For much of its early existence there was nothing extraordinary about Tsfat apart from its setting. The name Tsfat comes from the Hebrew word tzofeh, which means overlook, because for hundreds of years, its high elevation made it an ideal spot for lighting signal fires and looking out for enemies. Ancient Jews used it for both purposes. When the Crusaders swept into Tsfat during the 11th century, they found the hilltop useful for the same reasons and built a citadel of their own.

Tsfat’s original Jewish community died out, only to be reborn in a more glorious form. After Mameluke Muslim invaders chased the Christians out in 1266, Jews trickled back into the city. In 1492, Spanish Jews arrived, bringing their lucrative textile businesses with them. The new wealth, combined with low taxes and cool summers, made Tsfat an even more attractive place to live than Jerusalem.

Besides these practical advantages, Tsfat held special significance for those rabbis known as kabbalists. The word kabbalah literally means “to receive,” but by the 16th century, it referred to a specific body of mystical knowledge within Judaism. While some of its teachings date back thousands of years, the Kabbalah movement crystallized in the early 1200s in the Pyrenees and then spilled over into Spain. The central kabbalist text, the Zohar, centers on the travels of Shim’on Bar Yochai, a second century rabbi who wandered the hills near Tsfat and was buried on nearby Mount Meron.

Drawn by Rabbi Shim’on’s tomb, kabbalists began turning up in Tsfat in 1535. The first was Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, a native of Salonica. Alkabetz had spent years delving into the secrets of the Zohar and had written four books. But once he arrived in Tsfat, his teachings took on a more supernatural cast. Suddenly, angels were descending upon his late night study sessions with fellow rabbi Joseph Caro to illuminate fine points of Torah verse. Alkabetz initiated a tradition of dressing all in white and walking to the edge of a field each Friday night singing “Lecha Dodi,” a prayer he wrote to welcome the Shekhina as the Shabbat Bride. Alkabetz’s star student, Moses Cordovero, was no less avant-garde. Inspired by a kabbalist practice called gerushim (banishment), Cordovero spent long periods in the wilderness outside of Tsfat, exploring the Torah on entirely new levels. He played with the Hebrew letters that form God’s name, arranging them into different combinations and reducing them to pure sound.

But it was Isaac Luria—the mystic revered as the Ari (Lion)—who took all of these streams of insight and united them into a flood of revolutionary thought. As soon as he arrived from Egypt in 1569, he began teaching the other mystics the details of reincarnation and the secret of communicating with animals. He offered new interpretations of the Zohar and put forth ideas of his own. One such idea was a concept called tzimtzum. According to Luria, God’s first act was to withdraw into himself and create a void—a space where God was not—in order to make room for the universe.

The Tsfat theology was so distinct from the Jewish mainstream—even, in some cases, from the rest of Kabbalah—that it immediately aroused suspicion. Critics speculated that its ideas were not really Jewish but Muslim, borrowed from Sufi mystics who crossed paths with the Jews during the 800 years of Muslim rule in  Spain. Even looking around Tsfat today, many of the city’s most striking features are Muslim in origin: the hamsa amulet, for instance, and the evil-averting blue door. Sufis, like kabbalists, use meditation to achieve unity with God and emphasize mystical experience over book learning. And there are eerie similarities in language. Isaac Luria’s mystical Shabbat prayer starts with the proclamation, “I sing in hymns to enter the gates of the Field of Holy Apples.” A poem written 300 years earlier by the Sufi poet Rumi uses the same metaphor: “The smell of apples arises from the orchards of my soul. / One whiff and I am gone—toward a feast of apples I am going.”

Harder to explain is that core kabbalist teachings often sound more Far Eastern than Middle Eastern. To the Tsfat mystics, the Torah was more than a collection of stories. They believed that when God said “Let there be light,” the actual Hebrew letters that make up the word “light”—aleph, vav and resh—formed a unique vibration that physically gave rise to the phenomenon of light. Thousands of years earlier, the Vedic rishis of India likewise considered the sounds of their holy texts to be the cosmic blueprint of creation.

