The Mitzvah Tank campaign also highlighted the Rebbe’s belief that the performance of any mitzvah in and of itself, and even when performed by a person who is otherwise nonobservant (such as a Jew who puts on tefillin in a Mitzvah Tank and then goes off to eat an unkosher meal), has value. This belief was highly atypical in the Orthodox world of the 1960s and 1970s, although because of the Rebbe’s precedent, it is not as atypical today.
