Hayyim Vital

Hayyim Vital came to Isaac Luria in Safed in 1570, and Luria was dead by the summer of 1572. Everything that later Judaism means by Lurianic Kabbalah passed through that short apprenticeship and then through fifty years of Vital's writing.

Luria taught orally and left almost nothing written. Vital's answer was to record, arrange and rework, producing the enormous compilation known as Etz Hayyim, the Tree of Life, and the eight-part Shemonah She'arim, the Eight Gates, which distribute the material by subject: the gate of introductions, of principles, of reincarnations, of meditative intentions and the rest. The set was assembled after his death by his son Shmuel Vital at Damascus, while a second recension descending from Israel Sarug circulated in Europe in parallel. The Lurianic corpus therefore reached print by more than one channel, and it does not everywhere agree with itself.

Vital was also possessive about the material. He regarded himself as Luria's authorised transmitter, restricted access to his manuscripts, and the tradition preserves an account of copies being taken without his consent while he lay ill. What that means for a reader is worth stating plainly. The line between what Luria taught and what Vital understood him to have taught cannot be drawn from inside the texts, because there is no independent record against which to test them.

Alongside the systematic works Vital kept a private record of his dreams, of his visions, and of the things other people said about him, later gathered as Sefer ha-Hezyonot, the Book of Visions. It is not a devotional text and was not written for readers. He sets down dreams in which he is told he is the messiah of the house of Joseph, reports of what seers and possessed women said on seeing him, quarrels with rivals, anxieties about his standing among the Safed fellowship, and long stretches of ordinary disappointment.

The document is valuable for two opposite reasons. It shows the interior life of a sixteenth-century kabbalist without the smoothing that hagiography applies, ambition and self-doubt included, both of which a later admirer would have removed. And it shows the texture of religious life in Safed and Damascus, where dream interpretation, spirit possession and visits to the graves of ancient sages were ordinary practice rather than exotic exceptions to it.

Vital also wrote Sha'arei Kedushah, the Gates of Holiness, a manual of ethical and contemplative preparation whose fourth part, the one carrying the practical instructions, was withheld from print for centuries and circulated only in manuscript. Taken together the three bodies of work show one man as systematiser, as practitioner and as an unusually candid witness against himself.