Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 31 March 1972 — Page 44

THE JEWISH POST AND OPINION

Friday* March 31* 1972

Ari, Great Mystic, Died 400 Years Ago

(Continued from Preceding Pg.) TIME RAN ON. Rabbi Yitzhak Luria was now 35, with less than three more years to live. Hardly anything would have been known of him in days to come if not for the unpredictable turn which was suddenly to occur in his fate. One night, when the mystic’s

soul was returning from one of its Heavenly visitations, he heard a voice commanding him to leave the “unholy land” of his sojourn and go to Safad. There, he was told, he would reach his fulfillment; and he was not to tarry, as his time was running short. On the very next day Luria started out on

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the journey, with his family, on the generations that will come camel. Before long he arrived after you. at his destination. This was Thus it was acotally to be. towards the end of 1569. In the'summer of 1572, Safad Safad, a small, compact com- was ravaged by the Black munity, was at the time the Death. Among its victims was hot-house of Judaism. Within its Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, once narrow confines it harboured again accompanied by some of some of the nation’s most his disciples. He passed away energetic and brilliant minds in on Av 5, having barely reached various spheres, in rabbinic the age of 38, and was buried scholarship not less than in in the Safad cemetery near his mystic thought, in poetry as teacher-colleague, Rabbi Moshe well as in piety. To name but Cordovera. a few: the author of the AFTER THE death of the Ari, “Shulhan Aruch,” Rabbi Yosef his disciple, Rabbi Haim Vital, Caro; Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, set about, as charged by the who composed the Sabbath master, preserving his spiritual hymn “Lecha Dodi,” and the legacy. He collected the scarce doyen of the Kabbalists, Rabbi written fragments left by the Moshe Cordovero, whose Ari, and gathered from the writings had already reached colleagues the various notes and profoundly influenced Rabbi they had made of the master’s Yitzhak Luria in Egypt, and teachings, to supplement those now he would be able to sit /that he himself had most at the feet of the great master, copiously and scrupulously But alas, for only a few recorded during the one year months; in June, 1570, Cordo- and several months that he had vero passed away. been with the teacher. CORDOVERO and Luria are In the course of the next 15 the two all-time luminaries of years and more, Vital worked the Kabbala. They represent, with utmost devotion and faithhowever, two different worlds, fulness on the arduous task to Cordovero’s lasting achievement arrange, on the basis of all was the summing-up of the old, written records and all that he classic Kabbala; whereas Luria had heard from the master’s gave birth to the new Kabbala lips and observed from his which bears his name. The conduct, a comprehensive work ^Lurianic Kabbala, it must be in systematic, logical order, of added, has hardly more than the name in common with the former. Luria outlived Cordovero by only two years. During that final fraction of his life he engendered what can only be described as a volcanic eruption of the spirit, a one-man revolution, that reinterpreted and remoulded the Jewish faith — within its time-honored, sanctified framework — as no one and nothing ever before or after. IT DID NOT take the learned and pious men of Safad long to discover that the young, withdrawn Ashkenazi Kabbalist from Egypt, who had suddenly appeared in their midst, was an extraordinary man. As the months passed and Rabbi Yitzhak Luria relaxed his selfimposed restraint somewhat, he actually came to be regarded as a Ba al Ruah Hakodesh — one endowed with the Holy Spirit; and many wondrous feats were ascribed to him. Soon the Ari became a living legend. Luria’s way of teaching was by no means formal or systematic. As the spirit moved him, whatever theme at the moment occupied his mind or was the subject of one of his frequent visionary illuminations, he would convey some fragments of it to his chosen disciples; often actually struggling and refusing to divulge, only to give way in the end to their implorations, especially to the forceful pressure of Rabbi Haim Vital who had become his most trusted disciple. WHEN ONCE asked by Vital why wealth of his thought in a book he did not record the precious for the benefit of coming generations, Luria replied that whenever he opened his mouth on one of the sacred themes, the stream of thought came down on him in a torrent which he could not possibly restrain. Therefore, he said, let everyone of you write down whatever he hears from me, that this may remain as a lasting memory for you and for

all that the Ari had taught in the fields of mj'sfcic thought, devotion and practice. The outcome was the magnum opus, the “Etz Haim” (Tree of Life) with its eight “Gates,” that has been accepted throughout as the genuine, authentic record of the Ari’s spiritual legacy. THE WORK was edited later in a somwhat different arrangement by the compiler’s son. Rabbi Shmuel Vital, and, from the middle of the next century, it spread at large in many different versions and additional collections which went by the general description of “The Writings of the Ari” (Kitvei Ha’ari). The impact of the Ari on the following generations cannot be exaggerated. All that has come down from him in every sphere was looked upon by sages and common people alike as the last word of sublime truth and sanctity. The Ari s teaching has not only reshaped most basically all concepts of the Kabbala; it has made that new Kabbala itself the common property of the people in its widest sections, remoulding, in an unprecedented fashion and in countless features, the forms of belief and thought, and even the very modes of prayer and ritual practice and observance.