אליהו בעל שם מחלם

Rav Eliyahu ben Aharon Yehuda Baal Shem of Chelm (c. 5280/1520–5343/1583) was a mekubal and the rav of the kehillah of Chelm, and among the leading talmidei chachamim of his generation in Poland. His father Rav Aharon Yehuda sat in the rabbanut of Chelm, Lublin and Belz. As a young man he learned in Lublin in the yeshiva of the Maharshal, who gave him semicha and held him in high regard; the two stayed in contact through his years in the rabbanut, and he carried on a halachic give-and-take with the Bach as well. In 5324/1564 he joined his rebbi and other leading rabbanim in signing the ruling that permitted an agunah to remarry. He held the rabbanut of Chelm for the rest of his life, and he was the first man called by the title Baal Shem.

The account most attached to his name is the making of a golem by the ways of Sefer Yetzirah. It first appears in print in a kabbalistic work of Rav Binyamin Wolf ben Yitzchak Litmeritz, brought out by his son Yoel in 5398/1638, some fifty years after Rav Eliyahu’s petirah. Popular tradition in Chelm held that the golem was formed of clay, that it stood in the marketplace with an axe in hand and struck down any peasant who came to beat a Jew, and that it did the labor of the beit midrash and of the rav’s household; when word of its strength reached the local nobleman, Rav Eliyahu led it up to the attic of the old shul, drew the Shem out of it and turned it back to clay. It was told afterward that the attic stayed bolted, and that no one knew where its key was kept.

The Chacham Tzvi, a descendant of his, brings testimony about the making of the golem, and his son the Yaavetz relates in his father’s name that it grew so large that Rav Eliyahu feared it would lay the world waste, so he removed the Shem from its forehead — and the golem scratched his face as he did so. The two of them took up the halachic standing of such a creature, whether it could be counted toward a minyan; both ruled that it could not. Rav Eliyahu’s great-granddaughter married Rav Ephraim HaKohen, author of Shaar Ephraim and the grandfather of that same Chacham Tzvi.