Safed Renaissance

About Safed Renaissance

The Safed Renaissance is the modern scholarly designation for the extraordinary concentration of kabbalistic, halakhic, ethical, and liturgical creativity that flourished in the small upper Galilean town of Safed during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the most intense burst of mystical productivity in Jewish history and the moment at which post-expulsion Sephardic Judaism reorganized itself around new centers of spiritual authority. The Safed community was small in absolute numbers, perhaps a few hundred families at its peak, but it produced in the space of two generations a body of work that has shaped Jewish religious life from the sixteenth century to the present day, including the codification of Jewish law in Joseph Karo's Shulchan Arukh, the great encyclopedic synthesis of medieval Kabbalah in Moses Cordovero's Pardes Rimonim, the radically new system of Lurianic Kabbalah developed by Isaac Luria and recorded by Hayyim Vital, and the liturgical innovations including the Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service that have become standard in synagogues throughout the Jewish world.

The historical setting matters. The Spanish expulsion of 1492 had scattered the Sephardic communities of the Iberian peninsula throughout the Mediterranean world, and many of the dispersed Jews carried with them the rich kabbalistic learning that had been developed in Spain over the previous three centuries. The Ottoman Empire under Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent provided a relatively hospitable refuge, and the dispersed Sephardim established new communities in Constantinople, Salonica, Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, and the towns of the holy land. Safed in the upper Galilee was an unusual choice. The town had only a small Jewish population in the early sixteenth century, was located in a peripheral and economically marginal region of the Ottoman Empire, and had no obvious advantages as a center of learning. But Safed had two things working in its favor: a thriving local textile industry that could provide a livelihood for refugee scholars, and a cluster of associations with the legendary Galilean sages of the second century, particularly Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the supposed author of the Zohar, whose tomb at nearby Meron became the focus of pilgrimage and mystical celebration. The combination of economic opportunity and sacred geography drew kabbalistic refugees to Safed in increasing numbers during the early sixteenth century, and by the 1530s a critical mass of teachers and students had gathered to form the community that would soon transform Jewish religious life.

The first generation of Safed kabbalists was led by Joseph Karo (1488-1575), born in Toledo, raised in exile in Constantinople and Salonika, and arrived in Safed around 1536. Karo was the greatest halakhic authority of his generation, the author of the Beit Yosef commentary on the Tur and of the Shulchan Arukh, the code of Jewish law that has remained standard ever since. He was also a kabbalist with intense personal mystical experiences, recorded in his diary the Maggid Mesharim, in which a heavenly voice that he identified with the Mishnah personified spoke to him during his nightly study and dictated kabbalistic teachings, ethical exhortations, and predictions about his own life and the fate of his community. Karo's combination of supreme halakhic authority with intense personal mysticism gave the Safed community its distinctive character, in which legal and mystical concerns were inseparable.

Karo's close associate Solomon Alkabetz (c. 1500-c. 1576), born in Salonika and arrived in Safed at the same time, was the founder of the community's distinctive ritual practice. Alkabetz composed the hymn Lekha Dodi, Come My Beloved, which became the central liturgical poem of the Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service and which is now sung in virtually every synagogue in the world. He also led his colleagues in the practice of going out to the fields on Friday afternoons to welcome the Sabbath bride, a kabbalistic ritual that dramatized the cosmic union of the divine masculine and feminine on the eve of the day of rest. Alkabetz was the brother-in-law of Moses Cordovero and the uncle of Cordovero's wife, and the personal connections among the Safed kabbalists gave the community a tightly knit family-like structure.

Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-1570) was the great systematizer of medieval Kabbalah and the central intellectual figure of the first Safed generation. Born in Safed itself or in nearby Tzfat to a family of Spanish exiles, Cordovero studied with Joseph Karo and Solomon Alkabetz, and by his early twenties he had begun work on the Pardes Rimonim, the Pomegranate Orchard, his great encyclopedic synthesis of all earlier kabbalistic thought. Completed in 1548 when Cordovero was only twenty-six, the Pardes is a vast and rigorously organized treatise that maps every earlier kabbalistic system onto a single coherent framework, treating the doctrine of the sefirot, the names of God, the structure of prayer, the nature of evil, and dozens of other topics with encyclopedic thoroughness. Cordovero followed the Pardes with the even larger Or Yaqar, the Precious Light, a verse-by-verse commentary on the entire Zohar that runs to many thousands of pages and that remains among the most important works of Zoharic exegesis. He also wrote the Tomer Devorah, the Palm Tree of Deborah, a short ethical handbook that taught the practice of imitating the divine attributes of mercy as embodied in the upper sefirot, a work that became among the most widely read mussar classics in the modern Jewish tradition. Cordovero died in 1570 at the age of forty-eight, just as his great work was being completed, and his death cleared the stage for the second great phase of the Safed Renaissance.

