R. Chaim Vital: The Ari's Chief Disciple and Transmitter
🧿 The legacy of the Ari was closely guarded, and thus tied up in, the life and works of his self-proclaimed chief disciple, the prolific R. Chaim Vital of Tzfat, the architect of Lurianic Kabbala.
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The great Ari, the lion of Kabbalistic Tzfat (Safed), left behind strikingly few writings of his own hands, preferring to transmit his secrets orally to his disciples. These closely-guarded esoteric teachings continued to be restricted in various ways after the sudden death of the Ari in 1572: by keeping them within his circle of initiates, by writing them down only by hand and then restricting access to the few manuscripts, and so by keeping them out of print, the technology that disseminated writings on a mass scale. The task of preserving, organizing, and carefully transmitting the teaching of this most holy of Kabbalistic masters fell to his self-appointed definitive disciple, R. Chaim Vital, also known by the acronym Maharchav (מהרח"ו).
A Kabbalistic Life
Born in Tzfat in 1542 or 1543—just short of a decade after his master, the Ari—R. Chaim Vital was the son of a noted member of the Tzfat community, the scribe Yosef Vital Calabrese, whose surname testifies to the family’s origin in Calabria, in the south of Italy. (R. Chaim Vital is occasionally referred to as R. Chaim Calabrese.) As with both R. Yosef Karo and the Ari, R. Chaim Vital began his studies with traditional Talmud study in the yeshivot of Tzfat, notably under R. Moshe Alshekh, a prominent halachic authority (and Kabbalist) originally from Adrianople (today’s Edirne, Turkey) who had received official semicha (ordination) from R. Yaakov Beirav when the latter renewed it. Years later, in 1590, R. Alshekh would grant semicha to his pupil, R. Chaim Vital, in a direct line from R. Beirav.
In his early twenties, R. Chaim Vital became interested in Kabbala as well as other esoteric subjects, such as alchemy, which he later disavowed. Though he began by studying the Kabbala of R. Moshe Cordovero (Remak), he pointedly did not refer to Remak as his teacher, although the imprint of Remak’s work on R. Chaim Vital’s thought is discernible in places. Soon after the Ari arrived in Tzfat in 1570, R. Chaim Vital became his preeminent disciple, learning under him for about two years until the Ari’s untimely death in 1572. R. Chaim Vital saw this death as cementing the Ari’s trials as Mashiach ben Yosef, the forerunner of the ultimate messiah, Mashiach ben David, and hinted that his role was to take on the responsibility.
In the years following the death of the Ari, R. Chaim Vital attempted to control the Kabbalistic legacy of his master by becoming its authoritative conduit. In his mystical diary, Sefer ha-Cheyonot (The Book of Visions), R. Chaim Vital suggests that he was the Ari’s sole and preordained disciple, for which purpose the Ari had come to Tzfat. By 1575, he managed to obtain the signatures of twelve of his contemporaries on a shtar hitkashrut, a formal document stating that they would not disseminate the Ari’s Kabbala, and that they would only study it based on the version of R. Chaim Vital. In addition, they pledged not to extract or reveal any secrets which R. Chaim Vital chose to keep hidden, and even to refrain from publicizing teachings they had individually received from the Ari. R. Chaim Vital himself lived for a long period in Jerusalem, returning periodically to Tzfat, and eventually winding up in Damascus, Syria, where he died.
Transmitting the Ari
R. Chaim Vital wrote a sizeable number of works, some prior to his discipleship to the Ari and others in his own name, but, importantly, including the majority of extant works about the Ari’s Kabbala. These were disseminated in messy fashion, which R. Chaim Vital himself already attempted to organize within his lifetime. According to his son R. Shmuel Vital, later an important and heavy-handed editor of his father’s opus, R. Chaim Vital organized his works capturing the Ari’s Kabbala into a compendium called Etz Chaim (The Tree of Life), and another of his own works titled Etz ha-Daat (The Tree of Knowledge).
The original version (mahadura kama) edited by R. Chaim Vital was divided into eight sections, or “gates” (shearim). The first shaar in this version consisted of writings copied from the Ari’s own handwriting, which were later, in the disseminated version of Etz Chaim edited by R. Shmuel Vital (mahadura batra), broken up. R. Shmuel Vital scattered various segments of what had been part one throughout the work. They are, however, concentrated in the third section, which was newly split into two parts, titled Shaar Maamerei Rashbi and Shaar Maamerei Razal. The subsequent seven sections arranged by R. Chaim Vital are less severely altered in his son’s version. They include Sha'ar ha-Hakdamot (2), about creation; the aforementioned split section three; Shaar ha-Pesukim, commentary on Tanach (4); Shaar ha-Kavanot, on intention and meditation in prayer (5); Shaar ha-Mitzvot, on the purpose and meanings of the commandments (6), Shaar Ruacḥ ha-Kodesh, on mystical contemplation and unification (yichudim) and the tikkun (rectification) of sins (7); and finally Shaar ha-Gilgulim, on the transmigration (reincarnation) of the soul.
