ordinations were neither "proper" nor "official" in the way Jewish law intended them to be, rather, they were merely symbolic. Rabbi Berav thought it could be done properly again, and he ordained himself and one other person, but his attempt at re-instituting semichah was not successful. The rabbis in Jerusalem didn't recognize it, and, to this day, rabbinical ordination is symbolic only. The one person that Rabbi Berav ordained was Rabbi Joseph Karo. Rabbi Karo (1488 to 1575) was among the Jews expelled from Spain, and he had made his way through Europe and Turkey and finally ended in Tzfat. There he wrote one of the most important books in Judaism - the Shulchan Aruch "The Prepared Table" - and it is a code of Jewish law which is followed to this day. Before him, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher, another Spanish rabbi, had attempted to organize Jewish law in a book called the Arba Turim ("Four Sections). Rabbi Joseph Karo took the Arba Turim and spent 32 years writing a commentary to it, which he called Beit Yoseph, "House of Joseph," and which he later condensed into the Shulchan Aruch. Rabbi Karo was Sephardi, and Rabbi Moses Isserles (known as Ramah), a Polish rabbi from Krakow, wrote an Ashkenazi commentary to the Shulchan Aruch (see Part 49). To this day, the Shulchan Aruch by Joseph Karo, as amended by Moses Isserles, dictates Jewish law. While Joseph Karo is today most famous for his book of law, he was a mystic. And it is no coincidence that he made his home in Tzfat, because in his day Tzfat became the center of Jewish mysticism. JEWISH MYSTICISM What is Jewish mysticism? Jewish mysticism is more popularly known as Kabbalah. Kabbalah ("that which was received") is an interpretation of the Torah that focuses on the deepest, concealed meaning of the words and letters. According to Jewish tradition, this level of understanding of the Torah was revealed at Mt. Sinai, but because of its complexity, it was reserved for only a few initiated few. With time, that secret interpretation became more widely known and finally published and disseminated generally (though few could understand it). The key work of Kabbalah is the Zohar - the "Book of Splendor." The contents of this The contents of book were first revealed by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in approximately 100 CE, while the Zohar, "The he lived in a cave, hiding out from the Romans. Many academicians claim that this Book of book was written by Rabbi Moses de Leon, (1240-1305).
Splendor," were revealed by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the Roman era.
Indeed Rabbi Moses de Leon, a Spanish rabbi, was the first to publish the Zohar, though he never claimed to be the author. Furthermore, the teachings which he published were not organized into a coherent whole and, as before, few could understand them.
Then Rabbi Moshe Cordevero of Tzfat (1522-1570), better known as the Ramak, HTTP://WWW.SERVANTOFMESSIAH.ORG entered the picture. The Ramak rationally systematized all of Kabbalistic thought up to his time, in particular