The second phase began with the arrival of Isaac Luria (1534-1572) in Safed in 1569 or 1570. Luria, called ha-Ari, the Lion, was born in Jerusalem, raised in Egypt, and had spent years in seclusion on an island in the Nile studying kabbalistic texts and developing his own system. He arrived in Safed already possessed of a reputation as a mystical visionary, and within a few months he had gathered a circle of disciples around him, with Hayyim Vital (1542-1620) as his principal student. Luria taught his system orally, refusing to write it down himself, and his teaching style was idiosyncratic and intensely personal, with detailed instructions tailored to the spiritual condition of each individual student. He led his disciples on Friday afternoon walks through the fields outside Safed, identifying particular trees and stones with the resting places of biblical and rabbinic figures whose souls were undergoing tikkun, repair, through their reincarnation in his time. He performed dramatic acts of mystical theurgy in the synagogue and the marketplace. He developed the radically new doctrine of tzimtzum, the contraction of the divine to make space for creation, of shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels that contained the original divine light, and of tikkun olam, the cosmic restoration that human religious practice was meant to accomplish. Then in 1572, only two years after his arrival, he died suddenly during an epidemic, leaving his system to be transmitted, organized, and elaborated by Hayyim Vital and the other disciples.

The Safed community continued for another generation after Luria's death but never recovered the intensity of its golden moment. Hayyim Vital labored for the rest of his life to organize and write down what he had learned from Luria, producing the Etz Chaim and the other works that constitute the Lurianic corpus, but he was secretive about his manuscripts and many of them did not become widely available until decades or centuries later. By the early seventeenth century the center of kabbalistic creativity had shifted to other communities, particularly to the Italian Jewish world that absorbed and disseminated the Lurianic teachings, and Safed itself entered a long decline. But the work accomplished in Safed during those few decades had permanently transformed the kabbalistic tradition and through it the entire shape of post-medieval Judaism.

Teachings

The teachings of the Safed Renaissance fall into two distinct phases corresponding to the careers of its two greatest masters, Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria. Cordoveran Kabbalah, which dominated the first phase from roughly 1530 to 1570, was a systematic synthesis of medieval Kabbalah that worked within the framework of the ten sefirot inherited from the Spanish tradition and elaborated it with unprecedented thoroughness. Lurianic Kabbalah, which dominated the second phase from 1570 onward, was a radically new system that introduced the doctrines of tzimtzum, shevirat ha-kelim, and tikkun olam, and that reorganized the entire kabbalistic worldview around the cosmic drama of divine contraction, fragmentation, and restoration.

The central teaching of Cordoveran Kabbalah is that the entire previous history of the tradition can be integrated into a single coherent framework organized around the doctrine of the ten sefirot. Cordovero in the Pardes Rimonim treats the sefirot not as static attributes but as dynamic processes within the godhead, each one having its own characteristic activity, its own relations to the others, and its own specific role in the unfolding of divine self-manifestation. He develops the doctrine of behinot, aspects, according to which each sefirah contains within itself ten further sub-sefirot, producing a fractal structure in which the whole pattern recurs at every level. He treats the relationship between the sefirot and the Ein Sof as a question that admits of multiple legitimate answers, and he canvasses the views of his predecessors before offering his own moderate position. The result is the most systematic and philosophically rigorous treatment of medieval Kabbalah ever produced.

A second teaching of Cordoveran Kabbalah, developed especially in the Tomer Devorah, is the doctrine of imitation of God's middot, the divine attributes embodied in the upper sefirot. The kabbalist is to study each sefirah in turn, understand its characteristic mode of action, and then practice that mode in his own life. From keter, the crown, he learns the patience that bears with all transgressions. From chokhmah, wisdom, he learns the providence that watches over all creatures. From binah, understanding, he learns the repentance that returns to its source. The Tomer Devorah turned the speculative doctrine of the sefirot into a practical ethical program, and the book became among the most widely read mussar classics in the modern Jewish tradition.

