By Rabbi Yair Hoffman

Today is the first of Adar — the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Shabsai ben Meir HaKohen, the Shach. He passed away on this very date in 5423 (1663), at approximately forty-one years of age. He is buried in Holešov, Moravia — today’s Czech Republic — and his grave draws pilgrims from across the world. But his resting place in Klal Yisroel is the Shulchan Aruch itself: open any standard edition of Yoreh Deah or Choshen Mishpat, and there he stands in the margins, alive, arguing, insisting that we think more precisely.

What was it that made him remarkably singular? What gave the Shach that quality of penetrating, almost surgical insight that has made his works the irreplaceable companion of every posek for nearly four centuries?

There is no better way to answer that question than with a story — a story from nearly forty years ago that has stayed with this author ever since.

Rav Yitzchok Zilberstein, one of the supreme halachic authorities of our generation, opened a shiur, some forty years ago, with a question that landed in the room like a thunderclap:

“Where among all the nosei keilim — the standard commentaries on the Shulchan Aruch — do we find a machlokes in halacha between one of the gedolei haAchronim and a goy? Yes — an actual non-Jew, arguing a halachic position! Where is this found?”

Rav Zilberstein looked around the room. He went from scholar to scholar. No one had an answer. A machlokes in halacha between a Rishon or Acharon and a non-Jew — in the standard commentaries on the Shulchan Aruch?

The idea seemed impossible. And no had an answer

Rav Zilberstein finally directed them to a passage in the Nekudos HaKesef. The episode recorded there goes as follows.

The Shach was at some sort of gathering or party. A non-Jew poured wine for him. The Shach refused to drink. The non-Jew, far from accepting this quietly, turned on the Shach and challenged him directly — in the language of Torah learning:

“Shaal avicha veyageidcha — go ask your father and he will tell you! You don’t even know your own halacha!”

The goy continue, “There is a Tosafos in Maseches Avodah Zarah that says explicitly: Chazal never enacted the prohibition of yayin nesach in a case where the non-Jew pours the wine specifically in order to forbid it to the Jew — that is, to damage him financially. The entire gezerah was enacted to prevent social intimacy leading to intermarriage. Where the non-Jew’s intent is not friendliness but actively to harm the Jew economically, that case was never included in the gezerah! So: I poured this wine specifically in order to forbid it to you — to cause you a loss. Therefore, according to Tosafos, you are permitted to drink it!”

The non-Jew was using a genuine, sophisticated Talmudic argument. He was claiming that his own intent — damaging the Jew financially — fell into precisely the category that Tosafos had exempted from the gezeras yayin nesach. And the argument had real force.

Rav Zilberstein then paused and asked the second, deeper question:

“So then — what is pshat in the Shach? Didn’t he know the Tosafos? Of course he knew the Tosafos — he knew every Tosafos. So why did he still refuse to drink?”

This is where Rav Zilberstein’s brilliance, and the Shach’s brilliance that it illuminated, comes into full view.

Rav Zilberstein explained: The Shach was not unaware of the Tosafos. He knew it perfectly!

But the Shach made a penetrating judgment about what was actually happening at that gathering. This non-Jew did not pour the wine to cause the Shach financial damage. He poured the wine — and then cited Tosafos — in order to demonstrate that he was a lamdan, a Torah scholar. His motivation was intellectual showmanship. He wanted to impress the room. He wanted to show the great Rabbi Shabsai HaKohen that he, a non-Jew, knew Tosafos in Avodah Zarah.

And for that motivation — a display of erudition, a desire to show off one’s learning — Chazal never created an exception to yayin nesach!

The exception in Tosafos is specific: it covers a non-Jew who pours wine with the genuine intent to forbid it and cause financial harm. It does not cover a non-Jew who pours wine and then, after being challenged, reaches for a Talmudic argument to justify his action and impress the scholar in front of him. That is a fundamentally different act, a fundamentally different intent — and the Shach saw through it instantly.

