Vilnius's genius slept two hours and remade study
Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon, lived from 23 April 1720 to 9 October 1797. By twenty, rabbis sent him hardest legal questions. His glosses on Talmud and Shulchan Aruch still steer Litvak learning, while he backed Misnagdim against rising Hasidism.
Born near Brisk in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, he dazzled as a child, delivering a sermon in Vilna's Great Synagogue at six, recording insights by seven, studying Kabbalah at nine and needing no teacher by ten. He married Chana of Kaidan, who ran the household until her 1783 death so he could study undistracted; after travels through Poland and Germany he settled in Vilna by 1745, refusing official pulpits yet accepting a small communal stipend. Sons said he slept only two hours daily in four half-hour scraps, and his student Chaim of Volozhin described him going days without food over a Talmudic knot.
He urged mathematics as a tool for sacred texts yet blasted philosophy and metaphysics. When Hasidism reached his city he joined the Misnagdim seeking to curb it. Admirers ranked him with the Talmudic sages or early Geonim, and many yeshivas still keep customs named for him, reportedly the dominant Ashkenazi usage in Jerusalem. Though chronologically an acharon, devotees treat him like a rishon.
His method favoured the plain sense of a text over pilpul, the sharp dialectic popular in other study halls, and his rulings often broke with the Shulchan Aruch or settled custom. He emended the Jerusalem Talmud, Tosefta and Zohar largely from memory rather than manuscripts, and many of those corrections were later matched by reliable textual witnesses. None of his writings appeared in his lifetime.
As a Kabbalist he rejected revelations from angelic maggidim. Hasidim spread a rumour that he scorned the Zohar, which Chaim of Volozhin angrily denied; Chaim went on to found the Volozhin yeshiva on the Gaon's ideal of unbroken study.
Source: Vilna Gaon
