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Hillel Opened the Door and Rabbi Yochanan Broke His Own Student

A man who wanted the High Priest's garments became a Torah scholar under Hillel. A robber who became a sage was destroyed by one sentence from his teacher.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Man Who Wanted the Crown
  2. The Verse That Answered Him
  3. The Robber Who Became a Sage
  4. The Sentence That Broke Him

The Man Who Wanted the Crown

The man had heard how the High Priest was honored in Jerusalem and decided he wanted the office. This was not a spiritual awakening. It was an ambition in the wrong direction. He came first to Shammai and stated his condition: he would convert if they made him High Priest.

Shammai drove him out. He had a builder's measuring rod in his hand and he used it. The demand was absurd, and Shammai's patience for absurdity was short.

The man went to Hillel. Hillel welcomed him as a student without confirming the fantasy. He gave the man a path: learn everything a Jew is required to know, then the Torah itself will teach you what is possible. The man began studying.

The Verse That Answered Him

He worked through the priestly laws in Leviticus and Numbers, and somewhere in the reading he reached the verse: the stranger who draws near shall be put to death. He stopped.

The stranger who draws near, that was himself, he understood, if he were to approach the altar in priestly vestments. The Torah had answered his question without Hillel's help. He went back to his teacher and said that if a king's own son was warned away from the inner chamber, how much more should an ordinary man tremble. The High Priesthood was no longer his ambition. Torah had replaced it. He left a different man from the one who had come in.

The Robber Who Became a Sage

Rabbi Yochanan bar Nafcha was so beautiful that men traveled simply to see him. He was bathing in the Jordan when a bandit named Shimon ben Lakish leaped across the river toward him, thinking he was a woman worth pursuing. When Resh Lakish landed and saw a man, and what kind of man, he stopped.

Yochanan looked at him. "Your strength belongs in the study house," he said. Resh Lakish looked back. "Your beauty belongs to a woman," he answered. Yochanan made him an offer: he had a sister more beautiful than himself. Come to Torah and she would marry him. Resh Lakish agreed. He became a scholar, married Yochanan's sister, and eventually rose to become one of the great legal minds of his generation.

For years the two men argued together across the tables of the academy. Resh Lakish never let his teacher have an easy opinion. Every position Yochanan advanced, Resh Lakish pressed until it was either stronger or abandoned. The partnership was productive precisely because Resh Lakish had not come to Torah to agree.

The Sentence That Broke Him

Then came the day they argued about whether certain objects could receive ritual impurity from the point at which they were made usable, and one of the examples was a knife. Yochanan said that a robber would know, since it was robbers who sharpened blades. He meant it as a reference to Resh Lakish's former life. Resh Lakish heard the teacher who had rescued him from the riverbank calling him, in front of everyone, the robber he used to be.

He stopped eating. He became sick. He died. Rabbi Yochanan, left alone without the partner who had sharpened him, spent his last years in an academy where no one challenged him, surrounded by students who only agreed. He mourned what he had broken until the day he died.

ConversionTorahExempla Of The RabbisGasterHillelShammaiOnkelosResh Lakish
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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, Exempla No. 31The Exempla of the Rabbis (1924)

A gentile heard about the honor paid to the High Priest in Jerusalem and decided he wanted the office for himself. He came first to Shammai and asked to convert on the condition that he be made High Priest. Shammai refused outright. The demand was ridiculous, he said, and drove the man out with a builder's rod.

The man then came to Hillel. Hillel, famously patient, welcomed him warmly and accepted him as a student, with one condition: that he first learn everything a Jew is required to know. The convert agreed and began his studies.

Months later, reading through the Torah, he came across the verse that stopped him: "The stranger who approaches the sanctuary shall die" (Numbers 1:51). Confused, he went to Hillel and asked who this rule applied to. Hillel answered, "It applies to every Israelite who is not a priest, even King David himself. David was of the tribe of Judah, and even he could not approach the altar of the Lord."

The man laughed at his old ambition. If David could not approach, he thought, how could a convert demand the priesthood on day one? He accepted his place and converted in earnest.

