Reshit Chochmah ראשית חכמה
Five gates — fear, love, repentance, holiness, humility: the book by which the kabbalah of the Zohar reached the ordinary reader.
Reshit Chochmah by Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas was completed in 1575 and printed at Venice in 1579 — in the author's lifetime, which for books of that circle is rare.
Five great gates: the Gate of Fear, the Gate of Love, the Gate of Repentance, the Gate of Holiness, the Gate of Humility. Appended are chapters on the commandments, on the education of children, on honesty in business.
The material is the Zohar and Cordovero's teaching, but turned toward the person: not the structure of worlds but what to do today. The book was reprinted some forty times and abridged three times — it is long, and the abridgements made it more current still.
Its significance is wider than it looks. When scholars dispute what part of kabbalah actually spread through the communities by the seventeenth century, much of the answer is here: what spread was not the Lurianic system with its tzimtzum and broken vessels, but this rendering of the Zohar into the language of conduct.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Reshit Chochmah, Venice 1579 — five gates and appendices; completed 1575
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Vidas" — some forty editions and three abridgements
Basis: documents and evidence.