Therefore: the wine is forbidden. The Shach does not drink. And the Shach is right.

The room understood. The machlokes was not between the Shach and Tosafos. It was between the Shach and the non-Jew — specifically, a disagreement about the non-Jew’s own motivation. The non-Jew claimed his intent was to harm financially (the exempt category). The Shach read his true intent as showing off his learning (not the exempt category). And on that precise question of intent, they disagreed — a machlokes in halacha between a gadol and a goy, found nowhere else in the entire nosei keilim of Shulchan Aruch.

Years later, this author had occasion to relate this very shiur back to Rav Zilberstein himself, while presenting him with an important she’eilah from American poskim. Rav Zilberstein — who had been sitting behind his desk, in the middle of writing a teshuvah in an emotional response to my request — stood up, came from behind the desk, and tearfully (with joy) gave me a great hug and a kiss:

“Hechzarta li aveidas ti! — You have returned my lost object to me! Mamash shachachti mikol hashiur hazeh — I had completely forgotten the entire shiur. Attah hizkarta osi — you have reminded me!”

That emotional moment — entrenched forever in my mind, is the perfect introduction to the holy Shach. How so?

Rav Zilberstein embodied the Tefillah in Maariv that personified both him and the Shach.

Ki Haim Chayeinu.

For Torah is OUR LIFE.

How else could the Shach have written his remarkably penetrating and vast commentary on Shulchan Aruch Yore De’ah – unless it embodied his life??  This was reflected in Rav Zilberstein’s emotional response to having his Chiddush restored to him.

This was also how the Shach’s mind worked: not just deep, but precise. Not just knowledgeable, but perceptive.   That quality — that penetrating, revolutionary insight — runs through every line of the Siftei Kohen and everything else the Shach ever wrote. Let us now tell his story in full.

I. The World He Was Born Into: Vilna and the Golden Age

The seventeenth century opened on perhaps one of the greatest flourishing of Jewish civilization since the Babylonian academies. The Jewish communities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had achieved a level of Torah scholarship, communal organization, and cultural vitality unmatched anywhere in the Diaspora. The great yeshivos of Krakow, Lublin, Poznań, and Vilna trained thousands of students. The Council of Four Lands administered hundreds of thousands of Jews with sophisticated governance. The Maharsha, the Maharshal, the Bach, the Rema — these were men of recent memory, whose students and students’ students still walked the earth.

Into this world — into the city of Vilna, the beating heart of Lithuanian Jewish scholarship — Rabbi Shabsai HaKohen was born, around the year 5382 (circa 1621–1622). Whether his precise birthplace was Vilna itself or the nearby town of Amstibovo (Mścibowo), where his father served as Av Beis Din, remains a question in the sources. What is certain is that the family was deeply rooted in Torah: his father, Rabbi Meir HaKohen — the Maharam Katz, a student of the Maharam of Lublin — wwho served as Av Beis Din of Amstibovo and later Mogilev. The child’s world was Torah from his first breath.

It was a world that would be annihilated before he turned thirty. He did not yet know that.

II. Education: Formed by the Giants

The Shach’s education was a map of the greatest Torah personalities of his age. His first teacher was his father. The child was identified as an iluy almost immediately — not merely a strong memory but a penetrating analytical intelligence, the kind that sees through the surface of a sugya to the hidden tension beneath and presses toward resolution with alarming directness.

A remarkable detail from the Hebrew sources: even as a small child, young Shabsai studied under the Megaleh Amukos — Rabbi Natan Nata Shapiro of Krakow — one of the great Kabbalists and Torah scholars of the era. That such a towering figure was accessible to him even in childhood speaks to the family’s connections and to the extraordinary interconnectedness of Polish Torah scholarship in its golden age.

