Safed, the City of Kabbalists, and Lekhah Dodi

At the start of the sixteenth century Safed was a poor town in the hills of Upper Galilee, absorbed into the Ottoman Empire in 1516. Exiles from Spain and Portugal were drawn there, close to the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai at Meron. The Ottomans left them alone, the wool trade fed them, and within decades one hillside held more sages than any place since the Talmud.

There lived R. Yaakov Berav, who in 1538 tried to restore true semikhah — the ordination broken for over a thousand years — so that a Sanhedrin might be reconstituted (R. Levi ibn Habib of Jerusalem opposed him and the plan lapsed); R. Yosef Karo, writing his Beit Yosef; R. Moshe Cordovero, author of Pardes Rimonim, the first systematic work of Kabbalah; R. Moshe Alshich; R. Elazar Azikri, author of Yedid Nefesh; and R. Shlomo Alkabetz.

In Safed the custom of Kabbalat Shabbat was born. On Friday before sunset the sages walked out into the fields dressed in white, turned west and greeted the Sabbath as bride and queen. For that welcome Alkabetz wrote Lekhah Dodi — 'Come, my beloved, to greet the bride' — nine stanzas whose initials spell his name. Within decades it was sung across the Jewish world, as it still is in every synagogue.