great follower of Isaac Luria. Ashlag had high hopes of meeting great Kabbalists in Jerusalem including the Sephardi followers of the great 18th century Yemenite Jewish Kabbalist Shalom Sharabi. However, he was profoundly disappointed by his encounter with them. Their views about Kabbalah ran contrary to Ashlag's experience with the teaching as a means of profound personal transformation and spiritual illumination, by becoming a vessel for divine light. In 1926 Ashlag left for London, and it was there that he wrote his commentary on Isaac Luria's book Etz Chaim. This work is entitled Panim Meirot wMasbirot. It took him one and a half years to complete this work. It was published in 1927, and in 1928 Ashlag returned to the Land of Israel (Mandatory Palestine). In 1932 Ashlag and his family moved to Jaffa. During this period, Ashlag also began one of his main works, Talmud Eser Sefirot, a commentary on all the writings of Isaac Luria. In this undertaking, he developed a comprehensive explanation of the sequence of the creation of all of the upper worlds (Olamot Elyonim), starting with the source of emanation (Ma'atzil) and finishing with our world (Olam HaZeh). The work is divided into six volumes, containing sixteen parts and over two thousand pages. Some today consider it as the core of the entire teaching of Kabbalah. In the 1930s Ashlag, now in his fifties, gathered around him a group of disciples, including Rav Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein, his closest student, and studied Kabbalah every night, often from shortly after midnight until dawn. He also composed many articles and letters at this time that openly promoted the study of Kabbalah on a mass scale. Ashlag went to great lengths to publish Kabbalistic material, in mediums suitable for disseminating the knowledge he had acquired across the entire nation. He began an independent Kabbalistic newsletter publication, HaUma "The Nation", of which only one issue survived. Ashlag differs fundamentally from all Kabbalists of the past, who studied and taught Kabbalah in a concealed manner, in that he felt a great need to reveal and clarify the teaching of Kabbalah to the masses. This was because he saw that the evil inclination in people (human egoism) would rise to an altogether new height in this era of humanity, causing an altogether new era of internal suffering felt as a meaningless and confused existence. Writing of the Sulam In 1943, Ashlag moved