רבנו יונה גירונדי

Rabbeinu Yonah of Girona was one of the great sages of Catalonia in the thirteenth century, a relative of the Ramban, and one of the great teachers of ethics and halacha in Spain. But what made him a model figure is not only his greatness in Torah, but the way he learned to admit a mistake.

In the days of the great controversy over Rambam's philosophical works, Rabbeinu Yonah was at first among the opponents of the 'Guide for the Perplexed.' Then, when the Christians burned the Talmud in Paris in whole wagonloads, Rabbeinu Yonah saw in it a rebuke from Heaven: if they permitted the burning of Rambam's wisdom, in its wake the wisdom of the entire Talmud was burned.

Out of that realization he did a rare thing: he confessed his error in public, vowed to travel to Rambam's grave and ask forgiveness before ten men, and took upon himself to teach and to teach repentance. A great man who proved his greatness precisely in the words 'I was wrong.'

From that broken heart 'Shaarei Teshuvah' was born, his masterwork, the classic map of the path of repentance: regret, confession, resolve, and the levels of atonement. For seven hundred years it has been studied in the month of Elul and the Days of Awe.

In his other works, 'Shaarei HaAvodah' and his commentary on Pirkei Avot and Proverbs, he taught the building of character, that a person must work on himself day by day, for there is no Torah without the refinement of the soul.

And in his Talmudic novellae, 'Aliyot d'Rabbeinu Yonah' on tractate Bava Batra, it is clear that he was also a first-rank halachist and scholar, and not a moralist alone.

Rabbeinu Yonah teaches that the highest Torah is the Torah that is lived, that character precedes wisdom, and that a person's greatness is measured by his readiness to say 'I erred, and I will make it right.'