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Fascinating Biographies behind the Zemirot:
The Greatest Poets of the Golden Age of Medieval Jewry and
their Personal Journeys
Table of Contents
Chart of Medieval Jewish Poets and Maps
Introduction
The Ideal Poet of Spain
Dunash Ben Labrat, his Wife and his Teacher- Dror Yikra
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi –
Yom Shabbaton
Leaving the Land of the Golden Age for the Dream of Jerusalem
Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra – Tzamah Nafshi; Ki Eshm’ra Shabbat
The Wandering Poet, Philosopher, Translator, Biblical Commentator,
Grammarian, Mathematician and Astrologer Par Excellence
The Jewish Astrologer: Saturn and Saturday
Rabbi Yitzchak HaARI
Rabbi Yisrael Najara - Ya Ribon
Elazar Azikri – The Mystical Diarist of Yedid Nefesh and his Holy Convenant
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Medieval Hebrew Poets Chart
Early Poets (5th –7th century, Eretz Yisrael)
Yosi ben Yosi
Yannai
Elazar HaKalir
Moslem Golden Age (10th- -12th Century, Spain)
Saadia Gaon (10th, Baghdad)
Dunash ben Labrat (10th , Baghdad then Cordoba) – Dror Yikra
Menachem ben Saruq (10th Cordoba)
Shmuel HaNagid (10th , Granada)
Shlomo ibn Gabirol (11th , 1020-1057)
Moshe ibn Ezra (12th, Granada)
Yehuda Halevi (12th Toledo, then Eretz Yisrael) - Yom Shabbaton
Avraham ibn Ezra (12th , Granada, Italy, France, and England)
- Ki Eshm’ra Shabbat; Ki Eshm’ra Shabbat
Ashkenazi Piyyut in France and Germany
Rabbi Menachem ben Makhir of Ratisbonne (11th C.)- Ma Yedidut
Baruch of Mainz (12th C.) – Baruch Eil Elyon
Moshe (unknown dates before 16th century) – Menucha v’Simcha
Kabbalist Poets (16th Century, Safed, Eretz Yisrael)
Yitzchak Chandali - Yom Zeh L’Yisrael
Yitzchak Luria HaARI
Shlomo Alkabetz – L’kha Dodi
Yisrael Najara - Ya Ribon
Elazar Azikri - Yedid Nefesh
Shalom Shabazi (Yemen, 17
th
C.)
Maps of world powers and languages and religions and migrations
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Introduction
To sing through the traditional medieval Zemirot is to embark on a journey through out
Europe meeting some of the most personally colorful as well as most creative artistic minds
of Jewry. The time span is from the tenth to the sixteen century. The geographical spread
is from Bagdad to Cordoba and north to Germany. But the cultural variety is even greater as
we encompass Moslem Spain with supremely cultured aristocrats and courtiers and then to
Ashkenazi Western Christian Europe with little entrée to general culture and then to the
Turkish Ottoman Empire with strong Kabbalist influences as well as popular vernacular love
songs. With the help of the more exceptional biographies and photographs of the more
beautiful cities that have preserved some of the medieval ambience we invite you to our
thumbnail tour of the people and the places behind of the Zemirot.
(By contrast, the tunes we sing however do not preserve the medieval European legacy but
rather reveal the vagaries of European, Hassidic and now American and Israeli popular
music).
The Ideal Poet of Spain
In the 19th-20th century the image of the artist is typically a bohemian rebel against the
establishment, a nonconformist driven by inner passions released from the rational demands
of society. A contemporary poet would never want to be commercialized or put in a situation
of needing to flatter his consumers. Innovation – not tradition or ritual – inspires the
literary genius’s creativity. However the social ideal of the Hebrew poet of Moslem Spain,
as described by the great poet Moshe ibn Ezra, was quite different. These highly educated,
scholarly poets, though usually also rabbis and often physicians were nevertheless
dependent on the financial and political support of their aristocratic patrons. Their poems
were performed in the court in beautiful salons and manicured gardens and dedicated to
their benefactors.
Yet they maintained a sense of their own calling, both ethically and artistically. Ethically
they tried to live as aristocrats of the soul – restrained, noble, affable and sociable, welldressed and generous, true to their friends and truth tellers even when praising others –
and socially they sought to maintain tradition and show concern for their people as well as
for their upper class compatriots. From the Moslem Spanish court, these Hebrew poets
absorbed the values of elegance and beauty as well as the importance of expressing private
emotions regarding love, friendship and earthly pleasures. They integrated these aspects
into their secular and their sacred poetry. In their sacred poetry they achieved more
freedom of self-expression in which they could praise God without fearing that their
flattery would be false and servile. Their poems became a permanent feature of the
synagogue liturgy and turned services into a welcome arena for literary creativity in the
service of the highest Spirit.
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Dunash ben Labrat (North Africa, Babylonia and Spain, 10th century, 920990)
Dunash ben Labrat (whose Hebrew name was Adonim Levi) who inaugurated the Golden Age of
Hebrew poetry in Cordoba in Moslem Spain. He was born in North Africa and then studied in
Baghdad before reaching Spain at auspicious time. The Golden Age of Moslem Spain gave us Dror
Yikra by Dunash ben Labrat in the tenth century and later in the twelfth century Yehuda Halevi’s
Yom Shabbaton and his friend and in-law Avraham ibn Ezra’s Ki Eshmira Shabbat and Tzama
Nafshi. Even before Dunash arrived, the 10th century in Spain boasted aristocratic court Jews
well-versed in Hebrew grammar and patrons of original Hebrew poets reviving Biblical Hebrew in
their works. However he brought with him a new model for Hebrew poetry based on outstanding
Arabic poetry of the era and he started the greatest and bitterest struggle in Jewish history
over Hebrew grammar.
