12 Facts About Isaac Luria

Isaac Luria is considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah, his teachings being referred to as Lurianic Kabbalah.

Every custom of Luria was scrutinized, and many were accepted, even against previous practice.

Isaac Luria was born in 1534 in Jerusalem in what is the Old Yishuv Courtyard to an Ashkenazi father, Solomon, and a Sephardic mother.

Isaac Luria shall begin to deliver the believers from the qlippoth.

Isaac Luria is destined to reveal many hidden mysteries in the Torah and to expound on the Zohar.

Isaac Luria's uncle placed him under the best Jewish teachers, including the leading rabbinic scholar David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra.

Isaac Luria showed himself a diligent student of rabbinical literature and under the guidance of another uncle, Bezalel Ashkenazi, best known as the author of the Gathered Method, he became proficient in that branch of Jewish learning.

In 1569, Isaac Luria moved back to the Jerusalem Sanjak, and after a short sojourn there, where his new kabbalistic system seemed to have met with little success, he settled in the Safed Sanjak.

Bereft of their most prominent authority and teacher, the community looked for new guidance, and Isaac Luria helped fill Cordovero's former role.

Soon Isaac Luria had two classes of disciples: novices, to whom he expounded elementary kabbalah, and initiates, who became the repositories of his secret teachings and his formulas of invocation and conjuration.

On Shabbat, Isaac Luria dressed himself in white and wore a fourfold garment to signify the four letters of the Tetragrammaton.

Isaac Luria delivered his lectures spontaneously, without ever writing down his ideas.