Commentators:R. Eliyahu of Vilna (Vilna Gaon – GR"A)/0

R. Eliyahu of Vilna (Vilna Gaon – GR"A)

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Vilna Gaon

Name	R. Eliyahu b. Shelomo Zalman, Vilna Gaon ר' אליהו בן שלמה זלמן, הגר"א
Dates	1720-1797
Location	Lithuania
Works	Aderet Eliyahu on Tanakh, Beur HaGRA
Exegetical Characteristics
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Background¹

Life

• Name – 
  • Hebrew name – ר' אליהו בן שלמה זלמן²
  • _ name – 
• Dates – 1720-1797
• Location – Born in Selets, Grodno province, lived most of his life in Vilna.³
• Education – To say the Gra was a child prodigy would be an understatement, based on various reports of amazing incidents in his youth.⁴ From a young age, the Gra studied mainly on his own, always with great diligence and fortitude.⁵
• Intellectual pursuits – The Gra’s interests and teachings encompassed the entire world of Torah, both exoteric and esoteric.⁶ Moreover, he studied secular subjects such as algebra, geometry, astronomy, and medicine, and valued such fields as providing assistance in understanding the Torah.⁷ In contrast, he had a rather negative view of philosophy.⁸
• Occupation – The Gra led a life of secluded study until the age of forty,⁹ when he started lecturing to a group of elite Torah scholars who became his close disciples, and began assuming a communal leadership role.¹⁰ One of his main endeavors in this role was to oppose the emerging Chassidic movement, and it was the Gra himself who was the main driving force behind the anti-Chassidic campaign.¹¹ In practice, though not in any official capacity, the Gra became the spiritual leader of Lithuanian Jewry. At some point before 1783, the Gra set out for Eretz Yisrael, intending to send for his family later. However, he never reached his destination – for unknown reasons¹² – and returned to Vilna.¹³ Nevertheless, he famously encouraged his students to emigrate to Eretz Yisrael, and it was a group of his students and their families who comprised one of the first major waves of modern Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael.¹⁴
• Family – – The Gra came from a well-known rabbinical family. He married his first wife Chanah around the age of eighteen. After she died in 1782, he married Gitel. The Gra had three sons<fn>Two of these sons, Avraham and Yehudah Leib, published the Gra’s Torah commentary and other works.</fn> and four daughters, all from his first wife.<fn>See B. Landau, הגאון החסיד מוילנא (Jerusalem, 1978): 267-268 and notes, and S. Leiman, “Who is Buried in the Vilna Gaon’s Tomb?” available at the following link: http://ou.org.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/ja/5759winter/leiman.htm.</fn>
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Torah Commentary

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Later exegetes

Supercommentaries

¹ Sources for this section include: I. Etkes, The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and his Image (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2002) (hereafter: Etkes, Gaon), and the Encyclopedia Judaica entry Elijah Ben Solomon Zalman.

² Commonly referred to by the acronym גר"א - for גאון רבי אליהו. Also known as the Vilna Gaon. Regarding the possible surname Kramer or Kremer, see the following blog post by C. Freedman: Kremer – the Vilna Gaon had no Surname

³ Soon after his marriage, the Gra spent some time traveling throughout Poland and Germany.

⁴ For example, his sons (in their introduction to Aderet Eliyahu) relate that when the Gra was eight years old, a group of senior scholars in his city decided to study the laws of sanctification of the new moon, which require complex astronomical knowledge. After six months of study, these scholars convened to assemble an astronomical model that would help them better understand the relevant astronomy. But a mistake was made in the construction of the model, and the scholars struggled for hours to make sense of it. The child Eliyahu, having previously spent a mere few hours looking into such matters, was able to show these distinguished scholars the solution to their problem. His sons further report how, at the age of eleven, the boy Eliyahu learned – with perfect retention - the entire tractates of Zevachim and Menachot (with the commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot) over the night of Simchat Torah, achieving a pace of approximately 25 folio pages per hour. While it is easy to doubt this impossible-sounding feat, it is striking that the Gra’s sons themselves report this incident, no less with corroborating details about that evening including the identity of an eyewitness who tested the boy on the material.
Both the Gra’s sons and his closest disciple, R. Chayyim of Volozhin, report that the Gra possessed a deep knowledge of Kabbalah even as a child. R. Chayyim relates (in his introduction to the Gra’s commentary on Sifra DeTzniuta) that even before the age of 13 the Gra attempted to create a golem, abandoning the project when he sensed that God disapproved.
Regarding the biographical accounts of the Gra’s sons and students, I. Etkes has this to say (Etkes, Gaon: 35): “Even if we assume that in the portrait before us there is some degree of exaggeration and idealization, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it expresses an encounter with a personality endowed with extraordinary intellectual abilities and psychic powers.”