Dunash was a student of Saadia Gaon (whose title “Gaon” means “the pride” of the great
yeshiva). Saadia was the official leader of the rabbinic yeshivot, the head of the high court
of Babylonia and thereby the highest legal authority of all the Jewry under Moslem rule. He
resided in the Babylonian capital Baghdad, home of the Caliphate that ruled the vast Arab
world from North Africa to India. Dunash’s teacher was not merely an exceptional
Talmudist, an academic rabbi, but a fearless political leader and intellectual innovator.
Saadiah Gaon (882-942) was a new style of rabbi never known before and he was the
cultural Leonardo da Vinci of his era. Born in Egypt, he studied with the great Hebrew
linguists, masters of the Masoretic text of the Bible in Tiberias, where he also learned the
tradition of Hebrew poetry (Yosi, Yanai etc). Then he went on to Babylonia, political and
cultural capital of the Arab empire where despite his outsider status as one coming from
the provinces, he was appointed the “gaon”- head of the Yeshiva of Pumpedita and in effect
the head of the Jewish Supreme Court of all Moslem lands. An outspoken man of principle,
Saadiah confronted the moneyed-head of the Jewish community, the Resh Galuta, and
refused to bend the law to serve mere political interests.
In every field Saadiah set the standard taking his orientation from the cosmopolitan
intellectual elite of the Moslem empire. He invented Rabbinic Jewish philosophy and based it
on his dialogues with the great rationalist Moslem religious philosophers of his era. He
actually wrote the first Jewish book in the modern sense – original works, not compilations,
with introductions, titles and subtitles, and a logical progression speaking consciously in the
voice of the author. He also wrote the first topical law code, the first Hebrew grammar
(inspired by the great new Arabic grammarians), the first complete siddur, the first running
commentary on the Torah designed to provide the plain sense of the text, the first Arabic
translation of the Tanakh, the first rhyming dictionary for Hebrew poets, the first Hebrew
sacred poetry with a personal touch and the first literary polemics -- attacking the
Karaites, Jewish heretics and the corrupt Resh Galuta. With the loss of Aramaic as the
Jewish language, he created a tradition of Jewish creativity in Arabic (though it was
written with Hebrew letters as Yiddish is today). His model of symbiosis between Jewish
and general literary culture prefigured the great Jewish cultural creativity in German and
later English in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However he also promoted a broad
revival of Hebrew as a spoken, as well as a literary language.
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“Our heart and the living spirit within us are in pain over this, for the holy speech is
absent from our mouths and the vision of all our prophecies and the speeches of
God’s mouth are like sealed books to us…It is right for us to study Hebrew, to
contemplate it and to examine it closely, we and our children, even our wives and
slaves, so that the ordinary people of God will speak Hebrew when they go out and
when they come in and in whatever they do, in their bedchambers and with their
infants…”
(Sefer HaEgron, Saadiah Gaon).
He promoted a Judaism that could appeal to the well-educated Jews who appreciated the
philosophic and aesthetic standards of the surrounding liberal Moslem cultural and religious
renaissance around them. He was not afraid of a pluralistic dialogue with his non-Jewish
colleagues – Moslems, Christians and philosophers – all of them professing monotheism. For
Saadiah, revelation and reason were not in contradiction, science and religion were allies and
self-ghettoization was unnecessary to maintain Jewish observance and a high level of
Talmud study.
Saadiah’s student, Dunash brought that same spirit to the other end of the Moslem empire
and discovered in Moslem Spain that the Arab duchies included very highly cultured
aristocratic Jews in their courts as economic and political advisors. These Jews were
traditional in observance and proudly Jewish culturally and yet liberal minded in patronizing
Jewish cultural arts like the academic study of Hebrew language and Bible and the
creativity of court poets and literati, just as the Arab dukes did. For example, Shmuel
HaNagid (993-1055) was both a Hebrew poet and a decorated general. Hisdai ibn Shaprut
(915-970), the most prominent Jew of Cordoba, sponsored Menahem ben Saruq’s writing of
the first-ever Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary because it would help Hebrew poets. The revival
of the use of the Hebrew language for writing secular poetry about love, wine and
friendship as well as new sacred works for synagogue use, became a model for the modern
Zionist revival of Hebrew centuries later, led by the author of the first great modern
th
Hebrew –Hebrew dictionary, Eliezer ben Yehuda at the turn of the 20
century.
Dunash made a big “splash” on the social scene by writing a devastating critique of Menahem
ben Saruq’s magnum opus and inventing a new form of Hebrew poetry based exactly on the
Arab canons of poetry. An armada of polemical poems were dispatched by each side against
the other. The Jewish aristocrats who patronized these scholars and poets were
themselves deeply caught up in what no one considered a mere academic issue. In the
surrounding Arab world linguistic beauty was the key both to high culture and to religious
truth since the Koran’s verses are thought of as descending from Heaven. Jews felt the
need to demonstrate the equal aesthetic and therefore divine quality of Hebrew poetry.
Dunash’s Dror Yikra and his other poetry set a new norm that captivated Spanish Jewry for
500 years and produced the greatest Hebrew poetry since the Bible and until modern
Israel.
Dunash wrote not only religious poetry but also court poems of wine, women and song. Yet
even here he feels conflicted about the transitory value of these worldly delights when we
remember Israel’s historic fate:
There came a voice: “Awake!
