הרב אלעזר אזכרי

Rav Elazar ben Moshe Azikri (27 Iyar 5293/1533 – 5360/1600), whose family name also appears as Azkari and Azichri and who is known in English sources as Eliezer Azikri, was a mekubal, darshan and paytan born in Tzfat. He is known above all for the piyut Yedid Nefesh and for his Sefer Charedim, which, though it is a work counting the mitzvot, is held to be a foundational sefer of mussar.

He was descended from the exiles of Spain, and his writings and his labors carry the longing for the geulah and the love of Eretz Yisrael. His rebbe was the mekubal Rav Yosef Sagis, and he received semichah from Rav Yaakov Beirav, grandson of the Rav Yaakov Beirav who renewed semichah in Tzfat. He learned in the yeshiva of the Ramak and was drawn as well to the Torah of the Arizal, and he was among the great men gathered in Tzfat in that generation, among them the Radbaz, Rav Shlomo Alkabetz, Rav Yosef Karo, Rav Chaim Vital and Rav Yisrael Najara. In 1588 he founded the chaburah Sukkat Shalom, which worked to rouse Klal Yisrael to teshuvah and to dveikut in Hashem, as he set out in his introduction to Sefer Charedim.

He wrote the sefer as part of the chaburah’s aim of spreading yirat Shamayim in the world. It counts the mitzvot according to all the shitot, and is built on the pasuk “kol atzmotai tomarna Hashem mi kamocha” — the mitzvot are arranged in it by the limbs of the body. At its end he set three of his piyutim, the most well known of them Yedid Nefesh, which he himself headed as a request concerning the yichud and the yearning of love. Yedid Nefesh was taken up quickly in the siddurim of nusach Sefard, and some decades later entered the siddurim of nusach Ashkenaz as well; among the Sephardim it belongs to the shirat habakashot said before Shacharit.

He also wrote commentaries on Nedarim and Gittin in the Bavli. His commentary on Yerushalmi Berachot has been printed in editions of the Yerushalmi from the Piotrkow edition onward, and his commentary on Yerushalmi Beitzah was first published from manuscript in 1967; he refers in his writing to a commentary on Yerushalmi Pesachim that has not reached us. He left also a mystical personal diary, Milei d’Shmaya, on mussar and avodat Hashem. He was niftar in 1600 and buried in Tzfat, the city of his birth. In September 2009 it was reported that his kever had been located beside the kever of the Arizal in the old Jewish cemetery of Tzfat, by a resident of the city who had spent years searching out its old kivrei tzaddikim; a month earlier he had uncovered a matzeivah reading “Mazal Tov, daughter of the chacham Rav Avraham” — which, from Rav Elazar’s own writings, was the name of his wife, daughter of Rav Avraham son of Rav Yaakov Beirav.