הרב שלמה אלקבץ

Rabbi Shlomo HaLevi Alkabetz (c. 5265/1505–c. 5344/1584) was a mekubal and paytan of Tzfas whose Lecha Dodi entered every siddur, sung to greet the Shabbat in every kehillah in the world. Born to a family of the Spanish exiles, most likely in Salonika, he learned in the yeshiva of Rabbi Yosef Taitatzak. Upon his marriage he presented his bride’s family, in place of a dowry he could not afford, with his newly completed sefer — Manot HaLevi on Megillat Esther — a gift that became famous. In Adrianople he drew close to Rabbi Yosef Karo, and it was in their circle that the practice of learning through the night of Shavuot spread: on such a night Rabbi Shlomo recorded the words of the maggid — the heavenly voice that spoke through Rabbi Yosef Karo — praising the chaburah and urging them to ascend to Eretz Yisrael.

Around the age of thirty he settled in Tzfas, then becoming the center of the hidden wisdom. There he taught kabbalah to Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, the Ramak, who became his brother-in-law and the head of the mekubalim of Tzfas before the Arizal‘s arrival; his circle touched Rabbi Yosef Karo and the Alshich as well. He often prostrated himself at the kevarim of the tzaddikim of the Galil, and his poetry — woven through with the hidden wisdom — won the special regard of the mekubalim of Tzfas.

He wrote some ten sefarim, of which only a few were printed: Manot HaLevi on Megilat Esther, Ayelet Ahavim on Shir HaShirim, Shoresh Yishai on Rus, and Brit HaLevi, sodot on the Haggadah of Pesach. But his immortality is the piyut: Lecha Dodi, whose stanzas bear his name in their acrostic, first appeared in a printed siddur in Venice in 1584 and conquered the world. He rests in the old cemetery of Tzfas.