Arizal.org

This website shares the teachings of the Arizal, and facilitates discussion and a virtual study hall devoted to his Kabbalistic system. 

The Arizal (Rabbi Isaac Luria) was a Jewish mystic who thrived in Tzfat (Safed) in the 16th Century.  His name is connected with all of the mystic thought that developed in the Kabbalistic school of Tzfat.  His surviving literary compositions consist of only a few poems, but his fame led to the school and all its works being named after him.

Isaac Luria was born in Jerusalem in 1534 to an Ashkenazi father and a Sephardic mother.  His father died while Isaac was still a child.  Isaac was brought up by his rich uncle Mordecai Francis, a tax-farmer in Cairo, who placed Isaac under the best Jewish teachers.  Luria showed himself a diligent student of rabbinical literature.  Under the guidance of Rabbi Bezalel Ashkenazi (best known as the author of Shittah Mekubetzet), Luria became proficient at a very young age.

The Arizal used to deliver his lectures extemporaneously.  With the exception of several works and some kabbalistic poems in Aramaic for the Sabbath table, he did not write much.  The real exponent of his kabbalistic system was Rabbi Chaim Vital.  Rabbi Chaim Vital collected all the notes of the lectures which Arizal's disciples had made; and from these notes numerous works were produced.  The most important was the Etz Chayim, ("Tree of Life"), in eight volumes.  Etz Chayim expounds both the theoretical and the devotional or meditative Kabbalah based on The Zohar.

Lurianic Kabbalah has remained the leading school of mysticism in Judaism, and is an important influence on Hasidism and Sefardic kabbalists.  In fact, only a minority of today's Jewish mystics belong to other branches of thought in Zoharic mysticism.