940s, 317 in the 1950s, then falling to 11 by the 1970s as the audience widened). Serve with joy appears in 306, kabolas ol in 153, tefillah in 121. The signature departure, drawn straight from Igeres HaTeshuvah: not by fasting — a generation too weak for affliction purifies through tzedakah and joy instead, and the guard against melancholy is itself part of the avodah.
The 1950s dominate — 995 of 1,753 — the years the Rebbe was rebuilding inner lives after the war and spreading the study of Chassidus. Teshuvah, though, is heaviest earliest (§03).
The recurring calls, by how often they appear across the 1,753 Hebrew letters.
"Learn Chassidus" traces the sharpest arc: 89 → 317 → 58 → 11 across the decades. The 1950s were the decade of spreading pnimiyus haTorah; by the 1970s the weight had moved to action and mivtzoim.
Teshuvah is front-loaded — 256 of 758 letters are in the 1940s, when so many wrote as they rebuilt their lives after the war. The call to return is loudest at the start.
"Serve with joy" (306) recurs in every decade, and never once does he prescribe fasting as the path. Joy is the constant; affliction is what he steers people away from (§04).
Where an older piety reached for fasts and self-affliction to atone, the Rebbe reaches the other way — to tzedakah, care for the body, and joy. Again and again he tells a correspondent that fasting "is not a path for you," citing the Alter Rebbe's Igeres HaTeshuvah that in our generation purification comes another way. Here that reversal, verbatim.