הרב חיים בן עטר

Rav Chaim ben Attar (4 Av 5456/1696–15 Tammuz 5503/1743), known for all generations as the Or HaChaim HaKadosh after his commentary on the Torah, was among the greatest mefarshim of the Acharonim — parshan, mekubal and posek, among the greatest rabbanim of Morocco and beloved in the chassidic world. He was born in Salé (Sali) in Morocco to a family of the megorashim, descendants of the exiles of Spain; his father was Rav Moshe, and from before the age of nine he learned under his grandfather Rav Chaim ben Attar the elder, whose name he carried. He married Fatzunyah, daughter of his wealthy kinsman Rav Moshe ben Attar, in whose house he could learn free of the yoke of parnassah; he stood at the head of a yeshiva in Sali, gave two derashot a day, and served as a gabbai tzedakah for the city’s poor. As sons were not born to him, only daughters, he later took a second wife, Esther bat Meir Bibas; both wives were with him until his last day in Yerushalayim.

With the petirah of his father-in-law in 5484/1724 the family’s support collapsed, and years of court battles, heavy taxes and even a short imprisonment followed. In those very years of upheaval — through the fighting that tore Morocco after the death of its king — he wrote most of Chefetz Hashem, chiddushim on Berachot, Shabbat, Horayot and Chullin, and traveled to Amsterdam to print it in 5492/1732. He later settled for a time in Fez, teaching Torah alongside the rosh yeshiva Rav Shmuel ibn Elbaz, until the great famine of 5498/1738 drove him to Tetuan, where he resolved to go up to Eretz Yisrael; in Iyar 5499/1739 he set out by way of Algiers for Italy.

He reached Livorno on erev Shavuot 5499/1739. The notables of the kehillah supported him; his shiurim and derashot filled the hall until there was no room to enter, and in Italy he printed his Or HaChaim on the Torah and Pri To’ar on Yoreh De’ah. Around him he gathered a chaburah of talmidim from Morocco, Algiers and Italy, and a va’ad of Livorno notables took upon itself the monthly support of the yeshiva he would found in Eretz Yisrael. On erev Rosh Chodesh Av 5501/1741 he sailed with some thirty talmidim and their households, by way of Messina and Alexandria — delayed there when word came of an epidemic in Yerushalayim — and in 5502/1742 he entered Yerushalayim and founded his yeshiva, Midrash Knesset Yisrael. There the young Chida, Rav Chaim Yosef David Azulai, learned before him, and wrote of a master whose heart beat with Talmud and whose holiness was that of a malach of Hashem.

Less than a year after his arrival, on Shabbat, 15 Tammuz 5503/1743, he was niftar at forty-seven and was buried on Har HaZeitim. It is told among the chassidim that at seudah shlishit that Shabbat, before any word could have reached Europe, the Baal Shem Tov cried out that the light of the West had gone out. Beside the Chefetz Hashem and the Pri To’ar — which engages the Pri Chadash of Rav Chizkiyah de Silva — his Rishon LeTzion (Constantinople 5510/1750) holds chiddushim on the Talmud, on parts of the Shulchan Aruch, on the five Megillot and on Nevi’im and Mishlei. But his name stands on the Or HaChaim: the commentary on the Torah built along the four paths of Pardes, printed and reprinted many times — and his commentary on the Torah is learned today on this site’s own library pages, alongside the other mefarshim on the Chumash.