new certainties and new mysticism 391
the only work of his to survive. Travel from Egypt to the land of Israel
was not difficult at that time, and it is probable that he paid a special
visit to Galilee to celebrate Lag BaOmer at Meiron. His pupil Hayyim
Vital recorded that Luria brought his small son there together with his
whole family, cutting his hair there according to the well- known cus-
tom and spending a day of feasting and celebration. At any rate, in 1569
or early 1570, Luria moved to Safed and settled there.^17
The immediate attraction for Luria seems to have been the prospect
of studying with Moshe b. Yaakov Cordovero, who was of Spanish and
Portuguese origin and, as the head of the Portuguese yeshivah in Safed,
was deeply immersed in the study of kabbalah. In 1548, at the age of
twenty- six, Cordovero had written a major book on the notion of the
divine, the cosmos, the worship of God and other such major themes of
the kabbalah, making eclectic use of the Zohar and the ecstatic kab-
balah of Avraham Abulafia. By 1570 he was a major figure in Safed,
with a large crowd of disciples. Cordovero’s main efforts had been in
the production of a coherent speculative system by synthesizing previous
ideas, relying on philosophers (especially Maimonides) for a purified
concept of God as without attributes. He took from the kabbalah trad-
ition the structure of the sefirot, which he saw as both emanations of
God and part of God’s substance. Cordovero’s puzzlement about the
relationship of the sefirot to the divine will led him to the notion that,
in order to be revealed through the sefirot, God has to conceal himself:
‘revealing is the cause of concealment and concealment is the cause of
revealing.’^18
In some of his Zohar glosses, Luria refers to Cordovero as his teacher,
and he was just one of the impressive group of students of kabbalah
who had gathered in Safed to benefit from Cordovero’s vast knowledge.
But when Cordovero died at the end of 1570, Luria became the centre
of an academy of his own, with at least thirty disciples, and in the two
years before his death he imparted a radical new way of understanding
the significance of the kabbalah. Luria taught orally, delivering a flood
of ideas to his pupils on how to commune with the souls of the right-
eous, how to concentrate on the divine names, and how to achieve
proper kavanah, intensity in mystical meditation. Writing almost noth-
ing, and teaching for so short a period, ensured that Luria’s system was
by no means coherent. His later influence can be attributed to the con-
spicuous sanctity of his personal conduct as much as to his religious
doctrines, but it is certain that he believed himself to have made new
discoveries in the kabbalah (see below), and it is probable that he