Drink wine at morning’s break.
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‘Mid rose and camphor make
A feast of all your hours….
We’ll drink on garden beds.
With roses round our heads.
To banish woes and dreads
We’ll frolic and carouse.
Dainty food we’ll eat.
We’ll drink our liquor neat,
Like giants at their meat,
With appetites aroused….
Scented with rich perfumes,
Amid thick incense plumes,
Let us await our dooms,
Spending in joy our hours.
I chided him, “Be still!
How can you drink your fill
When lost is Zion hill
To the uncircumcised….
The Torah, God’s delight
Is little in your sight,
While wrecked is Zion’s height,
By foxes vandalized.
How can we be carefree
Or raise our cups in glass,
When by all men are we
Rejected and despised?”
(Raymond P. Scheindlin, Wine, Women and Death 1986 JPS p.41 Vaomar al tishan)
A Lone Jewish Poetess
Dunash’s wife who may have remained in Baghdad when he traveled to Spain, writes her own
plaintive poem of love for her husband. This female poetic creation is one of the most
unique finds from the medieval Jewish world. In this poem she holds her only son in her
arms and recalls the exchange of gifts between her and her now distant husband.
Will her beloved remember his friend (yedida)
On the day of their separation in her arms he left his son, his only one (yekhida).
From his right hand he placed his seal (ring) on her left (smola),
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And on his arm she placed her bracelet (tz’mida).
On that day she took as a memento his cloak (r’dido),
And he as well took as a memento her cloak (r’dida) –
Would he ever remain in Spain,
Even if he were to receive half of the kingdom of its prince (n’gida)?
Dunash replied with renewed profession of everlasting love and recognition of the
uniquely cultured wife he had found:
How could I betray a woman of culture like you?
And God commanded us to cherish the woman of our youth (Malachi 2:14).
If I had plotted to abandon my sweetheart,
Then cut me into a thousand pieces. 1
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi (1075 in Spain to 1141 in Eretz Yisrael)
– Leaving the Land of the Golden Age for the Dream of Jerusalem2
Why at age 66 would the greatest and most celebrated poet of the Jewish world abandon
his comfortable and esteemed position to set forth on a long and dangerous journey to
Crusader –dominated Jerusalem in the midst of the Moslem-Christian hostilities? Yehuda
Halevi was no messianic mystic and no ascetic pilgrim looking for a grave in the Holy Land.
He loved the creature comforts of the courtly existence in Spain, which he described in
lush detail in his court poetry about wine, women and song. He lived a full life in a web of
friendships with literati who all resided in Spain. So why did he set sail on a ship to Eretz
Yisrael in 1141 C.E. on the first day of Shavuot, knowing as he did, that the meager Jewish
community of Israel could provide him with no companionship and little realistic hope of
spiritual growth in the violent age of the Crusades?
Yehuda Halevi’s rapid rise to the top of the Jewish cultural world begins as a child born in
Tudela near Sargossa. His home was located on the unstable border running between the
warring parts of northern Christian and southern Moslem Spain. In 1085 Toledo was
captured by the Christians and in 1090 the North African fanatic Berber tribes conquered
southern Spain. The atmosphere of religious war threatened the tolerant, highly educated
Arab ruling class who had encouraged Arab-Jewish collaboration, literary creativity and
cultural cross-fertilization. Jewish refugees moved desperately in search of security and
opportunity to maintain what they could from the Golden Age, which was facing an external
catastrophe.
Yehuda Halevi in fact grew up on the Christian side of the border in Castile, where
nonetheless he learned the art of Hebrew poetry and the Arabic language of southern
Spain, the heartland of Jewish cultural creativity. He utterly surprised and charmed
Arabic-speaking Jews in Andalusia when he, as an unknown young man, triumphed easily in a
competition of Hebrew poets who were all trying to imitate the aging giant of Hebrew
1
2
7
Ezra Fleischer, “Dunash’s Wife” in S.D.Goitein, Mediteranean Society, no.5 pp.468-470.
See Yisrael Levine, Masao shel Yehuda Halevy.
poetry – Moshe ibn Ezra from Granada. Moshe ibn Ezra then adopted Yehuda as a protégé
and welcomed him as a houseguest. Here Yehuda met Moshe’s younger relative, Avraham ibn
Ezra, who would become his traveling partner and close friend. (According to some
traditions, ultimately Yehuda married off his only daughter to Avraham ibn Ezra ‘s son).
Though he came from poor family with no pedigree, Yehuda’s physical beauty, charm, poetic
genius, loyalty to friends and affability made him the most popular of poets and almost 800
of his poems survived due to the large number of copies made by his admirers especially
those in Cairo, home of the largest Geniza ever found.
In 1096 the Pope promoted a bloody Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Moslems.
That Crusade met with amazing success in 1099. In the process, which initially raised
Jewish hopes, thousands of Jews were massacred and /or forcibly converted in France and
Germany and hundreds more killed, along with the Moslem inhabitants of Jerusalem. In
Spain where the Christian Reconquista was picking up speed in reconquering the Moslem
south, the Crusades raised apocalyptic fears and hopes not conducive to the previous Golden
Age of high culture and tolerance. In reaction to the Crusades, Yehuda wrote a sensitive
elegy for those Ashkenazi martyrs massacred by the Crusaders. Yehuda Halevi, by now a
rabbi and physician as well as a poet, moved to Christian Toledo then administered by an
enlightened Christian ruler and his activist and educated Jewish cabinet minister. Yehuda
Halevi had prepared for the cabinet minister an official welcoming poem for his return from
a diplomatic trip. However in 1108 word was received that the minister had been murdered
by Christians. Yehuda understood that this was indicative of the impossible situation of the
Jews caught between warring religious fanatics.