The central teaching of Lurianic Kabbalah is the doctrine of tzimtzum, the divine self-contraction. Luria taught that before the creation of the world the infinite Ein Sof filled all reality, leaving no room for anything other than itself. In order to make space for creation, the Ein Sof had to contract itself, withdrawing its presence from a central region and leaving a void within which finite reality could come into being. Into this void the Ein Sof then projected a thin ray of light, the kav, which initiated the process of creation. The doctrine of tzimtzum is among the most original ideas in the history of Jewish theology and has generated centuries of debate about whether the contraction is to be understood literally or figuratively, and about its theological and philosophical implications.

A second teaching of Lurianic Kabbalah is the doctrine of shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels. After the initial tzimtzum, the divine light that entered the void was meant to be contained by ten vessels corresponding to the ten sefirot, but the lower seven vessels could not bear the intensity of the light and shattered, scattering shards of light throughout the universe. The shattered vessels and their captive sparks of divine light constitute the unredeemed condition of reality, and the cosmic task of human religious practice is to gather up the scattered sparks and restore them to their source.

A third teaching is the doctrine of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Every commandment performed with kabbalistic intention contributes to the restoration of the broken vessels and the gathering of the scattered sparks. The kabbalist at prayer, the householder eating his Shabbat meal, the parent raising children, the merchant honest in his dealings, all participate in the cosmic process of tikkun. This doctrine gave the most ordinary acts of Jewish life a cosmic significance and transformed religious practice from a personal discipline into a contribution to the redemption of the world.

A fourth teaching is the doctrine of the partzufim, the divine countenances. Where Cordoveran Kabbalah treated the sefirot as relatively static attributes, Lurianic Kabbalah reorganized them into five dynamic configurations called partzufim: Atika Kadisha, the holy ancient one, identified with keter; Abba, the father, identified with chokhmah; Imma, the mother, identified with binah; Zeir Anpin, the impatient or short-faced one, identified with the six middle sefirot; and Nukva, the female, identified with malkhut. The relations among the partzufim are described in highly anthropomorphic and even erotic terms, and the cosmic drama of creation, fall, and restoration is enacted as the changing configurations of these divine personae.

A fifth teaching, common to both Cordoveran and Lurianic Kabbalah, is the doctrine of gilgul neshamot, the transmigration of souls. The Safed kabbalists taught that human souls return to earthly life multiple times, taking different bodies and accomplishing different tasks in each incarnation, until they have completed the work necessary for their personal tikkun. Hayyim Vital's Sefer ha-Gilgulim, the Book of Reincarnations, is the most detailed treatment of this doctrine and identifies the past lives of many of his contemporaries.

Practices

The practical disciplines of the Safed Renaissance were rigorous and demanding, organized around an intense daily schedule of prayer, study, ethical observance, and mystical practice. The community as a whole functioned almost as a monastery, with members rising before dawn, immersing in the ritual bath, gathering for prayer at sunrise, and devoting the rest of the day to study, work, and mystical practice. The Safed kabbalists were unusually disciplined even by the standards of intensive Jewish observance, and their daily routines have been documented in detail by Lawrence Fine and other modern scholars.

The core practice was kabbalistic prayer with kavvanot, meditative intentions. The Safed kabbalists treated each blessing of the daily liturgy as having a specific sefirotic referent, and they directed their attention to the appropriate sefirah at the appropriate moment. The Lurianic system elaborated this practice into the most detailed prayer technique in the history of Judaism, with hundreds of specific intentions for the morning Shacharit alone. Hayyim Vital's Sha'ar ha-Kavvanot, the Gate of Intentions, records these intentions in painstaking detail, and the practice spread from Safed to Lurianic circles throughout the Jewish world. The performance of full Lurianic kavvanot during prayer was understood to have direct effects on the upper worlds and to contribute to the cosmic process of tikkun.

A second practice was tikkun hatzot, the midnight rite, in which the kabbalist would rise at midnight to mourn the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the shekhinah. The practice involved sitting on the ground in mourning posture, reciting Psalms and laments, and weeping for the divine sorrow at the broken state of the world. Tikkun hatzot was developed by the Safed kabbalists and became a standard discipline in subsequent kabbalistic and Hasidic circles.

