“I Am the Mishnah That Speaks in Your Mouth”

The man who wrote the most exacting law code in Jewish history kept a secret diary. In it, for some fifty years, Rabbi Yosef Karo wrote down what was said to him by a heavenly teacher he called the Maggid — “the one who tells.” The Maggid did not appear as a vision. It spoke from Karo’s own mouth, and it identified itself again and again: “I am the Mishnah that speaks in your mouth.” The Oral Torah itself, as it were, had found a voice. It is told that it came to him as he repeated Mishnayot from memory.

A demanding teacher

The Maggid was not gentle. It urged Karo towards holiness in every detail of life: to sleep as little as he could, to eat and drink only what he needed and take no pleasure in it, to guard every thought, and never to let a moment pass without learning. It rebuked him when he fell short — for a heavier meal, an extra sleep, a moment of distraction. Alongside these demands it taught him the secrets of kabbalah: the sefirot, the souls of men, reincarnation, the meanings of the mitzvot.

The promises

The Maggid made Karo promises, and the diary records them. It promised that he would merit to settle in the Land of Israel — and he did. It promised that he would complete his great book, and that it would light up the eyes of all Israel — and the Beit Yosef and Shulchan Aruch have done so for nearly five hundred years. It promised him one more thing, which did not come to pass (see The Promise of Fire).

What was a maggid?

Rabbi Chaim Vital, the Arizal’s disciple, explains in his Sha’arei Kedushah that the visit of a maggid is one of the forms of ruach hakodesh, divine inspiration, given to those who sanctify themselves. Karo was not the only sage of his age to receive one; but his record of it is the richest we have.

How much we have

The diary was printed only in the next century, as Maggid Meisharim. The Chida reports that what reached print was only about one-fiftieth of the manuscript. The rest — like so much of that world — is lost.