The Tsfat rabbis always insisted that their teachings were intrinsically Jewish. After all, Moses had somehow managed to part the Red Sea, draw water from a rock and bring the Torah down from the sky. His secret teachings, they believed, had been passed down through the generations and practiced by ancient rabbis like Shim’on Bar Yochai. Sadly, Judaism had lost this knowledge during centuries of persecution and exile and become a dry religion of rote ritual and intellectual debate. “[Jewish] hearts diminished,” wrote Moses Cordovero, “and those who sought Torah found their strength growing too weak even to perceive simple things—certainly not Kabbalah.”

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One blazingly bright afternoon, I followed a flood of pilgrims to the tomb of Yonatan Ben Uziel, another revered second century rabbi buried in a valley near Tsfat. It was the 26th of Sivan, the anniversary of his death, and the steep switchback leading up to his grave had a carnival-like atmosphere. Tour buses, their sides plastered with photos of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, were parked at the foot of the hill, blaring klezmer music. Makeshift souvenir stands sold hamsas and Star of David pendants, while every few feet, another disheveled man with a long beard asked visitors for tzedakah. It was an odd cast of characters, ranging from the spiritually curious to the devoutly religious. There were frum women in knee-high nylons, young women in strappy tank tops, elderly Hasids with spindly legs and tanned soldiers toting machine guns. There was also a peculiar sect of Breslovers, known locally as “Na Nachs,” who were beating drums and chanting the name of Breslov founder Rabbi Nachman in much the same manner as Hari Krishnas chant the names of Hindu deities. They were dressed in white from head to foot, and many had knotty payot that looked like remnants of a full head of dreadlocks.

In his or her own way, each person gathered here had come to Tsfat looking for a glimmer of the city’s medieval radiance. But whether by coincidence or divine intervention, all of the 16th century mystics died within a decade of one another: Cordovero in 1570, Luria in 1572, Caro in 1575 and Alkabetz in 1580. They left behind little that was tangible. Isaac Luria, the most prolific of all, had refused to record his insights or systematize them in any way. “It is impossible,” he replied when his disciples asked him to write a book, “because all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea had burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received, and how can I put it down in a book?”

As a result, Luria’s ideas drifted out to the world through circuitous channels. A few years after his death, one of his disciples, Chaim Vital, did record his master’s teachings in a volume that he kept under lock and key. A few years later, when Vital was ill in bed, his brother accepted a bribe and allowed a few secret copies to be made. One of these manuscripts fell into the hands of a man named Israel Sarug, who used Vital’s manuscript as a textbook for a new system of Lurianic Kabbalah that he set about teaching himself. Until the 19th century, when Vital’s book finally appeared in print, Luria’s teachings continued to spread to Jews and mystically-minded Renaissance Christians almost exclusively through Sarug and his students.

It was during this 300-year gap that a Ukrainian villager known as Israel Ba’al Shem Tov did something Luria himself likely never considered: He launched a popular movement based on the great mystic’s ideas. Hasids think of their founder as a great tzaddik in his own right—he has been credited with extraordinary powers that range from walking on water to moving mountains. But what made the Ba’al Shem Tov most appealing, especially to impoverished villagers in Southern Russia, was his ability to make mysticism accessible to the common folk. Where other kabbalists led students through a maze of abstract ideas, the Ba’al Shem Tov emphasized an individual’s personal connection with God. His followers horrified the more cultured and intellectual Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) by swaying, shouting, even performing handsprings during  prayer—whatever it took to achieve a state of spiritual ecstasy.

The Ba’al Shem Tov shared Luria’s aversion to recording his thoughts on paper, pressing upon his followers that his message could not be transmitted through writing. According to Rabbi Tzvi Meir, a leader from the Hasidic Gerer sect, the Ba’al Shem Tov’s true teachings were non-verbal vibrations “enclothed, so to speak, in the garment of a Torah teaching or story.” Nonetheless, after the Ba’al Shem Tov died in 1760, his followers hastened to put his teachings to paper. Rebbes in towns throughout Eastern Europe—Satmar, Lubavitch, Breslov, Viznitz and hundreds of others—created distinct systems of Hasidic thought, each giving a slightly different twist to the Ba’al Shem Tov’s message. The Tanya, a book written by Lubavitch Rebbe Schneur Zalman, offered step-by-step explanations of Lurianic concepts like tzimtzum. In contrast, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the Ba’al Shem Tov’s grandson, imparted the master’s teachings in the form of fairy tales.

