Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz רבי שלמה אלקבץ

Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi Alkabetz was born at Salonica about 1505, studied under Rabbi Yosef Taitatzak, and settled in Safed about 1535. He died about 1584.

In 1529, still in Salonica, he gave his father-in-law not sweets for Purim but a book — two commentaries on the scroll of Esther; hence the title Manot HaLevi, "the gifts of the Levite." In 1533, together with Rabbi Yosef Karo, he held the first Tikkun Leil Shavuot, the night of study during which, by his own account, a maggid spoke to Karo. The account is Alkabetz's, so the first witness in history to Karo's voice is he.

In Safed he wrote Lecha Dodi: nine stanzas, the first eight spelling "Shlomo ha-Levi" with their opening letters. The hymn entered Kabbalat Shabbat — the service of greeting the Sabbath composed by the Safed circle: six psalms for the six days of creation, Lecha Dodi, and Psalm 92. Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Italians and Chasidim all took it up; among the major rites only the Yemenite Baladi did not at first, and even there it later arrived. Hardly any later poem entered the fixed liturgy so widely.

The custom of going out into the fields to meet the Sabbath is linked to him — but carefully: the Encyclopaedia Judaica itself writes "probably." The Ramak, his brother-in-law, objected to a literal walk into the fields: the Sabbath descends from above, it does not come in from the field. The custom took hold in Luria's circle.