יואל בעל שם

Rav Yoel Baal Shem of Zamosc (seventeenth century, d. before 5466/1706), called Rav Yoel Baal Shem the First, was a master of halachah and the hidden wisdom who became famed as a baal shem — a wielder of the holy Names for healing and rescue. He traveled the length of Podolia curing the sick in body and soul with tefillot and kameot, and driving out dybbukim with hashbaot — in the broken generation of tach v’tat, when a suffering people needed such men.

His deeds were recorded by sober hands: Rav Tzvi Hirsch Kaidanover, author of the Kav HaYashar, tells at length of Rav Yoel’s actions in Poznan in 5441–42 — summoning the destructive spirits of a haunted house to stand in din before the beit din of Poznan, and enforcing the psak against them — and preserves a kamea formula received from him. The sefarim Toldot Adam and Mifalot Elokim, printed with the haskamot of his grandson Rav Yoel Baal Shem the Second, gather his segulot and refuot; the Toldot Adam tells how in the flight of 5408, with the murderers’ boats closing on a refugee ship, Rav Yoel hung a kamea on the mast and the ship sped from their eyes.

He headed a yeshiva in Zamosc teaching both the revealed and the hidden Torah, and his son Rav Uri learned under the Taz in Ostroh and the Magen Avraham in Kalisz before standing at his father’s side as rosh yeshiva for nigleh. His descendants carried both his name and his craft — his grandson Rav Yoel the Second was likewise famed as a baal shem — and his memory stands at the head of the tradition of the baalei shem.