The History of Kabbala Part 9 - Meet Rav Shmuel Vital, Author of the "Shemone She'arim"

this torah class is brought to you by torahanytime.com okay good morning everyone i want to um continue in our series about the history of kabbalah we spoke extensively about madura kama the first edition of rebhambital the itzkayam which was not supposed to be released and a man by the name of yoshua benoon bribed robhamital's brother to access 600 pages um we discussed that we discussed the maduro basra which will kindly tell buried and was unearthed i want to discuss today what is called um the shmaina the eight gates these are the eight gates of rav shmuel vital is the son of king and the sha'aram are considered the most authoritative of all the works of kabbalah the most accurate the most precise the most sifted the ones that have been corrected um and let's begin on pedro zion with what the qidah writes about the shema shahram it's already been 30 years that the shema shaaram have gone out now he writes on the bottom it doesn't mean it was published but it means that the manuscript was allowed to be copied mitsudarim arranged me ben from the son of and his name was moreno vital you could rely there is no second edition of these gates commanded that they be hidden uh moreno of yaakov therefore you will find in the safer derek that was arranged by maharam and this is the safers called by everyone it's many deep that are not in the sh there are small vital composed because urushima vital did not have the second edition therefore in other words like this the shmaina sha'arim contains only the the hidushim of the first edition of the town but it does not have the from the basra madhura basra because reframital really commanded that the madhurabas will be buried and therefore you will find in those who had access to maduro bastrokha that rushmove doesn't discuss therefore says one who wants to learn in the most accurate of the suffrage shall you should learn you should learn from the um composed and that is uh the the darach that the mara maru mayor papparish uh composed that's called the eighth cayenne um which has maduro basra regarding the ma okay so b doesn't make the the he does sort of vouching for the uh accuracy authenticity and clarity of something called the shmaina shaaram so now we give we begin the section on page you see the chapter heading okay so as we're going to write um as we as we draw forward with the help of hashem his schema daito ida and vital to be queef to the future generations as tyra rabbi the body of tar that he received from his rabbi kasw as we mentioned was uh the end of his first writing so rob khanvital decided that he would give over to future generations the torah of the arie based on his uh the end of his first series of writing which is called ethem the head if not preferred the text of this particular word called it's higher more than any other of his works that he wrote later for hidden reasons that we're going to explain in that song we examined that either of kai and vital felt that he he sort of added to the tour of the aria and he didn't want that to get out or he felt he unleashed and released the two deep information but he preferred what he wrote originally which is known as the it's therefore for this purpose he did not give to his son his mom the only thing he gave over to his son was the it's kind and he appointed him with a responsibility that was that was placed on his shoulder for future numbers so basically vital wrote things before he wrote things after but he preferred the time and that's what he gave over to his son to disseminate or to give over for future generations everything else yeah he didn't give over officially guarded his treasure with great faithfulness the nag by kamingag and he accorded himself like the holy practices of his father limo bataclas and he hid it from the purview of of most people's eyes he didn't allow anyone to copy it he didn't even allow anyone to look at it only those sages that had a specific times to learn with him to these sages he learned with them however on the other he gave over to complete the arrangement of the safer to arrange it in the best possible way what that means is as follows he decided if his father gave it to him if he's going to print it he's not going to print it exactly the way his father gave it to him but he's going to try to arrange the safer the manuscript no the it's kind which would be felt was that corpus of information that was fit to give over to a future michael bellam but ravita like his father you see the refrain vital did not package this manuscript it's kind of the exact way that rizal said it as we learned that rizal said things in a more random way one day he gave a josh about topic a in top in the joshua topic a you needed to have known about this introductory concept and that reference and he sort of wove it all together and he made reference to many things that the uninitiated would have no idea what he's talking about but after hearing him a number of times you're able to string together what these hakdamos were so but when kind of put it down he arranged it in in order of topics so everything was from that read but the presentation was packaging likewise movietal felt that he needed to package what his father gave over to him repackage it maybe more orderly maybe different so bital in a way was following the way of his father by changing from his father so just like his father repackaged that he repackaged his father that's that and what he repackaged it as what gave over was it he changed it into something called shemanisharam but the shema