From 1109 Yehuda Halevi wandered through southern Spain. He became the voice of the
people writing elegies for the victims of Christian pogroms in Castile – northern Spain. He
also spoke against the illusions of rapid return to long-term security in Spain – whether
Moslem or Christian. As a politically responsible leader, he used his fame and his vast
personal connections to raise money for, among other causes, a young Jew captured and held
for ransom. In his philosophic masterpiece, The Kuzari (after 1125???), Halevi expressed
his belief in the exclusive Jewish national and religious rebuilding of Eretz Yisrael and
denied the competing claims of the Christians and Moslems who were then battling over
military control of the Holy Land. In fact he insisted Eretz Yisrael could really only belong
to the people of Israel who by their very nature belong to the land that nurtured them as
the spiritual birthplace of the people. The poems about the national suffering and
humiliation in exile along with the yearning of the beautiful Songs of Zion represented a
uniquely “Zionist” sensibility at a time when a political or military movement for return to
Israel was merely a pipe dream.
In 1125 at the age of 50 Yehuda Halevi seems to have decided to make aliyah when he
writes: “My manifest hope is to wander eastward as fast as possible, with God’s help,” yet
he worries, “How can I repay my pledge and my vow [to make aliyah], when Zion is entrapped
by Edom (the Crusaders) and I am imprisoned in Arab hands?…My heart is in the East, but I
am in the farthest point of the West.” The practical difficulties and the constant
opposition – in love and in ridicule – by the still proud Andalusian Jewish community
prevented Yehuda Halevi from actualizing his dream for a long time. But he felt guilty for
the hypocritical gap between Jews’ constant prayers for the return to Zion and their
willingness to stay in Spain without any serious thought of actualizing their words of prayer.
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Finally in 1140 at the age of 66 (= 4900 of the medieval Jewish calendar, 7x7x100 years
since the Creation) Yehuda Halevi set sail with his family for Cairo where he was given a
royal welcome by its wealthy, highly cultivated community. The Jews of Cairo tried to
discourage Halevi from continuing on a dangerous sea journey to Eretz Yisrael. In those
days bandits were rife and passengers often became hostages for ransom or slaves to be
sold, if the unpredictable storms did not sink the ship. For over 800 years it was not clear
whether Yehuda Halevi ever fulfilled his vow to settle in Israel. Only in the late twentieth
century did scholars, sifting through fragments from the Cairo Geniza, discover the truth.
Letters found in the Geniza proved that the dream was fulfilled in Halevi’s lifetime; he set
sail on the first day of Shavuot in May, 1141and arrived in the Crusader-ruled land of Israel.
Halevi passed away just a few months later in the month of Jewish mourning, Menahem Av.
As much as his journey seems like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Halevi’s act
symbolized a direction, which, he believed, was the most reasonable and most honorable
national option. Sadly his dire predictions about Moslem Spain came true only seven years
later with the invasion in 1148 by the most fanatic fundamentalist Moslem warrior tribe –
the Almohades (= believers in the pure unity of Allah) who forcibly converted Jews who
became Moslem “Marranos” and subsequently took flight to north Africa or Christian
provinces to the north. Maimonides, born in Cordoba in 1138, was probably one of those
forcibly converted who with his family escaped to North Africa and ultimately, like Yehuda
Halevi before him, to Cairo.
However the meaning of Halevi’s aliyah is deeper than a national search for political
security and honor. Yehuda Halevi was choosing the way of “freedom” that would liberate
him from the constant need to find favor among his patrons and readers. The Rabbi in
Halevi’s book of philosophy The Kuzari explains the motivation for the decision to emigrate
to Eretz Yisrael:
I am seeking freedom from the enslavement to the many…the incessant desire to
find favor in their eyes. In its place I seek to be a slave to the [Divine] One for
enslavement to the One is freedom and submission to God is the true honor.
As he formulated this thought in one of his poems:
The slaves of time are slaves to slaves /
while only the slave to the Master (Adonai) is liberated.
The way of freedom is ultimately the way of love. In finding one’s Divine Beloved – in one’s
heart, one discovers a cure to all one’s ills. All fears disappear in one’s intimacy with the
Lord. That desire for personal redemption to be found within one’s heart but also in the
Holy of Holies in the Holy City was also part of the meaning of the fearless of an old man in
setting sail for the land of Israel in the midst of acute political and military turmoil.
The Geniza in Cairo
The greatest Jewish archeological finds of the last century were the Dead Sea Scrolls
preserving lost Second Temple Jewish literature hidden in the caves near Qumran from 68
CE until 1947 and the Geniza (meaning to “file away”) fragments of Cairo in 1896. The poem
of Dunash ben Labrat’s wife, the last letters of Yehuda Halevi before setting off on his
final voyage to Eretz Yisrael before his death and some of Maimonides’ writings in his own
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hand were all thrown in with the sacred trash in a back room of the synagogue between
approximately 800-1200. Thousands of documents which might have a holy reference to God
were all treated with respect and “buried” there honorably. The room was sealed up when
filled with thousands of old Hebrew manuscripts whether bills of sale, prayers or
philosophical works. Not until 1896 did some of the documents find their way to a street
vendor who sold them to two Christians from England who then shared them with the
scholar Solomon Schechter then teaching at Cambridge. Schechter recognized the original
Hebrew of Ben Sira’s second century BCE Book of Wisdom which had been lost for over a
thousand years. Rushing off to Cairo to the Ben Ezra Synagogue, Schechter packed 100,000
pages into his suitcases to bring back to England. Thousands more pages were later
collected and deposited in libraries from Russia to New York and are still being pieced
together and catalogued. That discovery has given us a window into a thousand years of
Jewish culture, much of which had been lost. For Jews who take their memories and even
more so their cultural creations as their holiest heritage this was a gift of recovered past
of inestimable value that has helped in the compilation of this book as well.
Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra – The Wandering Poet, Philosopher, Translator,
Biblical Commentator, Grammarian, Mathematician and Astrologer Par
Excellence
(10893 in Tudela, Spain – 1164 in London, England)
O for a clear way to keep your commandments!
For only in Your love do I find rest.
I am your servant; guide me in Your ways
I have no care but to deserve your grace;
I only ask that I may see your face.
(Avraham Ibn Ezra translated from the poem Achalai yikonu
by Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Gazelle 1991 JPS,)
Avraham ibn Ezra, author of Ki Eshmara Shabbat, was the great wanderer of Moslem Spain who went into
exile as result of the political catastrophes that ended the Golden Age of Spain. Though he suffered
personally from his many exiles, he managed to bridge numerous cultures and to bring the fruits of
Moslem Jewish Spain to many Jewish communities in Christian Europe – Italy, France and England. In
southern Spain he learned poetry with his older relative, the great Moshe ibn Ezra and there became best
friends with his slightly older contemporary the great poet Yehuda Halevi. According to some scholars
Yehuda Halevi’s only daughter married his son. Avraham also had a promising son who converted to Islam
causing Avraham great anguish.
After the invasions from the Christian Spain to the north, and the counter invasion by fundamentalist
North African Moslems from the south, many Jews began to wander in search of a new home for their
once great culture. In 1140 Ibn Ezra began his exile, moving first to North Africa, then to various city
states in Italy and from there to Provence and Ashkenaz. In France he met his colleague Rabbenu Tam and
perhaps his brother Rashbam, both of whom were Rashi’s grandchildren and great Talmudic and Biblical
commentators. Ibn Ezra finally ended up in London. In each location he earned his keep by writing and
3
Scholars debate the dates setting them around 1088/9 or 1092 to 1164 or 1167
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rewriting commentaries on many of the books of the Bible, even though he did not have his library with
him or the previous commentaries he had already composed. He also translated many Arabic works into
Hebrew. Serving as one of the Jewish conduits of ancient Greek knowledge through Arabic into Hebrew
and ultimately into Latin, Ibn Ezra brought a much higher understanding of Hebrew grammar to
Ashkenazim who had little exposure to linguistics. He also invented a Hebrew numerical system with a zero
notation learned from the Arabs. His commentaries – particularly on Shabbat identified with the seventh
planet Saturn – conveyed what was then considered the science of astrology in which he was very well
versed. He also used Shlomo ibn Gabirol’s neo-Platonic philosophy in his commentaries explaining that God
created the world not from nothing but by a process of emanation.
The Jewish Astrologer: Saturn and Saturday
While, according to the great rationalist Jewish philosopher Maimonides, the Torah is designed to liberate
Jews from astrological beliefs which should be viewed as idolatry – avodat kochavim umazalot / worship of
stars and constellations, some medieval rabbis accepted astrology as true science and harmonized it with
Jewish beliefs including Shabbat. The ancient Roman world sometimes used a seven-day week named after
the seven planets (Uranus and Pluto were as yet undiscovered), each of which was identified with a god
that ruled that day and gave it a particular character, such as Mars the god of war for Tuesday (Mardi).
In Europe most of the days of the week are still named after gods, often identified with the heavenly
bodies – Sun-day, Moon-day and in French Mercredi for Mercury. Even today Jews refer superstitiously to
the constellations of the zodiac that are purported to control our individual fates – hence the wish Mazal
tov / Have a good constellation to determine your fate!
In medieval Jewish astrology, Shabbat is surprisingly associated with Saturn, the most malicious of
planets. The Rabbis recommended, “Don’t go out alone at night especially on the fourth day of the week
(associated with Mars) and Shabbat evening” (associated with Saturn) (T.B. Pesachim 112b). Avraham ibn
Ezra explains the Shabbat commandment in terms of a wise strategy to countermand the negative
influence of Saturn and Mars (which for Ibn Ezra was the ruler of Friday rather than Tuesday):
The fourth commandment [to observe Shabbat], corresponds to the planet Saturn [called Shabbtai
in Hebrew]. For the astrologers [hachamei ha-nissayon] say that each of the heavenly planets
[servants in God’s cosmos] has a specific day on which to manifest its power…It is said that Saturn
and Mars [Ma’adim, the red planet] are harmful planets, and anyone who begins a new task or
embarks on a journey on one of these days come to harm …Nor will you find among all the days of
the week a consecutive night and day governed by these malicious forces except for this day
[Shabbat since Mars governs Friday evening and Saturn governs Saturday during the day].
Therefore it is appropriate not to be involved in any worldly activities but only in the service of God
alone.
