חיים בן בצלאל

Rav Chaim ben Betzalel (c. 5280/1520–6 Sivan 5348/1588) was a posek and rosh yeshivah in Ashkenaz, the elder brother of the Maharal of Prague. Born in Posen, the eldest of the four sons of Rav Betzalel, he learned in the yeshivot of Lublin under the Maharshal and under Rav Shalom Shachna, where the Rema was his companion in learning. In 5309/1549 he traveled to Ashkenaz and settled in Worms, standing at the head of a yeshivah and joining a chaburah of lomdei dikduk, and in 5324/1564 he moved to the kehillah of Friedberg in Hesse, where he dwelt until the end of his days, teaching Torah and horaah while declining to take upon himself the formal crown of av beit din.

His name in the annals of psak stands on the Vikuach Mayim Chaim, in which he took issue with the halachah-codes of his generation, and above all with the Torat Chatat of his old companion the Rema. Torah itself would be pushed aside, he argued, when every man could open a code for his answer, and the standing of the rabbanim would be lowered; a rav must reach his psak from the sugya itself; and a code fixes the minhagim of its author’s land upon all lands — the Rema, he wrote, set down the minhag of Poland even where the minhag of Ashkenaz differs. It was a machloket l’shem shamayim between two talmidim of one beit midrash, and the Rema’s defense was still being written generations later, when Rav Yosef Shaul Natanson answered the sefer in his Torat Moshe.

In 5338/1578 a fierce plague broke out in Frankfurt and Friedberg and took the maidservant of his house. His yeshivah ceased, and for two months he sat closed in his home — and in those months he wrote his mussar work Sefer HaChaim, in five parts, and the Igeret HaTiyul. Among his other works are Etz Chaim, on the wisdom of dikduk, and Be’er Mayim Chaim, a supercommentary on Rashi on the Torah.

He was niftar in Friedberg on Shavuot, 6 Sivan 5348/1588; his son Moshe served as parnas of the Friedberg kehillah. His sefarim were printed again and again — Sefer HaChaim in Krakow in 5353/1593, Igeret HaTiyul in Prague in 5365/1605, Vikuach Mayim Chaim in Amsterdam in 5472/1712 — many of the later printings with the encouragement of the leaders of the chassidut; in his haskamah to the Sefer HaChaim, the Ohev Yisrael of Apta wrote that its words were said with ruach hakodesh.