sheriff still didn't have the material that they were kindly tall didn't want to be right right correct he um completed it with whatever was left out the taistafis and editions of because that he found in his father's writing now it's interesting he writes on the bottom some of these editions were based on the later writings of rebecca and vital that ultimately were kind of buried so apparently it did creep into the shemanesh rm things that ultimately will kamital did not give license to publish okay correct right and some things that that rizal himself wrote now we don't have that much from what arizona himself wrote but vital did use some of what that rizal himself wrote to add to the it's kind where did he get that from uh apparently there were there must have been there must have been some remnants of some some semblance of myself the ichiro wrote some footnotes and he did write some editorial comments until he produced what is known as possibly the greatest work of kabbalah known as aram so the shema sharma was basically a repackaging of the itskaim with editions of rafital and editions of the rizal himself which are considered the most precise accurate authoritative of all the kabbalah they are considered the most authoritative of all the works of the re and from heaven they they gave this honor to be far of haim shannon that it was his books that were received by the sibor and the safer eight originally of the vital nobody really knows about they don't have those manuscripts i don't know we do have something called but it's not the original it's time of apparently what what is considered most authoritative by also the shema shahram now whether he writes in a footnote on page aleph there is writes about himself in shout outs that after the death of his father they arose um and what they were able to accomplish what kind we tell himself was not able to accomplish what does that mean that means uh i guess he felt he was able to package it and uh and and clarify and sift worried about what he was saying and he what he what schmovital feels he was able to produce was it was of higher quality than earlier okay now now what is the main difference in the arrangement between the way rashmovital arranged it and the way raphael originally arranged it the main change in the arrangement of vershmo in his arrangement of the eight gay it's differently than his father the heinous shuhu pizza as sasha he scattered the first gate of the kisiari into all hrm called kettava each piece where it's applicable apparently there was one chapter of that re that needed more uh separation this is a better distribution right he divided the gate of the statements of the raspberry and the the gates of the marauder to two gates because we learned earlier and this was on page te zayan that originally the eight zhayim which was the classic work of the was divided into seven parts number one it was called hakadomo is say there hashtag number two b or ma marie has zaya number three tanakh number four cavanaugh's tamiya mitsuba koi destruction and now he's dividing it into he divided sharma murray rajvi and sharma razal into two parts and we're going to see in total what the eight parts are oh another fundamental difference shapes of gammas he divided the various reports of the tamir mital into different sharim okay so now we're up to the next we're now on page i did you didn't get it but those those drashas that the tamidim heard that were incorporated now into the shemanisharam he put in the words means that means in the name of our my master idea tells al-qaeda meshes there are certain things of that heard from other talmidim and they were now being incorporated in the shemanisharim but it was clear that this this was not heard directly from um the aree but rather heard it from the tummy diary now raviyakov allah says in the later editions of the shemanisha aram the the letter mem shemam was removed so we don't know anymore what rouhami tells her directly from nari and what he heard from taomi they moved heard from larry okay now we're going to read a piece of what himself writes about what his modis apparante was in produce englishman asharam the zealous manager this word writes a martyr he was very young when he did this it's a it's sort of a a token of humility the young one meaning uh the unworthy one a marty alibi i said to myself and mostly you used to fray abba mari barabbi ganous and how how long are these manuscripts just gonna basically gather dust right so i'll serve god and nobody else will have a share in my father's teachings now the truth is whoever reads the works of my father will weary some of them because there are like the torahs was given on sinai what did he mean to say by that just like the torah in muhammad basically there's no chronology in the torah and therefore it's hard to get a it's scattered it's not there's a lack of clarity for the uninitiated i mean there he was you know a great guttle if he scattered it like this he must have done it for a purpose it would have been so simple for him to organize it in a better way so you have to imagine that if he scattered and maybe he wanted to make it more difficult for the hoi polloi to be able to put two things together whereas the bigger zadek in the bigger london they would be able to ascertain what he was really trying to do but maybe as the generations decreased even the great people could not decipher through this you know uh mixed order now it could be also that arizona writes about himself that he was not able to write because there were not enough pens in the world to record all the kedusham he said in fact he