Background
Born David Rozenson in Smarhon’ (now in Grodno Region, Belarus), Vilnius in the Russian Empire.
(There is a tradition that whoever knows the seventy six n...)
There is a tradition that whoever knows the seventy six names of the angel Metatron can express any wish and see it fulfilled. The Book of Desire means just this: It teaches how to express a desire and call the related appropriate name of Metatron. Eleazar includes this small treatise after the two tomes concerning the Work of Creation and the Work of the Chariot in his Sodei Razia (lit. Secrets of Secrets, also called The Book of Raziel), which represent the two first kabbalistic levels. After a ritual purification, the apprentice can engage in the mystical meditations and call the proper name of Metatron. A proper preparation leads to the appearance of a Maggid, who is a messenger angel. This envoy, as Eleazar says, will appear "according to your will and as often as you desire". He will mediate between us and the superior worlds, taking care of fulfilling our wish through the power of Metatron.
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Born David Rozenson in Smarhon’ (now in Grodno Region, Belarus), Vilnius in the Russian Empire.
He immigrated with his family at the age of three to Mandatory Palestine, where his father became a Hebrew teacher at a Tel Aviv elementary school. When the 1929 Hebron massacre broke out, he joined the Haganah in Jerusalem, where he was studying philosophy and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When the Irgun was established, he was one of its first members, and displayed outstanding military skills.
During the 1929 riots he served in the Haganah (underground Jew'ish selfdefense force) in Jerusalem. He despaired of the Haganah’s policy of self-restraint and passive defense, and in 1931 joined joined a group called
Haganah B, which advocated active defense and a retaliatory policy against Arab attackers. Raziel became active in training underground fighters. He opposed the return of this group to the Haganah, and in 1937 joined the newly created Irgun Tzevai Leummi (“Irgun”), the armed underground of the rightwing Revisionist Movement in Palestine. From 1937 to 1939 he commanded its Jerusalem district. The leader of the Revisionist Movement, Vladimir Jabotinsky, appointed him commander in chief of the Irgun in 1939. This underground claimed the right of every Jew to immigrate freely to Palestine and argued that the existence of an armed Jewish force in the country was a prerequisite for the creation of a Jewish state that would rise as a result of an armed struggle. Under his command the Irgun engaged in a series of retaliatory raids against Arab rioters, began to organize illegal immigration, and planned attacks on British facilities and installations. The British arrested him in 1939 and he was detained for a year. After his release, he was unable to prevent a split in the Irgun, which resulted in the creation of a third underground, the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Lehi), under Avraham Stern, who objected to the links between the Irgun and the Revisionist Movement.
After the outbreak of World War II, the Irgun decided to suspend its anti-Arab and anti-British operations and form an anti-Nazi front for the duration of the war. Raziel volunteered for a British-sponsored mission in Iraq to light the proNazi al Khilani regime. He was killed in a bomb explosion in the Habaniyeh air base near Baghdad. His remains were reinterred in a military ceremony in Jerusalem in 1961.
(There is a tradition that whoever knows the seventy six n...)
He was a leader of the Zionist underground in British Mandatory Palestine and one of the founders of the Irgun.