A third practice was the ethical discipline of imitating the divine attributes. Cordovero's Tomer Devorah taught a daily program of contemplating and embodying the qualities of the upper sefirot, and the Safed community as a whole was known for the unusual moral seriousness with which its members approached questions of speech, anger, jealousy, and humility. The kabbalists treated ethical perfection as inseparable from mystical attainment, and they regarded any failure of character as a hindrance to spiritual progress.

A fourth practice was the welcoming of the Sabbath bride on Friday afternoons. The Safed community would walk out into the fields outside the town as the sun began to set on Friday, dressed in their Sabbath garments, and would greet the arriving Sabbath as a bride coming to meet her divine spouse. The practice was developed by Solomon Alkabetz and his colleagues and was accompanied by the singing of Alkabetz's hymn Lekha Dodi, which became the central liturgical poem of the Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service. The practice spread from Safed to virtually every Jewish community in the world and remains standard synagogue practice today.

A fifth practice was the pilgrimage to the tombs of the rabbinic sages, particularly the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai at Meron. The Safed kabbalists would visit these tombs to pray, to seek the intercession of the departed sages, and to study the Zohar in proximity to the supposed grave of its supposed author. The pilgrimage to Meron on the holiday of Lag ba-Omer became a major mystical celebration during the Safed period and stays among the largest annual gatherings in the Jewish calendar today.

A sixth practice, characteristic of the Lurianic phase, was the performance of yichudim, meditative unifications based on the manipulation of divine names. The yichud was a private mystical exercise in which the kabbalist would focus his attention on a particular combination of letters of the divine name, holding the combination in mind while reciting prayers or studying texts, in order to effect a specific tikkun in the upper worlds. Hayyim Vital's Sha'ar ha-Yichudim records dozens of these meditations.

Initiation

The Safed Renaissance had no formal initiatory ritual. Entry into the community followed the master-disciple model of all Jewish learning, intensified by the moral and spiritual seriousness of the Safed kabbalists and reinforced by the conviction that the deeper teachings could be transmitted only orally and only to a worthy student. The pathway began with mastery of the standard rabbinic curriculum and continued through systematic study of the kabbalistic literature under the guidance of a recognized teacher.

The Cordoveran circle initiated students through a structured program of study that began with the basic doctrine of the sefirot and progressed through the more advanced topics of the Pardes Rimonim. Cordovero himself was an unusually patient and systematic teacher, and his disciples received a thorough grounding in the entire previous history of medieval Kabbalah before being introduced to the more difficult Zoharic and Lurianic materials. Cordovero's writings preserve the form of his teaching and have served as the standard introductory texts for kabbalistic study ever since.

The Lurianic circle had a different and more intense initiatory pattern. Isaac Luria personally selected his disciples, accepted only those whom he judged spiritually qualified, and tailored his teaching to the individual condition of each student. He performed acts of soul reading, identifying the past incarnations and present spiritual condition of each disciple and assigning him specific tikkunim, repairs, suited to his particular needs. The relationship between Luria and his disciples was unusually intimate and demanding, with the master serving simultaneously as teacher, spiritual director, prophet, and surrogate father. Lawrence Fine in Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos has documented this relationship in detail and shown how it became the prototype for later kabbalistic and Hasidic master-disciple bonds.

The acceptance of new disciples into the Lurianic circle was governed by a kind of informal but highly selective vetting. Luria would observe a prospective student for some time, assess his moral character and his spiritual capacity, and then either invite him into the circle or quietly refuse him. The disciples who were accepted were required to follow specific personal practices, including immersion in the ritual bath multiple times daily, the recitation of particular prayers at particular hours, the performance of specific tikkunim for the repair of their souls, and the maintenance of strict ethical conduct in all their dealings. Failures of practice or character were grounds for expulsion from the circle.

After Luria's death the initiatory function passed to Hayyim Vital and the other senior disciples, who continued to gather circles of students around them and to transmit the Lurianic teachings to a new generation. Vital was famously secretive about his manuscripts and refused to share them with most of his contemporaries, demanding personal oaths of confidentiality from those few he allowed to read them, and the Lurianic literature did not become widely available until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Vital's grandsons and great-grandsons released the manuscripts to the broader kabbalistic world.