said he had a hard time every time he opened his mouth he felt like it was a torrent of wisdom that was just going to rush forth from his mouth and he needed to open up just a pinhole like a mother who suckles a baby who if the hole would be even a little bit bigger the baby would choke so we can imagine that riza was like a personality who he had just so much was gushing forth maybe it was not possible to organize it and that was left to his tummy them you know that rizal said i'm here for a year and ten months that's all he was doing he just let it let it out and then afterwards they had the decades and decades and decades of editing anyway you see this is this is very interesting you see um you see we're not learning kabbalah but it's more of the history and understanding what happened because it's such a confusing uh subject you know that reason i'm taught for a very short amount of time and you know you hear different names of svarim so this gives you the an organized understanding just of the history of it okay so says um since it's so difficult to understand the torah of my father it's like in mokta mohammed torah passage these are quotes from different gemaras of questions there are on the mishnahs which are unclear and they all apply to subhamnita says to my father's torah has honestly no secret was beyond him he gathered and provided for all the who thirsted he was so dedicated to gathering all the info of the ari that it was not possible for him to organize it and therefore hashem is as whoever reads them will see straight as my father would have wanted me to say i ain't doing this for my own ego and i'm not doing this to make a name for myself i'm doing what my father would have wanted me to do um i am confident in the hustle of god that through the medium of this work the world will fill up with knowledge because i bothered myself physically financially and the truth is my vision is not like it once was basically my strength is waning so even though he started off he's a young man apparently his his curse were depleting let the world be filled with the splendor of of kabbalah in kenya basically i wanted people to be able to find whatever they needed and therefore i made a very comprehensive index and then basically enumerates what the eighth what the eight gateways are the achazham as shemaina aram then he describes and counts the eight gates kefisha siddhara at the end of every shower he wrote a seom and he wrote the date that he completed that char so basically he began from the scene of shah damma is on your gimbal the year tough test that's and he finished saddar 54. basically five years later and where did he do what just to repackage yeah that's what basically it was now did he have any major new fiducia the editor was just repackaging five years to repackage his father's work i'll tell you um i guess or no i wouldn't say but i just did this yesterday i'll give you an example so i'm working on something in english right so the first step that's is it's transcribed from the share then it's edited okay because even if it's transcribed maybe they're spelling and grammar fine so now what do you have you have an accurate transcription without mistakes you can't print that right so then i have to go through it i would say right i would say right i would say the first round of going through the transcription of one chapter which is about 10 pages took a good three hours first round i still need another round maybe another a different chapter yesterday took for two pages about an hour because you have all the information but the question is you don't write the way you say you know that might actually um it takes a very long time it takes much longer than you would have thought this is your own words and this is right and there's some of my own words you know what your skills will improve as time goes on yeah but it's a very it's a long concept you know my own professional career later on okay um now now rushmore vital has the shemanisharam now what so now it's ready uh send it to eichler's right no he decided not to publicize it so after years and years and years of repackaging the yetzkaim he did not want it to be publicized fully baloish without restriction like he says at the end of the show kavanaugh is that vietnam basically he wrote a warning that nobody could copy it without my permission over sony mamish without my will shiloh and that they cannot take it out of my possession kian versus my whole life it will remain under my domain my jurisdiction [Music] basically he wrote that even after his death if anybody wants to uh to to copy it they have to follow his admonitions okay basically it was uh it was restricted okay here we go next sheets of gum safer okay so now the question is how do we have the schweinsteiger right with great difficulty vyakov semach was successful to copy paper the new innovative things that he learned and heard from rashfital when he gave shir in the sheman asharam and ravyakov sema gathered it into a volume called ranuliyakov like he writes in his hakdama to the safer koba rama he right by the way rashmovital lived where in damascus everything now is taking place in damascus and afterwards yaakov says i came to damascus and i saw khaverim learning the suffrage harav in the house of smokital and in his house they would read half of shabbos from half the day and on and on friday night now he rav taos reports of has two great swarm with a very fine print the name of one of them was it's one other one is it's hadastaif now what is it is the jira wrote when he was young before he learned fanari there are pipsad remembers and