(from Ibn Ezra’s long commentary on Exodus 20:14)
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The Kabbalist Poets:
HaARI - Yitzchak ben Solomon Luria (1534-1572) - Yom Zeh L’Yisrael
Yom Zeh L’Yisrael has been traditionally attributed to Yitzchak HaARI whose name
forms its acrostic, even though scholars have discovered that its opening five stanzas were
written earlier. It was natural to make this attribution since HaARI wrote three famous
Aramaic Zemirot – one for each meal of Shabbat. Those Zemirot were thoroughly immersed
in Kabbalist imagery and language. Though they have not been included in our collection since
they are less popular today, this is an excellent occasion to review the biography of Isaac
ben Solomon Luria (1534-1572) in brief because he was so central in the movement in
Safed that formulated and popularized so many of the Shabbat evening ceremonies and
their mystical interpretations.
Isaac Luria was later referred to reverentially as the ARI” – “the divine Rabbi Yitzchak” /
A= ha-Elohi ‫ ; האלוהי‬R=Rabbi ‫ ;רבי‬I = Isaac -‫יצחק‬, although his Sephardi contemporaries in
Safed called him simply “Rabbi Isaac Ashkenazi.” His father emigrated from Germany or
Poland to Jerusalem and married into a Sephardi family. Since his father died when he was a
child, HaARI was raised in the home of his mother’s wealthy brother in Egypt. Luria quickly
became known as a brilliant scholar. Documents in the Cairo genizah indicate that while in
Egypt he was also a businessman who traded in pepper and grain. While still quite young, he
began his mystical studies and spent seven years secluded on a small island on the Nile near
Cairo owned by his uncle (whose daughter he married). There he studied the Zohar, the
works of earlier kabbalists, and especially the writings of Moshe Cordovero. During this
period, he wrote his only book, which was a commentary on part of the Zohar.
Yitzchak Luria settled in Safed in the beginning of 1570, where he studied with Moshe
Cordovero. After Cordovero’s death at the end of 1570, Chaim Vital become Luria’s chief
disciple. HaARI rarely taught in public, but often took long walks with his disciples and
pointed out previously unknown graves of important sages. He developed an original system
of theoretical Kabbalah, based on unification of the sephirot, concentration on divine names,
and kavvanah – meditation on the act of prayer. Luria preferred the Sephardi liturgy. For
this reason, Ashkenazi kabbalists, and later Hassidim inspired by HaARI chose to use the
Sephardi liturgy. He died in an epidemic on July 15, 1572, and his grave is still a place of
pilgrimage. Before Luria’s theoretical teachings became popular, some of his poetry became
famous. Best known are his three Zemirot for each of the Shabbat meals. 4
HaAri s Aramaic Zemirot helped transform the three Shabbat meals into a mystically
dramatic ritual. In the light of the Zohar which had now become increasingly accessible to
more and more Jews, Shabbat Zemirot were considered wedding songs used to honor the
Shekhina’s union with the other Divine Sefirot, just as Kiddush was a reenactment of the
Kiddushin wedding vows. The well-being of the Divine and the earthly worlds depended
4
This biographical synopsis is based on a summary provided the Jerusalem tour guide Asher
Arbit
12
directly on human efforts to arouse the Shekhinah’s mystical love and thereby bring down
her blessings. The ever-widening circles of Jews interested in mysticism and its new rituals
needed songs to sing for these new informal rituals which lacked an inherited fixed liturgy
or a halachic structure and often did not take place in the synagogue at all. This era
witnessed an overwhelming spiritual outpouring at all levels of Jewish society.
13
Rabbi Yisrael Najara – the Controversial Spiritual Singing Star| of the
th
16 Century (1550-1625, Safed, Damascus and Gaza) 5
A somewhat exaggerated “promo” for Rabbi Yisrael Najara, the author of the Aramaic
Shabbat favorite Yah Ribon Olam, might present him as the most controversial and yet the
most successful Jewish songwriter since the author of Tehillim / Psalms --King David.
David’s soul was, according to Yitzchak Luria, reincarnated in Yisarel Najara’s soul for David
was known as Ne’im Zemirot Yisrael – the “sweet singer of Israel.”
Najara’s commercial success transcended everyone – publishing three editions of his books
in his lifetime with almost 300 sacred songs written especially to be sung to popular Turkish
melodies. (Recall that printing presses had just begun to serve popular audiences in this
area of Hebrew songs). An early tradition attributed posthumously to HaAri, Rabbi Yitzchak
Luria (died 1572) claims that the angels who come to his table on Shabbat love Yisrael
Najara’s tunes and sing them like wedding melodies before God and the Shekhina. Yet Haim
Vital, HaAri’s primary student, writes scathingly of Najara for singing loudly and carousing
with non-Jewish minstrels in the park. He was accused of dressing immodestly, appearing
without the accepted big hat and with his arms partially exposed. He was reported to have
joined drinking parties with non-Jews even during the three-week mourning period before
Tisha B’Av when the destruction of the Temple is commemorated. When Haim Vital
exorcised a dybbuk /a spirit that had entered the body of a woman from a good family, the
dybbuk proclaimed that although Yisrael Najara’s songs were well-written, no one should
drink with him or speak with him.
