Isaac ben Solomon Luria

Jewish mystic and religious leader

• Born: 1534
• Birthplace: Jerusalem, Palestine, Ottoman Empire (now in Israel)
• Died: August 5, 1572
• Place of death: Safed, Syria (now Zefat, Israel)

Luria was the culminating figure in the Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah. His revision of key Kabbalist concepts and his theory of a dynamic creation altered by sin but capable of regeneration and final redemption had a profound influence on subsequent Jewish thought, including Hasidism, and on messianic movements in both the Jewish and the Christian worlds.

Early Life

Isaac ben Solomon Luria (I-zihk behn SAHL-uh-muhn LUHR-yah), also known as ha-Ari (acronym for Ashkenazic Rabbi Isaac), was born in Jerusalem. His father was an Ashkenazi who had come from Germany or Poland, and his mother was of Sephardic stock. At his father’s death, his mother took him to Egypt, where he grew up in the household of his wealthy uncle, a tax collector. Details of his life are sparse; the principal source is the Toledot ha-Ari (life of the Ari), an account written fifteen or twenty years after his death in which fact and legend are freely mingled.

Luria was highly precocious, and his uncle provided him with able tutors, including David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra and Bezalel Ashkenazi. He collaborated with the latter in producing legal commentaries and wrote a study of the Book of Concealment section of the Zohar, the central text of the Kabbalist tradition. In later life, he disdained to write, however, preferring personal teaching and communication with his disciples; his mature thought is known only through their accounts, particularly those of Ḥayyim Vital (1543-1620), who claimed to have recorded his master’s thoughts verbatim.

Luria married at the age of fifteen and later went into commerce, in which he was engaged to the end of his life. At the age of seventeen, he began an intensive study of the Kabbalah, focusing on the Zohar and on the works of his elder contemporary, Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-1570), the leading figure of the major Kabbalist school at Safed in Palestine. In early 1570, he took up residence in Safed with his family and studied briefly with Cordovero himself, who was said to have appointed him his spiritual successor.

Life’s Work

At Cordovero’s death, Luria became the head of a group known as the Cubs (his own nickname of Ari meant Holy Lion in Hebrew), who formed a core of devoted disciples about him. They lived as a community, with quarters for themselves and their families. Luria lectured to them on the Sabbath, after they had donned ritual white garments and marched processionally into the neighboring fields. He also worked with them on an individual basis, imparting the techniques of mystical meditation and elucidating the spiritual ancestry of each in accordance with the Kabbalist principle of transmigration.

The impact of Lurianic doctrine may be attributed not only to its intrinsic power as a revision of Kabbalist tradition but also to the condition of Jewry in the aftermath of the Spanish expulsion of 1492 and the revived anti-Semitism of Reformation Europe. For Jews seeking a divine meaning in these calamities and thrown back anew on the painful consciousness of their Galut, or exile, Luria’s thought had both explicative and consolatory appeal.

Traditional Kabbalism described the creation of the universe as a wholly positive event, emanating from God’s benevolence and unfolding in orderly stages. Luria, in contrast, described this process as involving an act of privation, a contraction or concentration (tzimtzum) of the Godhead into itself to create a space outside itself (the tehiru, or void) in which the universe could be formed.

The divine light of creation was released into the void, but some of the forms or vessels (sefirot) created to receive it were overwhelmed by its force. This “breaking of the vessels” (the shevirah) caused a catastrophic scattering of light. The intact vessels constituted a perfected but incomplete upper realm, while the broken ones (including the highest, Adam Kadmon, or Primal Man, which consisted not only of Adam but of the souls of all his progeny as well) produced a lower, fallen world, to which, however, many sparks of divine light still clung. The sin of Adam then produced further ruin, increasing the alienation of the fallen world from the Godhead.

Adam having failed, God turned to the people of Israel to accomplish the redemption (tikkun) of the fallen world and to liberate the divine sparks from their material prison. Each Jew could advance or retard this process by his or her ethical conduct; with each pious act, a spark was redeemed, but with each wicked or impious one, a spark of the sinner’s own soul was lost to chaos. The individual thus not only sought personal salvation by his or her acts but also participated in the process of universal redemption.

The most esoteric part of Luria’s doctrine concerned the divine motive for creating the world and its abortive realization. Luria suggested that there were elements of disunity within the Godhead itself, although the divine essence was seamless and could be conceptualized only as light. In the act of tzimtzum, God differentiated these elements (the reshimu), which cleaved to the “surface” of the tehiru in the manner of water clinging to a bucket. From this exteriorized residue, the vessels were to be composed, and this formed emptiness, penetrated by retained light from the Godhead. Thus, the creation of the universe was to accomplish the reintegration of the Godhead with itself. The world of evil resulted when the refractory vessels failed (or refused, since they were composed both of and by the reshimu) to contain the Godhead’s light; yet even that world was penetrated by divine goodness in the form of the sparks.

