Sha'ar HaMitzvot

Sha'ar HaMitzvot is the companion volume to Sha'ar HaKavanot in the Shemoneh She'arim, the eight gates through which Rabbi Chaim Vital set down the teachings of the Arizal. Where Sha'ar HaKavanot gives the intentions of prayer, this one gives the intentions of the mitzvot. Following the parshiyot of the Torah, it asks at each mitzvah a question the halachic literature does not: what happens above when this is performed below? The answers are specific rather than general — which Partzuf is built, which Name is unified, what a limb of the body corresponds to in the supernal structure, and what is repaired of the shattering of the vessels. Tzitzit, tefillin, milah, honoring a father and mother, the laws of what may be eaten: each is shown as an act with consequences in the worlds above. For most English readers this has been out of reach, the Hebrew compressed and assuming the full vocabulary of Lurianic Kabbalah from its first sentence. This edition offers a full English elucidation: the correspondence traced step by step, the allusions opened, the reasoning laid bare in the order it unfolds. Every gematria has been verified letter by letter, and the sequence follows the source exactly, with nothing skipped, duplicated, or reordered. This is a book about what the mitzvot accomplish, not about how to perform them — nothing here is a halachic ruling, and where it differs from a posek, the posek is right. Produced by AI Sefarim using Gemini 3.8 Flash with human oversight; offered as a study companion and not a substitute for the Hebrew or for a teacher.