הרב אליהו די וידאש

Rav Eliyahu de Vidas (5276/1516–c. 5339/1579), the author of the Reishit Chochmah, was a mekubal of Tzfat and later the head of the rabbanim of Chevron. Born in Tzfat to Rav Moshe de Vidas, of a family whose roots lay in the Jewry of the Iberian peninsula, he was orphaned of his father in his youth, and his early years passed in suffering. He was a close talmid of the Ramak, Rav Moshe Cordovero, whose manuscripts passed to him at his rebbi’s petirah, and he learned as well from the Arizal and from Rav Avraham HaLevi Beruchim. He belonged to the chaburah of the Ramak and Rav Shlomo Alkabetz that would go out to the hills around Tzfat in self-imposed wandering — the “geirushin” — as a tikkun for the galut of the Shechinah, and he drew also from the writings of Rav Yitzchak of Acco.

In time he settled in Chevron, standing at the head of its rabbanim, and there, on 18 Adar 5335/1575, he completed the Reishit Chochmah — its name from the pasuk in Tehillim, “the fear of Hashem is the beginning of wisdom.” Built above all on the Zohar, the sefer joins mussar and kabbalah into a single path, opening the gates of yirat Shamayim and kedushah to every Jew and treating the sides of a man’s life in their inner meaning — down to a chapter on derech eretz, where he writes that one who is careful in his conduct with his fellow man lengthens his days. The sefer spread through Klal Yisrael in edition after edition, in abridgments, and in a Yiddish translation, and it has never left the learning of mussar. He also wrote Totzaot Chaim.

Rav Eliyahu was niftar in Chevron (Hebron) and is buried in its ancient beit hakevarot. The ohel over his kever, built by volunteers in the early 1930s and destroyed under Jordanian rule, was rebuilt in our own generation with the Jews returning to Hebron and restoring the old cemetery.