רב (אבא אריכא)

Rav, Abba Arikha, is the man who made Babylon the center of Torah for a thousand years. A disciple of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi in the Land of Israel, he went down to Babylon and found large communities but distant from ordered study, and founded the academy of Sura, which illuminated Babylon for many generations and became the heart of the Torah world.

Rav was not only a head of an academy but an educator of a people. He enacted ordinances to preserve the faith in the scattered communities, taught the simple and the learned alike, and some of the prayers we say on Rosh Hashanah, such as 'Aleinu' and 'Malchuyot,' are attributed to him. He built not only knowledge but a framework of life.

His disputes with Shmuel, his colleague and head of the Nehardea academy, spread across the Talmud: Rav and Shmuel everywhere, and the law generally follows Rav in ritual matters and Shmuel in monetary ones. Two giants who differed on thousands of passages and never parted in heart, teaching that dispute builds Torah.

What do we learn from him? That continuity is not to be taken for granted, someone must go down to the exile and build a home there. Rav teaches that a great man can leave an established center in the Land of Israel to build a new one where it is needed, and that founding an institution of learning is among the great gifts a person gives to generations he will never know.