Great Rabbis of Tzfat

Rabbi Isaac Luria, the ARI 1532-1572 Next to R' Shimon Bar Yochai, the author of the Zohar (basis of Kabbalah), the ARI is the most revered Kabbalistic Rabbi to have lived. His family originated in Egypt, and although he himself was born in Jerusalem, upon the death of his father, the family returned to Egypt.  He was raised in an uncle's house and became known throughout the Jewish world at an early age as a mystic of mythical stature.  

In 1569 he came to Tzfat where he studied and taught, though he never wrote anything down.  He located gravesites of many great Talmudic Rabbis and other scholars who had died hundreds of years before his time.  He prophesized, divined, explained the unexplainable, and directed Kabbalah study to the direction that we know it today -- as a way of understanding the secrets of the Torah and how knowledge of those secrets can help us strengthen our relationship to God and to our fellow man.

To this day, visitors to Tzfat can see the little room in the Ari Sepharadi synagogue where The ARI is said to have studied with Elijah the Prophet, and broadened his understanding of Kabbalah through Divine Inspiration.  

Rabbi Joseph Caro 1488-1575 Born in Turkey to a family which had been expelled from Spain, R' Caro labored for 30 years in writing the Beit Yosef, his compilation of the laws of Jewish life which guide, till today, Jews throughout the world in their daily lives.  R' Caro worried that after the Spanish Expulsion, the new far-flung Jewish communities would no longer be able to have easy access to the Laws, and so he shortened his Beit Yosef to The Shulhan Aruch  to help laymen in their day-to-day practice of Torah life.

R' Caro is said to have written his works in a basement room which sits below today's Yosef Caro synagogue with the aid of a maggid, a heavenly messenger whose advice and assistance followed him through his years of scholarly research, writings, and then as the Chief Rabbi of Tzfat.  

R' Caro is one of the very few scholars who wrote and studied conventional Torah law while relating to Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, in fathoming the mysteries that lay behind the written words of the Torah.

Rabbi Ya'akov Beirav  1474-1546   Rabbi Beirav arrived in Tzfat from Damascus, intending to develop Tzfat's cultural and economic base.  He was responsible for the mills which were built in Wadi Limon which resulted in the expansion of the wool dying trade in the area.  As a wealthy merchant, he was able to establish a yeshiva in Tzfat and give stipends to the students and their families. 

However, it was as Chief Rabbi of Tzfat that R' Beirav became famous, because he envisioned the resumption of the Sanhedrin in Tzfat.  R' Beirav was concerned over the fate of Marrano Jews who openly converted to Christianity in Spain and Portugal, but continued to secretly practice Judaism.  When some of those Marranos escaped and began to attempt to return openly to Judaism, many Jewish leaders scorned their return, and refused to allow them to rejoin the Jewish community.

R' Beirav wanted a body with the authority of the Sanhedrin, a Jewish court which functioned during the time of the Temples and was outlawed by the Romans, to be reinstated, so that the authority of the Rabbis who demanded that these returnees be accepted back to Judaism would not be questioned.

The objection to reinstating the Sanhedrin was so strong outside of Tzfat that, although Beirav ordained 4 of his students (R' Caro, R' Di Curiel, R' Di Trani, and R' Shalom), their power was never recognized.  But the Rabbis themselves, both individually and now, collectively, carried enough authority to be able to influence the Jewish world to accept their way of thinking, and the Marranos began to assimilate back into the Jewish world. 

Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz  1505-1584 R' Alkabetz is best known as a student of the ARI and R' Joseph Caro, a mystic, and a poet whose practice of going out to "bring in the Sabbath" while watching the sunset over Mt. Meron inspired him to write the "Lecha Dodi" prayer which Jews sing during the Kabbalat Shabbat Service throughout the world. 

R' Alkabetz is also one of the originators of the custom, together with R' Yosef Caro, of staying up all night on the Shavouth holiday to study Torah. 

Rabbi Moshe Alshekh  d.1594 R’ Alshech was ordained by R' Yosef Caro.  He sat on the Beit Din of Tzfat and founded a synagogue for Marranos who wished to return to Jewish practices.

Rabbi Chaim Vital 1542 – 1620 R’ Vital was ordained by R' Moshe Alshekh. R' Vital, who had been born in Tzfat, was one of the closest students of the ARI.  While the ARI never wrote down his teachings, R' Vital did, but promised the ARI that he would not share them because of a worry that such strong mysticism could, if widely known, cause havoc with people's lives and the world.  Legend states that these writings were stolen from R' Vital and dispersed...it is these writings which form much of present-day Kabbalah study.