At the age of twelve — when most boys are just beginning their formal Talmudic education — Shabsai HaKohen was sent to study in Kazimierz under Rabbi Yehoshua Heschel ben Yosef, the author of Maginei Shlomo, a close colleague and friend of his father. He then traveled to Lublin — the city of the great Maharshal — and studied under the leading rabbis there, including Rabbi Naftoli Katz. Lublin’s academy was legendary, and the young Shabsai absorbed both its breadth of knowledge and its culture of demanding exactness. When he finally returned to Vilna, he was still a young man — but already, in the judgment of the gedolim around him, a gadol.

III. Vilna: Marriage, the Beis Din, and a Father’s Pride

In Vilna, Rabbi Shabsai married Yenta-Leah, the daughter of Rabbi Shimon Wolf Tauber — one of the wealthiest men in the city and a grandson of the Rema, whose glosses on the Shulchan Aruch were the foundation of Ashkenazic halachic practice. The marriage connected the Shach, by family, to the most illustrious name in Ashkenazic halacha.

Supported by his father-in-law and free of material concerns, he devoted himself entirely to Torah. Day and night, the sources tell us, he was immersed in study, analysis, and writing. In the year 5401 (1641), he was appointed as a dayan on the illustrious Beis Din of Vilna, under the presiding authority of Rabbi Moshe Lima, author of the celebrated Chelkas Mechokek — filling the seat previously occupied by Rabbi Hillel ben Naftoli Hertz, author of Beis Hillel. To sit in that chair, in that court, at that age, was to occupy one of the most distinguished positions in all of Lithuanian Jewry.

His father, Rabbi Meir HaKohen, lived to see what his son had become. When the Siftei Kohen was published, the elder rabbi composed a short poem in its honor — with an acrostic that spells out his own name, Meir HaKohen, Chazak. A father, celebrating in verse the son who had surpassed him. It is one of the most touching moments in the biography.

The Shach himself preserved another family tribute, in the middle of a halachic discussion in Yoreh Deah (Siman 326). He writes: “And so I saw from the pious and scholarly Rebbetzin, my mother — and from other righteous and wise women — that they were careful in this matter.” He cites his mother as a halachic precedent. In the home where the Shach was raised, the women were talmidos chachamim in their own right.

IV. The Siftei Kohen: A Masterwork at Twenty-Four

In 5406 (1646), when Rabbi Shabsai HaKohen was approximately twenty-four years old, he published the Siftei Kohen on Yoreh Deah. The title means “Lips of the Priest” — from Malachi (2:7): “For the lips of the priest shall guard knowledge, and Torah shall be sought from his mouth.” It is also an acronym of his name: Shabsai Kohen. The initials Shin-Kaf give us the universal abbreviation by which he is known: the Shach.

The work received the haskamos of eighteen of the leading scholars of the generation. The gedolei hador were not merely endorsing a promising commentary; they were announcing that something genuinely unprecedented had appeared.

What distinguished the Siftei Kohen from all previous commentaries? The Shach did not come to explain the Shulchan Aruch. He traced every ruling back to its Talmudic root, he exposed tensions that had not been fully explained, and he offered his own independent resolution with a directness that, well, let’s just say that he was willing to disagree with the Shulchan Aruch itself. He was also willing to challenge the Tosafos on the basis of his own reasoning. And he had that quality of seeing not just what an argument says but what is actually going on beneath it, and ruling accordingly.

He articulated his method himself, in a passage that is both bold and entirely unselfconscious:

“And all of this is clear as the noonday sun — and I would not have needed to elaborate, except that the Beis Yosef, the Maharam Isserles, the Baal Lechem Mishneh, Shearis Yosef, and the Bach did not find their footing here — and Heaven has left a place for me.”

The Beis Yosef. The Rema. The Bach. Three of the supreme pillars of Ashkenazic halachic literature, — and Shamayim had reserved a place for a correction for him?  Brazen!  

The Vaad Arba Aratzos issued a ruling that lasted a century.  The halacha is like the TaZ – not the Shach! But after a century more and more started paskening like the Shach.

