From Hagiography to Custom: Penitential Rites in Early Modern Musar Literature

In one of his hagiographical accounts sent from Safed to Poland, R. Shlomo Shlomiel Meinstral of Dresnitz reports about the rather exceptional penitential exercises performed by the kabbalist R. Avraham ben El‘iezer ha-Levi Berukhim (1515-1593). Even though this particular epistle is not included in Shivhei ha-Ari – as is the case with most of Meinstral’s narratives – different versions of it circulated in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Variants are included in Naphtali Hertz Bakharakh’s Lurianic work ‘Emeq ha-Melekh (Amsterdam 1653), Tzevi Hirsh Kaidanover’s musar-classic Qav ha-Yashar (1705), as well as in the anonymous Sabbatian musar-work Hemdat Yamim (Izmir, 1731–1732).
Scholars made frequent use of Shlomo Shlomiel Meinstral’s letter in support of the notion that asceticism was widespread among the kabbalists of sixteenth-century Safed. Very little attention has been paid, however, to the epistle’s impact on the religious practice of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
I my presentation, I shall map the dissemination of Shlomo Shlomiel Meinstral’s letter, examine the textual variants of the story, and show how the penitential exercises were associated with different times and events of the Jewish year cycle. Eventually, I shall address its Modern and contemporary reverberations in literature and film.