רב אשי

Rav Ashi (c. 4097/337 – 4187/427) was among the greatest of the amoraim of Bavel, of the sixth generation, and stood at the head of the yeshivah of Sura for close to sixty years. Together with Ravina he began the arrangement of the Talmud Bavli, the work that his successors completed. He was born in Avirya in Madai. His father Simai was a wealthy and learned man who had learned in the beit midrash of Naresh near Sura under Rav Pappa, and Rav Ashi’s own rebbi was Rav Kahana, who later headed the yeshivah of Pumbedita.

He was still young when he was appointed to head Sura, his learning acknowledged by teachers older than himself. The yeshivah had stood closed since the passing of Rav Chisda, and under Rav Ashi it became the center of Torah for the Jews of Bavel once more. He rebuilt the yeshivah and its beit knesset at Mata Mechasya, a suburb of Sura, sparing no expense and overseeing the building himself. He was careful with the honor of a beit knesset: no house in his city might stand higher than one, and when he saw cracks in the walls of one he took it down and moved his bed inside, to oblige himself to see the repair through. Wealth and Torah met in him, and the Gemara in Gittin brings him as the example of Torah and greatness in one place; even the Reish Galuta, Rav Huna bar Natan, was subject to his authority.

The labor of his life was the gathering and arrangement of the Gemara — the explanations of the Mishnah taught in the yeshivot of Bavel since the days of Rav, with the discussions bound up with them and the halachic and aggadic material of the batei midrash. He carried it out with his talmidim and with the scholars who assembled at Sura for the Kallah twice a year. A tradition brought by Rav Hai Gaon gives him sixty years in the position, apportioned so that each masechta took half a year, thirty years for the sixty masechtot, and the whole gone through a second time; the Gemara itself refers in at least one place to an earlier and a later version of his teaching. The work was carried on after him and brought to completion by Ravina, and of the two it is said that Rav Ashi and Ravina are the end of hora’ah.

Of his teachings: a talmid chacham who is not as hard as iron is no talmid chacham, and one who is arrogant is blemished. The Gemara tells that the malach hamavet appeared to him in the marketplace and that he asked for thirty days to review his learning, resting on the saying that fortunate is one who arrives in the next world with his learning in hand. His son Mar bar Rav Ashi, who signed himself Tavyomi, took up his father’s place at Sura twenty-eight years after his passing.