Episode 3: Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem and the Maharal of Prague

00:01 We continue the story of Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem. The emissaries of the beis din in Speyer came to him in Worms and conveyed its demands that he stop studying Kabbalah and stop using incantations to heal the sick. Rabbi Eliyahu received the emissaries warmly and listened good-naturedly to their demands, which came with a warning: if he did not comply, he would have to leave the country. He answered each point in turn. As for studying Kabbalah, he said, “Our Sages taught: When the master and the disciple say different things, whose words do we heed?” He therefore had to heed the Master, Hakadosh Boruch Hu, rather than the disciples, the sages of Speyer. As for healing the sick, he said he had never used incantations. Rabbi Eliyahu expressed his wish to travel to Speyer to speak with Rabbi Pinchas Zelig and show him that his campaign against those spreading the teachings of Kabbalah was mistaken. And Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem did indeed travel to Speyer. Rabbi Pinchas Zelig, however, would not even consider what he had to say. Instead, he decreed that Rabbi Eliyahu must change his ways and announce it publicly. When Rabbi Eliyahu refused to accept the decree, Rabbi Pinchas Zelig declared it forbidden to associate with Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem or his followers. Of course, this did not affect Rabbi Eliyahu. He returned to Worms and continued, as before, to study Kabbalah and heal the sick. Rabbi Pinchas Zelig now began an open, systematic campaign against the Baal Shem of Worms. He sent his eldest son, Rabbi Shmuel Zundel, from city to city and country to country to malign the Baal Shem of Worms. He also sent emissaries to distant lands to publicize the claim that, although the Baal Shem of Worms cloaked himself in the deepest secrets of the Torah, he was actually practicing sorcery. Following Rabbi Pinchas Zelig, the other great scholars of

02:43 Germany also raised an outcry against the Baal Shem of Worms. The campaign by the great scholars of Ashkenaz against Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem, and against Kabbalah in general, continued for a long time. Later, when Shabbtai Tzvi declared himself Moshiach, was ultimately exposed as a false messiah, and even converted to another religion, rachmana litzlan, the people of Speyer maintained that he had been one of the Baal Shem of Worms’s followers. On that basis, they intensified their campaign. As a result, when other kabbalists arose in later generations, and even when hidden tzaddikim of a different kind appeared—the disciples of Rabbi Yisroel Baal Shem Tov—there were always people who waged a campaign against them on the same grounds that had once fueled the campaign against the kabbalists and the hidden tzaddikim. To understand the story better and broaden the picture, we will now also tell you about the Maharal of Prague. The Maharal was born in 5272, approximately 1512 by their reckoning. His father was a great Torah scholar named Rabbi Betzalel, a fifth-generation descendant of the great Rabbi Yehudah Loew of Worms, whose tombstone stated that he was descended from King David. Rabbi Betzalel, the Maharal’s father, was a poor man, so he wanted to arrange matches for his sons when they were very young. Besides the Maharal, he had three other sons: Rabbi Chaim, Rabbi Sinai and Rabbi Shimshon. Betzalel sought matches for his sons with families of means, requiring them to undertake to send the prospective grooms to yeshivos at their expense even before the weddings, and to support them afterward so that they could continue studying Torah. And so, it seems, when the Maharal was ten, he was betrothed to the daughter of Rabbi Shmuel Reich of Prague, a wealthy Torah scholar with connections to the royal court whose efforts on behalf of the Jews helped thousands of them. At that time, the yeshivah in Przemyśl had become renowned. Its head was the celebrated Torah scholar Rabbi Yaakov Pollak, a disciple and successor of Rabbi Yaakov Margolies of Nuremberg. Rabbi Yaakov

