5 min read

Joshua Ben Levi Learned His Paradise Companion Was a Butcher

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi asked who would sit beside him in the World to Come, and the answer was a butcher who cared for his aging parents.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Question Only a Confident Man Would Ask
  2. What Was Visible and What Was Not
  3. The Jesters Who Cheered the Sorrowful
  4. The Witch and the Butcher Named Nanas

The Question Only a Confident Man Would Ask

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was a third-century sage known for two kinds of encounter that most people never had: conversations with the prophet Elijah and negotiations with the Angel of Death. He was not a man who doubted his own standing. When he wanted to know who his companion in the World to Come would be, he simply asked Elijah directly. He did not ask whether he would make it. He asked who would sit next to him.

The answer was a butcher in a certain town. A tradesman, not a scholar. Joshua ben Levi did not argue with the answer. He went to the town, found the butcher, and watched him.

What Was Visible and What Was Not

The butcher sold meat. He cut joints. He handled money. He did the things a butcher does and nothing visibly unusual happened around him. There was no miraculous atmosphere, no glow, no obvious performance of piety. The man was simply a craftsman at his trade.

Joshua ben Levi watched long enough to notice one thing: every morning, before the butcher opened his shop, he went home to his aged parents. He washed their faces. He combed their hair. He fed them. He made sure they had what they needed. Then he went to work. Every day. Without variance, without complaint, without any apparent sense that this routine was remarkable.

Joshua ben Levi went back to Elijah and reported what he had seen. He understood now. Honor of father and mother, kibud av va'em, was one of the ten commandments and one of the few for which the Torah specifies an explicit reward: length of days. But the butcher was not doing it for the reward. He was doing it because it was the thing he did every morning before he opened his shop.

The Jesters Who Cheered the Sorrowful

In a related story from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Taanit 21b, the sage Rabbi Beroka of Be Hozai stood in a marketplace beside Elijah and asked: is there anyone here destined for the World to Come? Elijah first pointed to no one. Then two men arrived at the edge of the market. Elijah pointed to them. Rabbi Beroka pressed them about their deeds, expecting scholarship or visible piety. They told him they were jesters. When they saw a person sunk in grief, they approached him and made him laugh. When they saw two people in conflict, they used humor to broker peace between them.

No Torah study. No formal prayer discipline. No ascetic practice. Two men who went around making the sorrowful laugh and the quarreling reconcile. Elijah pointed to them across a crowded marketplace as people destined for the World to Come.

The Witch and the Butcher Named Nanas

The tradition carries a third story in the same cluster. A woman in a certain town had a reputation for extraordinary piety. She attended every birth, praying at the bedside, staying until the baby came. But the babies came slowly and sometimes not at all. People began to whisper. A boy, left alone in a room, heard a strange noise from a cask in the corner. He lifted the lid. Inside the cask were bundles of witchcraft spells, each tied to a specific birth in the town. The woman was not hastening the deliveries. She was holding them back. She was performing the visible theater of piety while working the opposite result in private.

The butcher in the town, whose name in this version was Nanas, was the one who figured it out and exposed her. He did not study Torah at the level of the great academies. He was a tradesman who paid attention and acted when something was wrong. In the traditions that cluster around Joshua ben Levi's question about paradise, the answer keeps coming back the same way: what heaven values is the daily work of human decency, done without an audience, done without a name for it.

Joshua Ben LeviButcherParadiseParentsHumilityAfterlifeRighteousness
← All myths

From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Gaster, The Exempla of the Rabbis (1924), no. 323 (Codex Gaster 185)The Exempla of the Rabbis (1924)

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, a third-century sage famous in the Talmud for his conversations with the prophet Elijah and with the Angel of Death, once asked a question only a very confident man would ask. He wanted to know who his companion would be in the World to Come. Not whether he would make it. Who he would sit next to.

He received an answer he was not expecting. A certain butcher, in a certain town. A tradesman, not a scholar.

Joshua ben Levi went to find him. He traveled to the town, located the butcher, and watched him. And saw nothing unusual. The man sold meat. He cut joints. He handled money. He did his work and went home. There was no secret piety, no hidden learning, no mystical practice. By every outward measure he was an ordinary butcher.

