Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin רבי חיים מוולוז'ין

Rabbi Chaim was born in Volozhin in 1749 and died there in 1821. He became the Vilna Gaon's disciple at twenty-five and studied with him by visits from Volozhin; his teacher in Talmud was Rabbi Aryeh Leib Gunzberg, the Sha'agat Aryeh, then rabbi of Volozhin. The converse is worth remembering: almost everything known of the Gaon is known from what Rabbi Chaim wrote, and scholars today read those pages not only as testimony but as the making of an image.

In 1803 he opened his yeshiva—at first ten students, whom he fed and housed himself. What was new was the structure. Money was gathered not from one small town but across the whole diaspora, by printed appeal; so the community of Volozhin controlled neither admissions nor curriculum nor appointments. Students were taken from everywhere and on merit, and fed at the yeshiva rather than at householders' tables by the day. And above all, the declared purpose was study for its own sake, not the training of communal rabbis. By the 1820s some two hundred were learning there, and every yeshiva of the Lithuanian type is built on that model.

Nefesh HaChaim he wrote in his last years; his son printed it at Vilna in 1824. Four gates: man as the image of God and the weight of his deeds; prayer; tzimtzum and the limits of living by the words "there is nothing but Him"; and last, the study of Torah as the act that holds the worlds up.

It is often called the Mitnagdic answer to the Tanya. That is inexact: the book nowhere names the Tanya, and Rabbi Chaim himself did not sign the bans against the Chasidim and sought reconciliation. There is an argument in it, but not with one book—with the shape of Chasidic thought itself: devekut is reached by the work of the mind upon the text, not by the rapture of prayer or attachment to a tzaddik.