Notable Members

The Safed Renaissance produced an unusually large number of major figures within a small geographic and temporal space. Joseph Karo (1488-1575) was the senior figure of the first generation, born in Toledo and raised in exile in Constantinople and Salonika before arriving in Safed around 1536. He was the greatest halakhic authority of his generation, the author of the Beit Yosef and the Shulchan Arukh, and an intense personal mystic whose diary the Maggid Mesharim records his nightly conversations with a heavenly voice that he identified with the Mishnah personified.

Solomon Alkabetz (c. 1500-c. 1576) was Karo's close associate and the founder of the community's distinctive ritual practice. He composed the hymn Lekha Dodi, led the Friday afternoon walks to welcome the Sabbath bride, and wrote several kabbalistic works including the Brit ha-Levi, an extended commentary on the Passover Haggadah. He was the brother-in-law and teacher of Moses Cordovero.

Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-1570), called Ramak, was the great systematizer of medieval Kabbalah and the central intellectual figure of the first Safed generation. He composed the Pardes Rimonim, the Or Yaqar, the Tomer Devorah, the Elimah Rabbati, and several other works that together constitute the most comprehensive treatment of medieval Kabbalah ever produced. He died at the age of forty-eight, just before Luria's arrival in Safed.

Moses Alsheikh (c. 1508-c. 1593) was a senior rabbi and biblical commentator of the Safed community whose Torot Moshe became among the most widely read homiletical commentaries in the post-Safed period. He served as one of Joseph Karo's principal halakhic colleagues.

Isaac Luria (1534-1572), called ha-Ari, the Lion, was the great mystical visionary of the second Safed generation. Born in Jerusalem and raised in Egypt, he arrived in Safed in 1569 or 1570 and within two years had developed and transmitted the radically new system of Lurianic Kabbalah before dying in an epidemic. He wrote almost nothing himself, but his oral teachings were recorded by his disciples, especially Hayyim Vital.

Hayyim Vital (1542-1620) was Luria's principal disciple and the recorder of his teachings. After Luria's death he labored for the rest of his life to organize and write down what he had learned, producing the Etz Chaim, the Sha'ar ha-Kavvanot, the Sha'ar ha-Gilgulim, and many other works that together constitute the Lurianic corpus. He was secretive about his manuscripts and they did not become widely available until generations later.

Israel Sarug was a kabbalist active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century who claimed to have studied with Luria himself, though modern scholars including Yosef Avivi have questioned the claim. He carried his version of the Lurianic teachings to Italy and Europe in the 1590s and early 1600s and became one of the principal channels through which Lurianic Kabbalah reached the European Jewish world.

Other major figures of the Safed period include Eliezer Azikri (1533-1600), author of the Sefer Charedim and of the famous mystical poem Yedid Nefesh; Elijah de Vidas (c. 1518-c. 1592), author of Reshit Chochmah, one of the great kabbalistic ethical handbooks; and Joseph ibn Tabul, an early disciple of Luria whose oral transmission of the Lurianic teachings sometimes differed from Vital's.

Symbols

The defining symbolic system of the Safed Renaissance is the doctrine of the ten sefirot in their Cordoveran and Lurianic forms. Cordovero's Pardes Rimonim treats each sefirah with encyclopedic thoroughness, mapping its biblical names, its bodily correlates, its relations to the others, and its specific role in the unfolding of divine self-manifestation. Lurianic Kabbalah reorganized the sefirot into the five partzufim and developed an even more elaborate symbolic apparatus around them.

A second symbolic cluster centers on the figure of the shekhinah, the feminine divine presence identified with the sefirah malkhut and with the partzuf of Nukva in the Lurianic system. The Safed kabbalists developed elaborate symbolic readings of the shekhinah as the bride of tiferet or Zeir Anpin, the moon receiving light from the sun, the garden in which the divine spouse walks, the suffering exiled aspect of God who mourns the destruction of the Temple. The Friday night ritual of welcoming the Sabbath bride dramatized this symbolism in a public liturgical form.

A third symbol is the doctrine of the divine sparks, the nitzotzot kedoshim, scattered throughout the created world after the breaking of the vessels in the Lurianic cosmogony. Each spark is a captive fragment of divine light awaiting its release through the action of human religious practice, and the cosmic task of the kabbalist is to identify these sparks, raise them up, and restore them to their source. The image of the scattered sparks became among the most powerful symbols in the entire Lurianic system and survives in modified form in modern usage of the phrase tikkun olam.

