Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai

A student of Rabbi Akiva

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai lived in Eretz Yisroel in the turbulent decades after the destruction of the Second Beis HaMikdash and the failed Bar Kochba revolt. Almost nothing is known of his childhood; even his father, Yochai, is a name and nothing more. What the Talmud does tell us is that he attached himself to Rabbi Akiva in Bnei Brak and stayed at his side for some thirteen years. A passage in Berachos 28a also places him in the beis medrash of Yavneh in his youth, though historians have long debated whether that timeline works.

Rabbi Akiva cherished him. Rabbi Shimon became one of the pillars of the Mishnah: when the Mishnah simply says "Rabbi Shimon," it means him, and his opinions appear on nearly every page of the Talmud. He had an original way of learning. Where other Tannaim focused on the words of a verse, Rabbi Shimon often asked for the reason behind a mitzvah and let that reason shape the halacha, an approach the Gemara sums up as "darshinan ta'ama dikra."

Semicha under the shadow of Rome

After Bar Kochba fell, the Roman emperor Hadrian outlawed Torah study and forbade the ordination of new rabbis, on pain of death. Rabbi Akiva himself was martyred. According to the Gemara in Sanhedrin 14a, the elderly sage Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava gathered five of Rabbi Akiva's students in an isolated valley and gave them semicha anyway, so that the chain of ordination would not be broken. Rabbi Shimon was one of the five. The Romans caught Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava and killed him, but the young rabbis escaped and carried the Torah forward.

Years in the cave

The best-known episode of his life is told in Shabbos 33b. In a conversation among the sages, Rabbi Shimon spoke sharply about the Roman occupiers, saying that everything they built served only their own interests. His words were reported to the authorities, and a death sentence followed. Rabbi Shimon and his son Rabbi Elazar first hid in the beis medrash, where his wife secretly brought them bread and water. When that became too dangerous, they fled to a cave.

The Gemara relates that a carob tree and a spring of water appeared for them. To save their only clothes, they sat buried in sand up to their necks and learned Torah all day, dressing only to daven. After twelve years Eliyahu HaNavi announced that the emperor had died and the decree was void. But when father and son emerged and saw farmers plowing and sowing, they could not bear people setting aside eternal life for passing needs, and wherever they looked, the Gemara says, things burned. A heavenly voice sent them back to the cave for another twelve months. When they came out again, Rabbi Shimon healed whatever his son's gaze damaged.

On that second exit, late on Erev Shabbos, they saw an old man hurrying with two bundles of hadassim in honor of Shabbos. Seeing how dearly simple Jews loved the mitzvos, their hearts were settled. Other Midrashic sources (Bereishis Rabbah 79:6; Yerushalmi Shevi'is 9:1) describe a total of thirteen years in the cave, and a widespread tradition places the cave in the Galilee village of Peki'in, where visitors are still shown it today.

Leader, healer and teacher

After the cave, Rabbi Shimon became one of the leading voices of his generation. The Gemara in Me'ilah 17b recounts that he travelled to Rome with Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Yosi to plead for the cancellation of harsh decrees against Shabbos, bris milah and family purity. It is told that he healed the emperor's daughter and was invited to take whatever he wished from the treasury; he chose the document containing the decrees and tore it up.

He headed a yeshiva in a place called Tekoa, where, according to the Tosefta and the Gemara, the young Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, later the editor of the Mishnah, learned under him. Some scholars identify this Tekoa with a location in the Galilee rather than the Tekoa of Yehuda. The halachic midrashim known as the Sifrei and the Mechilta deRabbi Shimon bar Yochai are associated with his school.

The Zohar

To Chassidim and to the entire world of Kabbalah, Rabbi Shimon is above all the master of the hidden Torah. The Zohar, the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, is written as a record of his teachings and those of his circle, the "Chevraya Kadisha." It first came to light in Castile in the late 13th century through Rabbi Moshe de Leon. Traditional authorities, among them the Arizal and the Baal Shem Tov's disciples, treat the Zohar as the authentic teaching of Rashbi; academic scholars generally date its composition to medieval Spain. The app records the traditional attribution while noting this debate.

The Zohar describes the day of his passing in the section called the Idra Zuta: surrounded by his disciples, Rabbi Shimon revealed deep secrets of Torah, the house filled with fire and light, and he left the world in the middle of a word, "chaim," life.

His hilula and his kever

Tradition holds that Rabbi Shimon asked that the day of his passing be a day of joy rather than mourning, calling it "the day of my simcha." For this reason Lag BaOmer, the eighteenth of Iyar, is celebrated with bonfires, singing and dancing, especially at his kever in Meron, where he rests alongside his son Rabbi Elazar. Jewish travellers record a tomb of Rabbi Shimon at Meron already in the Middle Ages, and pilgrimages there have grown continuously since the time of the Arizal, who brought his own son to Meron for the first haircut on Lag BaOmer.