Rav Yosef Chaim of Baghdad

Early years

Chacham Yosef Chaim of Baghdad zt"l, the Ben Ish Chai, was born on 1 November 1832 in Baghdad, where his father, Rav Eliyahu Chaim, was the Rav. (Chacham, meaning wise man, is the Sephardi equivalent of Rav.) He first learned in his father's library. At ten he left the school room and began to learn with his uncle, Rav Dovid Chai ben Meir, the future founder of Yerushalayim's Shoshanim LeDavid yeshiva.

It is told that his gifts were plain from earliest childhood. When he was four, his father asked him why Hashem called out to Adam, "Where are you?" (Bereishis 3:9). The child replied that the Hebrew word for "where are you" is made up of letters that begin the words "I know all secrets," a hint to Adam that Hashem knew exactly what had happened.

At fourteen, he noticed in the house a letter from the rabbanim of Yerushalayim to his father, with a halachic question. He understood the problem at once and sent off an answer that same day, without telling his father. The rabbanim read the reply, accepted the ruling and acted on it. A few days later, Rav Eliyahu's own reply came, and it reached the very same ruling. Only then did the rabbanim realize what had happened, and they wrote to Rav Eliyahu in wonder at his son's remarkable ability.

At fifteen he entered the yeshiva of Rav Ovadiah Avrohom (Abdallah) Somech (1813–1889), the greatest talmid of his grandfather, who became, in his own view, his foremost teacher. He stayed only briefly. He withdrew from public view and closed himself away day and night in a little room at his father's home, immersed in Torah. Later he had a mikveh built in the courtyard so that he could immerse whenever he wished without drawing attention to his austere routine.

In 1851, at the age of eighteen, he married Rachel, a member of the Somech family and a relative of his revered teacher.

Torah and leadership

His name spread to the rabbanim of Saloniki, Izmir and Constantinople, and he exchanged letters with scholars in Eastern Europe. At twenty-three he received halachic questions from Rav Chaim Palaggi (d. 1873), the senior Rav of Izmir, who wrote dozens of works on halachah and aggadah and who praised his writings.

In 1859, when his father passed away, he was still in his twenties. The Jews of Baghdad accepted him in his father's place as their leading Torah scholar, although he never held the official post of Hakham Bashi. As his father had done, he took on only the formal post of darshan (preacher), without pay, and earned his living from a partnership in his brothers' business. Even so, the community decided nothing without his approval, and scholars and ordinary people alike treated his word as final.

His influence soon reached Iran and Kurdistan, and the newspapers of Baghdadi communities in far-off cities such as Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon and Bombay printed what he taught in his lectures. Halachic questions poured in from Jews all over the Middle East and the Far East, and his four-volume responsa, Rav Pealim, later gathered many of his replies. On the island of Jerba, off Tunisia, he was simply called "the Gaon," even though that old and learned community rarely praised living scholars. Rav Matzliach Mazz, an outstanding Jerban scholar of his time, wrote that everything in Rav Yosef Chaim's works was greatly valued there and treated as though it had come directly from Sinai.

He gave time to teaching every day. After Shacharis he lectured on Gemara in the Small Synagogue, with special emphasis on the aggadic passages, and these shiurim became his Ben Yehoyada (five volumes) and later Benayahu. A half-hour shiur on Shulchan Aruch followed. From 1860 he gave a three-hour lecture every Shabbos afternoon on the weekly parsha, and Aderes Eliyahu contains a sample of the first four years of these. From 1870 he added halachic rulings to his Shabbos lectures, and much of that material became the basis of his most famous work, Ben Ish Chai, and its supplement, Od Yosef Chai. Most of the community attended, and for days afterward people discussed and studied what they had heard.

Four times a year, on Shabbos Shuvah, Shabbos Zachor, Shabbos HaGadol and Shabbos Kallah, he spoke for four hours in the Great Synagogue. As the city's official darshan he had received from his father the sole right to lecture on these Shabbosos, and every other shul in town stayed shut. A small part of these lectures was later published as Ben Ish Chayil. On Purim morning he went through every detail of the Megillah, drawing on the Midrash and the Gemara. When he described how Haman sold himself to Mordechai as a slave, he acted out the scene in full, to the audience's laughter, while he himself remained completely serious. The Kabbalists of the city could tell that he was performing deep Kabbalistic kavanos (meditations).

He never gave the same derashah twice. Although hundreds of men, women and children attended, a deep silence filled the hall, and children sat at his feet on the podium through the entire lecture, making no noise.

Although he withdrew from all public activity, his door was never closed to those in need. People constantly came to ask for tefillos for the sick or for those in trouble, and for advice. He also put great effort into showing how the Kabbalistic requirements of teshuvah apply in practice, working to join the halachic and Kabbalistic sides of Torah. For this purpose he published Leshon Chachamim, which presents the different aspects of teshuvah in a way everyone can follow.

