הרב פנחס אליהו הורוביץ

Rav Pinchas Eliyahu Horowitz (2 Iyar 5525/1765–19 Nissan 5581/1821), author of the Sefer HaBrit, was a rav and mekubal whose one great work bound together emunah, halachah, mussar, kabbalah, and the wisdoms of nature. He was born in Lvov while his parents, Meir and Yenta of Vilna, were on the road from Vilna to Buchach — which is why the sources often call him a Vilna man. He grew up in Buchach, was orphaned of his father, his first and principal teacher, before reaching adulthood, and set out on years of wandering through the cities of Galicia and northeastern Poland to grow in Torah, in kabbalah, and in the outside wisdoms. Settling again in Buchach in his early twenties, he began writing the sefer of his life.

An illness that dimmed his eyesight until, as he wrote, he could no longer see, brought him to Lvov at the end of 5548/1788, where he stayed about half a year in the home of R’ Nachman Reis, a wealthy merchant and communal leader who apparently also helped finance the printing of his sefer. After his recovery he traveled for over a decade through Poland, Prussia, Holland, England, and Hungary, refining the work and gathering haskamot from leading rabbanim. The first edition was printed anonymously in Brno in Iyar 5557/1797; a second, corrected edition with some 350 additions appeared in Zholkva in 5567/1807 under the new name Sefer HaBrit HaShalem, and he lived to see a third printing in Vilna in 5578/1818. The sefer, which he framed as a gateway to the third section of Rav Chaim Vital‘s Sha’arei Kedushah, has been printed dozens of times since and translated into Yiddish and Ladino.

He held that emunah stands on the mesorah handed down from generation to generation, not on the arguments of philosophy — and yet a Jew of ability should also know the wisdoms of nature, both to deepen his grasp of the greatness of Hashem’s works and as a kiddush Hashem before the nations. He pressed just as hard for Torah together with melachah: a father is obligated to teach his sons a trade, as the Gemara rules, and the tannaim themselves — Rabbi Yitzchak Nafcha, Rabbi Yochanan HaSandlar — were baalei melachah, for “im ein kemach ein Torah.” His other sefarim include Ta’am Etzo on the Mishnat Chasidim of Rav Immanuel Chai Ricki, Mitzvot Tovim on ta’amei hamitzvot, Beit HaYotzer on Sefer Yetzirah, and a peirush on the Chayei HaOlam HaBa of Rav Avraham Abulafia. His last years were spent in the rabbanut in Krakow, where he was niftar on Shabbat chol hamoed Pesach, 19 Nissan 5581/1821, and was buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery.