שמאי

Shammai HaZaken (c. 50 BCE–c. 30 CE) was the last Av Beit Din of the era of the Zugot, the bar plugta of Hillel HaZaken, and the founder of the school that carries his name, Beit Shammai. Chazal call the two of them avot ha’olam, the fathers of the world. He came to office not together with Hillel but after the departure of his predecessor — “Menachem went out and Shammai came in,” as the Mishnah in Chagigah puts it — taking the seat of Av Beit Din while Hillel served as Nasi, the two of them assuming the oversight of the Sanhedrin that Shemayah and Avtalyon had laid down. From what the Gemara in Shabbat describes, Shammai appears to have been a builder by trade: a builder’s measuring rod is in his hand in the accounts of those who came to him asking to enter under the wings of the Shechinah by a shortened path, and were turned away.

His own conduct was exacting, and his name became a byword for strictness — so much so that later generations taught that a man should always be humble like Hillel and never exacting like Shammai. Yet the words he lived by, set down in Pirkei Avot, were: make your Torah fixed, say little and do much, and receive every person with a pleasant countenance; and he was modest even before his own talmidim. The stringency reached into his home. He wished his son to keep the fast of Yom Kippur while still a child, and was turned from it only by the pressing of his friends; and when a grandson was born to him on Sukkot, he opened the roof of the room where the mother lay so that the infant too would be sitting in a sukkah.

In halachah the rulings of his beit midrash are generally the more stringent of the two, though not without exception: Masechet Eduyot counts three disputes between Hillel and Shammai themselves, and in two of them it is Hillel who is stringent and Shammai who is lenient. After Hillel was niftar, Shammai took his place, and in that period the eighteen gezeirot were enacted — measures touching the purity of terumah and the separation between Yisrael and the nations. Of the day on which one of them passed against Hillel’s view, the Gemara says it was as hard for Yisrael as the day of the eigel. Beit Shammai held the upper hand in the Sanhedrin for a further span of years, until a bat kol went out that the halachah follows Beit Hillel. The moshav Kfar Shamai in the Galil carries his name.