Resh Lakish Leapt From Violence Into Torah

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He Leapt Into the Jordan

His weapons lay on the bank. Resh Lakish had lived by them. Some called him a bandit, some a gladiator, some a man who had sold himself to a circus troupe after his father died and left him nothing. The body was the same in every telling: built for violence, used to strength as a tool.

Rabbi Yohanan was bathing in the Jordan. He was one of the last beautiful men of the land of Israel, and people remembered the face. Resh Lakish saw him from the bank and took him at first for a woman. Then he leapt.

The water took him. He came up close. Yohanan looked at the force in the shoulders and said, "Your strength belongs to Torah."

Resh Lakish answered him in kind. "Your beauty belongs to women."

Yohanan did not flinch. "If you return to study, I will give you my sister. She is more beautiful than I am."

Resh Lakish accepted.

The Weapons Stayed on the Bank

He turned to leap back for the gear he had left in the grass. The same legs that had carried him across the river would not carry him home. He pushed off. The water held. He tried again and hung there, a man who had made a living by jumping, unable to jump.

The weapons stayed on the bank. He stood in the Jordan with nothing in his hands.

He went to study. He married Yohanan's sister. The pages took the violence out of the muscle the way a long illness takes weight. When he taught, he said the Torah Moses received was fire on fire: parchment of white fire, letters of black fire, sealed in fire and wrapped in fire. The man who had lived by a blade now spoke of a book that burned and did not consume.

Twenty-Four Objections

He and Yohanan sat opposite each other until the partnership itself became famous. Yohanan raised a point. Resh Lakish pressed it. Resh Lakish proposed a ruling. Yohanan found the crack. Yohanan said more than once that whenever he thought he had found something, Resh Lakish would raise twenty-four objections, and he would need to give twenty-four answers, and both of them would leave knowing what they had not known going in.

It was not a teacher with a student. It was two equals, and one of them had learned to read a weak spot in a dark alley before he learned to read a verse.

A Robber Would Know This Knife

The break came on a question about a knife. Could a blade contract ritual impurity before it was finished as a weapon? They were inside the law, turning it, when Yohanan cut a different way.

A robber, he said, would know about this kind of thing.

Resh Lakish heard the old life in the joke. He had left that life. Yohanan had been the one who told him his strength belonged to Torah and had offered his sister to make the transfer stick. To call him a robber now, in the study house, was to drag him back to the bank he could not reach.

"What good have you done me?" Resh Lakish said. "There they called me Rabbi. Here they call me Rabbi."

Yohanan was wounded. He did not speak to him as he had spoken before. Resh Lakish fell ill. He died.

Where Are You, Son of Laish

Yohanan's grief went past what his students could reach. They brought him a new partner, Rabbi Eleazar ben Pedat, a man who could find a supporting text for every statement. Yohanan heard the agreement and broke.

"There was a son of Laish who used to raise twenty-four objections to my one statement," he said. "You agree with me. That is not what I need."

He wandered the streets calling for him. "Where are you, son of Laish? Where are you, son of Laish?" The weapons had stayed on the bank. The man who could not leap back was gone, and the man who had named him for Torah could not bear a partner who only said yes.