The Ari - R. Itzchak Luria Ashkenazi
🧿 The enigmatic R. Yitzchak ben Shlomo Luria Ashkenazi, better known as the Ari, was a creative master of Kabbala who effected profound changes on the development of Jewish esotericism.
Audio (Paid Feature)
Find the audio version of today’s newsletter here.
In this issue:
The name by which he is known—the Ari (האר”י), “the Lion,” sometimes Arizal, with “of blessed memory” added—declares the regal proportions of his influence upon so much of Jewish history to come. Presumably an acronym of “ha-Eloki, Rabbi Yitzchak” (the divine Rabbi Yitzchak), this name was in use in the years following his death, although his contemporaries generally refer to him by a different acronym, of Rabbi Yitzchak Ashkenazi Luria (הריא״ש or הריא״ל). Though he spent few years of his short life in Tzfat (Safed), he quickly ingrained himself in the mysticism flowing through the city and is strongly identified with it, as well as his circles of teachers and disciples there.
A Fractured Life?
The Kabbala of R. Yitzchak ben Shlomo Luria Ashkenazi (1534–1572) depicts, in its conceptualization of the Sefirot and their effects on the higher and lower worlds, a dramatic “familial” structure of intersecting relationships. It has been suggested that this derives from personal crisis, possibly the early loss of his father, which also impelled the family’s move away from Jerusalem. But it is striking that the dislocations of the advent of modernity strike his life obliquely, if profoundly. That is, while forces of dissolution that characterize the transition from the medieval Jewish world to the modern one make deep marks upon the arc of the Ari’s life, he was not himself among the uprooted, exiled, and traumatized by history.
For instance, the Ari himself could only have come into being with the meeting of disparate Jewish communities in Ottoman Syria, to which the Land of Israel belonged. His father, R. Shlomo Ashkenazi, was so called because he was an Ashkenazi Jew in a largely Mizrachi world, a notable characteristic (rarely do people come to be labeled as Ashkenazi while they are still in Ashkenazi lands). He was actually a member of the scholarly Luria family, giving the Ari his compound surname. The Ari’s mother, meanwhile, was Sefardi, a member of the established Frances family, now of Jerusalem. The union of his parents, while not impossible in the world preceding the Iberian expulsions, was much more likely post-expulsion.
Born in Jerusalem, the Ari was brought sometime in his childhood—the evidence is inconclusive as to precisely when—to the home of his wealthy uncle, Mordechai Frances, in Cairo, following the death of his father. He therefore grew up in a mostly Sefardi milieu in Jerusalem and Egypt. In Egypt, the Ari studied under the great halachic authorities Radbaz (R. David Ibn Abi Zimra) and later R. Betzalel Ashkenazi, author of the Shita Mekubetzet (an extremely important anthological commentary on selected tractates of the Talmud), who was, like the Ari, the Jerusalem-born son of an Ashkenazi immigrant. However, after marrying his cousin, the daughter of Mordechai Frances, the Ari retired, reportedly for seven years, to an island of the Nile owned by his uncle and new father-in-law. There, in isolation, he engaged in mystical meditation and intensive study of the Zohar, appearing to his family only on Shabbatot. Among the few works we have written by the Ari himself are commentaries on the Zohar dating from this period. Not present in them, however, are elements of the later system of Kabbala which he would so creatively develop, and which would come to be known to scholars by his name, as Lurianic Kabbala.
Some six months or so before the death of the man he called his teacher, R. Moshe Cordovero (Remak), in the latter half of 1570, the Ari settled in Tzfat, by then famed as a city of Kabbalists and a center of esoteric innovation. For this brief period, he studied directly under Remak, although the influence of Remak on the Ari went beyond the period of time in which they interacted, derived from long hours of study of Remak’s works. Just two years later, in 1572, the Ari was felled by plague. But in those two years, history changed.
The Construction of a Legend
The story of the dissemination of the Ari’s Kabbala is unusually complex and will be the subject of next week’s newsletter, but several factors leading to this rich legacy were created by the Ari himself during his two or so years in Tzfat. For one, he instructed his disciples orally, never writing down his own teachings and restricting his disciples from sharing any of the secrets he taught them in any form. The Ari largely refrained from public teaching of any kind, though he occasionally appeared in a public capacity at the Ashkenazi synagogue of Tzfat—this, despite his preference for Sefardi liturgy. Later, his additions of kavanot—theurgic intentions added to prayer and rituals—would be adopted in Europe by Kabbalists and then Chasidim as the “Sefardi” rite, which remains distinct, and largely used by Ashkenazim, today, in distinction to the nusach (version) of the prayers used by Sefardi and Mizrachi Jews.
