Rabbi Yosei from Yokrat was the kind of man who terrified his own family. The Talmud in Tractate Taanit calls him a person "who has no mercy on his own son and no mercy on his daughter."
The story of his son is chilling. One day, Rabbi Yosei hired workers for his field but arrived late with their food. The laborers were starving. His son, seeing their suffering, turned to the nearest fig tree and commanded it: "Fig tree, fig tree—yield your fruit so my father's workers can eat." The tree obeyed. Figs appeared and the workers ate.
When Rabbi Yosei arrived and heard what had happened, he did not celebrate his son's miraculous power. He condemned it. "You troubled your Creator to make the fig tree yield its fruit out of season," he told his son. "Therefore, you will die young." And the son died before his time.
The story of his daughter is equally severe. She was extraordinarily beautiful. One day, Rabbi Yosei caught a man drilling a hole in his hedge to spy on her. He confronted the voyeur. The man stammered: "Rabbi, if I am not worthy of marrying her, can I not at least gaze at her beauty?" Rabbi Yosei turned to his daughter and said: "My daughter, you are causing trouble to people. Return to your dust"—and she died.
Yet this same man, whose severity extended even to his own children, had another quality. Rav Yehuda, an earlier sage, merely had to remove one shoe as a sign of distress and rain would fall before he could remove the second. Rabbi Yosei from Yokrat had comparable spiritual power. The Talmud places these stories together deliberately: extraordinary closeness to God does not always look gentle. Sometimes the people closest to heaven are the most demanding of those around them—and of themselves.