Joshua ben Levi eventually asked him directly what he did. The butcher was puzzled. He described his days. He named the hours he worked. Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned something he did not consider important. Every day, in secret, out of sight of anyone, he cared for his elderly parents. He bathed them when they could not bathe themselves. He fed them when their hands shook too much to hold a spoon. He did it quietly, because he did not want them to feel the shame of being cared for in public. No one in the town knew.

The exemplum, preserved as no. 323 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, is one of the most tender passages in the whole collection. A famous rabbi, a student of Torah since his youth, looked at a butcher who had never opened a tractate, and saw the man who would share his portion in Gan Eden. The Rabbis are being deliberate. The commandments that matter most, the ones that actually weigh the most on the eternal scale, are often not the ones that draw a crowd. Honor your father and your mother is the fifth of the Ten Commandments. It is also the one commandment that says, explicitly, it is connected to long life in the land (Exodus 20:12). The butcher knew this. He lived it with his hands.

Joshua ben Levi went home and did not grumble about his companion.

Full source
Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 413Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

Rabbi Beroka of Be Hozai once stood in the market of Be Lapat beside the prophet Elijah, and he asked whether anyone in that crowded place was destined for the World to Come. This story, preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (Taanit 21b), turns on a surprising answer. Elijah first pointed to no one, then indicated two brothers who soon arrived. Rabbi Beroka pressed them about their deeds, expecting feats of scholarship or visible piety, and instead heard something humble and ordinary.

The two men explained that they were jesters who cheered up the sorrowful. When they saw a person sunk in grief, they lifted that person's spirits; when they saw two people quarreling, they made peace between them by turning the bitterness into laughter. The rabbis who shaped this teaching insist that such men, who guard the dignity and the joy of their neighbors, share in the reward of the righteous tzaddik, even though they hold no rank in the academy.

The lesson of the companion in Paradise stands against the assumption that the next world belongs only to the learned. Bringing peace between quarreling people is counted among the deeds whose fruit a person enjoys in this world while the principal remains for the World to Come, as the Sages taught in the Mishnah (Peah 1:1). The cheerful peacemaker, anonymous in the crowd, is precisely the one Elijah singles out, teaching that hidden kindness outweighs visible honor.

Full source
Gaster, Exempla no. 412 (Nissim, Hibbur Yafeh)The Exempla of the Rabbis (1924)

A woman in a certain town had a reputation for extraordinary piety. She visited every household in which a woman had gone into labor. She prayed by the bedside. She comforted the mother. She stayed until the baby was delivered, though more often than not, the baby came very slowly or not at all. People began to whisper that her prayers were not working.

One day she visited a home where a young boy was left alone in a back room. He heard a strange noise coming from a cask in the corner. He lifted the lid. Inside the cask he found a cluster of kishufim, witchcraft spells, each tied to a specific name, each restraining a woman in childbirth somewhere in the town. He understood at once. When the boy broke the spells open, every woman in labor in that town was delivered. The community drove the witch out. Her prayers had been the spell that prevented the birth, and her presence at the bedside had only been her waiting to see her handiwork at its cruelest.

The Exempla pairs this story with another. A pious man was told in a dream that his companion in Paradise would be Nanas the butcher. The pious man went to find Nanas, sure there must be some great secret merit. Nanas said he gave away half his income to charity. The pious man was not satisfied. At last Nanas remembered one incident. Long ago he had ransomed a young captive girl, raised her in his house, and betrothed her to his son. At the wedding feast, a young man among the guests wept without stopping. Nanas asked why. The young man confessed that the girl had been engaged to him before she was captured. Nanas immediately canceled his own son's wedding, married the girl to her true betrothed, gave them rich gifts, and sent them home. That was the deed, drawn from the collection of Rabbi Nissim of Kairouan's Hibbur Yafeh, that had bought him a place in Paradise. A witch's piety and a butcher's generosity, seen side by side, teach the same lesson. The scale knows the difference.

Full source