Through his comportment and secrecy, the Ari created around himself an aura of especial holiness and engendered the idea that he was visited by the prophet Eliyahu (Elijah), and perhaps even to be associated with Mashiach ben Yosef (the Messiah, son of Joseph), the forerunner of Mashiach ben David, the ultimate messiah, who was tasked with laying the groundwork for redemption. The Ari was known to walk the city streets of Tzfat, pointing out the lost burial sites of sages he had identified by an otherworldly intuition. A hint of the richness of the Kabbalistic world he inhabited, and imparted to the dozens of disciples that surrounded him in his academy, is captured in the three zemirot (hymns) he composed for each of the three meals of Shabbat; here is the opening intention for the song for seuda shlishsit, the third meal, written in an evocative Zoharic Aramaic:
אַתְקינוּ סְעוּדְתָא
דּמְהֵימְנוּתָא שְׁלִימְתָא
חָדְוְתָא דְּמַלְכָּא קַדִּישָׁא.אַתְקינוּ סְעוּדְתָא דְּמַלְכָּא
דָּא הִיא סְעוּדְתָא
דִּזְעֵיר אַנְפִּין.וְעַתִּיקָא קַדִּישָׁא
וחֲקַל תַּפּוּחִין קַדִּישִׁין
אָתַיִן לְסִעָדָה בַהֲדֵהּ.They established a feast,
In perfect faith,
The rejoicing of the holy King.They established the feast of the King,
Which is the feast
Of Zeir Anpin [the “countenance” of the lower Sefirot],And of the Ancient Holy One.
An orchard of holy apples
Is coming to dine with us.
Lurianic Kabbala: A (Very) Brief Overview
There is a contradictory tendency in the thought of the Ari, in that he was notably conservative in his approach to ritual, giving great importance to established customs, and yet was boldly innovative in reading into the universe of the Zohar a new kind of Divine drama. The Ari’s thought is suffused with many of the same themes that captivated his predecessors, especially the idea of the exile of the Shechina—the feminine Divine aspect that represents G-d’s presence on earth, and is associated with the Jewish people—and the sense that the upheavals of the age anticipated the messianic period.
Upon these bases, the Ari greatly developed the (already-extant) concept of Tzimtzum, or Divine contraction, a process by which Ein Sof, the ungraspable apex of the Divine, creates space to emanate the lower worlds and (eventually) allow for earthly existence. During the process of creation, supernal light was channeled into “vessels,” which, being unable to contain the light, shattered. This shattering caused sparks of Divinity to become trapped in the worlds of creation. The shards of the vessels themselves, the Klipot (“Rinds”), became carriers of the forces of evil, the Sitra Achra (“Other Side”). In this way the Ari offered an explanation for the presence of suffering throughout the universe, a part of his theodicy (explanation of evil).
To this, the Ari added a rich spiritual mythos, refiguring the Sefirot by grouping them into Partzufim (“Countenances”), each associated with members of a Divine “family.” The Partzufim were part of a Divine recalibration and repair necessitated by the shattering of the vessels (Shevirat ha-Keilim). Their particular manifestation is extremely complex and there are multiple names and configurations, but generally speaking, the highest three Sefirot are constituted by Arich Anpin (“the Long Face”), Abba (“Father”), and Ima (“Mother”). the six intermediate Sefirot make up Zeir Anpin (“the Small Face”), and the lowest Sefira (Malchut/Shechina) is associated with Nukva (“Female”). The task of human beings then becomes completing this Divine healing and rectification by means of Tikkun, a kind of spiritual corrective measure.
Reads and Resources
A wonderful book in English devoted to the life and thought of the Ari, with emphasis on the effects of his life experiences upon him, is Lawrence Fine’s Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford University Press, 2003).
Thank you so much-fascinating
(Tzfat is one of my most beloved cities, so one can also see it, with their inner eye, when reading-even though nowadays, the municipality is probably busy with something else)