Word: torah
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Within Judaism, Maimonides is held in high regard by the Orthodox, who frequently quote his sayings and avidly study the Mishneh Torah* (Repetition of the Law), his magisterial systematization of biblical commandments and the Talmud. Many Orthodox ignore his philosophical masterpiece, The Guide of the Perplexed, which continues to inspire secularized Jews and is required reading in the Jewish studies departments that are proliferating in U.S. universities...
...years later the Maimon family moved to Egypt, where they found a final refuge. (Despite being the adopted land where Maimonides achieved world fame, Egypt is conspicuously absent from the dozens of official observances of the anniversary year.) There he devoted ten years to the writing of the Mishneh Torah. Its preface contained what became Judaism's standard listing of the 613 biblical commandments, which deal with matters ranging from ritual slaughtering laws to recompense for injuries. Maimonides said that "no other work should be needed for ascertaining any of the laws of Israel...
Maimonides conceived his Mishneh Torah as a single unifying law code for Judaism. Although it never became that, his work substantially affected every later development in Jewish scholarship. By many accounts, Maimonides' legal compendium provided a strength that enabled Judaism to avoid factionalism during the Muslim and Christian persecutions of the Middle Ages. The Guide of the Perplexed influenced the metaphysical speculations of Thomas Aquinas and other Christian scholastics while being largely ignored by medieval Judaism. But for modern Jews, says Biblical Scholar Nahum Sarna of Brandeis University, Maimonides provides "the model of a person who is able to accept...
Matters are complicated by the blacks' religious practices, which differ from those of most Jews. They believe in the Torah, the basic Jewish Scriptures, observe the Sabbath and dietary laws, and are circumcised. The Talmud, Jewish law and its interpretation, seems never to have reached them, however, because of their geographic isolation. The issue of whether the Ethiopians are even Jews was not settled in Israel until 1972. That was when Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef decreed that the Falashas are "undoubtedly of the tribe of Dan," the inhabitants of the biblical land of Havileh in what is today...
...well. At a party meeting to approve the list of Likud ministers, Sharon warned against yielding to Labor on certain issues, including the pace of Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank. Then a squabble developed over whether the National Religious Party (N.R.P.) with four seats or the Sephardi Torah Guardians (SHAS) also with four, would get the Ministry of Religious Affairs. SHAS, egged on by Sharon, insisted that Shamir deliver the Cabinet post. The N.R.P. demanded the position just as loudly. A predawn meeting on Wednesday between Peres and Shamir failed to break the stalemate...