Baal HaSulam

1885 CE–1954 CE · CO · Jerusalem

R. Yehuda Leib Ashlag (1885–1954), known as the Baal HaSulam after his monumental commentary on the Zohar, was the most important Kabbalist of the twentieth century. Born in Łódź to a Polish Hasidic family, he immigrated to Jerusalem in 1922 and devoted his life to making the inner wisdom of the Arizal accessible to a modern audience.

His magnum opus, the Sulam ('Ladder') commentary on the Zohar, breaks open the cryptic Aramaic of the Zohar with a systematic Hebrew exposition rooted in Lurianic Kabbalah. Ashlag also developed a distinctive social philosophy in which the goal of Kabbalah is the transformation of human nature from self-interest to altruism (bestowal), and from this base founded a circle of students that has shaped contemporary Kabbalah study worldwide.

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WarsawCongress Poland

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

Warsaw in this era

Warsaw in the modern era became the crucible of Jewish Eastern European life—a teeming metropolis where the rigid structures of traditional rabbinic authority fractured against the pressures of emancipation, industrialization, and ideological ferment. Under Russian imperial rule (after the Napoleonic wars), the city's Jewish population swelled to become one of Europe's largest, crowded into the densely packed streets of neighborhoods like the Old Town, where synagogues, study halls, and printing presses competed for space. The intellectual atmosphere crackled with competing visions: Hasidic rebbes maintained courts alongside rationalist mitnagdim; Jewish socialists and labor organizers challenged religious authority; Zionist dreamers debated the future in cafés; and brilliant yeshiva minds grappled with how to preserve Jewish learning while the world modernized around them. The Yiddish theater flourished, Hebrew newspapers proliferated, and the Enlightenment's questions reached even the most insular study halls. Yet this efflorescence existed under constant strain—economic marginalization, periodic pogroms, and the looming catastrophe of the twentieth century cast long shadows. By the 1930s, Warsaw's three hundred thousand Jews—fully a third of the city's population—sensed the darkness gathering, even as their cultural and spiritual creativity reached perhaps its final, most desperate intensity before the Holocaust consumed it all.