רבי נחוניא בן הקנה

Rabbi Nechunia ben HaKana was a tanna of the second generation who lived toward the end of the Second Temple era. He was a contemporary, though not a talmid, of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, and the rebbi of Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha. He was a man of wealth with a large household, known for his humility and his readiness to forgive — the traits to which he ascribed his long life when his talmidim asked how he had merited it. Tradition places his home in the town of Emmaus.

His way in learning was to expound the whole Torah by kelal uferat, the rule of the general and the particular, weighing how the broad statements and the specific ones bear upon one another and reading from them what is left unwritten. This approach he gave over to his talmid Rabbi Yishmael, who set it as the eighth of the thirteen principles by which the Torah is expounded. He appears in many sugyot; in Chullin he differs with Eliezer ben Hurcanus and Yehoshua ben Chananya on a halachah.

Two short prayers of his are known. The Mishnah in Berachot tells that he would say a brief tefillah on entering the beit midrash and another on leaving it; the Gemara’s form of these is printed to this day at the front of many editions of the Talmud and set at the doorways of batei midrash, and many say it at the start and close of their learning. His teaching in Pirkei Avot is that whoever takes upon himself the yoke of Torah, the yoke of government and the yoke of worldly care are lifted from him, and whoever casts off the yoke of Torah has both laid upon him.

Later generations ascribed to him works of Kabbalah, among them the Sefer HaBahir, the Sefer HaKanah, the Sefer HaPeliah, and the Sefer HaTemunah, as well as the prayer Ana BeKoach, whose forty-two words open with the letters of a holy Name. His kever was described by Rabbi Chaim Vital and was identified in recent times on a steep cliff in Nachal Amud near Tzfat.