Najara’s popularity derives from the use of popular Turkish and Arab love songs – their
lyrics as well as their melodies – for Zemirot designed to commune with God. Previously, the
dominant religious poetry of Sephardic Jewry followed an aristocratic Spanish tradition into
which Yisrael was born. For example, Rabbi Yehudah Halevi who wrote Yom Shabbaton and
Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra who wrote Ki Eshmara Shabbat had adopted the ornate upper class
Arab poetic style and adapted it to Hebrew for use in the cultural circles of wealthy
Spanish Jewish cabinet ministers. The youthful Yisrael Najara learned this style, preserved
by the immigrants from Spain (Yisrael’s grandfather was an exile from Spain whose name
Najara derives from the name of a town in Spain). But soon he and all his generation of
Jews were drawn to the more popular songs from their new non-Jewish cultural environment
– the Ottoman Empire. Its lively refrains were written and performed by Turkish and Arab
musicians and songwriters who wrote melodramatically of love and of suffering. Young Jews
were drawn to these impromptu jam sessions both on holidays in public parks – especially in
Damascus, the most beautiful of cities in this era - and late into the night at the newly
faddish coffeehouses even in Safed. The more established rabbis complained bitterly about
these social gatherings. Yisrael himself emerged from this rabbinic elite; he was a rabbi and
the son of a great Talmudist as well as a colleague of Yosef Karo, author of the Shulkhan
Aruch. He was also a student of the mystic master HaAri. Yet along with his learning he
5
See Meir Benayahu in Asufot No. #4 pp.203ff and Yosef Yahalom in Pe’amim #13 pp.96ff and Tarbiz #60
pp.625ff
14
developed as a fine musician and virtuoso performer. He was also an artistic calligrapher and
became the scribe of the Jewish community for official letters, as well as an inspiring
synagogue orator/darshan. Perhaps he was also a painter of ornamental objects and one who
inscribed verses over the doorway, as was customary at that time.
The musical revolution described above had its more conservative and its more radical
promoters. Yisrael Najar was the radical borrowing readily from popular non- Jewish
romantic sources, while his opposition was Menachem de Lonzano of Jerusalem who
published his own song book based on the use of more sorrowful Turkish tunes:
“God knows… that I did not compose songs using Moslem melodies in order to
encourage carousing with drums, halil (recorder) and wine. I chose only those Arab
melodies that I found expressed a broken heart and I thought they would be helpful
to conquer my uncircumcised heart …Therefore they should not be sung on Shabbat
and holidays…In this I differ from Yisrael Najara who makes no distinction between
Shabbat and Tisha B’Av.” 6
The more radical innovator was Yisrael Najara who explains in the preface to his bestseller
Zemirot Yisrael (1587):
“I seek to quench the thirst of those seeking the word of God [through song] and to
win over those Jews who now sing Turkish melodies with pornographic words…Surely
anyone who can enjoy what is permissible [singing sacred Hebrew songs to God] will
leave aside the Turkish lyrics since my melodies are exactly the same but with holy
Hebrew lyrics.”
Each of Najara’s songs was written to match the musical pattern of already well-known
melodies and often Turkish song’s title was written alongside the Hebrew lyrics. Therefore
anyone could learn to sing Najara’s songs instantaneously.
However the truly radical move promoted by Yisrael Najara was to apply the content of
very explicit love songs to the love of the people of Israel for God. For example, a famous
Spanish love song dedicated to Seòora became Shem Norah / God’s Awesome Name. Haim
Nachman Bialik, the national poet of the Zionist movement, who loved the classical poetry of
the Golden Age of Spain, complained bitterly of Najara’s borrowing from “lowly sources of
poetic inspiration:”
How could Rabbi Yisrael Najara take the melody of an Italian “Don Juan” holding a
bouquet of flowers, carrooning to his “Seòorita” in Italian before her window on a
spring evening.(?) Then they sing the same song with ashes on his head while sitting
before the Holy Ark at midnight in a Kabbalistic Tikkun ceremony using these lyrics
now in the holy tongue redirected toward the Holy One Blessed Be He!? 7
Yet that was exactly what was called for in the popular Kabbalist revival that began in
Safed and spread throughout the Mediterranean and then beyond “carrying and carried by”
the songs of Najara. His music and lyrics could – unlike the classical poetry of Spain or the
scholarly poetry of Ashkenaz – convey mystical meanings regarding the communion of the
Divine male and female aspects and the passionate romance of the soul for God. The Ari is
said to have rejected the abstract non-mystical intellectual poetry of Spain such as Yigdal,
6
[See the original quotations brought in the articles mentioned above in previous footnote].
7
15
H.N.Bialik, Shirateinu Hatz’ira, HaShiloach #17 p.72
which summarizes Maimonides’ 13 principles of faith. However his followers could sing
Najara’s hits, even though they were not suffused with mystical doctrines as were the Ari’s
Shabbat Zemirot. Najara’s songs were intended as allusions to the Divine lovemaking
recalled King Solomon’s Shir HaShirim / Song of Songs and they were used in the new
kabbalist customs created in Safed including: Kabbalat Shabbat, the midnight Tikkun on
Rosh Hodesh, Hoshana Rabbah, Shavuot, and pre-dawn prayers like Selichot. Yisrael Najara
himself was famed for his teshuvah / repentance sermons on Rosh Hodesh evenings and his
music filled a spiritual and social need.
How we may ask did the established rabbis of the period regard this mixing of the Jewish
and the non-Jewish, of the sacred and romantic? Despite the reservations of the some 8, the
majority regarded this as a legitimate and mainstream mystical effort, even though this
particular music and style of lyrics was so new to Spanish Jewry. The great mystical scholar
of Safed – Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (died 1570) who was also HaAri’s master – wrote:
All descriptions of males and females in the Song of Songs refer to spiritual/heavenly
intercourse – not God forbid, physical/earthly intercourse. All who sing these songs
thinking of their material meanings will destroy many worlds, but those who sing them
with beautiful spiritual intent are builders of many worlds.”
