Rav Yisrael Lipkin

Early years

Rav Yisrael Lipkin zt"l, known to the world as Rav Yisrael Salanter, was born in Zagare, Lithuania, near Kovno, on 3 November 1810. His father, Rav Ze'ev Wolf Lipkin, a descendant of the Vilna Gaon, was the Rav of Zagare and later Av Bais Din of Goldingen and Telz. His mother was Leah.

As a boy he learned with Rav Tzvi Hirsh Braude of Salant. In 1823 he married Esther Fega, daughter of Yaakov HaLevi Eisenstein and Yenta, and the couple settled in Salant.

His teachers and early leadership

In Salant Rav Yisrael continued his learning under Rav Tzvi Hirsh Braude and Rav Yosef Zundel of Salant, himself a talmid of Rav Chaim of Volozhin. Rav Zundel introduced him to the classic seforim of mussar and stressed working on oneself, and this left a deep mark on Rav Yisrael's character. The name Salanter was added to his own because so much of his learning took place in Salant.

Around 1833 he met Rav Alexander Moshe Lapidos, who was about ten years younger and became his lifelong talmid-chaver. Rav Yisrael was a great talmid chochom, and in 1840 he was appointed Rosh Yeshiva of the Rameilles Yeshiva (Tomchei Torah) in Vilna.

A minor controversy arose over the appointment, and he gave the position back to the man who had held it before. He moved to Zarechya, near Vilna, and opened a new yeshiva there, where he gave shiurim for about three years.

The Mussar movement

At Rav Yisrael's urging, mussar works by Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Solomon ibn Gabirol and Menachem Mendel Lefin were reprinted and spread in Vilna. From Vilna he went to Kovno, where he opened a yeshiva centered on mussar at the Nevyozer Kloiz. He remained in charge there until 1857.

He taught that the mitzvos between man and his fellow carry as much weight as the mitzvos between man and Hashem. Keeping the ritual side of Yiddishkeit without working on one's relationships with others and with oneself, he held, was a tragic mockery.

He also taught that a person must understand the hidden drives that move him, which he called the inner (penimiyus) and outer (chitzoniyus) processes, or the dark and the clear. In his writings he developed this idea in full by 1880. Since such drives often overpower conscious decisions, he said, the only way to change is to learn mussar with great feeling, choosing a statement of Chazal and repeating it again and again with deep concentration until it enters the inner self.

Rav Yisrael taught that the time to work on these impulses is a time of emotional calm, when a person is in control of his thoughts. In the midst of a strong emotional reaction, a person cannot easily reach the calming perspective he needs. He felt that people would be embarrassed to learn mussar this way in an ordinary bais medrash, so he established the bais hamussar, a separate room beside the bais medrash set aside for it.

Saving Jewish lives

During the cholera epidemic of 1848, Rav Yisrael set an example for the Jews of Lithuania. Some wished to have the needed relief work on Shabbos done by non-Jews, but he ruled that both Jewish ethics and halachah placed the duty to save lives above other laws, and he arranged for Jews to do it. On Yom Kippur of that year he instructed that the people must not fast but eat, to protect their health. It is told that, to remove any doubt, he himself went up to the pulpit, recited Kiddush and ate and drank before the congregation.

He kept the law carefully even when it was unfair to Jews. To be able to travel legally outside the Pale of Settlement, he trained as a master dyer, which gave him a permit for free travel within Russia.

When the Russian government drafted Jewish youths for military service, he wrote to rabbonim and community leaders urging them to keep lists of recruits, so that no one could claim that Jews avoided the service. At the same time he worked through contacts in St. Petersburg to have the Cantonist decree annulled. When it was annulled, on 26 August 1856, he told his talmidim that the day should be marked as a Yom Tov.

In 1848 the Czarist government set up the Vilna Rabbinical School and Teachers' Seminary, and Rav Yisrael was a candidate to teach or run it. He feared the school would turn out rabbis who did the government's bidding, so he declined and left Vilna for Kovno. He also played a large part in preventing the opening of a government rabbinic seminary in Russia.

Later years and passing

In 1857 Rav Yisrael left Lithuania for Prussia to recover from depression. He stayed in the home of the Hirsch brothers of Halberstadt, philanthropists, until his health improved. In 1861 he began publishing a Hebrew journal, Tevunah, on halachah and ethics, but after three months it had too few subscribers to cover its costs, and he closed it.

He lived for periods in Memel, Königsberg and Berlin, and gave his last decades to strengthening Torah life in Germany and Prussia. He was the first major Eastern European rav to move to the West, where religious standards were considered lower. Near the end of his life he was called to Paris to organize a community among the many Russian Jewish immigrants, and he stayed there two years. He was also among the first to try to translate Shas into another language, but he passed away before he could finish.

Rav Yisrael passed away on Friday, 25 Shevat 5643 (2 February 1883), in Königsberg. For many years the location of his kever was not known. After a long search it was found in Königsberg in 2007.

Legacy

Rav Yisrael is remembered as the father of the Mussar movement, which spread through the Lithuanian yeshivos of the nineteenth century and after. His thoughts were gathered in the sefer Or Yisrael by one of his closest talmidim, Rav Yitzchok Blazer of Petersburg. Among his other close talmidim were Rav Simcha Zissel Ziv of Kelm and Rav Yosef Yoizel Hurwitz of Novardok.

He is also remembered as one of the most eminent Torah leaders of his century, for his wide learning and deep yiras shomayim. Yidden still turn to his teachings, and to the many stories told of him, to learn how to look honestly at themselves and treat others with care.