Luria’s explanation of the fallen world may be regarded as an abstract reconceptualization of the story of the rebel angels, filtered through Manichaean and Gnostic thought. His attempt, as with all theodicy, was to account for the presence of evil without imputing it directly to God. Despite its abstract nature, it presented a powerfully compelling picture of creation itself as the process of God’s own self-exile and redemption, and the tikkun as Israel’s opportunity to participate in the completion of his design for the universe. Israel’s own exile, and the tribulations heaped on it by the forces of evil, could thus be seen as a mirror of the divine travail. The more closely the final victory of tikkun approached, the more violently evil resisted. Thus, the expulsion of the Spanish Jews and the general persecution of Israel were indications not of the weakness of the Jews in the face of their enemies but of their gathering strength against all opposition to the divine will.

Luria’s brief ministry ended with his death in August, 1572, during an epidemic in Safed, but such was the force of his personality and doctrine that his teachings were rapidly propagated throughout the Jewish world, where they profoundly influenced both contemporary messianic movements and the theological, liturgical, and literary traditions of Judaism.

The Safed Kabbalists believed that the moment of redemption was imminent. Luria may have conceived of himself as the Messiah ben-Joseph, the first of the two messiahs prophesied in Jewish tradition, whose fate was to be slain in the war of Gog and Magog; he was apparently so regarded by his admirers, and his sudden death did nothing to dispel the notion. Messianic expectation, nourished by Lurianic doctrine, flourished widely in the Jewish world for the next hundred years, culminating in an attempted mass migration to Palestine in 1665-1666 under Sabbatai Zevi. Christian chiliasts, who believed that the Jews’ return to Palestine was the prelude to the Second Coming of Jesus, were deeply stirred by this ferment, and the Lurianist Menasseh ben Israel paid a state visit to England at the behest of Oliver Cromwell.

Significance

Isaac ben Solomon Luria was the culminating figure in the Kabbalist movement, the major tradition of Jewish mysticism and speculative theology in the late medieval and early modern world. Menasseh ben Israel declared that “the wisdom of Rabbi Isaac Luria rises above the highest mountains,” and a modern scholar, Joseph Dan, has called the concept of tikkun “the most powerful idea ever presented in Jewish thought.” After 1620, almost all works of ethics in Hebrew used Lurianic symbolism, and, as Dan further comments, “Lurianism became a national theology for Judaism for several generations.”

Although Luria’s influence reached its apogee in the seventeenth century, it remained important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and passed directly into Hasidism. Luria’s emphasis on the world-altering significance of each believer’s acts revitalized Jewish ethics and continued to animate it long after his arcane theology had become, for most, a historical curiosity. The critic Harold Bloom has tried to revive Lurianic Kabbalism as a device of literary scholarship, and a current periodical of Jewish American thought calls itself Tikkun. Luria thus remains one of the most seminal figures in the past five hundred years of Judaism.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. A modern reinterpretation of Luria’s Kabbalism as a “psychology of belatedness” that anticipates Freudian doctrine, a philosophy of suffering that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche, and a system of signs with affinities to Charles Sanders Peirce. Bloom also proposes Luria’s thought as a paradigm for literary interpretation.

Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Major study of Lurianic Kabbalah emphasizes the importance of seeing it as a material, social, lived tradition, rather than a set of detached ideas. Discusses the relationship of Luria to his disciples and the influence of that relationship on his thought. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Fine, Lawrence. Safed Spirituality: Rules of Mystical Piety, the Beginning of Wisdom. Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1984. Focuses on the customs and rituals practiced by Luria and his disciples.

Klein, Eliahu, and Isaac ben Solomon Luria. Kabbalah of Creation: Isaac Luria’s Earlier Mysticism. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 2000. Radical new poetic translation of Luria’s early Kabbalah, as well as commentary on its meaning and its historical and bibliographic importance. Includes illustrations, glossary, bibliographies, and appendices.

Lenowitz, Harris. The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Reads Luria as an apocalyptic messiah, “adhering to a mystic worldview that seeks the repair of the world in a cosmic sense.” Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and indexes.

Schechter, Solomon. “Safed in the Sixteenth Century: A City of Legists and Mystics.” In Studies in Judaism. 1896. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. A classic essay, still valuable, on the Kabbalists of Safed and especially Luria.

Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. 3d ed. Reprint. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Scholem was the foremost twentieth century scholar of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. His work has been so dominant that it has spawned a major literature of reinterpretation and revision, best summarized in Joseph Dan’s Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Dimension of Jewish History (1987). Luria’s system is treated in the eighth chapter of Scholem’s book, which was first published in 1941. Includes an analysis of the textual issues in reconstructing the system from the writings of the disciples, with special emphasis on Joseph ben Tabul.

Scholem, Gershom. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York: Schocken, 1965. Another of Scholem’s major works, indispensable for understanding the Kabbalist tradition and containing a chapter on Luria. See also his book-length essay, “Kabbalah,” in the Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1971).