Rabbi Moshe Alshich רבי משה אלשיך
the preacher of Safed, whose Sabbath sermons became a commentary on the whole Tanakh
Rabbi Moshe Alshich was born about 1508 at Adrianople and studied at Salonica under Rabbi Yosef Taitatzak and Rabbi Yosef Karo. In Safed, Karo gave him the ordination Berav had renewed. There is no firm date of death: the Encyclopaedia Judaica says only "after 1593."
In Safed he was a judge and a preacher. Every Sabbath he spoke before the community — and out of preparing those sermons grew nearly everything he wrote: Torat Moshe on the Pentateuch, Shoshanat ha-Amakim on the Song of Songs, commentaries on Psalms, Job, Ruth, Lamentations, the Prophets.
That is what makes him unusual in a city of kabbalists. Cordovero, Luria and Vital wrote for a narrow circle, about matters they expressly forbade explaining to the uninitiated. Alshich wrote sermons: a connected reading of the verse, addressed to a man who came to synagogue on Shabbat. So his books are still read far more widely than Pardes Rimonim, and he is called Alshich HaKadosh, the holy Alshich.
His student in the exoteric Torah was Chaim Vital, whom he ordained in 1590; tradition says Luria dissuaded Alshich from kabbalah.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Torat Moshe — the commentary on the Pentateuch that grew out of Sabbath sermons
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Alshekh, Moses" — ordained by Yosef Karo; death "after 1593"
Basis: documents and evidence.