He came into conflict with Jacob Obermeyer, a Bavarian Jewish scholar of reformist views who resided in Baghdad between 1869 and 1880, and placed him in cherem. The dispute was due in part to their opposing views on how the Zohar should be promoted.

He taught that Jews in the Diaspora have a duty to support the poor of Eretz Yisroel, and he set an example by printing most of his seforim in Yerushalayim. On his advice, Yosef Avraham Shalom, a prominent philanthropist of Calcutta and one of his patrons, helped build the Porat Yosef and Oz VeHadar yeshivos in the old city of Yerushalayim. He taught that we must wait and pray for the redemption at all times, yet never try to force it, and he was against uprooting Arab residents to make space for Jewish settlers.

In 1869 he visited Eretz Yisroel. On arriving in Yerushalayim he went at once to Yeshivas Beis El, the Kabbalists' yeshiva once headed by Rav Shalom Sharabi more than a century earlier. To his disappointment, no one there equaled him in learning. He did meet the great Kabbalist Rav Yedidya Refael Chai Abulafia, a talmid of Rav Shalom Sharabi's grandson, and the two were able to discuss Torah together. In Chevron he visited the resting place of the Avos and met his childhood friend Rav Eliyahu Mani, whom he had asked to manage his small estate there and with whom he corresponded regularly. He also visited the graves of prophets and early sages, among them that of Benayahu ben Yehoyada (Shmuel II 23:20), to whom he felt a special spiritual bond; several of his most important works carry that name.

Teachings and seforim

Rav Yosef Chaim wrote with astonishing speed. It is told that he would finish a full page before the ink at its top had dried, and since he could not stack the wet pages, he laid them out on a shelf built for that purpose. He published twenty-four works in his lifetime, but these were only a small part of his writings. The rabbanim of Baghdad knew of about eighty more in manuscript, many of which his grandson, Rav Dovid Chaim, could not take with him when he left Iraq.

His best-known work, Ben Ish Chai, grew out of homilies he gave over two years on the weekly parsha. Each chapter opens with a mystical discussion, usually showing how a Kabbalistic reading of a verse relates to a particular halacha, and then goes on to explain that halacha with clear rulings. Written for ordinary people and arranged by the parsha, it serves in many Sephardi homes much as a Kitzur Shulchan Aruch does, and it is widely learned in Sephardi yeshivos. Many siddurim of the Iraqi rite follow his rulings.

He took the names of several works from Shmuel II 23:20: Ben Ish Chai, Me-Kabtziel, Rav Pealim and Ben Yehoyada. Tradition relates that he regarded himself as a gilgul (reincarnation) of Benayahu ben Yehoyada, who is described there as a ben ish chayil, a son of a valiant man, and it is said that both the first and second Batei Mikdash stood in his merit.

He also wrote for those who were not learned. His Laws for Women (Qanun al-Nisa) deals with vital halachic subjects and moral exhortation. He wrote it in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic, matching the speech of the city's women, and he filled it with parables on self-improvement and with humorous anecdotes from Jewish and non-Jewish sources to hold the reader's attention. Its most recent printing was in Israel in the 1940s. Mashal VeNimshal and Imrei Binah likewise collect tales and anecdotes aimed at the unlearned in the community, and they offered an alternative to the secular literature that was then reaching Baghdad.

Later years and passing

The business that sustained Rav Yosef Chaim and his four brothers failed in 1881. The brothers requested time from their creditors, among them many Arabs, to sell off their assets for a fair price. Most creditors would not agree and pushed them into bankruptcy. An official inquiry followed, and the four brothers sat in prison for more than a year, 1882 to 1883, until a court established their innocence. Already in 1882, before the arrest, Rav Yosef Chaim had accepted on himself seven years of fasting daily from dawn until dusk, and he stayed inside his house, even giving up his lectures.

He turned down an offer, made in 1909 about six months before his passing, to serve as Rishon LeTzion and Chacham Bashi of all the Sephardi communities in Eretz Yisroel. In early winter 1907 he had gone to Al Kifil, the village where the navi Yechezkel is buried. During a three-month stay at the grave he wrote a short treatise on the history of the area. On 5 Elul 1909 he travelled there again. On the way back to Baghdad he suddenly fell ill, and he passed away on 13 Elul 5669 (August 30, 1909). The largest funeral Baghdad had seen since Talmudic times was held for him, and many non-Jews attended.

Rav Yosef Chaim was survived by his son, Rav Yaakov Chaim, who held his father's position until he himself passed away in 1920, and by a daughter. Rav Yaakov Chaim was succeeded by his son, Rav Dovid Chaim, who in 1973 left Iraq taking most of the manuscripts his grandfather had left behind.

Legacy

Chacham Yosef Chaim guided his people through a time of religious upheaval, and his influence was not limited to Baghdad. His halachic opinion was sought throughout the Sephardi world and is still followed by thousands in those communities. His rulings are regarded as significant even outside Sephardi communities. Because of the popularity of his Ben Ish Chai, its name came to be his own, and he is universally called the Ben Ish Chai to this day.