Rabbi Yehoshua Bested Four Times on One Afternoon Walk

A Rabbi Takes a Walk

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah was one of the great sages of his generation, a man who had survived the destruction of the Temple and helped rebuild rabbinic Judaism from the rubble of Jerusalem. He had debated emperors and outwitted questioners who came looking for trouble. He was not accustomed to losing arguments.

Then he went for a walk.

The path he took that afternoon cut through a field. Such paths were created by people traversing the same route often enough that the grass yielded and a track formed. Technically, walking that kind of path could be a violation of agricultural law, since it might damage someone's field. The first person he met on the road did not greet him. He asked what the rabbi was doing.

A Path Through a Field and the Man Who Called Him a Thief

Rabbi Yehoshua said: I am walking along the path. The man replied: you have spoken well that you are walking along a path, for it was trodden by robbers like you. There was nothing gentle about the phrasing. He was not praising the rabbi's honesty. He was accusing him of creating the path himself, of being one of the feet that wore down someone else's field.

Rabbi Yehoshua had no clean answer. He moved on.

The next encounter was with a young girl at a well. He had come to draw water and found her there first. She looked at him and said: the road you came by, the one you used to reach this well, it has been trodden down. The fields along it belong to us. He had thought he was using a legitimate path. She was telling him the path itself was the problem. Every traveler who used it was part of the damage.

The Child Who Refused to Step Aside

The third correction came from a child. Rabbi Yehoshua was walking and saw a small boy sitting directly in the middle of the road. He asked: why are you sitting in the path? Move to the side. The boy answered: I am sitting in a plowed field. There is no path here for you to travel. You are already off the road. You are in someone else's furrows.

This was worse than the first two encounters. A child had just demonstrated that the rabbi's entire concept of where he was had been wrong. He had thought he was on a legitimate route. He had been walking through cultivated land the whole time, treating fields as thoroughfares.

He moved on, and the shame moved with him.

The Girl Who Would Not Yield

The fourth correction came from another girl at a crossroads. Rabbi Yehoshua and his companions needed to know the way to the city. They asked her which road to take. She answered with a question: which road do you want, the short one that is long, or the long one that is short?

He chose the short one. They walked it confidently until they reached the outskirts of the city and found themselves standing in front of gardens and orchards, with no way to enter. The road that looked short ended in a wall of vegetation. They had to turn around and take the longer path.

When Rabbi Yehoshua found the girl again, he said: did you not tell me this was the short road? She said: did I not also tell you that it was long?

The Speech He Made When He Got Home

By the time Rabbi Yehoshua reached his destination, something had shifted in him. He had spent the afternoon being corrected by a farmer, outmaneuvered by a girl at a well, instructed by a child, and turned around in an orchard by a riddle. He gathered the people around him and said: the young people of this generation are greater than us.

He did not say this bitterly. He did not qualify it. He praised them. He had left home that morning as one of the great scholars of his age. He came back having been bested four times by people with no formal learning, no standing in any academy, and no interest in being impressed by his reputation. Each one had simply been right, and he had been wrong, and they had said so without apology.