רבנו תם

Rabbeinu Tam, Rabbi Yaakov, Rashi's grandson, is the greatest of the Tosafists, the man who turned Talmud study into a living, rolling dialectic. If his grandfather Rashi opened the Talmud with plain commentary, Rabbeinu Tam and his students built a second story upon it: the questions and answers, the comparisons between one passage and another, the 'Tosafot' printed to this day on every page opposite Rashi.

His erudition and sharpness were so great that he sometimes disagreed even with his grandfather Rashi, out of deep respect but out of truth. In the matter of tefillin, Rashi and Rabbeinu Tam differed on the order of the passages, and there are scrupulous ones who don 'the tefillin of Rabbeinu Tam' alongside the usual, to fulfill both opinions of the two giants.

And here is valor: in the decrees of the Second Crusade rioters attacked Rabbeinu Tam and wounded him, and he was nearly killed sanctifying God's name. He lived in a generation of blood, when the communities of Ashkenaz were slaughtered, and out of that darkness he established a whole world of Torah that illuminated the generations.

What do we learn from him? That respect for the great master does not contradict the duty of truth, and that sometimes the grandson continues the grandfather precisely by disagreeing with him for the sake of Heaven. Rabbeinu Tam teaches that the Torah lives in the tension of question and answer, and that one can build peaks of dialectic precisely out of a generation of persecution and breaking.