A fourth symbol is the partzuf, the divine countenance, which Lurianic Kabbalah introduced as the basic unit of cosmic structure. The five partzufim, Atika Kadisha, Abba, Imma, Zeir Anpin, and Nukva, are described in highly anthropomorphic terms with hair, beards, eyes, mouths, hands, and other bodily features, and the relations among them are presented as cosmic dramas of love, conflict, and reconciliation. The partzuf imagery gave Lurianic Kabbalah its distinctive mythic depth.

A fifth symbol is the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai at Meron, the legendary author of the Zohar, which the Safed community treated as a sacred site and a focus of pilgrimage and prayer. The annual celebration at Meron on Lag ba-Omer, with its bonfires, songs, and mystical festivities, became a major event in the Safed religious calendar and stays among the largest annual gatherings in the Jewish world today.

Influence

The downstream influence of the Safed Renaissance is the most extensive of any kabbalistic school in history. Within a generation of Luria's death in 1572 his teachings had spread throughout the Jewish world, reaching Italy through Israel Sarug and Menachem Azariah da Fano, reaching the Ottoman East through Hayyim Vital's own travels and through manuscripts copied by his disciples, and reaching Eastern Europe through the slow penetration of Lurianic ideas into Polish and Lithuanian rabbinic circles. By the early seventeenth century Lurianic Kabbalah had become the dominant framework for all serious kabbalistic study, and Cordoveran Kabbalah had been displaced as the leading intellectual current though it remained important as a propaedeutic.

The Sabbatean movement of 1665-1666 was the first great popular consequence of Lurianic Kabbalah. Nathan of Gaza's theological architecture for the messianic claims of Shabbetai Tzvi was built explicitly on Lurianic foundations, and the rapid spread of Sabbateanism throughout the Jewish world was made possible by the prior diffusion of Lurianic teachings. After the Sabbatean catastrophe the Lurianic system survived in modified form, and it continued to provide the theological framework for Jewish messianic and mystical speculation throughout the eighteenth century.

The Hasidic movement that began in the 1740s with the Baal Shem Tov was the second great popular consequence of Lurianic Kabbalah. The Baal Shem Tov and his successors took the Lurianic doctrine of the divine sparks scattered throughout creation and used it to give a cosmic significance to the most ordinary acts of daily life. The Hasidic emphasis on devekut, joyful prayer, and the elevation of stray thoughts during davening, are all rooted in Lurianic doctrine, and the Hasidic master-disciple relationship is modeled on the Lurianic prototype. The Habad school of Hasidism in particular developed Lurianic Kabbalah into a sophisticated philosophical system that remains the framework of Habad teaching to the present day.

The Mitnagdic opposition to Hasidism, led by the Vilna Gaon and his disciples in late eighteenth century Lithuania, also took its theological framework from Lurianic Kabbalah, though it interpreted the Lurianic system in a more intellectualist and ascetic direction. The Volozhin yeshiva founded by the Vilna Gaon's disciple Hayyim of Volozhin became the central institution of Mitnagdic learning and integrated Lurianic doctrine into its standard curriculum.

In the twentieth century the Lurianic system has provided the theological framework for several major modern Jewish thinkers, including Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Mandate Palestine, whose vision of cosmic redemption draws heavily on Lurianic categories. The American Reform Jewish slogan tikkun olam, the repair of the world, is a popularization of the Lurianic doctrine, though the original kabbalistic meaning of the phrase has been largely lost in modern usage.

The academic study of Kabbalah, founded by Gershom Scholem in the early twentieth century and continued by Moshe Idel, Yehuda Liebes, Lawrence Fine, and many others, has taken the Safed Renaissance as one of its central objects of investigation. Scholem's reconstruction of Lurianic Kabbalah in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism remains the starting point for all subsequent scholarship, and Lawrence Fine's Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos provides the most detailed modern study of the Lurianic fellowship and its practices.

Significance

The Safed Renaissance matters first because it produced the most influential body of kabbalistic literature in Jewish history. Cordovero's Pardes Rimonim and Or Yaqar systematized medieval Kabbalah in a form that subsequent generations could study and build on. Luria's system, transmitted through Hayyim Vital's writings, became the dominant framework for all kabbalistic thought from the late sixteenth century to the present day. The combination of these two achievements made Safed the central source of modern Kabbalah, and every later kabbalistic school, from Sabbateanism through Hasidism through Mitnagdism through twentieth century academic Kabbalah, has worked within the framework Safed established.