Until the early 20th century, virtually all  knowledge of the Tsfat mystics came to the public through Hasidic texts and stories. It was the scholar Gershom Scholem, born in Germany in 1897, who created an alternate narrative. Scholem was the first to approach Jewish mysticism in an academic manner, carefully studying the original manuscripts and drawing his own distinctions between truth and legend. Hasidic Jews were enraged by Scholem’s rational methods, particularly when he declared that the Zohar had not been written by Shim’on Bar Yochai as they believed. But in scholarly circles, Scholem was seen as a bold pioneer who took an arcane subject and turned it into a modern academic discipline. His most influential book, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, presented the Tsfat mystics as historical figures and explored their ideas in the context of other theologies. Later scholars such as Arthur Green in Boston and Daniel Matt in Berkeley expanded upon his scholarship, writing books that began to show up on the bookshelves of young seekers. By simply introducing the phrase “Jewish mysticism” into the public vocabulary, Scholem opened the field of Kabbalah to Jews and non-Jews alike.

Although not his intent, Scholem also paved the way for tshuva, the return of thousands of disaffected young Jews to Orthodox Judaism. Scholem’s work inspired the movement’s central figure, the late Modern Orthodox rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, to peruse the original kabbalist sources and draw conclusions of his own. But Kaplan’s motivation was quite different: During the 1960s and 1970s, he had seen multitudes of young Jews flock to Indian and Buddhist spirituality. Kaplan wanted to provide them with a Jewish alternative to eastern meditation.

The problem was that no one, save a few elite Hasidic rabbis, was quite sure what kinds of techniques the Tsfat mystics had actually practiced. After poring over abstruse texts and experimenting with some of the techniques, Kaplan conceded that the instructions left behind by the mystics were far from complete. “The details were fascinating,” he wrote in the introduction to his book Jewish Meditation, “but when we tried to translate them into practice, we discovered that too much information was missing. It was like trying to use a book on advanced French cuisine without a rudimentary knowledge of cooking. The recipes were there, but a novice could not use them.”

Kaplan’s books may have lacked a few key ingredients, but they whetted the appetites of spiritually curious young Jews. Most opted for Kabbalah á la carte, delving into Jewish mysticism without adopting a stringent Orthodox lifestyle. Others chose to study with Hasidic rabbis, most notably the students of Yehuda Ashlag, the Polish-born rabbi who founded the original Kabbalah Center in Jerusalem in 1922. A small but significant minority took the next step and became ba’alei tshuva: returnees to an Orthodox way of life. Those who gravitated toward Hasidism were especially drawn to ecstasy-oriented Breslov and outreach-driven Chabad-Lubavitch.

These two groups proved to be the vehicles that brought Kabbalah back to Tsfat: When rabbis from each sect announced that the true knowledge of Kabbalah had returned to the city of air, hundreds of ba’alei tshuva heard the call and moved there.

“There’s something huge, huge, huge going on here,” said Avraham Lowenthal, a 36-year-old artist who discovered Kaplan’s books as a student at the University of Michigan. Since 1994, he has been living in Tsfat and studying Kabbalah under a disciple of Yehuda Ashlag’s son. His paintings feature elaborate geometric diagrams, circles of Hebrew letters and permutations of the name of God. “All the kabbalistic teachings are coming out now after hundreds of years, and Tsfat is like Central Station,” said Lowenthal, a slender man with a white kippah above his beaming, serene face. “Whether people are religious or not, everyone can taste what’s going on here. This place is a spiritual vortex of the world.”

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Until the Hasidim came to town, art, not religion, was modern Tsfat’s main attraction. The city’s beauty enthralled the European painters who began to trickle in during the 1920s and continued to arrive in a steady stream throughout the following decades.

“The architecture of Tsfat made these European artists feel that they were really in the Orient,” explained Michal Auerbach, a 66-year-old artist who has become an advocate for the city’s art community. “They were deeply inspired by the stone, the courtyards, the arches inside the buildings.”

