הרב משה חיים לוצאטו

Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (5467/1707–26 Iyar 5506/1746), the Ramchal, author of the Mesilat Yesharim, was a mekubal, poet, and master of machshavah whose sefarim became pillars of mussar and emunah. Born in the ghetto of Padua, Italy, to Rav Yaakov Chai Luzzatto, a merchant and talmid chacham of the Ashkenazi kehillah, and to Diamante, he learned lashon hakodesh, poetry, and rhetoric under Rav Yitzchak Chaim Cantarini, and Torah under his rebbe muvhak, Rav Yeshayahu Bassan. It was said that at fourteen he knew the whole Talmud Bavli, the writings of the Ari, and the Zohar by heart. At eighteen he published his first work, Leshon Limudim, on the craft of Hebrew style; before twenty he had composed a hundred and fifty mizmorim in the manner of Tehillim; and in 5486/1726 he received semichah and stood at the head of the chaburah “Mevakshei Hashem,” which learned the Zohar in unbroken shifts.

On Rosh Chodesh Sivan 5487/1727, by his own account, a maggid began to reveal to him deep secrets of kabbalah, which he set down in writing. When word spread through his talmid Rav Yekusiel Gordon of Vilna, coming so soon after the Shabtai Tzvi calamity, it aroused the alarm of rabbanim across Europe, above all Rav Moshe Chagiz; in Av 5490/1730 the young Ramchal was made to give up his kabbalistic writings and bind himself by oath before the rabbanim of Venice. In 5491/1731 he married Tzipporah, daughter of Rav David Pinzi, rav of Mantua. In 5495/1735 he set out for Amsterdam; passing through Frankfurt he was made to sign a further declaration, and the chest of his writings was sent there, where most were buried and some burned. Only scattered manuscripts survived; his Tikkunim Chadashim came to light in the Bodleian Library only in 5718/1958.

In Amsterdam he was embraced by the Portuguese kehillah, earned his bread polishing diamonds, and learned in the beit midrash Etz Chaim. There he wrote and printed the sefarim by which all Israel knows him: Mesilat Yesharim (5500/1740), which leads a person step by step out of the grip of the yetzer, and Derech Hashem on the foundations of emunah, with Da’at Tevunot and Derech Tevunot beside them. The Vilna Gaon said of the Mesilat Yesharim that its first ten perakim contain not one superfluous word, and that had its author still been alive he would have walked from Vilna to learn at his feet; a century later Rav Yisrael Salanter set the sefer at the heart of the mussar learning of the yeshivot, where it remains to this day.

In 5503/1743 he went up with his wife and son to Eretz Yisrael and settled in Akko. On 26 Iyar he was niftar in a plague, together with his wife and his only son. His original beit knesset in old Akko was torn down in 1758 and a mosque built over it; in its place the Yidden of Akko received a small building to its north, which stands and serves as a shul bearing the Ramchal’s name to this day.