 

Stories of Miracles of Tzfat

Miracle of Abuhav Synagogue The Abuhav Synagogue is known as the "Blue Synagogue" because of it's high blue ceiling. It's a Sephadadic synagogue, and the original Abuhav was built by Rabbi Abuhav in the 1500s. 

The Abuhav Synagogue houses several Torah scrolls, some of which were written hundreds of years ago (one is said to have been written by Rabbi Abuhav 500 years ago).  During the 1837 earthquake, the entire synagogue collapsed, aside from the wall with the Torah Arks, which withstood the earthquake, saving the Torah scrolls.

In the summer of 2006, when Hizbollah fired 500 missiles into Tzfat, one missile landed directly between the Abuhav synagogue and the Alsheich synagogue (Alsheich was the only synagogue which withstood both the 1759 and 1837 earthquakes).  The building, housing a girls' school, was destroyed, but both the Alsheich and Abuhav synagogues sustained no more damage than a few broken windows. 

The Miracle of The Dancing Camels  R' Yisrael Najara, author of the Sabbath Z'mira Ya Ribon, was well-known singer and songwriter.  He traveled frequently between Damascus and Tzfat.  On one trip, he was captured by a band of Bedouin nomads who planned to kill him. 

Najara asked if he could pray, and when the Bedouin agreed, he took out his flute and began to play and pray.   The soothing sounds of his flute lulled the camels, and they gathered around him, protecting him, and convincing the Bedouin to leave.  Najara thus entered Tzfat, with the dancing camels surrounding him.

In the summer of 2006, a new immigrant from the United States started a micro-brewery.  Inspired by Najara's story, he named his beer The Dancing Camel Brewery.  www.dancingcamel.com

The Miracle of the Avritch (Bat Ayin) Synagogue The Avritch Synagogue was filled one winter morning in 1837 when the Rabbi of the synagogue, R' Dov of Avritch, called to his followers "whoever wants to live, come stand with me!"

As the men rushed to stand with their Rabbi, the earthquake of 1837 hit the city, crushing the city and burying close to 4000 residents under the rubble.  The men who stood with Rabbi Avritch survived. 

The Miracle of R' Yossi Banai During the Turkish Rule, one harsh ruler declared that a number of white chickens would have to be brought to him -- if not, the Jews of the city would be forced to pay an enormous fine.  The Jews worried, but Rabbi Yossi Banai assured them that all would be well, and indeed, in the morning when they awoke, all of the chickens of the city had turned white.  

The Miracle of Mordichai, the Cemetery Caretaker In 1972, Mordachai Shababo, a wrestler with the Israeli Olympic team, was preparing to attend the Munich Olympics with the Israeli Olympic team. Shortly before leaving Israel to represent the team abroad, he was visited by a vision in a dream, in which the image berated him about the horrible condition of the graves in the ancient cemetery.  After several nights of this dream repeating, Mordachai asked the opinion of a Rabbi, who interpreted the dream to mean that Mordachai should NOT go to Munich, but should move to Tzfat to take care of the cemetery.  This convinced Mordachai, who decided to not attend the Olympics  -- the infamous Munich Olympics... where his Israeli teammates were massacred by terrorists. Mordachai became religious and began to devote his life to maintaining the ancient gravestones of Tzfat's cemetery. Mordachai is responsible for painting the gravestones of the great rabbis who are buried in the cemetery blue.

The Miracle of the Victims of the 1837 Earthquake  The year 2007 marked the 170th year of the 1837 earthquake, in which close to 4000 Tzfat residents were killed.  In the aftermath of the quake, the victims were buried in mass graves, but it was done quickly and with no organization, and until 2007, no marker of their resting places had ever been found. 

In January 2007, coinciding with the 170th year of the earthquake, one of the cemetery’s caretakers, Eli, was walking through the cemetery with Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Chief Sepharadi Rabbi of Tzfat.  They prayed that they would be able to find some sign of these people, and suddenly, Eli heard a voice in his ear saying "drop down and roll".

Eli did so, and rolled down the hill.  Exactly where he stopped rolling, he and R' Eliyahu found a headstone with an inscription marking one of the mass gravesites of the 1837 earthquake victims. 

War of Independence One of the biggest battles of the Israeli War of Independence was fought in Tzfat.  The residents of the city were largely elderly religious people, and numbered about 1500 Jews and 12,000 Arabs.  When the war broke out, there were 221 Jews of fighting age, with an additional 136 who were brought in to augment their numbers.  10,700 Arab soldiers were deployed to meet them. 

