בחיי בן אשר

Rabbeinu Bachya ben Asher ibn Chalava (5015/1255–c. 5100/1340) was a commentator on the Torah from the circle of the mekubalim of Girona, who lived in Zaragoza in Spain. He is one of two chachamim called Rabbeinu Bachya, the other being Rav Bachya ibn Pakuda, and he wrote no peirush on the Talmud. He learned the revealed Torah from the Rashba, heard also from Rav Dan ben Yosef Ashkenazi, and served as a darshan in his city. The words of kabbalah he brings in his peirush on the Torah he marks as hints to the words of the Ramban, of whom he wrote that he showed the way that ought to be walked, though he did not learn from him directly.

In 5051/1291 he began writing his peirush on the Torah in the form of midrashim, gathering the four layers of interpretation current in his time and binding them together under a single pasuk. The first is peshat, the plain sense, and here he names Rabbeinu Chananel and the Rashba as his guides. The second is drash, the sayings of Chazal on the pesukim. The third is a peirush of the mind, resting on what he set out at the opening: that our Torah is from the Ribono shel Olam and holds all the wisdoms within it. The fourth is the way of light, which is kabbalah. Each parashah opens with a pasuk from Mishlei together with the peirush of Rabbeinu Yonah, for he held that the middot are the ground of keeping the mitzvot.

His own hand is felt in the clarity of his phrasing, in which he set out the writings of earlier mekubalim that had been closed to most of the public, easing the way for the reader. That manner of writing spread the sefer widely already in his own time; the Tosafot Yom Tov wrote a peirush on it, Tov Taam, and brings that in many kehillot it was learned regularly every Shabbat. The manuscript of some of the midrashim he cites has been lost, so that his sefer is now their only source. Mekubalim of standing, among them the Ramak in Pardes Rimonim, leaned on his writings in clarifying the nature of the sefirot. He mentions the Zohar only twice, and beyond the Sefer HaBahir and the works of the Ramban he does not name his kabbalistic sources.

The peirush was first printed in Naples in 5252/1492, and not fewer than ten supercommentaries were written on it. Beside it he left Kad HaKemach, eighty-two drashot on emunah and mussar arranged alphabetically, which take in a peirush on Megillat Esther under the entry “Purim” (Constantinople, 5275/1515); Shulchan shel Arba, whose four gates treat the laws of the meal and the seudah of the tzaddikim in the World to Come; and a peirush on Masechet Avot. His kever is marked in a low cave on the slope beside Kibbutz Chukok in the lower Galil, a short walk from the kever of Chavakuk HaNavi.