the Vilna Gaon הגר"א מווילנה
leader of Lithuanian Jewry, head of the Mitnagdim, reformer of Torah study
Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman was born in 5480 near Vilna and astonished people with his learning as a child. He held no office — neither rabbi nor head of a yeshiva — living on a modest communal stipend and studying alone, barely leaving his room, eighteen hours a day.
His method was a revolution. Instead of elaborate dialectics he demanded precision: he compared manuscripts, corrected corrupted passages in the Talmud and midrashim, and sought the plain sense. He insisted that everything be studied — Tanakh, Mishnah, both Talmuds, midrash, Kabbalah — and that without mathematics and astronomy parts of the Torah cannot be understood; at his request a student translated Euclid into Hebrew.
In 5532 he led the ban against the Hasidim, seeing in the new movement a danger: experience replacing learning, a cult of tzaddikim, changes in the liturgy. The struggle lasted decades until the shared threat of the Haskalah drew the sides together.
He set out for the Land of Israel, reached Europe and turned back without explaining why.