V. The Shach and the Taz: The Great Dialogue

But earlier, in that very same year — 5406 (1646) — the Turei Zahav appeared in Lublin, by Rabbi David ben Shmuel HaLevi: a senior authority, already celebrated, son-in-law of the Bach. Two monumental commentaries on Yoreh Deah, from two scholars of entirely different generations, appearing simultaneously. It was one of the most consequential coincidences in the history of halachic literature.

The Shach read the Taz and wrote Nekudos HaKesef — “Silver Points” — a systematic critique of the Taz’s rulings. The title was deliberately modest: the Taz means “Rows of Gold,” and by calling his critique “Silver Points,” the Shach signaled deep personal respect for the elder scholar, even while contesting him forthrightly. But the intellectual engagement was absolute.

The Shach’s own account of his relationship with the Taz, in his introduction to Nekudos HaKesef, is among the most beautiful passages in all of the history of Hakdamos:

“Let it not enter the reader’s mind that I composed these critiques because of any dispute with the Turei Zahav, or any ill will — for it is known to all that between us was fulfilled the verse ‘and love in the end.’ The Torah seeks out its proper lodging, and I became the lodging place for the Turei Zahav: he was with me for three days, and I honored him with a great honor the like of which cannot be believed, and he too honored me greatly — to the point that he kissed me on my head, and he rejoiced with me with the very joy of the Beis HaShoeva. And Hashem knows and is my witness that I composed Nekudos HaKesef only for the sake of Heaven.”

The Taz — decades the Shach’s senior, already famous — came to visit the young genius, spent three days with him, kissed him on the head, and rejoiced with him like the ecstatic joy of the water-drawing celebration in the Beis HaMikdash. And then the Shach, with complete intellectual integrity, proceeded to disagree with him in print on dozens of rulings.

This is how Torah disagreement is supposed to work. Ki Haim Chayeinu.

The Taz responded with Matzref HaKesef; the Shach replied with his Kuntres Acharon. The entire exchange was eventually embedded in every standard edition of the Shulchan Aruch — the Daf on one side, the Kuntres on the other — where it has lived for over three centuries. They are the Ashli Ravrevei, the “great trees” of Yoreh Deah, inseparable from the Code itself.

It was in this very Nekudos HaKesef that the episode of the non-Jewish “lamdan” was recorded — the ruling with which this article opens. The same work that contains the great intellectual battle with the Taz also contains the Shach’s instantaneous reading of a non-Jew’s true motivation at a party.

VI. The Cataclysm: Gezeiros Tach V’Tat

The year 5408 (1648) ended everything.

Bogdan Chmielnicki, y”s head of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, launched his uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Cossack armies, allied with Tatar hordes, swept through Ukraine, Podolia, Volhynia, and Poland. For the Jewish communities in their path it was not war but extermination. Estimates of the Jewish dead run from one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand. Nemirov, Tulchin, Polonnoye, Uman — annihilated. The Shach himself recorded the horror: fifteen hundred holy yidden killed at Uman on Shabbos alone, stripped, surrounded in fields, offered conversion and choosing death.

These are the Gezeiros Tach V’Tat — the worst catastrophe in Jewish history between the destruction of the Temple and the Holocaust.

The Shach was not a distant observer. He was a survivor. He had family, colleagues, students in these communities. He watched the world that had produced the Siftei Kohen torn apart. And he did what a scholar does: he wrote.

He composed Megillas Eifah — “Scroll of Darkness” — published in Amsterdam in 1651. Written in rhymed Hebrew prose, it is both a primary historical document (translated into German and Russian, relied on by historians for centuries) and a work of genuine literary power: grief disciplined into art.

He composed selichos for the massacres. And he instituted a fast day on the 20th of Sivan, in memory of the destruction of Nemirov. He established it first for himself and his descendants — a private commitment of perpetual mourning. In 1652, the Council of Four Lands adopted it as a public fast for all of Jewry. The Shach’s private grief became part of Klal Yisroel’s collective memory.