He had two sons. One he named Hillel, after the master who had received him. The other he named Gamliel. They were known ever after as the proselytes of Hillel, and their father was Onkelos, the convert who eventually translated the entire Torah into Aramaic. That translation, the Targum Onkelos, became the standard Aramaic version of the Torah for the whole Jewish world (Gaster, Exempla No. 31).

The man who came looking for the crown of the High Priest walked out with something more enduring: every Torah scroll in the diaspora is read through the lens his translation provided.

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Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 379:2Yalkut Shimoni on Torah

"And these are the garments that they shall make" (Exodus 28:4). Our Rabbis taught: A person should always be humble like Hillel and not impatient like Shammai, and so forth. There was another incident concerning a certain gentile who was passing behind a synagogue and heard a scribe reading aloud, "And these are the garments that they shall make." He came to the scribe and said to him, "Explain these to me." He explained them to him. He said to him, "For whom are these?" He said to him, "For the High Priest." That gentile said to himself, "I will go and convert so that they will appoint me High Priest."

He came before Shammai and said, "Convert me on the condition that you appoint me High Priest." Shammai pushed him away with the builder's measuring rod that was in his hand. He came before Hillel, who converted him. Hillel said to him, "Does one appoint before the king anyone but one who knows the protocols of royalty? Go and learn the protocols of the kingship." He went and read, and when he reached "and the stranger who draws near shall be put to death" (Numbers 1:51), he asked, "About whom is this verse said?" They told him, "Even about David king of Israel." That convert reasoned a fortiori about himself. He said, "If Israel, who are called children of the Omnipresent, and because He loved them He called them, 'Israel is My firstborn son' (Exodus 4:22), yet of them it is written, 'and the stranger who draws near shall be put to death,' then how much more so a mere convert who comes with his staff and his bag," and so forth.

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Gaster, Exempla No. 224; Bava Metzia 84aThe Exempla of the Rabbis (1924)

Rabbi Yochanan bar Nafcha was so beautiful that the Talmud said he was among the last of the handsome men of Jerusalem. His skin, his eyes, his bearing, men traveled to simply look at him.

One day, while Rabbi Yochanan was bathing in the Jordan, a bandit named Resh Lakish leaped across the river after him, thinking him a woman worth carrying off. When Resh Lakish saw up close that he had jumped at a man. And an extraordinary one, he stopped.

Rabbi Yochanan looked up at him. "Your strength should be spent on Torah," he said. "And as for your beauty". Resh Lakish was magnificent himself, "it is wasted on women."

Rabbi Yochanan made the robber a promise. "Repent, study with me, and my sister will be your wife. She is even more beautiful than I am."

Resh Lakish agreed. He abandoned the bandit's road and became one of the great sages of the age. He and Rabbi Yochanan became chavrutot, study partners, for decades. Resh Lakish would challenge every one of Rabbi Yochanan's rulings with twenty-four objections, and Rabbi Yochanan would answer with twenty-four replies, and together they pushed the Torah deeper.

Then, years later, in an argument about a technical legal matter concerning the purity of weapons, Rabbi Yochanan lost his temper. He said cuttingly: "A robber knows what a weapon is."

Resh Lakish absorbed the insult and was broken by it. Rabbi Yochanan's wife, who was also Resh Lakish's wife (the sister of the story), pleaded for reconciliation, but Rabbi Yochanan would not yield. Resh Lakish fell ill from grief and died (Bava Metzia 84a; Gaster, Exempla No. 224).

Rabbi Yochanan mourned him wildly. He could find no partner to replace him. He wandered the streets calling out, "Where are you, son of Lakisha? Where are you, son of Lakisha?" He refused food. He lost his mind. He died of sorrow.

The rabbis tell this story as a warning to teachers and to friends: the one thing Torah cannot survive is cruelty between those who study it together. Resh Lakish's robber past had already been sealed in the river. Rabbi Yochanan reopened it with a sentence, and the world lost them both.

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