רבי עובדיה יוסף

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is the halachic giant who 'restored the crown to its former glory,' and gave eastern Jewry pride in its identity. Possessed of a legendary memory and erudition, in every responsum he surveyed a sea of sources, from the Geonim through Maimonides and Maran the Beit Yosef to the latest of his time, and decided with clarity. His thousands of responsa, 'Yabia Omer' and 'Yechaveh Da'at,' are an immense treasure of law.

His life's work was 'to restore the crown to its former glory': to return the rulings of Maran the Beit Yosef, father of the Sephardic tradition, to the center of eastern Jewish life, after years in which many of its children felt their tradition had been pushed aside. He gave an entire generation of easterners the confidence that their fathers' tradition is a complete, glorious and binding Torah.

Rabbi Ovadia served as chief rabbi, but above all he was a teacher of law to multitudes. He devoted his life to study and writing, and by tradition scarcely raised his eyes from the book. Even when occupied with public matters, his heart and mind were in the sugya, and he gave a class every night into his nineties and beyond.

What do we learn from him? That immense erudition serves one purpose, to give the people a clear and confident ruling. Rabbi Ovadia teaches that one can restore to an entire community the pride in its tradition without harming anyone, and that devotion to study, night after night over decades, is what establishes an authority on which an entire generation leans.