הבן איש חי

The Ben Ish Chai, Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad, is the man who turned a weekly sermon into a book that accompanies Jewish homes to this day. The leader of Babylonian (Iraqi) Jewry in the nineteenth century, great in law and Kabbalah, he preached every Shabbat before a vast crowd, and gathered his sermons, which combined practical law with hints of the secret and story, in his book 'Ben Ish Chai.'

His genius lay in speaking to everyone at once. The simple heard a clear law and a gripping story, and the deep one found hidden kabbalistic hints in those very same words. He did not separate the people from the sages but built a bridge: the same sermon nourishes both. In this he held up an entire community, from the simple to the kabbalist.

The Ben Ish Chai was also a hidden kabbalist and a worker of wonders by tradition, but his heart was with the community. He answered questions from all the communities of the East, from India to North Africa, and became the halachic authority of all eastern Jewry. His book is studied at the Shabbat table in many homes to this day.

What do we learn from him? That a true Torah scholar speaks simultaneously to the simple and the deep, without giving up on either. The Ben Ish Chai teaches that law, story and secret can live in a single sentence, and that one who knows how to make the Torah accessible to all layers of his people holds an entire community by a thread of light.