Its second importance lies in the integration of kabbalistic with halakhic authority. Joseph Karo was simultaneously the greatest halakhic codifier of his generation and an intense personal mystic, and his combination of these roles in a single figure gave Safed Kabbalah a legal authority that earlier kabbalistic schools had lacked. The Shulchan Arukh, written by a kabbalist, became the standard code of Jewish law throughout the Jewish world, and the assumption that kabbalistic considerations should inform legal decisions became permanent in Sephardic and many Ashkenazic communities.

Third, the Safed Renaissance produced the liturgical and ritual innovations that became standard in synagogue practice throughout the Jewish world. The Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service, with its sequence of Psalms and the singing of Lekha Dodi, was developed by the Safed kabbalists and within a century had spread to virtually every Jewish community on earth. The custom of saying the Tikkun Hatzot, the midnight rite of mourning for the destruction of the Temple, the practices of immersing in ritual baths before prayer and study, the elaborate Shabbat table rituals with their kabbalistic intentions, and many other elements of modern Jewish observance trace back to Safed innovations.

Fourth, the Safed Renaissance produced an ethical literature of extraordinary power and influence. Cordovero's Tomer Devorah, Eliezer Azikri's Sefer Charedim, Elijah de Vidas's Reshit Chochmah, and Isaiah Horowitz's later Shnei Luchot ha-Brit all draw on the Safed inheritance and together constitute one of the great moments in the history of Jewish ethics. These works combined kabbalistic theology with practical moral guidance and reached audiences far wider than the kabbalistic literature itself.

Fifth, the Safed Renaissance established a new model of the kabbalistic community as a tightly knit fellowship of disciples gathered around a charismatic master. The Lurianic circle in particular, with Luria at the center and his disciples bound to him and to each other by intense bonds of mutual love and shared mystical practice, became the prototype for later kabbalistic and Hasidic communities. Lawrence Fine's Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos has documented in detail the social form of the Lurianic fellowship and its lasting influence on the structure of subsequent Jewish religious communities.

Connections

The Safed Renaissance connects to nearly every major stream of Jewish mysticism. It received the entire medieval kabbalistic inheritance from Provençal Kabbalah, the Gerona School, the Castilian Zoharic Circle, the Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah, and Italian Kabbalah, all of which arrived in Safed in manuscript form through the dispersed Sephardic networks of the post-expulsion era. Cordovero's Pardes Rimonim is essentially an attempt to integrate all these earlier streams into a single coherent system, and the Safed community treated the entire previous history of Kabbalah as a unified inheritance to be preserved, organized, and built upon.

The Safed Renaissance also drew on the older inheritance of Heikhalot literature and Merkavah mysticism, which provided the meditative and theurgic vocabulary that the Safed kabbalists used in their own practice. The Lurianic kavvanot, the meditative intentions performed during prayer, are recognizable extensions of the older techniques of intoning divine names that go back to the Heikhalot tradition.

The doctrine of the ten sefirot is central to Safed Kabbalah throughout its history, with elaborate treatments of keter, chokhmah, binah, tiferet, and the other sefirot in both Cordoveran and Lurianic forms. Cordovero's treatment of the sefirot in the Pardes Rimonim remains among the most systematic expositions in the entire kabbalistic literature.

The Safed Renaissance gave rise directly to Lurianic Kabbalah, which is best understood as the second phase of the Safed flowering rather than as a separate movement. Through Lurianic Kabbalah the Safed inheritance reached Sabbateanism in the seventeenth century and Hasidism in the eighteenth, and through these later movements it shaped the entire course of modern Jewish religious life.

The central figures of Safed connect to many later movements. Joseph Karo, Solomon Alkabetz, Moses Cordovero, Moses Alsheikh, Isaac Luria, and Hayyim Vital are all foundational figures of post-medieval Jewish mysticism. Israel Sarug carried the Lurianic teachings to Europe, and Menachem Azariah da Fano sponsored their dissemination in Italy. Isaiah Horowitz wrote the Shnei Luchot ha-Brit that became among the most widely read works of post-Safed kabbalistic ethics.

Further Reading