רב (אַבָּא אריכא)

Rav (c. 3935/175–4007/247), whose given name was Abba bar Aivo and who is also called Abba Aricha, stands at the head of the Amoraim of Bavel — the talmid of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi who carried his rebbi’s Torah back to Bavel and founded the yeshiva of Sura. Born in Kafri in Bavel to a distinguished family, he went up to Eretz Yisrael with his uncle, Rabbi Chiya the Great, served as his meturgeman in Teveria, and then entered the beit midrash of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi himself. There he made it his way never to leave the beit midrash for even an hour, and so became the surest master of Rebbi’s Torah in his generation. Standing as he did between the eras — among the last of the Tannaim and the first of the Amoraim — the Gemara grants him what almost no amora receives: “Rav tanna hu u’palig” — Rav has the standing of a tanna and may dispute one.

In 3979/219 he went down to Bavel, and the annals of the yeshivot count that year as the opening of the age of the Talmud. In Nehardea the Reish Galuta set him over the markets, and he sat quietly in the yeshiva of Rav Shila — one day even filling in as Rav Shila’s meturgeman without revealing who he was. When Rav Shila was niftar, Rav stepped aside so as not to diminish Shmuel, his friend from the days of Rebbi’s beit midrash, and went instead to Sura on the Euphrates, a place then empty of Torah. The yeshiva he founded there grew to 1,200 talmidim and stood for some eight hundred years; with it, Bavel became a center of Torah in its own right, no longer leaning on Eretz Yisrael.

The give-and-take between Rav and Shmuel runs through the whole Talmud Bavli, and it was Rav’s method — taking the Mishnah of Rebbi as the foundation, setting the other teachings of the Tannaim beside it, and drawing out the halacha — that gave the Talmud its shape. Where he found a “field” of loose practice he fenced it with takanot, and he taught that a talmid chacham must know even writing, shechitah, and milah. His hand is in the siddur as well: he placed Aleinu in the Mussaf of Rosh Hashanah, and he composed the blessing said on Shabbat before each new month. The greatest baal aggadah among the Amoraim of Bavel, he left sayings the world still lives by: the mitzvot were given only to refine people, and better for a man to throw himself into a fiery furnace than to shame his fellow in public.

One of his daughters married into the house of the Reish Galuta, and two of his grandsons held that office. He was niftar in Sura at a great age, mourned by all of Babylonian Jewry; his talmid Rav Huna succeeded him at the head of the yeshiva of Sura.