When the artists first arrived, Tsfat was a Muslim city where 1,350 Jews lived precariously among 12,000 Arabs. This changed in May of 1948, when Israel declared independence and the Arabs fled to neighboring Lebanon. With government permission, the artists moved into an especially picturesque quarter of the Old City where the Arab Christian population had resided.

The Tsfat artists’ colony, officially inaugurated in 1951, was born at an opportune time when there were no government art museums and few private galleries in Israel. Landscape painters such as Yitzhak Frenkel and Moshe Castel, along with the Judaica artist who called himself Shalom of Safed, were soon counted among Israel’s most celebrated painters, and art lovers flocked to Tsfat to see their exhibitions. The northern Galilee, with its high elevation and low humidity, also happened to be an excellent place to escape the heat, and Tsfat became one of Israel’s most popular summer tourist destinations. Hotels were built, and homeowners took in summer lodgers. At the height of Tsfat’s popularity, many locals went so far as to live in their kitchens so they could rent out the rest of their rooms.

Decline set in during the 1970s. Some of Tsfat’s great painters died while others moved to Tel Aviv, a city that now boasted the country’s best galleries. Around the same time, air conditioning became widely available throughout Israel. Israelis no longer had to travel to the Galilee hilltop to stay cool—they could spend their summers at home or in more glamorous locales. It was at this moment that the Breslov Rabbi Gedaliah Kenig established Kiryat Breslov, a Hasidic community in the Old City of Tsfat.

Irene Awret, a German-born artist who helped to found Tsfat’s artists’ colony, clearly remembers the public meeting in the early 1980s where she first learned that the Hasidim were coming. The mayor was visibly excited as he shared the news: The Breslovers would pour in by the hundreds—they would renovate decaying homes and build a huge synagogue just below the Old City, developments the mayor was certain would be good for Tsfat.

Aryeh Eckstein, one of Tsfat’s more outspoken artists, rose from his seat. “To say that bringing in Breslovers will help Tsfat,” he declared, “is like straightening the Leaning Tower and saying it will be good for Pisa.”

Awret believes he was right. Shortly after the Breslov rabbi’s pronouncement, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, sensing spiritual rebirth in the city of Isaac Luria, sent an emissary of his own. “There was a big influx of religious Jews from New York, and the character of the town changed, not for the better,” said Awret, who now lives in northern Virginia. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t like to live there now.”

Awret’s concerns go deeper than the new preponderance of black hats and long skirts. The city’s economy has never fully recovered from the loss of its best known artists and the influx of thousands of immigrants, a fact that is most visible beyond the streets of the Old City. Tourists rarely visit Tsfat’s newer neighborhoods; they have no charming stone alleyways or flower-filled courtyards. Some are filled with the humble abodes of older Tsfat families, mostly Sephardim who predate both the Hasidic wave and the artists’ colony. Others are home to the 6,000 newer immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union who live clustered in sterile apartment blocks littered with broken glass and rusted cans.

Many of these neighborhoods are teeming with ever-expanding ba’alei tshuva families, prompting complaints from other residents who say that the large population of Hasidic Jews places a palpable strain on their struggling city. Some grudgingly accept the theory that these religious families are supporting the whole Jewish people spiritually, if not economically, through their intensive study and prayer. Still, with so many men learning Torah all day and so many women caring for enormous broods of children, Tsfat must rely heavily on government support and foreign donations. All of this is a marked contrast from the 16th century, when the rabbis held day jobs in the wine and wool industries. Even the ethereal Ari traded spices.

The Old City, too, is less prosperous than it once was. The guest houses have gaping vacancies and many galleries are shuttered. Among the artists who remain, it is, not surprisingly, Kabbalah-inspired painters like Avraham Lowenthal, David Friedman and Yaacov Kaszemacher who generally sell the most work. (See Gallery.)

Michal Auerbach believes the city should do more to support the other artists, those who favor landscapes or abstract modern themes. A number of Russian émigré painters have settled in the city, and with the mayor’s help, she believes Tsfat could create a new artists’ colony, modeling itself after successful tourist towns throughout the Mediterranean. She’d like to see the city establish an artist-in-residence program. “But of course this takes vision,” she added. “No one in the city government has been interested enough to see to it. And it’s a very great pity, because here in Tsfat, all we can talk about now is the past.”

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Ascent, a religious youth hostel housed in a plain cream-colored building at the edge of the Old City, is the cornerstone of what skeptical locals call the “ba’alei tshuva industry.” Since it was founded in 1983 by three Lubavitch couples, the 75-bed hostel has been the city’s unofficial welcome center. One night costs 60 Israeli shekels (about $13.50), but visitors can actually earn 20 shekels toward their stay by attending each of the hostel’s twice-daily classes. These sessions invariably have flashy names: “The Real Jewish Astrology,” “Kabbalah and Love,” “Mystical Shabbat.” The hostel also offers special weekend seminars such as “Supercharge the Search for Your Soulmate.” It publicizes these courses via psychedelic, bubble-lettered flyers promising “spectacular nature hikes,” “mystical insights” and “midnight meditations in the cave of Shim’on Bar Yochai.”

“A person feels comfortable soul searching here,” said Rabbi Mordechai Siev, Ascent’s director. A rotund, likable man who is affectionately known as “Big Mo,” Siev was raised in New York by parents who practiced what he calls “bagels and lox Judaism.” He joined the Lubavitch movement during his college years at the University of Buffalo. When asked what drew him to Hasidism, he said simply, “I had some experiences that opened my eyes. Every Jewish person wants something more, but you don’t know how to get it if you aren’t exposed to it growing up.” After college, he went on to a yeshiva in Israel, and when he first visited Tsfat, it was “like being in heaven. In America you have to create a special atmosphere. In Tsfat, it’s here all the time. You just have to tap into it.”

Now that there are fewer secular visitors, religious institutions like Ascent have cornered Tsfat’s tourism market. There are still Israelis, easily spotted in their blue jeans and tank tops, who come up on weekend trips. There’s also a steady stream of foreigners passing through with the Birthright program, solidarity missions and other organized bus tours. But according to Lauri Rappaport, who runs the city’s tourist center, most of Tsfat’s visitors are now religious seekers. Although tourism in general has been down since the start of the Second Intifada, Rappaport estimates that Tsfat’s tourist traffic tripled between 2003 and 2004.

Economically speaking, the religious tourists who drift into Tsfat today are no substitute for the art lovers of yesteryear. But institutions like Ascent have more interest in souls than wallets. Their underlying goal—turning would-be kabbalists into kippah-wearing Jews—is evident in a poster on display outside Ascent’s library, featuring cartoon characters reminiscent of the 1970s TV show Scooby Doo. “Okay, I get it,” says a shaggy haired boy in a rainbow shirt and a backpack. “Kabbalah is fascinating and so awesome. I understand this could add so much to my world and my life. Now I really want to learn the depths of Torah, Kabbalah and Hasidism.”

To that end, there are numerous yeshivas in Tsfat, ranging from a program for troubled boys to Lubavitch and Breslov institutions crowded with serious black-clad scholars. In addition, there are three English-language yeshivas that welcome students from virtually any Jewish background. Most popular are the brother and sister institutions Shalom Rav and Sharei Bina, run by American-born Rabbi and Rebbetzin Rafael and Tova Weingot. To call this couple laid back would be a stretch by ordinary standards—they are ultra-Orthodox Jews who demand strict religious observance from their students. But within these carefully drawn boundaries, the Weingots cultivate an atmosphere of friendliness, openness and flat-out hipness. Students are allowed to dress in any style they like, as long as they meet the basic criteria of modesty, and with their Indian-print skirts and funky earth-tone skullcaps, some could be mistaken for Woodstock-goers of 1969. When it comes to the classroom, Shalom Rav peppers its traditional yeshiva curriculum with mystical Hasidic teachings, while Sharei Bina offers courses that would fit comfortably into Harry Potter’s Hogwarts course schedule: Astrology, The Language of Animals, Dream Interpretation. The teachers, mostly ba’alei tshuva, are unusually engaging, able to excite restless college-age students with the unlikely stimulus of deeper knowledge. When I told Tova Weingot that one rebbetzin had agreed to teach the girls in their bedroom while they lolled around and braided each other’s hair, she smiled indulgently and remarked, “I just thank God they’re learning.”

