Ben Ish Hai (Ben Ish Chai): Rabbi Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad

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When Jews speak of the Ben Ish Hai, which you will also see spelled Ben Ish Chai, they may mean a book or they may mean the man who wrote it, because the book did so well that people took to calling him by its name. The man was Rabbi Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, born around 1834, who died on 30 August 1909. Every Sabbath for fifty years he stood up and preached to his city’s Jews for three hours, and the book is what those sermons became. People wrote to him with their questions from as far off as India and Singapore, and he answered them, and there are many Jews today who still open his book to find out what to do.

We are Christians, and we come to him as visitors. The law he taught belongs to the Jewish people and it is for them to say what it asks of them, and where our two faiths part company we have set that out plainly in Judaism and Christianity compared. Here we only want to tell you about a man who spent his life teaching his people the commandments of the God of Abraham, and who had thought harder than most of us ever will about how to get people to listen.

His father, Elijah, was a rabbi and a leader of Baghdad’s Jews, and his grandfather Moses Hayyim had been a chief rabbi there before him, so the boy was born into the work, in a city that was still part of the Ottoman Empire and had a great many Jews in it. There were about 20,000 of them among 70,000 neighbours in 1860, and a few months after he died a British consul called the community “after that of Salonica, the most numerous, important, and prosperous in Turkey.”

His biographer at Chabad, the Jewish movement, says that when he was seven he fell into a pit in the courtyard of his home and was saved “by a miracle,” that out of gratitude he gave his life to the study of Torah, and that he would get up at midnight to mourn the destruction of the Temple. He studied with his mother’s brother, David Hai ben Meir, and from 1848 with Abdallah Somekh, who headed Beit Zilka, the Jewish seminary of Baghdad, and in 1851 he married Rachel, the daughter of Rabbi Yehudah Somekh.

His father died, and in 1859, the year after, when he was about twenty-five, Baghdad’s Jews accepted him in his father’s place as their preacher, and he stayed in that pulpit for the rest of his life. The Orthodox Union and the Jewish Virtual Library call him the Rabbi of Baghdad, while the Jewish Women’s Archive says he never held any public position, and his biographer has him taking no salary, living from a share in his brother’s business and leading the community without a title. In 1869 he travelled to the Land of Israel, to Jerusalem and Hebron, and when they offered him a post as a rabbi there he went home to Baghdad. You can judge what his people thought of him from what happened in 1876, when a man named Jacob Obermeier, who had come from Vienna to teach French, insulted him, and the community excommunicated Obermeier and made him ask the rabbi’s pardon.

We said around 1834, because we can tell you the day he was born but not for certain the year. Every source that names a day says the 27th of the Hebrew month of Av, and the years you will see run from 1832 to 1835, so here they all are together, with the Hebrew dates worked out on our calendar.

Who says so	Date given	Civil year
Hebrew caption under his portrait	27 Av 5594	1 September 1834
Library of Congress record	approximately 1834	about 1834
Encyclopaedia Judaica	1833 or 1835	1833 or 1835
Segula, an Israeli history magazine	27 Av 5595	August 1835
Chabad.org	27 Av, 1832	August 1832
Jewish Virtual Library, short life	1832	1832

If you made us choose we would say 1834, the date under his portrait, and two writers who were not trying to settle his birthday at all come out close to it. The Orthodox Union’s life of him says he was twenty-five in the Hebrew year 5619, and Levi Cooper, writing for the National Library of Israel about something else entirely, says he was forty-eight in 5642. Those ages point roughly to 5594, the portrait’s year, though they would fit a birth a year earlier nearly as well. His death gives less trouble, because we know he died on 13 Elul 5669, which was 30 August 1909, and if you see 1904 anywhere it looks like a slip in one short biography.

He taught every morning, and every Sabbath he preached for three hours, and he did that for fifty years. Those of us who start looking at our watches twenty minutes into a sermon may well ask how a man preaches for three hours, and as it happens he told us.

It is all in his introduction to the book, and any preacher will nod along. If you lecture people on nothing but Jewish law, he says, “the heart of the masses is not drawn after this,” and he had the Talmud to back him up. Rabbi Meir, he points out, gave a third of his sermons to law, a third to stories and a third to parables. And he reminds us of the day Rabbi Abbahu and Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba came to the same town, Abbahu teaching stories and Hiyya teaching law, and everybody walked out on Hiyya and went to hear Abbahu. Abbahu comforted him with a picture from the market. When one man is selling precious stones and another is selling small wares, he said, which one do the customers run to? They run to the small wares, and that says nothing against the jewels.

So you have to go wisely, Yosef Hayyim says, by the minds of the people in front of you, giving most of the sermon to stories and the explaining of Scripture and letting the law come in somewhere in the middle or at the end. After the Hebrew year 5630, which began in 1869, he started doing just that, tying laws from the Shulchan Arukh, the great code of Jewish practice, into his Sabbath sermon on the week’s Torah reading, and finishing with verses from the reading from the Prophets. There was more law than would go into one year, so he spread it over two, to be taught round again every two years, and that is why the book has the shape it has, with the sermons first and then a first year of laws and a second. It was printed in Jerusalem in 1898, nearly forty years after he first took that pulpit.

It means “son of a living man,” and it comes from a verse that Jews read in the Tanakh and we read in our Old Testament. The King James Bible has it like this: “And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man, of Kabzeel, who had done many acts, he slew two lionlike men of Moab: he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow” (2 Samuel 23:20).

