Rabbi Yohanan went to visit Rabbi Elazar, who lay gravely ill in a dark room. The sick sage had been declining for days, his body wasting, his spirit dimming. The room was as dark as his prognosis.
When Rabbi Yohanan entered, he uncovered his arm — and the room filled with light. Rabbi Yohanan's skin was so luminous, so radiant, that it functioned as a lamp. The darkness retreated before his bare forearm as though a torch had been lit.
In that light, Rabbi Elazar looked at his visitor — at the extraordinary beauty of Rabbi Yohanan's face and form — and began to weep. Not tears of joy at the visit. Tears of grief.
"Why do you weep?" Rabbi Yohanan asked. "Because of this beauty," Rabbi Elazar replied, "which will one day rot in the earth." He was not mourning his own death. He was mourning Rabbi Yohanan's. The sight of such perfection, the knowledge that even this luminous body must ultimately decay and be consumed by worms — it was unbearable.
"For that," said Rabbi Yohanan, "you should certainly weep." And they wept together.
The sages preserved this exchange because it captures something essential about the rabbinic view of mortality. Beauty is real. Bodies are real. The radiance of a human being at their finest is not an illusion. But it is temporary — devastatingly, heartbreakingly temporary. The sages did not deny the beauty of the body or dismiss it as unimportant. They mourned its passing, as one mourns anything precious that cannot be kept.