On February 4, 1657, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, issued the first residence permit to a Jew, Luis Carvajal, since the expulsion of all Jews from England by King Edward I in the year 1290. The edict of expulsion had been officially overturned in the previous year, 1656. The re-admittance of Jews into England was partially due to the efforts of the great scholar Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel.
Link: Menasseh Ben Israel
Rabbi Moshe Galante II was born in Safed in 1620 and later moved to Jerusalem where he founded a large yeshivah. He was a grandson of the famed Rabbi Moshe Galante I, who was a student of Rabbi Yosef Karo.
Rabbi Galante was the first rabbi endowed with the title Rishon l'Tzion ("the First of Zion"), a title traditionally conferred upon the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Jerusalem and later of the Land of Israel. This due to the profound love and esteem he was given by the Sephardic community in Jerusalem.
He authored a number of works including Elef HaMagen, which includes 1,000 responsa on various topics; Parpara'ot l'Chochmah, a commentary on the Bible; and Zevach HaShelamim on the Talmud.
Counted among his students was Rabbi Chizkiyah De Silva, rabbi of Hebron and author of the Pri Chadash (printed in the standard edition of the Code of Jewish Law).
When you approach any human wisdom, you must first understand and discern. You must say, “This makes sense to me; I will follow this. This is a teacher with a good reputation; I will consider her lessons. This doesn’t fit for me; I will put this aside for now.”
Not so with learning Torah. We already know Who is behind this wisdom. We are not interested in the knowledge per se, but in Him. To make His thoughts our thoughts, His mind our minds. To achieve perfect oneness with the One Above.
At Sinai, we understood this well. When Moses asked us if we were ready to accept the Torah, we answered, “We will do, and we will understand.”
First, we said, “We will do.” Because we understood Who was asking us and we desired to connect with Him.
Then we said, “We will understand.” We would take upon ourselves a venture that should be entirely impossible, only now made available to us through divine intervention:
To know the divine. To bring His thoughts into our thoughts, His mind into our minds. To become one with Him.