Rabbi Yochanan bar Nappacha, the great third-century amora of Tiberias, was famous among his contemporaries for two things. He was one of the most brilliant legal minds of his generation, and he had a face considered so beautiful that seeing it was supposed to be a blessing in itself.
The Talmud in Bava Metzia 84a preserves the account, which exemplum 222 of Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis condenses. Rabbi Yochanan, the sources say, used to sit at the gate of the mikveh, the ritual bathhouse used by married women, at the hours the women emerged from their monthly immersion. He sat there deliberately, knowing his face was radiant, knowing the women were about to return to their husbands. Let them look at me, he said, so that they bear children as beautiful as I am, and as devoted to Torah.
His colleagues worried about him. Rabbi, are you not afraid of the ayin hara, the evil eye? The evil eye, in Jewish folklore, is the spiritual envy that falls on someone who is too visibly blessed. Beauty on full display is exactly what invites it.
Rabbi Yochanan answered without flinching. I am a descendant of Joseph. Joseph, the son of Jacob, was called ben porat alei ayin, a fruitful bough over the eye (Genesis 49:22), a phrase the Talmud reads as immunity from the evil eye. Because Joseph, in the house of Potiphar, had refused to look at a woman not his own, his descendants were granted the gift that no eye, however envious, could harm them.
This brief exemplum, preserved as number 222 in Gaster's collection, twists together beauty, modesty, and lineage. Rabbi Yochanan did not sit by the mikveh for himself. He sat there as a descendant of Joseph, offering his face as a blessing to the women of Israel, protected by the modesty of an ancestor who had refused the wrong gaze centuries before.