הרמב״ם

Maimonides, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (the Rambam), is the great eagle who fled persecution and still ordered the whole of the Torah. 'From Moses to Moses none arose like Moses,' they said of him, for one man did what seemed impossible: he wrote the 'Mishneh Torah,' in which he gathered all of Jewish law from beginning to end, in order, in clarity, in pure Hebrew, so that every Jew could know his law.

But Maimonides was not only a decisor. He was the sultan's physician in Egypt, a philosopher who wrote the 'Guide for the Perplexed' to bridge Torah and reason, and a leader who answered questions from the ends of the earth. In his Epistle to Yemen he strengthened an entire community facing forced conversion, and in his Epistle on Martyrdom he taught not to despair. His hands touched everything, from the healing of the body to the healing of the soul.

And all this out of exile and persecution. His family fled Spain before the Almohads, wandered to Morocco, the Land of Israel, and Egypt, and his brother David, who supported him, drowned at sea with all their wealth. Out of such personal ruin arose the man who gave the people order, method, and the confidence that one can know, not only believe.

What do we learn from him? That one can hold everything without surrendering anything, law and science, faith and reason, heaven and earth. Maimonides teaches that order itself is an act of kindness, that when you organize knowledge you give the ordinary person the ability to live rightly. The great eagle spread his wings over an entire people, and from him we learned that the Torah does not fear the intellect.