The Jewish soldiers were outnumbered in weaponry by over 10 – 1, and were further hampered in their efforts by the activities of the British Army, which turned over all the high points of the City to the Arab forces when they left in April 1948. 

 

The introduction of the Davidka, a Czech artillery piece which made more noise than damage, is given credit for scaring the Arab population and fighters into leaving, as they believed the rumors that the Jews had acquired the Atom Bomb.

 

A tour guide recently described a discussion that he had with another Tzfat Tour Guide many years ago.  Yisrael Shalem, z”l, had been researching how a disinformation campaign about the atom bomb could have caused such panic among Arab civilians and soldiers alike, to the point of convincing them to leave Tzfat entirely in the midst of a battle in which they had the upper hand.

 

Shalem spoke to the old people of Tzfat, who told him that before the riots of 1929, the Jews and Arabs of Tzfat had enjoyed good relations, and had even known each other well through their contacts at the weekly marketplace. 

 

During the war, at the end of each day’s battles, the old ladies of the town, who knew each other from before 1929, would come to “no man’s land” which separated the Jewish and Arab quarters, and call to each other, the Jews in Arabic, and the Arabs in Yiddish!

 

After the Davidka was fired off, the Arab women called to the Jews “vos is dos?” to which one Jewish lady sarcastically replied “we have the atom bomb”.

 

When it rained unexpectedly that night, the Jewish commanders started the rumor that “everyone knows that it always rains after an atom blast” and with that, the Arab forces and civilians fled, and Tzfat was liberated. 

 

Jewish Traditions from Tzfat

There are many traditions and customs which are, today, observed throughout the Jewish world, which have their origins in Tzfat:

Kabbalat Shabbat Kabbalat Shabbat service, sung at the beginning of Shabbat, was instituted by the ARI and his students.  They would go to an apple orchard outside of the city and sing hymns and psalms and R' Alkabetz's L'cha Dodi, as they watched the sun set over Mt. Meron and "brought in" the Sabbath.

Upsherin A kabbalistic tradition exists of leaving a little boy's hair uncut until age 3, as the child "ripens", in the same way that a fruit tree's fruit is only picked after the third year.  At age 3, many people take their young boys to the tomb of R' Shimon Bar Yochai (believed to have written the Zohar, basis of Kabbalah) at Mt. Meron to have their hair snipped, often by great rabbis and rebbes.  This was begun by the ARI as a blessing to the boys and their families for long lives of health and happiness.

Tu B'Shevat Seder Mentioned in the Talmud, the "New Year of the Trees" (when the sap begins to run in the trees in late winter) is a time when Jews recognize their dependence on nature and appreciation of the environment.  The ARI and his students instituted a "Seder", modeled on the Passover Seder, where, in order, each of the Land of Israel's seven species is discussed, and thanks given for what that species gives us. 

There are many other discussions during the Seder about the different meanings of various fruits and wines. 

Tikkun Leil Shavouth One Shavouth night as R' Shlomo Alkebetz and R' Yosef Caro sat studying Torah, R' Caro's maggid, his heavenly messenger, related to him that from this holiday onward, Jews should make it their custom to do exactly that....spend Shavouth night awake, studying Torah.  Till today, Jews do this, known as the Tikkun of Shavouth. 

Lag B'Omer Procession to Mt. Meron  In the 16th century, the ARI initiated the traditional Lag B'Omer procession from Tzfat to the gravesite of R' Shimon Bar Yochai at Mt. Meron.  R' Bar Yochai was the first recognized scholar of Kabbalah, and the author of the Zohar, the book of Kabbalah. 

In the 19th century, the Abu family added the tradition of bringing the Torah scroll from their house which would accompany the pilgrims to Mt. Meron with singing and dancing....this ceremony is the official opening ceremony of Lag B'Omer today. 

Rosh Hashana The custom of Tashlich, casting ones sins, metaphorically, into the waters on Rosh Hashana seems to have begun in Germany in the 16^th century, but become widely accepted after the ARI began to adopt it in Tzfat.

Honey on the book when beginning to learn – in both Sepharadi and Ashkanazi communities, little boys have traditionally begun their learning with honey smeared on the pages of the primers which they would learn their aleph bet.  The boys were encouraged to lick the honey from the book, with the explanation that their learning would be as sweet as honey.  The ARI instituted this custom in Tzfat, and from Tzfat, it spread throughout the Jewish world.