ישראל מסלנט

Rav Yisrael Lipkin of Salant (6 Cheshvan 5571/1810–25 Shevat 5643/1883), known in English sources as Israel Salanter, was the founder of the mussar movement in Lithuania. He was born in Zhagar to Leah and Rav Zev Wolf Lipkin, rav of Zhagar and later of Goldingen and Telz, author of the hagahot Ben Aryeh on the Talmud. At twelve he was sent to learn under Rav Tzvi Hirsh Broide in Salant — the town whose name he carried ever after — and at fourteen he married the daughter of Rav Yaakov HaLevi Eisenstein of Salant. There he met Rav Yosef Zundel of Salant, talmid of Rav Chaim of Volozhin, whom he held as his rebbe muvhak; asked in later years whether he had been Rav Zundel’s talmid, he answered only, “I saw him.” From Rav Zundel he received the yesod that mussar is a limud demanding its own set study.

Between 5600/1840 and 5608/1848 he served as rosh yeshiva in Vilna, where his open derashot on the mitzvot between man and his fellow, built on Chovot HaLevavot and Mesilat Yesharim, drew thousands, and he worked to found batei mussar for the broad public. In the cholera epidemic of 5608/1848 he ruled that the relief work needed on Shabbat be done by Jews themselves, and that on Yom Kippur of that year the public must eat to guard its health. When the government pressed him to head its new rabbinical school in Vilna, he refused and left for Kovno, where he set a mussar yeshiva in the Nevyozer Kloiz.

From 5617/1857 he lived in Prussia — Königsberg, and from 5620/1860 Memel, where he founded a beit mussar and moved merchants to close their shops on Shabbat. There he put out the journal Tevunah (5621/1861) of halachah and mussar, having already published in 5618/1858 the Iggeret HaMussar, a foundation text of the movement. In 5639/1879 he founded a kollel of avreichim in Kovno, and in 5640/1880 went to Paris for two years to strengthen the Russian immigrants there; he also labored for a translation of the Talmud into a European tongue, which he did not live to finish.

His derech rests on the two kinds of forces he saw in a man — the “clear” forces of the conscious mind and the “dark” forces beneath it, which drive a man more than his daat; only limud hamussar b’hitpaalut, the repetition of a maamar Chazal aloud and with feeling, plants the truths of Torah in the heart and mends the middot. His watchword came from a craftsman he found working late into the night: “As long as the candle burns, it is still possible to repair.” His talmidim — Rav Yitzchak Blazer, who gathered his rebbe’s writings in Ohr Yisrael, Rav Naftali Amsterdam, and Rav Simcha Zissel Ziv, the Alter of Kelm — carried the movement onward, and from his mussar grew the schools of Kelm, Slabodka, and Novardok. He was niftar in Königsberg on 25 Shevat 5643/1883; his kever there was located anew in 2007, and yeshivot bear his name — Knesset Yisrael of Slabodka, Or Yisrael in Petach Tikvah, and Ner Yisrael in America.