When we lay that verse beside the titles on his shelf we find several of them standing in it. His commentary on the Talmud’s stories he called Ben Yehoyada, the son of Jehoiada. His collected answers to people’s questions he called Rav Pe’alim, which is the Hebrew behind “who had done many acts.” And the book of sermons takes the words that come between, with a small surprise the King James cannot show us. The Hebrew as it is written says hai, “living,” while the traditional way of reading it aloud says hayil, “valiant,” and the King James follows the reading aloud. He took the written word. His introduction says only that having called the Talmud book Ben Yehoyada he chose Ben Ish Hai for this one, and it leaves the rest for us to notice.

The book goes through the Torah reading by reading, a sermon and then a run of practical laws, and it is known for being strict, with many of its rulings resting on the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. Take his law for Purim, which says that women, who are obliged to hear the Book of Esther, should hear a man read it and not read it for themselves. Now and then the laws let us see into a household. On the day a girl takes on the commandments she is to wear a new garment and say the blessing of thanksgiving, though he notes that it is not the custom to hold a festive meal as there is for a boy. Women rest from their work at the new moon, and he explains that this is a privilege of theirs, because they had no part in the sin of the Golden Calf.

He also wrote a whole book for the women of Baghdad, Hukkei ha-Nashim, the Laws of Women, printed there in 1906 and written in Arabic so that they would understand it, and his grandson remembered the women of the family getting together on Sabbaths and holidays to read from it. It warns against marrying girls too young, it takes people to task for reacting badly when a daughter is born, it tells women to treat their servants with respect, and it has a chapter of riddles. He also held to the law as he had received it, so the same pages tell a wife to bear with her husband’s irritability and to serve him, while elsewhere he rules that a woman may not say the mourner’s prayer for her parents and that daughters have no right of inheritance, though they may claim compensation. In the chapter about a wife’s patience he stops to answer the woman he imagines asking why the husbands are not given commands as well. “I have many charges for your husbands regarding you,” he says, and he promises another book, for the men.

The answer starts in his own lifetime, when the Jewish Encyclopedia, three years before he died, could say simply, “Jews residing in India and in the Far East refer to him questions of ritual,” and the answers he sent, gathered in the volumes of Rav Pe’alim, went to Iraq, India, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Kurdistan. We think part of what has kept the book going is its shape, since you can open it at this week’s reading and find the law already laid inside the teaching, and his biographer says it reached ordinary people as well as scholars, women among them.

You will find it in most Sephardic homes, where it does what the Kitzur Shulhan Arukh, the short code of Jewish law, does for Ashkenazi Jews. Among Mizrahi Jews, whose families come from Arab and Muslim lands, it is fairly popular to this day. If you want to read it yourself, Sefaria, the Jewish online library, lists the whole book and has his introduction in English, and between 1989 and 1991 an English translation of part of its laws, by Shmuel Hiley, appeared in Jerusalem. The book is not the only thing of his still in use, because he wrote about two hundred poems, and about fifty went into the prayers of Baghdad’s Jews, and one is still sung by thousands at Meron, in Galilee, on Lag BaOmer.

On the 8th of Elul in 1909, a few days before he died, he went on pilgrimage to the tomb of the prophet Ezekiel, whose book we have in our Bibles too, and he fell ill soon afterwards. He died on the 13th, and his body was carried back to Baghdad and buried that same night. His biographer says that more than ten thousand people came to his funeral, Jews and non-Jews together, and that for years afterwards Jews went to his grave every Friday.

Some forty years after that funeral the community itself was all but gone, because between 1950 and 1951 almost 120,000 Jews left Iraq, many of them stripped of their citizenship and their property. In 2013 the United States National Archives reported, “Today, fewer than five Jews remain.” They are scattered around the world now, and we imagine his book went with many of them. Thousands, his biographer says, still study his books and live by them.

In 1972 his grandson, Rabbi David Hayim, came from Baghdad to Israel and brought a manuscript with him, and the next year it was printed. It was a collection of answers to questions of Jewish law called Torah Lishmah, and it said it was the work of a Rabbi Yehezkel Kahali, who had begun it in 1681 or 1682. Nobody but Yosef Hayyim had ever cited this Kahali. The 1898 book mentions Torah Lishmah ten times, and a volume of 1903 finally gave the author’s name. The manuscript presents itself as a copy, the copyist’s handwriting is Yosef Hayyim’s own, and a note from the copyist says, “it is likely that there is no other copy in the world.”

So had he written it himself and handed it to the world as an old book? His grandson said so without hesitation in his foreword to the printed volume, and when it came to why, he could only suggest that Jewish scholars are divided over whether an author should put his name to a book, and that his grandfather, who signed some books and left his name off others, may have been trying to honour both sides. Rabbi Shalom Messas and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, great authorities both, could not accept that he wrote it, though a late postscript of Rabbi Ovadia’s left the question open. Then in 2004 a team under Moshe Koppel at Bar Ilan University compared it by computer with Rav Pe’alim and concluded that one author had written both. Whether the grandson had found the reason, nobody can say.

Rabbi Avraham Hayim Ades, a scholar from Aleppo who had settled in Jerusalem, did try asking him while he was alive. After the name appeared in 1903, Ades noticed that in Hebrew, where every letter is also a number, Yehezkel adds up to 156, the same as Yosef, and Kahali to 68, the same as Hayim. So he wrote to Baghdad with a list of questions of Jewish law and added one more at the end, asking who wrote Torah Lishmah. The man whom Jews had been writing to from India and Singapore and Kurdistan answered every question on the list but that one.

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