Isaac Luria

Isaac Luria (1534 – July 25, 1572) (Hebrew: Yitzhak Lurya), also called Yitzhak Ben Shlomo Ashkenazi (Isaac ben Solomon Luria) aka as "The Ari", "Ari-Hakadosh", or "Arizal," meaning "The Lion," is the foremost rabbi and Jewish mystic in the community of Safed in the Galilee region of Ottoman Palestine.

He is considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah.

He is known for the interpretation of his teachings in Kabbalah known as Lurianic Kabbalah.

While his direct literary contribution to the Kabbalistic school of Safed is extremely minute (he writes only a few poems), his spiritual fame leads to their veneration and the acceptance of his authority.

The works of his disciples compile his oral teachings into writing.

Lurianic Kabbalah gives a revolutionary new account of Kabbalistic thought that its followers synthesize with, and read into, the earlier Kabbalah of the Zohar that had disseminated in Medieval circles.

Lurianic Kabbalah describes new doctrines of the origins of Creation, and their cosmic rectification, as well as a new descriptive paradigm of preceding Kabbalistic teaching.

The main popularizer of Luria's ideas is Rabbi Hayyim ben Joseph Vital, who claims to be the official interpreter of the Lurianic system, though this is disputed by some.

Previous interpretation of the Zohar had culminated in the first complete intellectual synthesis of Kabbalah, in the rational school of Moshe Cordovero in Safed, immediately before Isaac Luria.

Both schools gave Kabbalah a philosophical depth of theology to rival earlier Medieval Jewish philosophy ("Hakira").

Under the influence of the esoteric mystical developments of Jewish thought in 16th-century Safed, Kabbalah replaces Hakira as the main Jewish theology, both in scholarly circles, and in the popular imagination.

Lurianic thought, seen by its followers as harmonious with, and successively more advanced than Cordoveran, mostly supersedes it, and becomes the mystical dimension of most Orthodox theology until today, with the later Hasidic and Mitnagdic movements differing in their interpretations of it.

The Sabbatean mystical heresy will also derive its source from Lurianic messianism, but distort the Kabbalistic interdependance of mysticism with Halacha.

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