Welcome back to our fourth and final installment of the Mystical Magical Mystery Tour, wherin we are going to wind our way to Tzfat and take it all home.
You can catch up on episodes 1-3 here:
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
When we last saw our heroes, there was a big flowering of Kabbalistic work all over medieval Europe – and we don't have all the receipts, but there are at least a few clues about where some of those traditions might have come from. Most notably, the Zohar came out of Spain ca. 1200.
Today we'll talk about a number of the ingredients that went into creating the famous, distinctive movement that was Tzfat Kabbalah, why it wasn't as much of a bro-zone as is often thought, and what happened after.
Kabbalah spread as Jews did: often not willingly. In addition to various pogroms and expulsions across Europe between the 12th-16th centuries, the expulsions in 1492 from Spain and by 1506 from Portugal were epoch-defining for the community. Many of these latter Jews wound up in Ottoman lands, including the families of Rabbis Joseph Karo (author of the cornerstone Jewish legal text the Shulchan Aruch) and Solomon Alkabetz (author of the liturgical poem Lecha Dodi), both enthusiastic students of Kabbalah.
Karo regarded himself as regularly visited by a heavenly mentor ("maggid") called the Mishnah that revealed kabbalistic doctrines to him. (Perhaps not coincidentally, this spirit thought Karo was the smartest teacher out there.) In 1534 or 36, in either Adrianople, Türkiye or Nicopol, Bulgaria (scholars disagree), Alkabetz, Karo and others were staying up all night studying Torah for the holiday of Shavuot when, as Alkabetz wrote:
