Elazar ben Moshe Azikri was a kabbalist of sixteenth century Safed, the Galilean hill town where the mystics of the generation after the Spanish expulsion rebuilt Jewish devotion, and his diary and his book Sefer Charedim, the Book of the Reverent, record a piety of consuming intimacy with God. Yedid Nefesh, published in that book in 1601, is its distillation.
The poem addresses God as Beloved of the soul and merciful Father, and asks that the servant be drawn like a gazelle to run toward the divine presence, finding God's love sweeter than honeycomb. The second stanza speaks as a lovesick soul begging healing by the light of God's face, the third asks the Ancient One to reveal mercy speedily, and the fourth pleads, spread over me the shelter of Your peace, let the earth shine with Your glory. The initial letters of the four stanzas spell the Tetragrammaton, the four letter name of God, so the poem's very structure is the name it dare not say. Azikri's autograph manuscript survives, and its readings differ at points from the versions the prayer books print, a reminder that even a beloved text travels and changes. Within a century the poem had crossed from a mystic's notebook into the liturgy of communities across the Jewish world.