Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz was born to a highly respected rabbinic family of tsadiks (pious men). His great grandfather was the famous scholar, master Kabbalist, and preacher Rabbi Nathan Nata Spira, who wrote the Megaleh Amukot (see below).

Early on in life, Yehonatan was known as an ilui (a child prodigy). Even as a very young boy, he astonished adult scholars with his brilliance and insightful depth and breadth of thought. While still a boy, he acquired great renown throughout Yiddishkeit. His enormous scholarship in both Talmud and Kabbalah became legendary.

As Yehonatan grew from a boy to a young man, his reputation continued to grow as well. While Yehonatan was still a young boy, it is said that his famous Talmudist and Kabbalist father—Rabbi Nosson Nota—revealed to him the profound, secret mysteries of the Kabbalah, which had been passed down from Yehonatan’s great grandfather, Rabbi Nathan Nata Spira.

Rabbi Nathan Nata Spira

Rabbi Nathan Nata Spira (c, 1584–1633) was a highly renowned Polish Kabbalist, a scholar of Talmud and rabbinic literature, and an unusually gifted pulpit orator. He ran a highly renowned yeshivah, and, being from a well-to-do family, he did not accept a salary. He also served as head of the rabbinic court. Born into a prominent rabbinic family, he was also widely known as a child prodigy. Truly a man of his times, Rabbi Spira’s spirited messianic Kabbalah teachings found a large and ardent following among Polish Jews.

At every Shabbas and festival, he would preach profound sermons on the mysteries hidden in the letters of the Torah. His son, Rabbi Solomon Spira (1616–1648), who was slain by the Cossacks under Bogdan Chmielnicki in 1648, wrote that his father was endowed with incomparable capacities and had a memory unlike anyone else.

Solomon goes on to write that his father would awaken in the middle of the night, weeping over the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and how the Jewish people were forced to wander the world in exile. He prayed that redemption would swiftly come and the fallen tent of David would be raised up. One night after midnight, the prophet Elijah appeared to him. Solomon said, “Hashem gave him the tongue of the learned to preach on Shabbas and festivals words of truth and righteousness, choice fruit and spices, sweet and sharp explanations with deep mysteries of accents, letters, and vowels, words that no ear had ever heard and preached before.”^[1]

Rabbi Nathan Nata Spira’s book Megaleh Amukot was published posthumously in Cracow, 1637, by his son. It was reprinted many times, becoming one of the Ashkenazi Kabbalah classics. It also went on to be the classic work on gematria (numerology), which assigned spiritual and mystical meaning to the relationship of words and letters to numbers. A simple example of this is the Hebrew word chai, which means “life.” The numerical equivalent of chai is eighteen. This is why many Jews give tzedakah (gifts and donations) in multiples of eighteen. Most Jews don’t realize that their eighteen-dollar gift relating to chai is based on gematria, the connection of words and numbers to spirituality and mysticism. Nor do they realize that Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz’s ancestor “wrote the book” that is widely used in Kabbalistic practice, even to this day.

Megaleh Amukot is composed of 252 different interpretations of one single Torah passage, Deuteronomy 3:23, where Moishe (Moses) beseeches Hashem (G-d) to allow him to have a look at Israel. It was as if the author was intoxicated with numbers, using them and their permutations and combinations to elucidate the single passage and relating them to spiritual, mystical, and real-life situations. Even to this day, Rabbi Nathan is held in high regard for his extraordinary mathematical mind. Where others thought in words, he thought in numbers, and his method of thinking is still used to this day. He also mentions a similar book of his in which he interprets the single letter alef in the word Vayikra (in Leviticus 1:1) a thousand different ways! Rabbi Nathan also wrote another mystical Kabbalistic commentary to the Pentateuch (Torah) entitled Megaleh Amukot al HaTorah.

One of the reasons Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz is said to be “Descended from Giants” is because Rabbi Nathan Nata Spira was his great grandfather. However, Rabbi Eybeshitz’s giant intellectual lineage goes even further back in history. Rabbi Nathan Nata Spira’s grandfather, Rabbi Nathan Nata Ashkenazi, was the rabbi of Grodno and became famous with the publishing of his books Mea Shearim and Imrei Shefer. Moreover, Rabbi Eybeshitz’s family lineage can be traced back to Rashi and then back to biblical times as a direct descendant of the famous King David! He truly was descended from Torah Giants.

 

Rabbi Eybeshitz’s family lineage can be traced back from Rabbi Nathan Nata Spira to Rashi a direct descendant of the famous King David! He truly was descended from Torah Giants.

Rashi