It’s not uncommon for students at these yeshivas to eventually adopt full Hasidic dress, find a religious spouse and stay on to expand Tsfat’s ba’al tshuva population. But in Tsfat, even trading in patched blue jeans for tzitzit does not mean settling into a quiet, straight-laced existence. One night, as I was out for a walk, I heard moans from somewhere deep in the woods on the edge of town. “Tatiiii!” one voice cried out, shouting the Yiddish word for father. A lowing cow, far off in the distance, answered the call. Wondering whether I had encountered the legendary Tsfat ghosts, I saw two shadowy figures walking up the path, their hats and sidecurls silhouetted against the stars. The voices belonged to young Breslovers who had secluded themselves in a grove of trees to howl out their prayers to God.

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Over the years, Michal Auerbach has gradually resigned herself to life in a nouveau-holy city. “I think I am the only secular person in my vicinity now,” reflected Auerbach, who owns a home in the heart of the former artists’ quarter. “Most of my neighbors are Orthodox, and most of them have young children. These houses are going to be occupied for many years. This trend cannot be reversed now.”

One of Auerbach’s neighbors, an American woman named Adina Rosen, invited me over to lunch on my last Saturday in Tsfat. A teacher at Sharei Bina, Rosen is typical of Tsfat’s ba’alei tshuva: She launched her spiritual quest 25 years ago as a college student at Berkeley, where she spent several months living with a Chabad family and visiting the local Krishna temple in the afternoons. Her real calling to Judaism came while traveling through India. Sitting in meditation, she had a vision of white light spreading out in all directions. “That light was pure love, the essence of Indian spirituality,” she recalled. Just as suddenly, she saw the light being sucked upward into an immense black hole. “That,” she finished dramatically, “was Torah.” The message was clear to her: “I didn’t have the slightest idea what Torah was.”

Today Rosen lives with her husband and children in an exquisitely renovated home with low arched ceilings, elaborate stained glass windows and a giant cactus at the garden gate. When she greeted her Shabbat guests—two male yeshiva students and three seminary girls—she was dressed all in white apart from a turquoise scarf and purple turban. A few minutes later, her husband, Rafael, a retired physician, returned from his morning prayers. He made a striking picture as he came in from the Middle Eastern summer heat: a thin, somber-faced man with a long gray beard trailing off his chest, wearing a royal blue caftan and over-sized tinted glasses. Beads of sweat dripped down from his shtreimel, an enormous fur hat balanced on his head like a wheel. Later, standing at the head of the table and reciting the Kiddush, he spoke haltingly, intentionally pausing after each Hebrew word as though leaving room for mystical experience in the gaps of silence.

It’s hard to imagine how Isaac Luria and his fellow kabbalists might have reacted had they been seated at the Rosens’ Shabbat table. Modern day Tsfat is far from a replica of the 16th century. The original kabbalist teachings had to filter through the Hasidic movement, the hippie movement and the tshuva movement before they could return again to Israeli soil.

As a result, Tsfat is now an odd mélange of Middle Eastern, European and American traditions, with a free-flowing spiritual aesthetic borrowed from the Far East. But to religious Jews like the Rosens, this Israeli city is more than a patchwork of past influences. Their calling, as they see it, is to uncover the true Tsfat, a timeless entity buried under centuries of spiritual rubble. Many believe that when the Messiah arrives, he will first come to Tsfat. In all their euphoric anticipation, they have a tendency to behave as though Tsfat’s new golden age has already dawned.

Toward the end of the meal, Rafael Rosen and the yeshiva boys broke into Hasidic niggunim. Their songs grew louder and more jubilant until Rafael leapt from his seat with unexpected alacrity and began to dance. His male guests joined him, and together they rushed into the backyard, forming a spinning circle.

“Tsfat was different when we first came 20 years ago,” the matriarch of the house remarked to the young women who remained at the table. “The Jews living here were traditional in a simple way. ‘Harsh’ is too harsh a word. But the people were stark. It was as if the real Tsfat was hidden.”

One of the women, a 29-year-old Hungarian writer named Eszter, was taking all this in with a pensive expression. She was a religiously observant woman who practiced yoga and meditation, and she’d come to Tsfat to find a teacher, a tzaddik hiding in a cave somewhere who would fit the final piece into her spiritual puzzle.