The Voice on Shavuot Night

Open the book Maggid Meisharim — the diary in which Rabbi Yosef Karo recorded the words of his heavenly teacher — and before the diary itself begins, you find a letter. It was written by his friend and companion, the poet and kabbalist Rabbi Shlomo HaLevi Alkabetz, to the circle of scholars they had left behind in Salonica. In it Alkabetz tells what happened on one Shavuot night in the early 1530s, somewhere in the Ottoman Balkans, and why the two of them were now on their way to the Land of Israel. The printers of the diary placed this letter at its head as its introduction; the Shelah HaKadosh later brought it again in his section on Shavuot. It is the earliest account we have of a Tikkun Leil Shavuot — and the closest we can come to hearing Karo and Alkabetz in their own time.

“We agreed to stay awake”

The letter opens without ceremony: “דעו לכם כי הסכמנו החסיד נר״ו ואני עבדו ועבדיכם מהחברים…” — “Know that the pious one, may God protect him, and I, his servant and yours, of the companions, agreed…” — to banish sleep from their eyes on the night of Shavuot. Alkabetz arranged the order of study himself, and he lists it with care. They chanted, aloud and with the cantillation, the account of Creation; the giving of the Torah at Sinai in Exodus; the covenant that followed it; the Ten Commandments and the Shema in Deuteronomy; and the last chapter of the Torah, the death of Moses. Then the haftarot of the festival — Ezekiel’s chariot and the prayer of Habakkuk — and psalms, the whole Song of Songs, the whole book of Ruth, and the end of Chronicles. Then they turned to the Mishnah and began the order of Zera’im, and after it the teachings of kabbalah. Everything, he insists, was done in awe and trembling, with the right melody and the right notes — “it is hard to believe.”

Midnight

They had finished two tractates of the Mishnah when, at midnight, a voice began to speak from the mouth of Rabbi Yosef Karo — a great voice, every letter sounded clearly, rising in a long melody and growing louder as it went on. The neighbours could hear it but could not understand the words. The friends fell on their faces; none of them could lift his eyes for fear.

The voice spoke to them as to beloved children: “שמעו ידידי המהדרים מן המהדרים, ידידי אהובי, שלום לכם, אשריכם ואשרי ילדתכם…” — “Listen, my friends, most devoted of the devoted, my beloved, peace to you; fortunate are you, and fortunate she who bore you.” It named itself: the Mishnah, “the mother who chastises her children.” They were fortunate in this world and the next, it told them, because they had taken it upon themselves to crown her on that night. Her honour had long been cast down to the dust, and they had raised it up again; their learning had risen to the heavens. “ואל תפסיקו הלימוד, כי חוט של חסד משוך עליכם, ותורתכם ערבה לפני הקב״ה” — “Do not stop your learning, for a thread of grace is drawn over you, and your Torah is sweet before the Holy One, blessed be He.” It told them to stand and say aloud Baruch shem kevod malchuto, as on Yom Kippur.

“Not every time is right”

Then the voice turned to the matter that would change both men’s lives. Go up to the Land of Israel, it told them, for not every time is right. And it reached for the words Joseph sent to his brothers — “do not regret your belongings” — and turned them round: do not let your eyes spare your possessions. “ואם תאבו ושמעתם, טוב הארץ ההיא תאכלו; לכן מהרו ועלו” — “If you are willing and listen, you shall eat the good of that land; therefore hurry, and go up.” And to men who feared for their families and their livelihood, it promised: “כי אני המפרנסת לכם ואני אפרנסכם, ואתם שלום ובתיכם וכל אשר לכם שלום” — “for I am the one who sustains you, and I will sustain you; peace to you, and to your households, and to all that is yours.”

At daybreak they went to immerse, as they had done on the two days before. And they rebuked the three companions who had not come that night. When those three heard what they had missed, Alkabetz writes, they wept and struck themselves.

The second night

Outside the Land of Israel Shavuot lasts two days. Though none of them had slept, they resolved to do it all again — and this time to be ten. The voice came earlier than before, while they were still reading the Shema, and spoke for about half an hour. At midnight it returned and spoke for more than an hour. It urged them to prepare themselves in the vestibule so that they could enter the great hall; it rebuked them for clinging to the desires and the mud of this world; and again, more urgently, it told them to go up to the Land. Alkabetz adds that what he has written is not even a hundredth part of what was said.

The Shabbat after, and a pact

On the Shabbat that followed, the voice came to Karo once more and reminded the companions of the promise they had made. Before the morning meal Karo gathered them and charged them to keep it, and they answered as Israel answered at Sinai: “We will do, and we will hear.” They took upon themselves new rules of holiness — among them a weekly day of mourning for the Temple, when they would eat no meat and drink no wine.

“Open your eyes”

The letter was not written as a memoir. It was written to persuade. Alkabetz turns to the friends in Salonica and pleads with them to open their eyes, to see in all this a sign, and to join Karo and himself in the Holy Land before the moment passes: the time of reaping has come. He has told them everything, he writes, and so he has saved his own soul. He ends with a prayer that they will soon serve God together in the Land.

The road to Tzfat

The letter does not describe the journey, and later accounts disagree on its details. What historians can piece together is this: the call was not answered at once. Alkabetz spent some time in Adrianople, where he finished his book Brit HaLevi and dedicated it to the friends he had made there; he reached Tzfat in about 1535. Karo, travelling by way of Istanbul and Egypt, arrived in about 1536. Some accounts say they set out together and sailed from Istanbul; others have them arriving a year apart. Either way, within a few years of that Shavuot night both men were in Tzfat — Karo to become the head of its court and its greatest teacher, Alkabetz to write, in its hills, the hymn Lecha Dodi that the whole Jewish people sings each Friday night.

The voice had kept its word. For the rest of their lives they lived in the Land it had sent them to — and the friendship that began on the night the Torah was given is buried with them in the old cemetery of Tzfat.

How the letter travelled

Alkabetz wrote to a small circle of friends; he could not have imagined his readers. More than a century later the printers of Maggid Meisharim set his letter at the front of the book, and the Shelah — Rabbi Yeshaya HaLevi Horowitz — brought it in his section on Shavuot as a model of how the night should be spent. In Tzfat itself, a generation after the letter was written, the Arizal also taught the great importance of staying awake and learning through that night, as his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital recorded. Through these pages the vigil of a few friends became the Tikkun Leil Shavuot kept in synagogues across the world — including, every year, in the beit midrash of Maran in Tzfat.