new certainties and new mysticism 379
communities. With great clarity and precision, these sages laid down
rules for piety in daily life, interleaving ethical teachings seamlessly with
the practical halakhah. They dealt with blessings, prayers, the Sabbath
and festivals; dietary laws; laws for mourners, vows, respect for parents
and charity; personal status (including marriage and divorce); and Jew-
ish civil law as it was applied in the diaspora. How did their codes come
to be so influential?^1
The remarkable private diary of the Sephardi sage Yosef Karo,
entitled Maggid Mesharim (‘Preacher of Righteousness’), records the
nocturnal visits over some fifty years of a maggid (meaning in this case
a heavenly teacher), a personification of the Mishnah, who urged the
sage not just to moral behaviour but to asceticism, rebuking him for
drinking too much wine or eating meat, encouraging him to hope for a
martyr’s death, and exhorting him to study the mysteries of the kabba-
lah. Hard though it may seem to us to correlate the dry clarity of the
Shulhan Arukh with a mystical maggid who issued his teachings in the
form of automated speech which came out of Karo’s mouth, it is clear
that this maggid was also experienced by Karo as an integral part of his
religious persona when engaged in the clarification of the halakhah.
Intense concentration was required for the maggid to come, as Karo
acknowledged:
I rose early as usual in order to recite extracts of the Mishnah. I recited
about forty chapters, but as it was still night I went back to sleep and slept
until the sun shone on the earth. Then I began to recite. I was grieved that
I would perhaps not be visited as usual and continued reciting until it was
said to me, ‘Be strong and of good courage ... for although you have
thought that I had left and forsaken you [this is not so], though it is what
you have deserved.’Karo’s authority came not just from his exceptional halakhic know-
ledge but from a deep, and widely acknowledged, personal piety.^2
Leaving the Iberian peninsula soon after his birth, Karo had spent
much of his youth studying with kabbalists in Greece, under Ottoman
rule, moving to Safed in Galilee in 1536 at the age of forty- eight. By this
time he had already spent more than a decade working on a commen-
tary on a fourteenth- century code, the Arba’ah Turim of Yaakov b.
Asher (see Chapter 13), with the explicit aim of sorting out conflicting
rules in existing codes and ending the variety of local customs which
had grown up. Karo’s aim was practical: ‘to ensure that there should be
one law and one Torah’. The Arba’ah Turim commended itself as the