(Cordovero's teacher in Halakha), Rabbi Moshe of Trani, Rabbi Yosef Sagis, and Rabbi Moshe Alshich. As a whole, Ramak's contributions to posterity were in speculative and performative Kabbalah, but during his lifetime he was the renowned head of the Yeshiva for Portuguese immigrants in Safed. Scholarship According to his own testimony in the introduction to "Pardes Rimonim", in 1542, at the age of twenty, Ramak heard a "Heavenly voice" urging him to study Kabbalah with his brother-in-law, Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, composer of the mystical song Lecha Dodi. He was thus initiated into the mysteries of the Zohar. The young Ramak not only mastered the text, but decided to organize the Kabbalistic themes leading to his day and present them in an organized fashion. This led to the composition of his first book, Pardes Rimonim ("Orchard of Pomegranates"), which was completed in 1548 and secured Ramak's reputation as a brilliant Kabbalist and a lucid thinker. The Pardes, as it is known, was a systemization of all Kabbalistic thought up to that time and featured the author's attempt at a reconciliation of various early schools with the conceptual teachings of the Zohar in order to demonstrate an essential unity and self-consistent philosophical basis of Kabbalah. His second work - a magnum opus titled Ohr Yakar ("Precious Light") - was a 16 volume commentary on the Zoharic literature in its entirety and a work to which Ramak had devoted most of his life (the modern publication of this great work has started during the mid 1960s and reached partial fruition in 2004 Jerusalem, though the 23-volume set left out about two-thirds of the Tikkunei Zohar; additional volumes are still being published). Some parts of Ohr Yakar have been published under separate titles, such as Shiur Qomah, Tefilah le-Moshe etc. Some other books for which the Ramak is known are Tomer Devorah ("Palm Tree of Deborah"), in which he utilizes the Kabbalistic concepts of the Sephirot ("Divine attributes") to illuminate a system of morals and ethics; Ohr Neerav, a justification of and insistence upon the importance of Kabbalah study and an introduction to the methods explicated in Pardes Rimonim; Elimah Rabbati, a highly abstract treatise on kabbalistic concerns revolving around the Godhead and His relationship to the Sefirot; and Sefer Gerushin, a short and intimate composition which features the highly devotional slant of Ramak, as well as his asceticism and religious piety. Certain parts