Pammy Brenner
The Lublin Jewish cemetery, founded in the mid-16th century, is notable for two famous rabbis buried there: Rabbi Ya’akov Yitzchok Horowitz, the Chozeh of Lublin, and Rabbi Shlomo Yechiel Luria, the Maharshal. I had the privilege of discussing each of their lives at their final resting places. The Maharshal, rabbi during the golden age of Torah study in the 16th century, succeeded Rabbi Shalom Shachna as head of the Lublin Yeshiva, and eventually went on to begin his own yeshiva. The yeshiva he built was focused on a new way of Talmudic study, with an emphasis on returning to the sources of Jewish law, or halakhah, to chart a clear trajectory of how those legal conclusions were reached. Because of his passionate emphasis on halakhah, his tombstone includes the line, “he is requested in the Heavenly Yeshiva for religion and halakhah.” A (likely apocryphal) story is told about him: A student of the Maharshal once asked him what to do about Jews who walk around without kippahs. He responded by saying that one must focus on their interior, as opposed to their exterior, just like his method of Torah study was focused on the interior core of Torah. The title of the Maharshal’s magnum opus, the Yam Shel Shlomo, or the Sea of Shlomo, was carefully chosen to be polemical in nature. Not long before the publication of his book, another rabbi, Rabbi Yosef Karo, published a code of law entitled the Shulḥan Arukh. Rabbi Karo’s book provided a uniform list of rules as a “Set Table” (as the title describes). The Maharshal, in opposition to this view, published his halakhic work using the imagery of a sea, implying that the law is a lively and vast enterprise, as opposed to Karo’s wish that it be a rigid code.
The Chozeh of Lublin, born in the mid-18th century, was representative of a vastly different religious landscape. As a third generation Chassidic rabbi, he established the role of the tzadik, a spiritual mediator between the people and God. The creation of the tzadik meant that people were wholly dependent upon him. The Chozeh, or Seer/Prophet, was called as such because even was considered capable of seeing into people’s souls. Under his leadership, the Chassidic movement greatly flourished. As legend has it, there was another rabbi in the Lublin community who was resentful of the Chozeh’s popularity. People were leaving his congregation to flock to the Chassidic one, so he tells the Chozeh to instruct the people to not attend his sermons. The next day, the Chozeh makes an announcement that no one should attend his sermons because he’s not a Torah scholar. In response, the people were so impressed by his humility that even more townsfolk attended his lecture the next week. The rabbi then tells the Chozeh to make a second announcement that he is a big Torah scholar, so that the people will think he is egotistical and stop attending his lectures, to which the Chozeh responded that he cannot lie. As a Chassidic rabbi, he took on the burdens of all of people who came to him. The position took such a toll on him that by the end of his life he was living in partial isolation. When he died on the holiday of Simchas Torah, his opponents (the Misnagedim) claimed that he hurt himself, whereas the Chassidim reported that he died of heartbreak.
The veracity of these tales notwithstanding, the extent to which legendary folklore has developed around these two figures highlights the immense positions they hold in the world of Jewish history and imagination. Spending time in Lublin helped provide a cultural, historic and geographic context for me to understand the worlds that these two Torah scholars occupied.
