1) At Sinai, the people of Israel voluntarily contracted a bilateral covenant with the Creator, mediated by Moses, in which they agreed to follow the precepts instructed to them via Moses.
2) The aforementioned covenant includes a provision for dealing with questions that arise regarding the formulation or practical implementation of its precepts, especially in regards to their more ambiguous aspects that have yet to be officially regulated: consult the highest court and follow their decisions.
3) From the time of Moses until the closing of the Talmud, there was always a high court charged with determining the national calendar and with defining, formulating, and regulating the precepts of the national covenant, although the guises the high court took often changed with the epochs: an assembly of seventy elders, a council of prophets, a great congress, a Sanhedrin, a national academy’s court.
4) A record of the decisions of the high courts is found in the content of the classical rabbinic corpus – the Tosephta, the Siphra and the Siphré, and the two Talmudim – and ends with the last high court to historically serve the entire people of Israel, that of Rabina and R Ashé.
5) After the last high court of Israel disbanded, there is no entity with institutional authority to determine the national calendar; to define, formulate, or regulate the precepts of the national covenant; or to make any laws that are binding on the entire nation.
6) Nevertheless, many other institutions and individuals have, over the centuries, claimed the prerogatives of the highest court, making alternate claims to legal and social authority and even promulgating rulings, laws, and customs at odds with the recorded decisions of that court.
7) Trained in the jurisprudential tradition of the Talmudic academies and comprehensively educated in the classical rabbinic corpus, Rambam undertook the task of constructing an encyclopedic textbook of the actual laws of Israel, the Mishneh Torah (“restatement of the law”), composed in the familiar Hebrew language common to all communities of Israel, that would provide everyone without access to the classical rabbinic corpus with an understanding of what the national covenant requires of them, personally and collectively.
8) Although widely accepted throughout the Middle East and North Africa as part of the new standard in Jewish education and jurisprudence, the Mishneh Torah was also heavily criticized by detractors who objected to both Rambam’s style (in that he presented settled law while only obliquely referencing his sources) and his decisions (challenging his fidelity to the Talmudic record); however, there simultaneously emerged a scholarly defense of Rambam’s work throughout the ages that culminated in R Yoseph Qafeh’s exhaustive commentary to the Mishneh Torah, in which he provided all of Rambam’s sources and successfully rebutted all challenges to Rambam’s decisions vis a vis the Talmudic record.
9) The Mishneh Torah was the work of one brilliant, highly educated, but ultimately human scholar capable of error, and was accordingly subject to constant revision throughout the author’s lifetime (and inescapably contains idiosyncrasies and ambiguities of language and meaning); furthermore, the ever-growing socio-economic gap between the historical world of the cases Rambam discusses and our own modern world, additionally complicates any reading with the aim of practicing what is read.
10) Nevertheless, the final edition of the Mishneh Torah – when read together with the Hebrew Bible – remains the best guide to the laws of the covenant of Israel as understood and decided by the highest courts of Israel throughout history; and the intervening years since its publication have produced an abundance of commentaries, ancillary literature, and actual practice to provide necessary context and elucidation in interpreting Rambam’s decisions.