הרמח״ל

The Ramchal, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, is the prodigy who united poetry, Kabbalah and ethics, and paid for his greatness at a heavy price. In Italy, at an astonishingly young age, he wrote masterworks in every field: Hebrew plays, books of Kabbalah, and the composition without which no house of study is complete, 'Mesillat Yesharim' (The Path of the Just).

'Mesillat Yesharim' is a systematic guide to the ascent of the soul, from watchfulness and zeal to holiness, which became the most widely studied ethical work in Israel. The Ramchal took the path to holiness, which had seemed hazy, and laid it out as a clear pathway that every person can climb step by step.

But his greatness in Kabbalah aroused suspicion. The great sages of Italy and Ashkenaz, who remembered the false messiahs, feared his engagement with the secret and the 'maggid' that revealed itself to him, and they persecuted him and placed a ban on his writings. The Ramchal accepted the suffering with humility, went up to the Land of Israel, and died young in a plague with his family. Only generations later was his greatness fully recognized.

What do we learn from him? That the path to holiness can be a clear pathway, not a fog, and that every person can climb it. The Ramchal also teaches about the price of greatness: that sometimes a generation is not ready for the giant who arises within it, and that the truth, even when persecuted in its hour, finds its place in the end, as Mesillat Yesharim is now studied everywhere.