1) Joy.
This is a principle that comes from the Gra. He says joy comes of עולם הבינה  the world of creation.


 LM volume II chapter 24.  "It is a great mitzvah to be joyful always." This is a serious approach to Torah. It says if something makes you miserable there is no mitzvah in doing it. This has in fact been a guiding principle for me. If a certain mitzvah is making me miserable I figure that I ought to quit it because it is defeating the purpose of the mitzvah.

Similarly if I think something is a mitzvah but it seems to bring out bad character traits in me then i figure that it is objectively not a mitzvah at all and that somehow I made a mistake in thinking that it was.

2) Similarly talking with God. This is because God can help. And even if he does not help at first he does eventually. And this kind of informal prayer without any fixed setting brings about a connection with God that often  do mitzvot do not do.

3) Faith in God. This is one of the reason I wrote a few essays on monotheism in my blogs, and I tried to show the difference between Monotheism and the paganism. I consider Jewish faith to be important to understand what it is. The main source for this is obviously the books of Saadia Geon and Maimonides but I thought since it is  such an important issue I should say  few words about it here also. (I should mention that Monotheism is the world view of the Torah. Many people worship tzadikim and think that that is a part of Torah faith, and so this issue clearly needs clarification. Tzadik worship is not a part of the Torah's world view.)

4) Judging people on the scale of merit. This I mentioned  before that you can find this principle in  Chaim from Voloshin also with the same kind of emphasis.

5) To go through the entire Oral and Written Law in order word by word. Every day to have a session in which you go through Babylonian Talmud, the the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Sifi, Sifra, Tosephta and all the writings of Isaac Luria.

6) Not to rebuke people. Even though there is a mitzvah of rebuke in the  Torah, but today we can't rebuke. Even Rabbi Akiva said in his days, "I would be surprised to find anyone in this generation is is capable of delivering rebuke properly." (תמה אני אם בדור הזה יש מי שראוי להוכיח) And when one cant do it properly then one is not required to do so at all.

7) To come to Uman on Rosh Hashanah. This I have found to be helpful for myself in helping me to keep focus on keeping Torah.

8) Not to pay attention to people that try to prevent you from the service of God. He said that Abraham only reached his level by thinking of himself as being alone in the world and so is the case for anyone who wants to serve God. They must not pay any attention to people.

9) Religious leaders that are bad people he thought one should stay away from.