Rabbi Chaim Vital רבי חיים ויטאל

Rabbi Chaim Vital was born in Safed in 1542; his father, Yosef Vital Calabrese, was a scribe from Calabria — the father's origin, not the son's, and the two should not be confused. Vital died in Damascus in 1620.

He studied under Rabbi Moshe Alshich, who in 1590 gave him semikhah — the Safed ordination. In 1563–65 he spent two years on alchemy and afterwards regretted it. He began kabbalah in 1564, on Cordovero's system.

Everything changed in 1570, when Luria came to Safed. For two years — exactly two, until his teacher's death in 1572 — Vital was his chief disciple. Luria taught orally and all but forbade writing; after his death Vital alone could reconstruct the system whole, and he kept the manuscripts to himself.

About 1587, while he lay gravely ill, his brother was bribed, the manuscripts were opened, and copyists reproduced them — by tradition six hundred pages in three days. So the teaching spread, against Vital's will.

Hence two recensions. Shemonah She'arim, the "Eight Gates," was assembled in Damascus by his son Shmuel Vital, and by it the Sephardi kabbalists learn. The other was arranged in Jerusalem in 1650 by Rabbi Meir Poppers, and by it Etz Chaim is printed — the version known to the Ashkenazi and Chasidic world. To say "Vital wrote Etz Chaim" is therefore inexact: he wrote the notes; Etz Chaim is their editing.

His diary also survives, Sefer HaChezyonot — a book of dreams, visions and testimonies about himself, gathered in 1609–1612: a rare document in Jewish literature, in which a man speaks of his inner life outright.