jirosh and nara it's hadas actually we've quoted that one time on tehillim so it's interesting wrote a book before he met dari he wrote it more but remembers and it's not a picabala and he may meet the array in spot or he might have been domestic in sas so he only spent time with him for a little over a year a year um right a year and 10 months so the majority of his life i don't know how old he was when he met and he eventually moved back to damascus and that's where he's buried we know how old he was when he met the eureka first time because here it says he wrote it before he met diarrhea that's right yeah we do know i don't have information right now okay so these are the two eighths in that vital had the eight zhayim and the eights had asked him and whenever i saw this there i wrote it in a safer called ronald yakov and it's based on the parshiots and the and the philos of the different times of the year also biakov sama gathered other phrases from the itzkayan and he put it in their place and he called he wrote so rabbiakov was one of the great talmidam of ravital another name that's important to be our mind is likewise ramir paprish was successful in in uh drawing from the rubric from like he says in hakodama to the safer derek he says i was busy in the melaka shema for four years from the year tafe until tafyod so basically that is 1645 to 1650 and a little bit more i did not complete i didn't have the merit to complete learning everything from rashford as i would have wanted to until the great bitter day came that i was exiled from um basically he says i did not complain i didn't have this close to complete being in arizona until the bitter day came that i was exiled from israel and i came to damascus meaning he's saying i learned um in peace in israel from 1645 to 1650 but then i came to damascus to the holy house of smokital then i go in there the the muslims uprising you see shamracks i was there for a short amount of time i was only there eight days in damascus but luckily the gonna have gone after you mad me i said i go i was able to steal a couple of things from his house what exactly he means he must have uh he must have he must have looked copied and uh published basically basically it must not have been easy to get access to the ribs mobital is seeing the language that uh mayor paprish writes he says bottom line is it was not easy to access anything from his house ubraka karadavula you know he was a chip off the old black the same way vita was also very careful and guarded so to azure vital making sure that this would not be revealed and look further when the shla hakadosh visited the house of smokital and we actually read that a few weeks ago there was the stockholder says when he was in damascus he also had a was given a look at some of the writings of kai and vital let's see if we could quickly go to that um the writes that that one and he gave me the safer it was very hard to read because it was written in saab svardi but you should know from the day the torah was written there was never a safer like this now that was referring to the azkaim that was now referring to the shema shahram the khaira now let's see if we could uh just finish this off we find that rabbyakov samach and writes an incredible description of the shannon shaaram more than all the other manuscripts in their in what they encompass in their clarity this is what rabbiakov writes everything that i wrote here on the server under the archive are from the sifrey harav meaning this form of vital from what i remember when i desired this khachma i don't remember the order i don't remember the phraseology and the language i just remember hearing it so therefore i want you to know i definitely added to what i heard words and letters where i detracted okay we should praise not god ado the master of all writings that's it from that's a play on words we normally say that he possesses all the writings of him his father and that is his son because he's an ammon in the oit source of hashem the oil source of caim and he has the eighth kaiyam of italian without any mixture and these are the two ethem now the godless of these svarim are many uh ways there are many um jerusalem that have never been revealed beat on the zayah being and i'll give you the last page here's the last page fine it's very organized there also says that in front of each drush there's a small hakadama which encompasses the whole drush and then afterwards is the longer version okay so here he's uh praising the greatness of the shemanisharam software every friday night and shabbos after shao should us we would hear from raphael jerusalem and kavanaugh is in this forum and we would read this zoyar and i would try to remember it to be able to record it on matsushabus but he says look this is from my memory whatever i'm telling you is from my memory and you're going to find um koza tim sullivan the commentary is not for him okay so this is uh it gives us a little bit of a history and a flavor for the role of small vital in the dissemination of the the kabbalah of the town most authentic work was the it's hayem which he repackaged from nari and that was later repackaged and smoothed out and corrected and authenticated through the shemina sha'aram of rashmovital who also did not intend to print it he also guarded it he didn't let anybody copy it over but what we have today however we got it is the most authoritative text of the suffrage do we have anybody ever find the original manuscripts from the re not that i know okay everybody say have a good day you've just experienced another torah class brought to you by torahanytime.com