The Robber Who Became a Sage and Broke His Teacher's Heart

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.