 Chabad is an offshoot of Hasidism and a movement of its own, characterised by its own successively articulated orientations, and with its own extensive writings that are typified by the systematic nature of their thought, with their own conceptual language.Chabad is described in scholarship as the intellectual or philosophical school in Hasidism.These comparisons are qualified, however, by considerations that Chabad thought is not rationalistic, as it builds its philosophical investigations of divinity upon Lurianic Kabbalah and other traditional Torah sources without independent reason from first principles; though incorporating Maimonidean and other medieval Jewish philosophy methods, most Chabad thought is presented in a Kabbalistic theosophical framework; its aim is inward mystical self-transformation applied to self-sacrifice in Jewish observance, not formal philosophical intellectualism; and Chabad thought retains mystical revelation as its infinite intuitive divine essence source, drawn down into successively greater intellectual understanding by each leader of Chabad.