VII. Flight: Vilna Falls

In 1655 a second catastrophe struck: Russian armies invaded the Commonwealth and captured Vilna. On Thursday, the 24th of Tammuz, 5415, Rabbi Shabsai HaKohen fled his city — among a mass of Jewish refugees pouring westward, carrying what they could, leaving everything else behind. The Beis Din where he had sat, the community he had served, the city that had shaped him — all of it suddenly behind him.

He made for Lublin. But the war followed. On the first day of Sukkos, armies arrived and massacred many of Lublin’s Jews. Again the Shach escaped. He made his way to Bohemia — pausing in Prague — then to Strážnice (Dresnitz) in Moravia, where he accepted the rabbinate.

In this period of wandering and terror, a family tragedy unfolded that was later immortalized by Rabbi Meir Lehmann in the novel Bas HaShach. As the Shach fled through the forests during the Russian invasion, his young daughter was lost.

A non-Jewish nobleman found her, was taken with the child, and raised her as a princess — never knowing she was Jewish. She maintained her identity in secret. Eventually the Shach found and recognized her.

I am unsure as to all of Rabbi Lehman’s sources, but whatever the precise historical core of this narrative, it captures something real: the terror of families torn apart in flight, children swallowed by the chaos of invasion. That the Shach — the author of immortal works, carried this wound alongside his public greatness makes him more human, and more heartbreaking.

VIII. Holešov: The Final Station

From Strážnice, Rabbi Shabsai HaKohen was called to the rabbanus of Holešov — a small but dignified Jewish community in Moravia, in today’s Czech Republic. He settled there, served as its Moreh Horaah, and there he remained until his death. He was perhaps thirty-five when he arrived. He had six years left.

Holešov was nothing like Vilna. One cannot help imagining what it cost a man of his stature to lead a more modest community after the Beis Din of Vilna — knowing that the world which had produced him was in ruins.

Actually, I take that back.  The Alter Mirrers, among whom were three of my Rebbeim also felt that.  But that is another story.

And yet Holešov offered something he had not known in years: stability. The community embraced him with reverence. He continued to write and rule on questions that arrived from far beyond Moravia. He completed the Siftei Kohen on Choshen Mishpat.

There he also formed one of the most striking friendships in rabbinic biography: a close intellectual relationship with Magister Valentino Wiedreich, a philosopher and scholar from Leipzig. A Lutheran academic and a Jewish posek — in seventeenth-century Central Europe — developing genuine intellectual friendship. This was the same fearlessness that had allowed the Shach to engage the non-Jewish lamdan’s Talmudic argument at the party and demolish it on its own terms. He was not afraid of the wider world of ideas; he simply had better arguments.

The Shach Synagogue of Holešov — built in the late sixteenth century, adorned with magnificent Baroque interior decoration — bears his name and stands as one of the finest preserved historic synagogues in Central Europe. His grave in the adjacent cemetery remains a pilgrimage site. He is universally considered the greatest rabbi buried on Czech soil.

IX. His Family: A Constellation of Torah

The Shach’s family circle was itself a seedbed of greatness. His brother Rabbi Yona Nachum HaKohen served as Av Beis Din of Sochatchov; his descendants include the Hasidic Rebbe Rabbi Chanoch Henich HaKohen Levin of Alexander. An additional sister was the grandmother of Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt, author of the responsa Panim Meiros. His son Rabbi Moshe HaKohen served as rabbi of Krotoschin; his grandson Yitzchak brought two of the Shach’s works — Giburos Anashim and Poel Tzedek — to press. His son-in-law Rabbi Menachem Manish Chayes published the Siftei Kohen on Choshen Mishpat and wrote its introduction.