The manuscript of Etz Chaim produced by R. Chaim Vital was closely guarded by his son in Damascus, and was barely copied, let alone printed. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, however, R. Shmuel Vital’s edited version of Etz Chaim, also closely guarded, came to circulate more widely, and it is in this version that the Ari’s Kabbala came to be known. It was not printed until the later nineteenth century. In the intervening years, however, Kabbala in general and Lurianic Kabbala in particular proved to be an enormously potent means for Jews to grapple with changing historical circumstances, the need to breathe new meaning into familiar texts and rituals, and also the magical-mystical folk practices that emanated from the rarified world of the the Tzfat mystics. For all the secrecy and guarded manuscripts, the Kabbala of the Ari spread widely throughout the Jewish world, from Eastern Europe to Yemen (not without encountering resistance, in both of those places, as well as others).
Between Orality and Textuality, Manuscript and Print
The tension between orally-transmitted Torah and written Torah goes back in Jewish history to remote antiquity; the very rabbinic terminology used for a verse of scripture, mikra or kra (“that which is read”), emphasizes its written form, in contrast to its authoritative interpretation, which remained oral. This tension was brought to the fore by Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi’s project of writing down the Oral Law as the Mishna, in apparent (but only apparent) contravention of the prohibition on its writing, which, as Rambam would later explain in the introduction to his Commentary on the Mishna, was a result of the especially difficult tribulations the Jewish people encountered in late antiquity. Nevertheless, orality remained the primary mode of Jewish learning, teaching, and scholarship for centuries, well into the medieval period, and the process of textualization—of capturing that scholarship in writing—was gradual. It was, in fact, marked by the continued coexistence of both oral scholarship and written texts.
The situation with regards to the adoption of printed books made with mechanical, moveable type was somewhat of a contrast. It too was gradual, and manuscripts continued to be important in the centuries following print. They also, as historians of the book and print culture have established, profoundly influenced the form of printed materials. Nevertheless, the transition from handwritten codex to printed book was far more rapid a process than that of textualization. While many treasures of the Jewish library remained in manuscript until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and others even still remain so, the mainline tradition of Jewish learning relied upon printed texts, with modern rabbinic authorities debating the status of those figures whose writings had “fallen out” of the masora (chain of tradition) by not being printed, such as those of R. Menachem ha-Meiri.
In regards to both orality and manuscript culture, the Kabbala of the Ari, as mediated by R. Chaim Vital, was a notable and intentional throwback to earlier modes of teaching and textual transmission. This was not unusual for the esoteric traditions of Judaism, which were from the beginning deliberately passed down in master-to-disciple lineages, orally in person, and often to one person only. Even when they began to be written down, they tended towards revealing only partial information, or “chapter headings.” What was notable about R. Chaim Vital’s reliance on orality and manuscripts, however, was the scope of limitation of access that he managed to achieve and the way he held off printing of the Ari’s Kabbala in the full-blown age of print. In his mission to direct and control the dissemination of these intense secrets, R. Chaim Vital built upon deeply traditional modes of expression and managed to keep most of the writings preserving the Ari’s Kabbala in manuscript, only to be printed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often by academic researchers. Nevertheless, the revolution unleashed by the Ari’s unique interpretation of the Zohar and the Kabbalistic inheritance of the Middle Ages was unstoppable, and would go on, in popularized form, to rock the early modern Jewish world.
Reads and Resources
Notably, on Sefaria the writings of the Ari and of R. Chaim Vital are presented together, with many, though far from all, available.
R. Chaim Vital’s spiritual autobiography, Sefer Chezyonot, is translated into English by Morris M. Fairenstein in Jewish Mystical Autobiographies (Paulist Press, 1999).
"This tension was brought to the fore by Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi’s project of writing down the Oral Law as the Mishna, in apparent (but only apparent) contravention of the prohibition on its writing, which, as Rambam would later explain in the introduction to his Commentary on the Mishna, was a result of the especially difficult tribulations the Jewish people encountered in late antiquity."
The Rambam ז''ל did explain it this way, but that does not seem to be true, and it is not even certain that it was written down at all. Most likely it was, but the near-exclusive means of its dissemination was oral, and deliberately so. I highly recommend 'The Publication and Early Transmission of the Mishnah' by David Stern.