Seder Hatephilah al Derech Hasod [prayers through the year, including Passover Hagadah]

(LITURGY)

n.p.

Zolkiew

1781

According to the mystical elements of Chaim Vital and the meditations of Isaac Luria

Vinograd, Zolkiew 415 (erroneously noting only one errata leaf)

The first Complete Aschkenazi AR”I z”l Prayer-Book. The rise of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria led many Kabbalistic circles to compile prayer-books containing specialised Lurianic meditations and esoteric rites. These texts circulated in manuscript among differing regional circles of Kabbalists. The first printed Lurianic prayer-book was the Sha’arei Rachamim (Salonika, 1741) which accorded to Sephardic rite. Before our prayer-book, there was a previous Aschkenazic prayer-book that incorporated the Lurianic kavanoth (meditations): Or HaShanim by R. Aryeh Leib Epstein (Königsberg, 1765). However Epstein’s prayer-book was incomplete.The present Zolkiew edition is the first complete Aschkenazic prayer-book with the kavanoth of the Ar”i z”l. (See printer’s introduction.) According to a stipulation in the haskamah of R. Mordechai Ze’ev of Lvov, permission was granted to print the prayer-book only if it was produced without the nekudoth, in order to make it inaccessible to the average man. It was felt that the Lurianic kavanoth should be reserved for the spiritual elite. See also Abraham David Lavoot in his introduction to Sha’ar HaKollel (printed as an appendix to Torah ‘Or, the Siddur Nusach Ar”i of the Lubavitch chasidim)