הרב אריה לייב גינצבורג

Rav Aryeh Leib ben Asher Ginzberg (c. 5455/1695–15 Tammuz 5545/1785), known across the generations as the Shaagat Aryeh after his sefer, was among the sharpest and most independent of the Acharonim. He was born in Minsk, where his father Rav Asher served as rav, and in his youth he was recognized as an illui. He founded a famous yeshiva in the city, teaching by way of pilpul; a dispute with the rav of Minsk, Rav Yechiel Halpern, author of the Seder HaDorot, eventually drove him out. Around 5505/1745 he came to Volozhin and opened a yeshiva for select students, and served for a time as its rav.

Much of his life was spent in poverty, and he held himself to great stringency — strict upon the prohibition of chadash outside Eretz Yisrael, he would travel from town to town carrying his own pot and grits so as to eat only what he could permit himself. Like the Vilna Gaon after him, he opposed the excessive pilpul of the age and sought psak drawn from the plain sense of the sugya, weighing Shas and the Rishonim by his own reasoning without leaning on the later authorities. It was said that he completed the Shas a thousand times. He met the Gaon and remarked that all the sages of Yisrael were as a garlic-peel to him beside Rav Eliyahu of Vilna. Among his talmidim were Rav Chaim of Volozhin and Rav Simcha of Volozhin.

From 5525/1765 to the end of his life he was rav, av beit din and rosh yeshiva in Metz in France; offered the post at the age of seventy, he assured the wary community he would serve them many years, and indeed led them some twenty years, niftar at about ninety. His fame rests on the Shaagat Aryeh, a work of halachic discussions cast as questions and answers, mostly on Orach Chaim, first printed in Frankfurt in 5516; beside it stand Turei Even on Rosh Hashanah, Chagigah and Megillah, and Gevurot Ari on Taanit, Yoma and Makkot. He was niftar on the 15th of Tammuz and buried in the Jewish cemetery of Metz.