The Maggid of Rav Yosef Karo

Rav Yosef Karo had an angelic maggid, who came and spoke to him and taught him many deep and hidden secrets. These teachings are gathered in the sefer Maggid Meisharim. On Shavuos night, as Rav Yosef was learning with Rav Shlomo Alkabetz, author of Lecha Dodi, the maggid revealed itself and spoke through him. It said that it was the angel of the Mishnah, the Oral Torah, which Rav Yosef knew by heart.

Once, as the Beis Yosef sat writing his great work on the Tur, the same maggid that had appeared to him earlier in Salonica appeared again in Tzfas and in Beria. It told him that the souls of the Rambam and the Baal HaTurim rejoiced at how his commentary explained their opinions and upheld their arguments and halachic rulings.

The maggid praised Rav Yosef's rulings as pure and faultless and promised that he would merit to spread them across the entire Jewish world. "The Torah rejoices as on the day it was given on Har Sinai, and I shall place you above my nation and exalt and uplift you, your yeshiva and its stature. You shall merit to see Eliyahu HaNavi face to face and one day to see your descendants in the Sanhedrin in the Lishkas HaGazis, teaching the laws of kemitzah, because every yeshiva and study hall below has its counterpart above, and on high they are learning in the Mesivta of Atik Yomin, to which your yeshiva corresponds."

Indeed it has been so, for no other author's work has been accepted as the basis of Jewish law the world over as the Shulchan Aruch has been, and no other author has been given the title Maran, our master, or the Mechaber, the author.