⁵ His sons report that the Gra slept no more than two hours a day, half an hour at a time. See Etkes, Gaon:23 ff. for a discussion of the Gra’s piety, especially how it differed from the Chassidic view of piety and how it related to his approach to Kabbalah and mystical experiences.

⁶ His involvement in esotericism included not only the study of the entire corpus of Kabbalistic texts, but also mystical experiences and practical Kabbalah. In addition to an attempt to create a golem (see note above in this section), the Gra is reported to have refused to receive revelations offered him by angelic maggidim, and to have attributed higher value to Torah secrets discovered through conventional intellectual endeavor than those obtained through an “ascent of the soul” (a kind of mystical experience that R. Chayyim of Volozhin infers the Gra indeed had. Regarding both this and the Gra’s encounters with maggidim, see R. Chayyim’s introduction to the Gra’s commentary on Sifra DeTzniuta). For a discussion of why the Gra devalued knowledge obtained in mystical ways, see the discussion in Etkes, Gaon: 27-32, where he suggests, among other things, that the Gra may have been responding to the Frankists, a secret Sabbatean sect whose antinomian nature came to the fore in the 1750s, creating a controversy that had a strong impact throughout Poland and Lithuania.

⁷ In a very famous passage, the early maskil R. Barukh of Shklov writes (in his introduction to his Hebrew translation of Euclid’s Elements) of his teacher the Gra: “I heard from the holy one that, to the extent that a person is lacking in knowledge of secular subjects, he will lack one hundredfold in the wisdom of the Torah. For the Torah and secular knowledge are bound together. . . He commanded me to translate whatever possible of the secular subjects into our holy tongue…” The Gra is also reported (by R. Avraham Simchah of Amcislaw, R. Hayyim of Volozhin’s nephew) to have desired a Hebrew translation of Josephus (see Etkes, Gaon: 53). For a discussion of the relationship of the Gra to the Haskalah, and whether he can be viewed as a harbinger of the Haskalah, see Etkes, Gaon: 37 ff. It is further worth noting that the Gra did not know foreign languages and thus learned all his science from Hebrew texts, which mostly were composed in medieval times and therefore reflected pre-modern scientific views. The Gra was thus unaware of Newton’s theories and the beginnings of modern chemistry. He maintained the Aristotelian theory of the four elements, even sometimes incorporating it into his interpretations.

⁸ See Be’ur HaGra to Shulchan Arukh Yoreh De’ah 179:6, where he famously criticizes Rambam for being led astray by “accursed” philosophy. The word “accursed”, which appears in the first printing of Be’ur HaGra, was removed by later publishers. For a discussion of this issue, and Eliyahu Stern’s theory (in his book The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, 2013) that the Gra did not oppose philosophy, see M. Shapiro’s review of Stern’s book: “The Vilna Gaon, Part 1: How Modern Was He?” .

⁹ He received a maintenance from the bequest of a wealthy ancestor, and later also received an allowance, and rented apartment, from the Vilna community board. Circa 1785 this allowance was raised to a level higher than that paid to the city’s rabbi, despite the fact that the Gra held no official position.

¹⁰ See below, Works, regarding the fact that at this age he ceased writing Torah works.

¹¹ The reasons for the Gra’s opposition to Chassidism are not clear, and are the matter of some controversy. See H.H. Ben-Sasson “אישיותו של הגר"א והשפעתו ההיסטורית,” Zion 31, 1 (1966): 39-40 for a summary of some of the approaches appearing in scholarly literature.

¹² See M. Tzuriel, Otzerot Gedolei Yisrael Vol. 2:139-142 for a discussion of possible reasons.

¹³ While on his journey, he wrote a letter to his family. See below, Works.

¹⁴ For an account of this immigration, see A. Morgenstern, Hastening Redemption: Messianism and the Resettlement of the Land of Israel (New York, 2006).