And then there is the most extraordinary genealogical tradition in the record: that a granddaughter of the Shach — the daughter of his daughter Yocheved, born in 1660 — became the second wife of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism. But it is not so pashut.  Historians treat this claim with appropriate caution. But if accurate, it means that the great river of Hasidism flows through a granddaughter of the man who corrected the Rema — the supreme legal analyst and the revolutionary mystical founder, joined by blood.

X. His Works: The Full Canon

Siftei Kohen on Yoreh Deah (Krakow, 5406 / 1646)

The magnum opus. Published at age twenty-four with haskamos from eighteen gedolei hador. Since 1674, printed in virtually every standard edition of the Shulchan Aruch alongside the Taz — the two primary running commentaries, the Ashli Ravrevei. Required study for the Chief Rabbinate of Israel’s semicha examinations to this day.

Siftei Kohen on Choshen Mishpat (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1663; Berlin, 1697)

A second monumental commentary on civil and monetary law. Published posthumously by his son-in-law Rabbi Menachem Manish Chayes. Foundational in its field.

Nekudos HaKesef (“Silver Points”)

A systematic critique of the Taz’s rulings on Yoreh Deah — printed at the end of the Taz in standard editions. Contains the famous episode of the non-Jewish lamdan and the argument from Tosafos in Avodah Zarah — with the Shach’s penetrating response about the true nature of the non-Jew’s intent. The Taz replied with Matzref HaKesef; the Shach rejoined in the Kuntres Acharon. All three works are embedded in every standard edition of the Shulchan Aruch.

Takfo Kohen

A major scholarly work on the halachic principle of tkapfo kohen — the laws of tephisah (seizure of possession). Studied intensively in yeshivos. Rabbi Yonasan Eibeschitz composed an abridgment; the Kuntres HaSfekos is written in dialogue with it.

Megillas Eifah (Amsterdam, 1651)

A historical chronicle in rhymed Hebrew prose of the Chmielnicki massacres. A primary historical document, translated into German and Russian, and a landmark of Jewish lamentation literature.

Selichos (Amsterdam, 1651)

Penitential prayers for the communities destroyed during Tach V’Tat. The Shach was the first to institute the fast of 20 Sivan, later adopted by the Council of Four Lands as a public fast.

Giburos Anashim, Poel Tzedek, Sefer HaAruch

Works on Even HaEzer, the enumeration of the mitzvos, and a longer commentary on Tur Yoreh Deah. Also: published responsa (Eishel Avraham) and handwritten glosses on the Yam Shel Shlomo of the Maharshal on Chulin preserved in manuscript.

XI. The Shach’s Method: What Made Him Different

The Rav Zilberstein story is not an isolated anecdote. It is a window into the Shach’s mind as it operated at all times and on all topics. His halachic independence was not merely intellectual courage — it was principled methodology. He believed that every ruling must be traceable to its Talmudic root, and that no authority — however revered — could override what the primary sources themselves demanded.

Epilogue: Today Is His Yahrtzeit

Today — Rosh Chodesh Adar — is the day the Shach left this world, in Holešov, in 1663, at forty-one years old. He had lived through the near-destruction of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry. He had fled Vilna with armies at his back. He had lost a daughter in the forest. He had composed the greatest commentary on Yoreh Deah in the history of halacha. He had sat with the Taz for three days and been kissed on the head. He had faced a non-Jew at a party who cited Tosafos to justify his action — and had seen, in an instant, exactly what was happening and exactly why the argument failed.

Rav Zilberstein’s shiur — nearly forgotten, restored by a talmid who had carried it for decades, embraced back as a lost treasure — is itself a parable about how Torah lives. The Shach “forgot” nothing; we are the ones who forget. And it falls to each generation — at each Rosh Chodesh Adar, at each opening of a standard Shulchan Aruch — to remember him: the genius from Vilna who became a refugee, who wrote his masterpiece at twenty-four, who loved the Taz like a brother and argued with him like a scholar, , and whose Siftei Kohen remains, as it has been for nearly four centuries, clear as the noonday sun.

יהי זכרו ברוך — May his memory be a blessing.