Rav Yosef Karo and Sefer HaMaggid: Episode 1 (with Rabbi Moshé Kravetz)

In 1533, while living in Salonica, Rav Yosef Karo—the towering legal mind who would later author the Shulchan Aruch—began hearing a voice speak through his own mouth as he recited Mishnah. The voice identified itself as the Mishnah personified, an angel created by his own Torah study and mitzvos. For the next four decades, this "Maggid" would appear to him, usually on Shabbos nights, delivering teachings, reproof, and personal guidance. Rav Karo wrote it all down, producing a diary-like record that eventually became known as Sefer HaMaggid (or, as printers later renamed it, Maggid Meisharim). The book is at once a mystical diary, a kabbalistic treatise, and an unintended autobiography of one of the most consequential figures in Jewish legal history.

Who Was Rav Yosef Karo?

Born in 1488 somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula—possibly in Spain, possibly in Portugal—Rav Karo was a child when the Spanish Expulsion upended Jewish life. He fled with his family, eventually settling in Egypt, where he likely studied under his father (Rav Ephraim Karo), his uncle (Rav Yitzchak Karo, author of Toldos Yitzchak), and possibly the great Rav Yaakov Beirav. By 1522, he was in Adrianople (Edirne, in Ottoman Greece), married to the daughter of Rav Yitzchak Saba. From there he moved to Salonica, then the largest Jewish city in the world and the epicenter of Sephardic scholarship.