05:50 Pollak had an original approach to Torah study. He brought the method of pilpul to perfection. He separated and divided each Talmudic passage into its component subjects, examined each subject according to its different lines of reasoning, and clarified and refined each line of reasoning to the highest possible degree. His yeshivah earned a fine reputation, and students flocked to him from everywhere. Rabbi Yaakov Pollak, however, was very strict about admissions. He wanted only the best and most outstanding students, with the sharpest minds. So, of every twenty or twenty-five students who sought admission, he selected only one. The Maharal’s future father-in-law sent him to this yeshivah when he was twelve. He was admitted at once and stayed for four full years, studying with diligence and devotion. According to a family tradition, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak would say of this student, the Maharal—who may have been the youngest in the yeshivah—that he was the third point of the three-point segol that, with Hashem’s help, he had formed in the vineyard of the House of Israel. He meant his three students Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Maharam of Padua; Rabbi Shalom Shachna of Lublin; and the Maharal of Prague. Of the thousands of students he had taught, he took particular pride in these three. Later in life, the Maharal himself would say that in the yeshivah of his teacher, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak, he had learned not only to pave a path using the finest and most subtle reasoning, but also to build a three-story palace. In 5288, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak left Przemyśl and was appointed rabbi of Prague. The Maharal left the yeshivah and went into a period of wandering exile, as was customary in those days. He wandered for two years and then returned to Prague. Around that time, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak traveled from Prague to Lublin to visit the yeshivah his student Rabbi Shalom Shachna had established there. While in Lublin, Rabbi Yaakov fell ill and passed away at a very advanced age.

08:48 Rabbi Shmuel Reich, the father of the Maharal’s bride-to-be, wanted the Maharal to marry his daughter Perl immediately. After the wedding, the Maharal could travel to study at whichever yeshivah he chose. But the Maharal felt that the bride, then fourteen years old, was too young to marry. He therefore asked to be sent to a yeshivah for another four or five years. They would marry afterward, and he would then be supported at his father-in-law’s table. Perl was distinguished by her abilities and her learning. She had been only six when she was betrothed to the Maharal. Even then, when she learned that her groom was a great Torah scholar, a genius of exceptional gifts, she decided on her own to study and develop her knowledge so that he would not be embarrassed by her. She began studying from books by herself and continued to improve throughout those years. When the Maharal returned to Prague, she met with him and told him of her progress in her studies. The Maharal was very pleased. Before he left again for the yeshivah for another four or five years, he set out a special course of study for Perl and received her promise to continue studying with the same diligence as before. During the Maharal’s two years of wandering exile, he encountered great Torah scholars along the way. He concealed his own greatness, but wherever he went, he tried to hear words of Torah from the great scholars he met and wrote them down for himself. While traveling, he heard that a great scholar named Rabbi Yitzchak Klover had come from Worms to Poznań. According to reports, Rabbi Yitzchak Klover had a distinctive method of study based on the approach of the great scholars of Ashkenaz and France. The Maharal therefore decided to spend those additional years studying with Rabbi Yitzchak Klover. When he arrived in Poznań, he met Rabbi Yitzchak’s grandson, Rabbi Shlomo, son of Rabbi Yechiel Luria of Brisk, who was then seventeen years old,

11:34 In other words, he was two years younger than the Maharal, and the two became friends, studying Torah together under Rabbi Yitzchak, Rabbi Shlomo’s grandfather. Rabbi Yitzchak was already very old, but of these two students—his grandson and the Maharal—he said that he could wholeheartedly apply the teaching of our Sages: “I learned much from my teachers, but more from my students.” And so the four additional years the Maharal had asked to spend studying in the yeshiva passed. He did not really want to return to Prague to marry; he simply could not bear to leave his teacher and his friend. So he wrote to his prospective father-in-law and his bride, asking permission to remain in Poznań for another three years. Permission was granted. During those three years, the bride’s father, Rabbi Shmuel Reich, lost his wealth and was forced to sell all his possessions to pay off his debts, leaving him with nothing. Rabbi Shmuel Reich informed his prospective son-in-law, the Maharal, in Poznań of what had happened, and told him that he could no longer fulfill the commitments he had made to him, whether for his support or in other matters. He therefore told the Maharal that, as far as he was concerned, he was free to break off the match with his daughter and seek another. The Maharal replied with an encouraging letter, saying that only if the bride did not wish to wait for him could she break off the match. As far as he was concerned, it made no difference whether her father was poor or rich.