“Anyone who composes a song with a parable about a woman sitting in mourning for the
husband of her youth, may portray her crying for him and imagine her physical needs
for food, clothing and sexual gratification and her heart filled by love and desire, for
this woman is clearly a reference to the Shekhina / the Divine Presence who dwells
with him. This is on condition that no physicality but only spirituality is intended. 9
In this use of earthly imagery for heavenly communion we find that the Muslim Sufis, the
Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, followed the same pattern. In fact, one of Yisrael Najara’s
most famous poems used in the Sephardi tradition every Shavuot is the Ketubah of God and
Israel celebrating their marriage at Mount Sinai on Shavuot.
Najara’s songs continue to be popular and each generation gives them a new musical
interpretation. One of the most remarkable uses of these popular songs goes back to 1621
when at age 71 Yisrael Najara was appointed the rabbi of Gaza, a small, undistinguished
Jewish community. After him, his son and grandsons served as the city rabbinic authorities.
When Rabbi Nathan of Gaza, Shabbtai Zvi’s spiritual mentor and promoter, preached that
Shabbtai was the mystical messiah he won over Yisrael’s grandson and soon Najara’s songs –
with new interpretation – became very popular for Sabbateans.
8
On Soul Music and Scandal - Reb Shlomo Carlebach:
Interestingly there are some similarities in the controversy about music, popular
th
spirituality and rumors of sexual promiscuity that surrounded both Najara in the 16
century and enveloped Shlomo Carlebach in the twentieth century. . Reb Shlomo Carlebach,
Hassidic singing star and spiritual leader of many Baalei teshuiva, found music a way to
reach out to broader masses and to bring assimilated Jews closer to a more spiritual
Judaism. His songs have now became widespread best-sellers even among establishment
Orthodox congregations even though established figures once condemned his behavior
which was often surrounded by rumors.
9
Moshe Cordovero, commentary on Shiur Koma 33:4; 34:1.
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Rabbi Elazar Azikri (1533-1600, Safed) –
The Mystical Diarist of Yedid Nefesh and his Holy Contracts
The mystical diaries of Elazar Azikri, author of the famous Shabbat song Yedid Nefesh, are a
unique phenomenon in Jewish literary history. In his diary Azikri traces his four-decade struggle for
moral perfection with his fellow human beings and for spiritual concentration on the Beloved of his
Soul/Yedid Nefesh – God. Azikri began to document his inner life immediately after the tragic
death of his two sons in 1564. The author describes how he strives for communion with God using
most unusual techniques. Besides studying Torah and mysticism, he spent one third of each day
standing in absolutely silent meditation. He also entered into a binding legal contract - a shtar with the Master of the Universe, dated 1575, attested by two witnesses and containing binding
clauses. The witnesses who “signed” are Heaven and Earth as in Moshe’s poem Haazinu
(Deuteronomy 32). The stipulations were read aloud four times a day – at sunrise and sunset and at
noon and midnight. They include:
loving people and not prejudging them
contemplating God at all times and refraining from worldly activities
praying with enthusiasm
giving tzedakah every night before going to sleep
crying regularly except on Shabbat and holidays
visiting the graves of righteous spiritual masters
Rabbi Elazar Azikri combined interpersonal and spiritual mitzvot because he believed that God’s
name is inscribed in the face of each human creature. He identified the four letters of God’s unique
name – Yud Heh Vav Heh – with which he began each of the verses of Yedid Nefesh – in the facial
structures of his fellow Jews. The ear is like Yud; one cheek is like Heh; the nose is like Vav; and the
other cheek is again like Heh. The idea is that whenever we encounter a fellow Jew, we are looking
at the face of God and must do so with reverence and even lower our eyes as we would in confronting
a majestic Ruler.
In 1575 he created a new legal document called a Brit Hadasha / a New Covenant perhaps in the
spirit of Jeremiah’s new covenant (which is translated by the Christians by the term New
Testament):
“A time is coming – declares God – when I will make a new brit/covenant with the House of
Israel …and I will put my Torah inside of them and write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:3032).
That contract bound together a Holy Havurah of three rabbis in Safed and listed ten conditions
including:
maintaining the unity of the three mystics (who would also share all their property equally)
honoring both our heavenly and earthly parents
suffering insults in silence while honoring all creatures and despising and ridiculing none
studying with spiritual intensity the MiSHNA (the Rabbinic code of Oral Law) for that
gives wings to the NiSHaMA / Soul which shares the identical letters
accepting the yoke of God’s kingdom in our hearts constantly - without distraction
This Holy Havurah expressed their personal love for God by speaking to God regularly in private and
“by singing before God to arouse their love – more wonderful than the love for women” (as King David
said of his love for the fallen Jonathan in II Samuel 1:26). In Rabbi Elazar Azikri’s book Sefer
Haredim (1601) he published the songs of beloved friendship with God that he shared with his
friends in the Havurah. The most famous was Yedid Nefesh which we sing on Shabbat when we too
17
withdraw somewhat from worldly activity and create space – like a honeymoon for lovers - for
spiritual love with the Divine in ourselves, our friends and the world.
Elazar Azikri, like his teacher Moshe Cordovero and his colleague Haim Vital, recommended a weekly
spiritual week-in-review for the chaverim / members of the havurah who would meet in the
synagogue before Shabbat and would tell and discuss with one another how they had behaved –
whether properly or not - during the past week and then proceed to greet the Shabbat Queen. .” 10
10
See Meir Benayahu, “Shtarei Hitkashrut shel Mikubalim bSafed and Mizrayim” in Asufot 9(1995),
pp.131ff.
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